What They Say:
Finally returning to their village, Leviatan and her friends are enveloped by a pleasant sense of weariness and relief. Syrop asks the three girls once again if they will join the Aquafall Defense. Jörmungand and Bahamut respond to her request, but Leviatan says she wishes to stay in the town and refuses…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
With the girls having done a fair bit of journeying in the last several episodes and encountering many things, the show is opting to move them back to a more familiar location, home. Their initial journey started with a bit of bonding and it got them to grow it over the course of time, which was weak and simple and largely ineffective in making us actually like the characters because there’s so little to them in general outside of the barest of archetypes. They made some fun discoveries along the way and I’ll admit there were some decent moments surrounded by mostly dull or interminable pieces that left me banging my head on the desk. But now that they’re heading home, things have a small sense of change about it as it returns to that familiar locale.
With the girls back in town, they’re starting to learn more of what’s been going on elsewhere in the world, and the viewer as well as we learn how some towns have been destroyed lately and there’s a grown sense of tension, only temporarily offset by the girls returning and having quite a little party down at the local pub. The lightness is decent, but the show throws a lot of different things at us from there, from Bahamut discovering that she’s not the real daughter of her father to some other small struggles that each of them face in some different way. All of it is done with the idea that in the background, the struggle that the world faces is simply growing. But there’s no tension to it and nothing that really draws you into it. It’s the simplest of character moments and ideas that does nothing to make them engaging.
In Summary:
With only one more episode left, Zettai Boei Leviatan simply can’t end soon enough. Every time the show started to do something a little different, I held out some hope that things would come together in an engaging way, somehow. Yet each new thing resulted in more of the same, little in terms of the main storyline and dull as dishwater characters that only got more and more simplistic as it went on. This episode tries to thrown some character drama into it, but having not cared for the characters for eleven episodes prior, it doesn’t do the trick and just feels like a limp thrown more than anything else. Even with the threat that’s coming, which only Bahamut knew about, it just lacks all tension until it tries to toss it in just at the end which feels so forced and poorly done that you just roll your eyes more than anything else.
Grade: D
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Sony KDS-R70XBR2 70″ LCoS 1080P HDTV, Dell 10.1 Netbook via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
