Tears to Tiara #23 — Recycled Bosses
September 7th, 2009
Sweet. Penultimate battle and it’s against an unnamed guy and a priest killed in episode 2!
Impressions:
When last we left our intrepid heroes, they were 1,000 years in the past in a field somewhere fighting orcs. So it makes perfect sense for most of this episode to take place inside the Tower of Doom. But wait! The plot thickens. The writers realized that they leaped too far ahead and have to split the entire party up by deus ex machina so they can all fight their own battles against random midbosses. Oh yeah, and the writers decided to change how gravitas works, so now it affects human mages, dragons, and fallen angels, but apparently Arthur’s plot armor protects him. Funny, when it was strong enough to raise the dead, only the elves got the sniffles.
Luckily, the miniboss fights are… well… also pretty embarrassing. They fight the undead versions of characters that we haven’t seen since January. Sure, they could have brought back the villains that the show already spent a month developing, but there’s so much more that we have left to learn about Drwc, and… Unnamed Mayor Whose Arc We Skipped. Man, what a great villain Unnamed Mayor is. I really feel the menace and drama radiating off of Unnamed Mayor. Morgan and Octavia’s fight against Unnamed Mayor is especially important because then they can… leave the room. DRAMATIC! But they’re not rude. The proper villain credo is to just stand there and watch as she collapses and her brother drops everything to help her. I mean, sure, it’s technically your fault already for linking her life to your undead one, but why bother going any further than that? Just because you’re an evil undead priest dedicated to obliterating all life doesn’t mean that you have to be rude about it. Why bother killing her outright when you can… stand around and stare at them.
Sigh. At least it remains relatively well produced, even while the plot has descended into a shambling incoherent mess.
Preview:
The party versus villains we don’t care about.
Posted in Tears to Tiara | 7 Comments »
Producers’ vote on reviving dead villains:
Heroic Sociopath with BFS: “We gave him the Eyeshadow of Death, so he’s out of the question.” – 0%
Octavia’s Foe-Yay: “A PS3 exclusive character…? PFFFFT-!” – 5%
Fat-Old-Guy-No-One-Gives-Two-Shits-About: “BEST CHARACTER EVARRR~!!!” – 95%
For a climactic “Storming the Enemy Stronghold” episode, it makes me wonder if the series is gonna end anytime soon. I feel a little dissonance between this and the previous episode, like, “what the-? Is this the final battle already!?”
TtT’s pacing sure is skrewed up. Plus the recent battles have been deliberately short and/or cut-off to save on budget. Having THREE EPISODES WORTH of “Flashback~! Flashback~! How can I forget you, baby~!?” is more than enough proof of that.