天下制覇

I hear it was a graveyard smash.

Impressions:

Dammit, A-1. I was all ready and wound up to tear into this and you had to actually produce something pretty decent and amusing. Let’s start with the bad though just to get it out of my system. The direction’s the weakest part of this show by far and the writing’s not all that amazing either. They go out of the way to try to build up a dramatic scene of Maya’s father rising from the dead, and then spoil it by having a girl lose her glasses and grope around like a moron. Then, later, the same girl… now a zombie, loses her glasses and has to stop her undead rampage to find them… at which point Gothfatty tries to poke her in the glasses ineffectually with his dowsing sticks. Come on, here. Maya also seems to be made of and for nothing but fanservice, from the tip of her stocking clad feet to the top of her breast hugging dress.

On to the good then. Art and animation look great, far better than A-1’s previous two Anime no Chikara offerings. It’s still not the prettiest thing this season, but it does mostly look very good. I also loved the scene between Maya and her ‘father’ at the end, particularly the reveal of the illusion that the nice family room was actually a torture chamber. No big dramatic cut away or anything, the background just changed. An excellent trick for thrillers if you want to actually immerse the audience and get them to wonder if what they’re seeing is actually real. Her grandfather was obvious, but the second illusion on top of it is actually something unexpected that adds to the scene instead of being totally gratuitous.

So, I must begrudgingly admit that this was a very solid first episode. There are definitely rough edges here and there and we got a slight glimpse of the second main character and his shining penis at the end of the episode, so there does remain a lot of stuff to be filled in that could drag this down quicker than a historical lecture about atom bombs, but… well… you win this round, A-1.

Preview:

Hello, thighs, hips, and bust.