Calm down there, Rainbow Brite.
Impressions:
I’m so glad they found a way to jam in an entirely unfitting insert song here. They also found a way to make Andy useful. And here I was wondering what the point of him even existing or the start of the episode focusing on him was when Kyousuke’s super ultimate prismatic rainbow power went out of control and only the touch of another man could bring him back. Or, you know, one of the eight thousand anti-ESP machines that even the luddite terrorist cells in this setting seem to carry around in the back of their trucks. I’m also a little confused as to why Babel apparently sent Minamoto and Sakaki alone to handle things. Maybe someone thought that there was a terrorist convention in town.
So yes, it was a silly and poor ending where the big bad that previously elicited all kinds of gasping did nothing but sit and watch it on TV. Even Dr. Claw takes a more hands-on approach to his villainry. Hell, the big climatic ‘end’ struggle didn’t even involve him, but Kyousuke’s handwaved into existence extra super special powers for extra super special out of control because… hell if I know. And then Kyousuke mindraped the last boss in front of children while he was reading the newspaper. I really don’t think you have the high ground there, skippy.
Final Thoughts:
I’ll call this a win for Manglobe, but it still had many of the same problems. Their low level script writers are just really bad and so many of the things that happened made little to no sense. I’m not terribly sure that the whole "Strongest psychic in the world gets a button that gives him extra super powers, but at what price!" would have made worked anyway, but thrown into the ridiculousness of everything else, especially the lack of a villain, focus on a character who really serves no purpose, and a power of feelings ending… well, let’s just say that it could have used a little more direction and probably not had about 20% of it eaten up by a nonsensical flashback just to introduce the antagonist whose main powers are: has gun, and appears to be dead for approximately 20 minutes worth of episode time. Antagonists in general would have done this show good. All they managed was to yank one out of their asses at the last minute with the kind of inane plan even Dr. Wily would raise his eyebrow at.
Otherwise, it was okay. Not great, not horrible. It had a few episodes where it was a servicable popcorn action show at least, mostly earlier on before the flashback arc and awful ending really started to kick in, but it was by and large nowhere close to well-made to carry itself on that alone, nor did it have the creativity or sense of fun that served the original so well. Gone was any creativity with the espers and their powers, and replaced with everyone glowing with increasingly larger auras to show how extra super psychic they were and gasping in surprise over it.
They didn’t rape the corpse of the original, merely prodded it with a stick for a while before sneezing on it. I guess you call that a victory when Manglobe’s concerned. It exists. That’s my opinion and I’m sticking to it.
