天下制覇

Give them a hand.

Impressions:

As big a fan as I am of dismemberment and brutally slamming heads into walls, this episode absolutely reeked of wasted potential. Ganessa sacrificing herself to protect Bridg would have been much better placed as a cliffhanger for last week two weeks ago for starters. They also really should have spent a little more time and effort on her the whole show if they were going to have her give a ‘deathbed’ speech about how protecting each other is what Pandoras are supposed to do. Then we get to the big showdown. The Nova uses the gem to teleport right to ground zero where everybody convenes. So we’re going to get a nice little group battle of everybody putting their differences aside and working together to fight it, right? No. Bridg is still holding the gem she ripped off of Cathy and it takes her over. That’s fine. Even better perhaps. We can have everybody working together to take down extra-psycho Nova-amped mode Bridg without killing her to reinforce that whole Pandora love fest deal. That would have been great. Maybe if they hadn’t wasted time on that stupid fashion show episode, they could have worked that in.

What do we get instead? Glowing lights. First red for Bridg using her random Nova power. Then blue for Pandora mode. Then Bridg just overwhelms them based on plot convenience and it’s back to red. Then Kazuya finally wakes up and everything goes blue again. Then glaring white for visions of sisters past. Then super orgasmic blue for Kazuya hitting the rest of the Pandoras with it. Seriously. They’ve all got a sexual flush and are moaning through that scene about how good Kazuya’s ‘light’ feels. Then a bunch of stills showing them sort of hitting things which could be the Nova, could be random walls, could be anything really, and show’s over. Everybody gets their limbs back and goes home.

Well, and Bridg and De Arimasu have a strip fight over Kazuya. It wasn’t an awful ending, but the big conclusion should have and could have been so very very much more than just glowing lights and stills.

Also… Seriously, eyecatch? His hair? There’s no place on Kazuya more sensitive than his hair? I swear. I will never understand Japan’s sexual culture.

Final thoughts at the bottom.

Final Thoughts:

Despite the underwhelming ending, I’m actually fairly pleased overall with Freezing. I’d hardly call it a particularly good show by any means, but it was always easy to watch and fun to write about. Unlike many of these T&A action shows, it actually remembered to have decent action every week, something that ARMS has been badly struggling with lately in their own endless parade of similar shows. Its main flaws were the truly awful male lead and the lack of any focus or development given to any character besides Bridget… who is also only marginally more interesting than navel lint. The pacing could have also used some help. While the constant action was appreciated, few of the battles had much weight to them, even at the very end.

Otherwise, direction was fine, production was decent and consistent from start to finish, and while the character writing was fairly weak, it was still worlds above the space-shark infested waste puddle that it feels like most of the other shows this season tossed themselves into during the second half of the season. It’s almost boringly consistent and never got significantly better or worse than its first episode. While it means that there weren’t too many low points, there weren’t any high points either. That’s not something to be pleased about.

So if you like these kinds of fanservice-heavy fighting shows, it’s one of the better ones. Even as just a pure action show, I’d say it’s worth at least looksie just because it’s a rare thing for a Japanese action show to remember that it’s about the fighting, not talking about how they’re going to fight. This is even delightfully visceral to boot, even if they handwave all the eye gouging, throat slitting and dismemberment away with super science. They still held back enough to keep it from being too cartoonish. It’s still pure fluff though. At best, it’s something quickly consumed and then forgotten. It simply doesn’t do anything to stand out at all, but that’s still a far cry from doing all kinds of things horribly wrong as we’ve seen to great effect this last season. Plus, like I said, it was great fun to write about each week, even if the eyecatches were what I always looked forward to the most.