天下制覇

 

And yet, still less of a disaster than the other show.

Impressions:

After the other show today not only stumbling at the finish line, but somehow managing to impale itself and the judge from Germany with a hurdle, the bar was set incredibly low. I’m not sure it cleared it though. We had all the awful expected cliches, from “this is serious” to “friendship power” to a ‘heroic’ death reset within minutes, to the final battle taking place in space against the true ultimate final super form.

So really, no great surprises except for how obnoxious Mako was and the truly horrible ‘death’ scene. Ragyo gained a sudden and unexpected vulnerability to being attacked, so of course she had to eat Nui (who had also gained a newfound vulnerability to the entire Job Squad), thus making her 100% invulnerable again until someone shouted enough about friendship at her to convince her to kill herself. I don’t know which was worse, the immunity to all attacks, or Ryuko instantly regenerating from everything. “Everything-proof shield!” and “Regenerate all damage instantly!” don’t make for an interesting fight.

Throw in some awful insert songs and terrible shouting about friendship, not giving up, wave some brightly colored lines across the screen, let Ragyo give a moronically long monologue and another few insert songs  (there were seriously like 5 this episode) and show’s over. Senketsu’s gone, it was the real world all along, nobody’s special anymore, and Satsuki becomes a middle-aged secretary, just like everyone hoped it’d end.

Final Thoughts:

Repetition and repetition and repetition and repetition. The show blew its load very early on with Ryuko and Satsuki’s quite well-done initial fight, but then the entire first half (and large chunks of the second) were trying to build up to… Ryuko and Satsuki fighting… again, and again, and again. There are lots of ways they could have made it work, but they were so hung up on the singleminded duo of power levels and friiiiiendship that those two things just got hammered in over and over and over and over. Even on the rare occasions that Ryuko lost, she either outright forgot about it by the time next week rolled around, got a hug to boost her power level, or simply pulled heretofore unseen abilities out of her ass. The problem only got worse as the show went on as every fight became completely one-sided to ridiculous levels of characters regularly getting beheaded or chopped into small bits, but it only counted when God descended from on high and said it did. I can already hear the braying of the hounds but I’m fairly sure that most of it will boil down to “They MEANT to do that,” but that’s all the more reason to be dismissive of both their inability to escalate well and their inability to execute it.

The budget also collapsed quite quickly. Fights soon became shout-fests over very basic animation loops or stills of weapons on a black background. Often, they were cut-aways to have the other characters explain how cool and awesome the things we weren’t actually seeing were, and at its worst, the characters themselves shouting about how they were fighting while not. All noise and exposition about how badass things were while forgetting to actually BE badass. Most egregiously were the side characters, whose whole existence in life was to job over and over and over again to make Ryuko and Satsuki ‘look’ cool. Its continuous attempts to shove the extraordinarily out-of-place comic relief Mako into the center of everything despite Ryuko never really showing the slightest inkling of care for her was also a constant source of annoyance. Characters in general only existed to shout exposition, be unwelcome series gags, or to job to the main couple, often in unpleasant flashbacks.

I remember saying at the very start that it seemed like it could be a cool OVA series and that I had no idea how it was going to be stretched out to a full show, so now I feel a bit smug. More than usual. It had a fairly strong start, but instead of continuing to build beyond that, the show was content to go backward and try to do the same things again and again, but with less and less budget to swing around each time and more relying on the hand of God to both reset things and to determine when the stars aligned and THIS TIME, the finishing blow counted. Watch the first few episodes and you’ve seen the show at pretty much its best. The rest is increasingly weak attempts to recapture that.