Anime: Melody of Oblivion

Finished watching the last two volumes of the anime, "Melody of Oblivion", last night.

As of the end of volume 4, I would have given this series absolutely glowing reviews.  I would've been praising its quirkiness - the way it takes a fairly ordinary human savior versus evil monsters plotline and then twists things just enough to makes for this interesting, surreal, oddly seductive sort of a  setting.  There would have been a few negatives, mainly involving the over-the-top-ness of some of the human villains, but overall, the positives far outweighed the negatives.

And then I hit the final volume.  And what had been "surreal and oddly seductive" crossed a huge line into crack-spawned and weirdly perverted.  The storyline, which was a bit vague around the edges up to this point but at least kept moving steadily forward, just sort of hit its climax point and sputtered out in a smattering of bizarro imagery and random mumbo-jumbo.  Some really interesting plot threads got added late in the game...and went nowhere.  Fan-servicey content, which up to this point had been rather blatantly amusing, turned sour with some rather over-the-top scenes that didn't *show* anything but were still rather tasteless, imo.

I've never had the final volume sour me so much on a whole series.  After the way I felt about volume 4, even a mediocre conclusion would have left me generally happy and ready to buy the series for my collection... but now I'm not so sure.  *sigh*