天下制覇

Literally.

Impressions:

Really? Not only is the assistant not dead, but the idiot terrorists have a change of heart and decide to help Charlotte… and they just happened to be trained medical professionals with a stocked medical bay on the train, while Teppei and Seb call off the pursuit to play Rock, Paper, Scissors to decide whether the trained butler assassin or the cheeky kid with a sword is going to rescue Charlotte. What happened to all the other soldiers? Shouldn’t they have had more than about six people involved here? Does anybody in Charlotte’s kingdom even care about her?

I think the real display of stupidity was when Charlotte yelled at the terrorists to stop shooting, and they obeyed her. GMW Stubbins’ excessive gun twirl in front of Charlotte’s face also counts as a pretty major display of stupidity, on both their parts. I don’t even want to talk about Teppei’s godawful morality speech. It wasn’t even a good insert song. Yes, I realize that you’re an insane internationally wanted terrorists who has assassinated two people, committed high treason, attempted to kill your lover, and bears an irrational grudge against my entire family, but LIVE ON! There’s a better tomorrow waiting for you… in jail. Or at the gallows.

For some reason, they also blew whatever remaining budget they had on the dance scene at the end, although the rapidy swinging camera and the excessively quick animation that made them all look like jerky chipmunks gave me a touch of seasickness.

Final Thoughts:

Well, this has been quite the trainwreck, literally. I remarked that I was disappointed in how generic it was way back in episode one, but it managed to distinguish itself by tossing the writers off the cliff entirely. That’s not a compliment either. The show had severe problems with its tone and development from start to finish and never came even close to matching the action or production of the first episode. Hell, Seika, the random side character that had absolutely nothing to do with the entire second half of the show had more development than Yuu and Sylvie. You’d think that the fiancee would have at least been given an episode, but no. She’s the eternal second fourth banana. At least she got further on screen than Charlotte, and that’s all that really counts.

I’d go on, but I think that if you’ve been following me for the last few weeks, you’ve picked up on my distaste for where this one has ended up going. I really have little else to add beyond that. At least it has been amusing to write about simply for just how awful it’s gotten. It certainly looked good enough to be a very fun show at the end of one episode, instead, we got terrorists doing slapstick. And that’s the last word I’m going to say on that.