天下制覇

Even the women were staring.

New Season Disclaimer:

I try to watch at least the first episode of every new show in a season. However, do not expect anything I say to be fair or balanced. I value my own entertainment above all else and there are some genres or methods of presentation that I just plain do not like and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I’ll attempt to at least make a cursory explaination of what did and did not please me about each show, but it’s just a simple fact of life that my tastes are mine alone. Feel free to express your own opinions in the comments, just keep it under control. This is just television after all.

Impressions:

I think what annoyed me the most about this first episode is what nitwits both of the mermaids were. Marin’s cut right out of the idiot savant psychiatrist role of a thousand other heroines, and I was in Urin’s corner for a while (outside of the raging racism), but then she found the evil sealed tomb and thought to herself "gee, I wonder what might be inside." Kanon’s decent so far, but it’s not really abundantly clear from this first episode how anything’s really going to be progressing yet and all she really did was wonder how dumb Marin was (her and me, both) and glare at her ex. The whole ‘lost ring’ thing just ended up being something Kanon threw into the sea because her boyfriend rejected her for another girl. Of course, now it’s possessed by the unspeakable evil that Urin has unleashed upon the world. Again, well bloody done, Urin.

Production wasn’t as high as the promotional material led me to believe it would be, but it was still rather good with only one scene that made me wince a little bit as they tried to toss in an SD arm with a normal body. That’s more of a simple direction miscue than a problem with the production though. The music was very… well… ambient. I’m not sure I liked it that much, but it was more or less what I was expecting. Lots of tinkly piano and things you’d associate with a general oceanic nature film viewed at a museum. It is rather relaxing at any rate. Interestingly, despite really not too much fanservice outside of the general bikini getup, the background characters couldn’t take their eyes off of Marin’s can. Every scene with Marin and random villagers, their eyes were glued to her ass. It was uncanny.

Overall, I have to admit that I’m a bit underwhelmed so far. Marin’s an airhead and my last impression of Urin is her unleashing unspeakable evil for curiosity’s sake. The actual plot only barely started to kick in at the end of the episode though, so I’ll give it at least one more episode to see where it’s going. Hopefully it can put together something a little more compelling than "airheaded mermaids wander around, admire ring, doom world."

Sea Story OP

Preview:

Evil.. frog woman?