天下制覇

Yes, show. I heard you the first time. You don’t need to spend twenty minutes repeating that.

Impressions:

You know how I absolutely adore self-referential episodes! I guess at least they didn’t get overly melodramatic over it, erring on the side of the all happy smiles about saying ‘goodbye’ and being his harem, but like most of this run, it couldn’t been handled with a lot more grace. The closing moment or two was nice enough, I guess, but it was very by the books and they did spend the entire episode practically screaming "SHOW’S OVER SHOW’S OVER SHOW’S OVER," so that didn’t exactly help matters. Nor did it being predicated on nothing more than the show itself ending. Nor did the obtrusive tour of all the side characters in the first half. "Hey! Remember this character who hasn’t been in the show for two months!? Or this one that had 4 minutes of screentime this season!? SAY BYE BYE!"

It was nice to see them at least trying with the visuals a little bit here after doing jack squat with them for pretty much the entire rest of the season. Still too little far too late, but at least they went out… uh… trying to bunt?

Final Thoughts:

Without any of the visual flair or directoral creativity of the first season, this is really just a shadow of its former self. The art may be a little more consistent, but at the cost of absolutely bloody nothing interesting being done with it. Just glancing back over my old posts reminds me of everything Deen did with the visuals that this didn’t even bother to try. The jokes didn’t always work then, but the whole show had a lot more energy and drive that filled every episode that is simply missing from this iteration.

At least it’s only a shadow and aside from a character or two (namely Chizuru and Ken), it’s still recognizable as the same show, but I really can’t think of a single meaningful thing that this season did better than the first. I guess maybe the occasional mood whiplash problems weren’t as severe, but that’s because everything was flattened out to a dull blandness and most were telegraphed 5-10 minutes before the show actually got to them making the problem one of stretching them out instead of too abrupt shifts.

So no, I’m not going to call it a worthy successor to Deen’s version. It’s not horrible though, just exceptionally plain without any of the heart and soul that really characterized the first season and gave the characters life. Of course, that could just be the bad melodrama that has consumed every single other thing this season talking. Nearly anything is preferable to that.