天下制覇

I would buy this RPG in a breath.

New Season Disclaimer:

I’ll make a post for almost all new series (barring sequels) with a wrap-up and bullet point opinion of each once the premier week is over. Remember that these are just my kneejerk reactions to the first 20 minutes of shows, many of which in genres that I don’t even particularly like, but I do believe in giving every new series at least an episode to at least try and hook me.

Impressions:

Absolutely delightful opening episode. Who knew… an action show that contained a significant amount of action. It’s a bloody miracle! About 8 minutes of this episode was spent on two different fight scenes, one between a squadron of manly men fighting against a giant insect (and its CG potatobugs), and we also got another minute or so of random students brawling for Layfon to break up. I’ll admit that they certainly weren’t the most amazing fight scenes that I’ve ever seen, but they were above average and didn’t abuse any stills or other particularly lazy cost cutting measures, so I’m pleased. I’ll take 8 minutes of constant fighting to 60 seconds of excellent fighting coupled with 7 minutes of angsting any day of the week.

What I really really loved about this episode though, was the scoring. Except for Mifi’s theme, the music was all excellent. A little heavy on the trance/techno side, but it gets the blood pumping during the fight scenes very effectively and keeps them driving forward. The theme playing while Layfon was being… er… welcomed to the academy by the headmaster was straight out of Chrono Trigger’s Zeal, which I consider a good thing. Production values in general were very good, though certainly not amazing. The giant acidic CG potato bugs made me chuckle, as did the CG desert, but otherwise, very well done.

I’m not really sure where to come down on the characters yet. I was very happy with Layfon’s kiss to his girlfriend at the end of the opening sequence, and the taciturn loli getting pissed off and kicking the crap out of some pipe thingy and then screaming into it. She’s already got more of a personality than every other generic taciturn loli out there. The photographer’s group doesn’t interest me overly much, and I imagine they’re just there to provide exposition on various things. This episode was pretty light on that, so I imagine we’ve got a lot coming. Doesn’t look like it’ll be next episode though, as the preview was almost 100% action, even if it did appear to just be the students fighting each other. Layfon also seems to have the general personality of mildew, but hopefully he’ll step it up once his woman gets into whatever trouble that she’ll get herself into.

So in short, I’m so on board for this. RPGesque action show full of action? Please. Please. This was easily the strongest all-around first episode thus far in my mind, and regardless, Saturdays are strangely light this season aside from ZKC. I doubt it’s going to get too much deeper than "kill bugs, save world," but you know… there’s nothing wrong with that at all.

Second FightScene (More to Demo the Music)

Preview:

Training with the rest of the academy.