天下制覇

SMOOOOOOOOOKE.

Friendly reminder. Japan doesn’t observe DST, so with the hour change, everything is effectively pushed back an hour. Adjust your brains accordingly.

Impressions:

Honestly, about 90% of the reason I pay attention to these HOLiC OVAs anymore is to make jokes about Watanuki wearing Yuuko’s dresses and spending all of his waking hours with Doumeki and sleeping hours with somebody that looks exactly like Doumeki. Since this episode was almost completely focused on Watanuki going through Doumeki’s dreams and showing how very manly and strong their bond is, I feel like there’s even less sport here than usual. And the punchline at the end is that Watanuki takes up smoking due to Doumeki’s dead grandfather. What would the Surgeon General say?

Production IG did at least do a decent job with the fight against the nightmare, especially compared to how they usually handle animation with xxxHOLiC, which is namely to say that they don’t like to animate anything except flailing spaghetti limbs. I guess they probably saved on the budget since present Watanuki is on prozac and Doumeki/Haruka only have about two or three facial expressions total between them. They still could have done a lot more with the dreamscapes too. It didn’t have to be to Merry’s level of unneeded surreality, but they were simply dull with only a little static tossed in during the Yuuko part to really give it any real atmosphere.

So whatever. Another almost literally random little bit of xxxHOLiC spat out in celebration of the manga finally finishing. Since they skipped over adapting the meat of the story, it’s still hard to really get too excited about any of it, but I wager that if you’ve made it this far, you’ll take whatever you can get. At least Watanuki wasn’t sprawled out and giving that come hither look this time. *shudder*