天下制覇

Kaboom!

Impressions:

The writing continued on its more or less nonsensical tangent right up to the very end, but at least oce they were this deep into the RPG cliches,they stuck with them. Right up to the bitter end where the final bad guy was a tree surrouded by insane hunter-killer priestess robots. The only way they could have upped that cliche is if they were all angels. The insanity took back over halfway through when Peterhausen began launching missiles and turned into a network hub, but really reached its fever pitch at the end when Kena’s vagina started glowing and then exploded, taking out the entire bloody place. I may be taking some creative liberties here, but it works, and makes more sense than a USB dragon. It’s also better than the brief timeout that they took to explain how the tree-god-network was going berserk. It’s a tree with delusions of godhood. How much motivation do we need to go blow it up?

There were the usual production hiccups too. Last episode’s action was far more impressive than this one’s. Why would you waste money on a bunch of nameless ninjas at the expense of the climax to the show? Hell, Sai didn’t even really fight the legion of robot priestesses. The scene at the start with Hiroshi was also far more homosexual than it had any business being, and I have absolutely no idea why the broadcaster decided to censor the ‘gore’ of the robots being cut in half, but only sometimes. It was quite obnoxious censoring too. What even happened to the well placed bush or girder blocking out view? Why the giant black cloud blocking out 2/3rds of the screen? For the most part, it was a competent finale, if a bit underwhelming, especially given the episodes that came before it. Even the status quo of Sai as the demon king was restored in literally the last three seconds of the show. Drum roll and cymbal splash goes here.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

After how abysmal the first episode was in terms of character stupidity, this did turn out a whole lot better than I would have imagined. It did veer off into very strange directions at times and it was very clear that there were a number of… shall we say… production irregularities that mostly manifested as pacing resembling a drunken three-legged cow trying to iceskate its way down a hill. That’s not as big a deal as it sounds since a strong plot was never one of this show’s draws to begin with. It just made a massive leap from nonexistent to nonsensical at around episode 7 and never looked back. The technical production itself also ended up being very uneven, but it was rarely outright bad.

Most of the fun of the show comes directly from the characters, and Artland did a great job with a couple. As stupid as he was, Sai was very entertaining to watch and seeing someone begin snapping bones instead of wallowing in angst is always a good way to go. Korone was also very well handled and provided a snarky, intelligent side that diluted a lot of the stupidity of the other characters. Kena and Fujino both suffered a bit from inconsistent characterization, and I’m still not entirely certain what to think of Hiroshi, but he certainly stepped up from irritating sidekick, so they deserve credit for that.

Overall, it was certainly a very fun show that after a few episodes, I was looking forward to each week and it didn’t disappoint me. It rarely went quite how I had hoped or expected, and the plot was beyond moronic towards the end, but it was still just plain fun. So long as you can stomach the characters being overwhelming stupid for a couple episodes and the occasional in-your-face T&A, this is definitely a light hearted action show worth checking out.