Last Period: Owarinaki Rasen no Monogatari

Recently gacha mobile games have been taking up more of the video game landscape. With more gacha games being released each year and many of them getting their own anime, it should be expected that a show like Last Period would come along and decide to parody the whole system. What is more surprising is how well the show is able to do that.

While there are a lot of gacha jokes that could be made, after all the system and its likeness to gambling make it an easy target of parody and jokes. Just look at any gacha board's subreddit and you will be ... drowning in memes about the low return on value for spending their precious currency in order to get 1 star common trash unit. And while Last Period has those jokes, it actually has so much more than just that. The comedy is on point, and is done extremely well. Jokes are taken for all they're worth, but aren't over-utilized like with some other comedy shows. While Konosuba is hilarious most of its jokes end up around the same material. Last Period is able to cover a lot of different material with its jokes and finds numerous material to make fun of. Whether it be the tendency for gacha to have special units to increase the chance of players opening their wallets, or whether it be the fact that many NPCs are not distinguishable from each other, Last Period has a lot of jokes that are not overused.

I also must admit that Last Period's humor style very much aligns with mine. There is a underlying silliness and stupidity to it that I very much enjoy. For example, the mayors of the villages they go to all have a pun gimmick that they use based off of the name of their town. And while that is already fun, the show likes to go the extra mile by willing it into existence no matter how weak those puns may be. So while one mayor will have their pun game on lock, another will be forcing a poor choice of words into the sentence, which I personally find quite humorous.

And even with all of that, that's not all to their humor. There are also references, and not just light references but rather references where they go all in and continually make more and more references to the material they're referencing getting funnier with each reference that they fit into the work. While references are not uncommon I do like Last Period's style where rather than make a ton of references they make one or two but make so many to that one material and have it build on that throughout the episode.

The characters of Last Period aren't special but they do a great job of being likeable and working for the comedy that it's going for. At large the characters are all pretty dumb and silly, just like the show. They're perfectly set up to not notice the obvious and to make themselves go down the wrong path. In a sense they are a cast of lovable losers. They may not be smart or skilled but they're fun to watch. Meme girl in particular is fun with her fourth wall breaking self. Her deadpan when blasting the show for it's weak jokes is fantastic. I personally love it when comedy shows joke about themselves. It's so much fun to see the characters of a work continually diss the work that they're in. It's a common trick of Pearls Before Swines, and is a big reason why that is my favorite comic strip. There is also a nice relation between the heroes and their rivals Wiseman. While the two are natural rivals and try to out do each other. It isn't one of hate or malice but rather a friendly one. They do show concern over each other when things go south.

But what really helps with these characters are their fantastic character designs. Every single one of the characters is adorable and they look so dang good. Some of the best parts of gachas are the character designs that they create in order to get people into the game. And to have those on display here in animated form with actual personalities given to them is something I very much enjoy. It's like the best part of the gacha without having to roll for the gacha. It also helps that JC Staff does a great job with its art. While JC Staff may not be the best animating studio, it's art is always filled with effort and looks very pleasing. The animation isn't the best although when the situation demands it the animation chops are brought out and some fantastic scenes are brought out onto the screen.

Last Period is pretty much everything I want from a comedy. Top tier jokes. An atmosphere of fun and silliness. Great character designs. Characters who have just enough to stand on their own. While it may not have the depth I love to get I do think it has its own moments and that does a good job of making those characters root-able and likeable. And considering how well it does its comedy I don't have an issue that it focuses on that. Considering the time of the gacha is now, it's quite well timed, and I completely get the experiences that they go through as I go through my own struggles with gacha games. Getting that experience down pat while also bring in the laughs makes this one of the best comedy anime I have watched, and my personal pick for anime of the season.

Considering this came out around the time I got heavily invested into Fate/Grand Order, an anime about a JP gacha game was very fitting. Doesn’t exactly make it a good anime though. I was never that big of a fan of referential humor. If you play gacha games, you’ll understand most of the references and jokes. Whether or not you’ll find that funny is another thing. I understood the references, but it was ultimately something I’d just say “Yeah, I get that” and move on without giving it any extra thought. There were probably about 2-3 episodes that I truly found myself enjoying. Most of ... the humor didn’t hit for me and the episodes that weren’t anime/gacha references were absolutely boring to sit through. The main cast were all completely forgettable outside of Choco. She’s the type of character who basically knows she’s in an anime based off of a mobile game, so her 4th wall breaking meta humor was enjoyable. The other 3 really don’t bring anything to the anime at all. However, Last Period makes up for it by having AMAZING side characters. Particularly the group called Wiseman. They serve as the main group’s rivals/antagonists, but they bring so much life and enjoyment to an otherwise below average anime. They were over the top, ridiculous, had great character designs, personalities, and were just fun to see. Hell, even the ED of the anime was their very own theme song sung by the three members of Wiseman. They made the anime worth continuing each week just to see their antics. Ultimately, they can only improve the anime so much. It’s still an average anime that really isn’t worth sitting through unless you’re a diehard gacha fan. You’re not missing out on much.

I cannot possibly bring myself to rate this at higher than 4/10 after thinking through all the good and bad parts of this show. I feel like the overall rating of this show should be around a point lower than it is now, it doesn't deserve even a 6.61/10 score.

This thing is just so damn insipid. It's seemingly supposed to make fun of, or otherwise show, jrpg mechanics and I do recognize all the jokes where it tries to be funny since I've played my fair share of games, I just don't find them to be that amusing. There were a few funny parts here ... and there, but most of the time I just find it to be a miracle that I even managed to sit through all 12 episodes. Some episodes had to be put on twice the speed just to get done sooner, that's how bad it was sometimes.

Here we have a boring cast of characters and most of them just makes me cringe, hard. Especially the "wisemen" which is kind of like a team rocket who wins more, but they're seriously incompetent and stupid, yet so are the main character&company, so I guess they make a good fit for eachother. That doesn't change the fact that they're annoying and just gets in the way by always repeating the same scenario where they arrive to steal the request the mc&company was going to do, yet they're utterly worthless and just has a chance because they can summon super strong people randomly, it would've been more interesting if they did something with their own powers instead. Then we have the "boss" character that is playing around as both the leader of the wisemen and the leader of the main character&company. It's just that I see no reason for her to do so and it's just boring, not even when it's kinda explained a little around episode 12, it makes no sense whatsoever, being utterly moronic.

This anime had the POTENTIAL to be hilarious, but the subpar, tasteless jokes and overall irritating characters and "plot points" make sure that it's anything but. The "story" or whatever we should call it is just so lacking and it's easy to see that the creators made no effort with it. I mean, look at this one episode where they won a lot of money, somehow two of the main team becomes even more retarded than usual and starts to act like newly rich morons while pretending to be all high and mighty, holding a contest of wealth and ultimately having their servants or similar run away with all their money, even the main headquarters has everyone they hired/employed steal their money too, so they're back to the run-down shithole... AGAIN, since this happened at the start of the anime as well. Even the one who didn't partake in the whole thing, the mc, was robbed of all his wealth, I mean come on? These people aren't just retarded, they're brain dead and not in a funny way, it's just frustrating and boring to see such morons, cringeworthy is the only thing I can describe it with.

Sigh, really. It doesn't help that the subtitles are kind of half-arsed, freely edited and making their own jokes that they think are "funny". Especially the copy-paste mayors/village elders which ends their sentences weirdly usually have subtitles completely different from what they're actually saying. I'm all for translators that change things slightly to flow better as long as the original meaning is still there as that is what a good translator should do at times, but changing something completely and inserting their own jokes? Do these guys know what a freaking translator is?

In the end, I kind of liked the setting of this anime, it's just that it's so badly done with dry jokes and borderline obnoxious characters along with cringeworthy events that I barely managed to watch through it. Just a few episodes were actually worth watching, maybe around three episodes. The story is a 1/10, the art is a 7/10(pretty good), the sound is a 6/10, the characters are a 2/10 and my enjoyment is at most a 4/10, so I'll just give it a 4/10 overall. At certain episodes, it can spike to 7 or even 8/10 and be quite enjoyable(such as episode 10 where they somehow end up in different mobile games from their original one, that was relatively interesting, absolutely not funnier than the other episodes, just more interesting, though it ended with an episode reset, that is, the different mobile game world thing was never solved and instead just ended with the episode as if it never happened), but other than those it's not worth watching. This anime would've done better as as 10 minute episodes with a higher pace, actually, I recommend watching the entire thing at 2x the speed! That way, it's more bearable and isn't as much of a chore to watch. Trust me, you'll miss absolutely none of the entertainment this way and it won't degrade the anime in anyway, it'll just improve it.

In the end, I guess that this anime is made for teenagers or children alone. People with low standards for humor and who doesn't think about stuff while watching, just absorbing it like the empty sponges they are. People who actually think that ending a sentence weirdly or characters being absolute morons for no reason whatsoever to the point where you wonder if their brains are truly seriously damaged is the most hilarious shit they've ever seen and not just tired, dry crap that they've seen a million times before and nowadays is just annoying. If I watched this when I was 10-15, I might've found this to be a good laugh trip, but at 23 after going through thousands of manga, novels and anime, it's just garbage. I wish I could go back to the time when I was able to enjoy anything and everything, even subpar shoujo manga I found in the library that I now almost faint and foam at the mouth after trying to read a single chapter of. So, take my review with a grain of salt, if you're younger or haven't gone through that many anime/manga/novels, you might actually find this to be good enough for a 7-8/10 score.