天下制覇

I think I was fighting those in Spore the other day…

Just FYI, I’m on vacation until next Tuesday. Updates will come, but they’ll probably be much later than usual, and beginning tomorrow night, have at least a 40% chance of being written while drunk. I can only imagine how awesome Pengy will be once I’ve got some triple sec in me.

Also, yes, I know about Symphonia’s continuation. I’m fully expecting UFOTable to continue doing an awesome job of it.

Impressions:

I’m exhausted right now and fighting a bit of a headache, so I’m going to try to be brief. Not the best finales around, especially since they felt the need to cut away from the action multiple times to let Duclis or freaking Zanaffar give speeches. You are a flipping giant wolf/dragon monster. Was it really a sticking plot point that you were artifically created in some magical lab centuries ago? That added absolutely nothing to anything. Nobody is expecting character drama from a giant wolf/dragon. As for the rest.. eh… whatever. The reveal about Ozel being related to Rezo was interesting, but seemed really tacked on and I kind of hope that they don’t start the second half of the series as "The Search for Robot Maids." I’m also disappointed that Duclis isn’t dead after all that nonsense and has just sort of been half mutated into a mini-Zanaffar. I also have absolutely no bloody idea what was with that closing shot of Zuuma looking like he was in pain and holding something (his arm?) in his mouth.

So… yeah… lots of minor complaints about it and there really wasn’t all that much particularly well done action to bolster things. I enjoyed Sylphiel’s useless Flare Carrots, but most of the rest just really wasn’t interesting enough, especially after all the unneeded exposition.

Final Thoughts:

If I had to name the one thing that Revolution did completely differently from all the other Slayers series, it was to remove the focus from Lina’s group and drop it all on the new character, Pokota. He was essentially the protagonist and the ‘main’ characters were pretty much just along for the ride from about episode 4 onward. That would have been perfectly fine if his character and his story weren’t so lame and cliche. As it was, he stopped being interesting as soon as they started revealing everything about him and devolved from a small fuzzy Digimon version of Lina into just some whiny and irritating stuffed animal that wanted a hug from his tiger friend.

It did do a better job than the original trilogy did in sticking to a plot, and there was really only one episode where I felt that they were consciously just filling in time (the ball rolling episode). On the other hand, the writing felt quite a bit more undirected and meandering in and out of various plots and like I said, even at the very end, they were tossing in relatively meaningless backstory. I’m not sure which I’d pick between aimless writing and magical tennis, but I think the entire second season would be vastly improved if they thanked Pokotta, took the replica Sword of Light, and then dropped him off a cliff while they went and hunted down Rezo. I’m still on board for the finale of this story, but they would be well served to get back to the core cast instead of putzing around with furballs and tigers so much.