天下制覇

And no, that’s not Mr. Saturn.

Impressions:

This immediately makes me think of an angsted up and mood evened Comic Party. Not Revolutions. Revolutions was hilarious. The crappy initial adaptation. Mashiro takes the spot of personalityless Kazuki and Takagi fills in for Taishi, only without any of the energy or charm. Subtract the colorful and… well… insane cast of characters and dump in three tons of genericness in their place too. Mostly at any rate. Something about everybody’s hair disturbs me. It’s like they all showered in crisco. It never moves, and it glows with the same unearthly light in both night and day. The direction is also suspect. I have no idea why the show would feel the need to leap around between flashback and present other than to wring out some extra angst. "I like manga! Wait, now I don’t. Here’s a flashback that explains what happened in the three minute span between my total reversal of opinion." Why not just keep things in proper chronological order and save yourselves a few minutes of exposition and hand wringing? Oh right, can’t move the plot at above a snail’s pace or they’ll take away your Jump license. 

Anyway, production is rather poor. Consistent at least, but JC Staff is obviously putting as little effort in here as they can get away with. The sound is perhaps the biggest fault. It’s like they got Index’s cracked up composer back (which maybe they do, I don’t care to check) to toss in bizarre overly synthed irritating tracks whenever they crack something even approaching plot motion in order to jolt you out of whatever stupor the previous four minutes of angsty narrated flashbacks have dropped you into. "MAKE A MANGA!?" Quick! Track C! With extra reverb! The sound effects for ‘jokes’ is also almost insulting. "Marry you!?" –BOING– Why not drop a safe on someone’s head while we’re mining the Looney Tunes archives? The Super Hero Whatever part that the show opened with was the highlight of its production and musical design. That’s… not commendable.

At the end of it, it commits a bigger sin than being bad; it’s boring. Nothing happens… slowly, the characters have no personalities, and the show simply looks bad. There is really no defining trait or, and I hate to use this term, wow factor that makes me give a rip about anything that happened didn’t happen in this episode. No defining moment, no hook, nothing. Just… "Here’s some guys, they’re making manga about Jump. You like Jump, right? Buy this. Okay, that’s a day. Everybody to the titty bar. Satoshi’s gonna do body shots off that skanky ho with the c-section."

Preview:

I like how the next episode preview had about 15 frames.