Now this is the kind of DVD extra I like.

Semi-Impressions:

Instead of the usual hot springs/cosplay cheesecake bits, it looks like XX is going to actually produce some DVD specials that may be worth watching. This one had Chuubou coming to Hakufu’s rescue as a mighty warrior and then even getting the girl in the form of Ryomou. This may very well have been better than all previous Ikki DVD specials combined, let alone most of XX. If they had used this for filler episodes instead of fighting giant snakes, there may have been hope.

Well, this somehow managed to be more unpleasant than expected.

Impressions:

The best part of this episode is that you could see the exact moment that the budget ran out. Everything immediately ground to a halt and then there were about 30 seconds with half a dozen skills before the episode basically ended. The iron masked nun ended up just being Teni possessed by generic evil wraithface who only showed up to kill some random punks, attempt to assassinate Ryuubi, and then remind everybody about Bachou’s brother. Oh yeah, maybe they should have addressed that at some point. Or Bachou’s ‘undying hatred’ for Sousou. Oopsise.

At least it was more amusing than the first half. I remember a time, way back in the first two seasons, when Kann-u was actually threatening and not reduced to abjectly pathetic comic relief. Those were good days. This wasn’t even any kind of ending at all really. Not that I expected them to be able to drag this out of the hole, but they could have at least given Bachou the majority of the screen time to wrap up her stuff instead of 10 more minutes on the lesbians of Seito. No, having the villain monologue at her for a minute or two is more than enough wrapup for a central character.

Final Thoughts:

In short, bleh. It certainly started promisingly enough, then immediately reduced Bachou to mostly sidekick comic relief and got bogged down in the whole fight with Kentei that could have been finished in three or four episodes, but somehow managed to fill the entire season. At the end of it, everything just boiled down to the major theme just being the usual nonsense about fighting against their destinies that the show’s been leaning on since the very first episode of the first season. Not that anybody is watching this for the plot, but the alternative is talking about Si Ma Yi’s evil magic tree that was defeated by a helpless girl with a matchbox. DD’s random flying blue Hakufu in a china dress was at least easy on the eyes.

So in the end, it was a step up over GG, but still behind the first season and well behind DD. It suffers a lot of the same problems as GG, a meandering plot, characters wandering around for no reason, a lack of threatening antagonists, minimal budget, and everything stretched out about four times longer than it needed to be. Seriously, I cannot stress that enough. Kann-u’s fight in Kentei’s little chamber lasted half of the entire season. The only difference is that this had people wandering on an island filled with tribesmen and giant animals instead of picnics with Ryofu and Saji Genpous everywhere.

Sigh. I wish I knew how to stop hurting myself like this.

This post is rated R for nudity because it would take me twenty minutes to go through and censor all of this nonsense.

Impressions:

Let me get this straight… Shiba-i is now some kind of wraith, Hakufu was dead… but suddenly just got better and had a giant montage about how great she is before she won with a single attack, and the final boss was ultimately defeated by a little girl setting fire to its unguarded pile of doom magic? And then… and then… her evil plot to sit there and suck up energy having been foiled, Shiba-i got into her rocket chair and blasted off into the sky screaming "Next time, Sonsaku! Next time!!!"This episode certainly went places, but I’m not sure that I can adequately enunciate my feeling for said places without breaking at least eighteen of Miss Manners’ rules for proper decorum for proper ladies.

It all startd so well too, and even flirted with both being so bad that it was amusing again and actually almost nearly towards how good decidedly watchable DD was. I’m still trying to figure out what the hell the point of Bachou was, let alone how she learned to shoot lightning out of her hands. She appears to be fighting some kind of Teni/Wraith-i nun next week in the big finale. I don’t even want to contemplate the ulterior meaning there. At least Chuubou smothered one half of the Saji Genpous in her chest and made overtures toward’s Koukin’s tacklebox for the big finale of her show. Bachou… well… we’re still looking for meaning here for her and her brother. Isn’t she supposed to go kill Sousou? I wonder if the writers forgot.

Preview:

One of these scenes seems… different from the others.

I feel like I’ve seen this episode before… probably because it was made of about 25% recycled footage.

Impressions:

Give me a bloody break. They’re seriously going to drag out drama about whether or not three main characters are dead across two episodes? Plus Kentei still hasn’t been revealed and the Chekov’s Gun known as Bachou’s brother sitting around in a hospital somewhere. Give me a break, Ikkitousen. I would say that you’re better than this, but at least when you’re bad, it tends to be in a less sensical and more amusing manner. Does anybody really believe that Hakufu would be killed by rocks dropped on her by a secondary antagonist? Honestly.

This episode was frustrating beyond the hackneyed cliffhangers though. By the end of it, the whole thing had gone absolutely nowhere. Chouhi somehow got her first successful punch of four seasons off and succeeded in winning in that single hit, and Choun/Kann-u attacked each other and then spent the remaining five minutes of the episode hovering in the middle of the air. The rest of the time was filled with yet more flashbacks of people whining about their destinies and even worse, flashback montages. That’d be forgivable if they had spent the budget they spent on animating the episode, but no. Most of the fights were back to those lazy fades between stills. If you’re going to do that, at least give us something interesting to look at, like Koukin fighting a 25 foot tall penguin in a tutu.

Preview:

Oh, do we finally get to see that the person who never takes off her mask is not who she claims to be?

Proportions!

Impressions:

So much for the momentum of the last couple episodes, even if it was partially built on how horrible it was to have people behead snakes with their sneakers. This episode was that special kind of boring where it’s hard to even make fun of it because so much was just random exposition. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire Ryomou flashback was just recycled footage from one of the previous seasons. I swear to Zeus that we see that sequence or similar ones every damn series. We all know that Ryomou dreamed about a threesome with Ryofu and Saji♂ at this point. Maybe a foursome with Saji♀ too. It’s unclear.

Sadly, the trojan horse bit was the most amusing part. At least that was silly. Well, so is relying on Chouhi to do anything, let alone take out one of the antagonists while some of the strongest people on the island fight an army of barbarians. Koumei’s explaination about how dark the dark majic really is was painful, all the cast suddenly becoming jedi and trying (and sometimes succeeding) in sensing disturbances in the Force was worse. Most of the episode outside of the 30 seconds of Kann-u/Ryomou battle also looked horrendous. Not just the usual badly animated brand of Ikkitousen horrendous, something well beyond that which will haunt the nightmares of any little child unfortunate to stumble onto this site looking for Digimon fanart.

Preview:

Chouhi… what the hell are you doing?

It should have been a sarlacc.

Sorry this is late. There were a number of technical difficulties (likely arising from the fact that my laptop hasn’t been rebooted in a month) that resulted in the auto-capping breaking, crashing, or spewing out a bunch of garbage over and over again until I just re-encoded the damn thing into a codec I knew would work. On the other hand, it seems that the longer it takes for me to get around to these Ro3K episodes this week, the better they seem to end up.

Impressions:

The rollercoaster ride continues, although this was mostly an upswing. If not for the armored tiger preceeding it and the giant snake that followed, this could have been a pretty solid episode at least up to the rather dubious standards of DD. It could have certainly used a few… dozen… more frames in places, particularly Teni’s attack against Bachou, but it wasn’t embarassingly bad like most of the rest of this season has been. They also brought back the Ryomou/Kannu stuff which has lain pretty much ignored since the first season. Essentially, Ryomou’s the one that killed Kannu back in Ro3K times. It is looking like my prediction of Kentei brainwashing Kannu and Ryomou is coming about though. The jury remains out on whether we’ll see Hakufu have another oxygen depletion induced orgasm though.

It does get pretty stupid in the later going though. Hakufu and Koukin have apparently developed a telepathic connection for some inane reason, and then Hakufu and Bachou meet in a garbage pit where they have to fight a dianoga snake… which Bachou decides to headbutt while Hakufu stands there and yells until they behead it with a kick. They cut the poor idiot snake’s head off. With sneakers. Kentei is still bothering me though. The fact that (s)he won’t reveal her face still all but guarantees that it’s not Shiba-i which doesn’t leave a whole ton of other characters. Bachou’s brother wouldn’t surprise me, but would make zero sense. My money’s on Bunwa with an extreme case of PMS pissed off at the other schools for continuously killing her boyfriends.

And yes, Teni does apparently have the best ass of all Chinese warlords. Who knew?

Preview:

The legendary horseman inside a wooden horse.

Put it out! Put it out!

First off, tonight’s Community was simply amazing. That is all.

Impressions:

Ah, now we’re getting back into the swing of things. It was still very underanimated, but at least they’re putting in the effort and Gakushu breaking Iron Tager’s hand was sufficiently stomach turning, so it’s a step forward. It’s clear where some of that budget came from though, with the recycled 30 seconds of the same footage after being run through a browning filter. It did trail off a lot towards the end, but 15 minutes of being "not bad" is well beyond my expectations. They didn’t even use the flaming wolves to strip Chouun or Bashoku either. Plus, the eyecatch was only maybe marginally racy. If not for Mouryou popping out of her top, I could almost mistake this for… well… not-Ikkitousen.

I am not sure how they’re going to stretch this out for another five or six episodes though since this one really did cover quite a bit of ground. They’ve already killed one bad guy and turned another. Unless Gentei’s grand plan is brainwashing Kann-u and Ryomou through the power of armored tigers, I’m not sure that they can stretch out Teni and Chakram girl for an entire extra month and a half. Maybe Gentei will bite it next week while they’re storming the school and go possess Sousou to be the last boss again.

Preview:

Garbage can! GARBAGE CAN!

Now we’re going places.

Impressions:

Oh, thank Zeus. We’ve rounded the bend on bad writing and gone from simply boring to outright ridiculously terrible. That’s a relief. And a step up from the last couple weeks as well. Sure, I have no idea how Mouya managed to take Ryuubi hostage, why Hakufu’s spider sense started tingling, how (or why) she and Sousou had a psychic conversation about the meaning of being warriors for the eighteenth time, why Kakouton was tripping balls, why Evil McEvil School school is in the middle of a jungle, how Ryuubi managed to start using her powers under her own control, how Hakufu suddenly has the magical power of fishkinesis, or why Chouhi continues to exist. All of that is meaningless.

The important thing is that Butchy McLesbian fought a giant armored tiger. A giant armored tiger. This is apparently part of Kentei’s master plan. Get Kann-u into her throne room, unleash a magical armored giant tiger, and then watch. I’m torn between hoping that there’s some inane magical explaination for this, perhaps pheremones only released when giant lesbians fight tigers… or simply hoping that this was just all a horribly misguided plan to get Kann-u to bleed on whatever the giant magical tree thing is… by leaving her alone with her weapon and the big boss… and a tiger. I suppose if I had to wake up and look in the mirror every day and see my hair trying to eat my face, I probably wouldn’t have too many NASA-cabliber plans either.

Oh yes, and the big cliffhanger is that Seito is about to be attacked by magical wolves. Wolves. I can’t believe they’ve run out of Chinese warlords and are having to resort to animals. I just hope that means that we’re in for a real twist and Giant Shark is the last boss behind Kentei’s mask. Now that would be storytelling!

Preview:

Oh hey, it’s Bashoku. Where’ve you been, girl?

How did this season get so bad so fast?

Impressions:

So, Community and 30 Rock finally get new episodes tonight… except that NBC out here has bumped them for the damned Trailblazer playoffs. So I pop over to see how that game’s going… is the game at least worth depriving me of Community? And the Blazers are down by 29 at the half. Twenty bloody nine. This is what you ruined my night for.

But hey, maybe the night could be saved. Maybe Ikkitousen would have at least 30 seconds of passable action. Maybe the writing would only be tolerably bad instead of horribly… or so horribly bad that there are giant land sharks with lasers on their heads. Perhaps they would show Chouhi doing something other than getting beat up. There’s the possibility that they would remember who had taken a back full of arrows between scenes. An outside chance that they wouldn’t waste 5 minutes of recap with stills from the previous season. Maybe it would have at least twenty minutes of animation and the last minute of the episode wouldn’t be a series of stills blurred from one to the next in lieu of animation.

So much for hoping.

Preview:

Meanwhile, back on the ranch.

Who brought the root beer?

Impressions:

This really is getting to the point of battered wife syndrome. Most of my enjoyment of this episode came from taunting other people about Koukin’s sexual proclivity while watching the episode. This episode should really have been merged into the previous episode… which should have been merged into the previous one as well. They sat around on the boat for twenty minutes while we suffered through one half-assed attempted assassination on Ryuubi and entirely too much Sonken, and were then attacked by GHOST PIRATES and LeChuck Ten’i. Great. I’m glad that it took them twenty bloody minutes to get the ambush in the middle of the ocean.

For that matter, why was there an ambush in the middle of the ocean? Why not just leave a bomb on the ship? It took them long enough to figure out that they were on their own, why not just leave a bomb on the ship? Or set it to go out into literally the middle of the ocean and just leave them there. Sure, apparently the evil plan works out if next episode’s preview is anything to go by, but the same thing could have been accomplished without SEA GHOST PIRATES. It was painfully obvious every single character involved that it was probably a trap anyway. Sheesh.

Preview:

Again… why not just bomb the damn ship?