Ah~ my first negative review. After doing three positive reviews I wanted to show people that I’m not just here to give positive reviews of good anime. I’m also here to tackle the bad stuff as well and while this special isn’t god awful it’s still bad in my book. The special goes like this, in the kingdom of a foreign country the queen and prince have been killed and now the princess barely the age of a high school girl is next in line for the throne. Through a series of events, Conan and his team get involved with the investigation and Conan has to piece together who really killed the queen and prince. While that’s going on Lupin is also in the country trying to steal the prized crown of the kingdom and soon both Conan and Lupin’s story converge on each other and the two match wits with each other to see who’s better the detective or the thief. Or at least that was the idea.
On paper this idea sounded great. Taking two of the most iconic characters and pitting them against each other since they both match up so well. Conan is a very skilled detective and Lupin is a clever thief who nobody has been able to captured. Both are on the opposite sides of the law but they both have honor and a high level of intelligence and seeing them match up with each other would have been great. Unfortunately, something went wrong and instead we focus mostly on Conan’s side of the story. Lupin kind of gets the shaft in this special and barely appears. Even when he does appear it’s only briefly and our two main stars don’t wind up interacting with each other until an hour into the special as they near the third act. I said it before but Conan interacts more with Jigen than he does Lupin, Goemon the fan favorite only gets two scenes, and Fujiko is underused as it would have been funny seeing her flirt with Kogoro. The mystery isn’t really all that interesting as you’ll figure out who did it within the first minutes of the special. When I posted this review I found out that a lot of people liked this special and I was shocked. Were we watching the same special or was there another special I was unaware of at the time of the review. As a Conan special which is what the special basically is it’s decent but as far as a Lupin vs Conan special it’s bad. It’s incredibly disappointing and it’s insulting at how badly they built the hype for this special to have people watch it only to have them be ripped off and have them tune in to watch a Conan special with special guest Jigen. You know those old Scooby-Doo episodes where they had guest star appearances such as Batman and Robin, The Harlem Globetrotters, and Josie and The Pussycats where they really didn’t contribute much to the episode and were just there to be there playing the star power card? Well, that’s what this special felt like to me. It was basically a Conan special with star power added to it in order to get the viewership up and it’s downright sad that this was the best they could come up with. I honestly feel that I or anyone else for that matter could have come up with a better special than what they us where Conan and Lupin do face off against each other and they put each other over. The only thing I can I really enjoyed about the special was the music. The blending of Lupin music with the Conan music was well done but other than that everything else was a disappointment for me. My original score for this anime was 4/10 but after looking back I would change my score to a 2.5/10 because of how badly they screwed up something so simple. I really did want to like this special and I was really looking forward to it. I don’t know if there was conflict between the writers, producers or something but whatever it was it interfered with giving us what could have been a great special.