天下制覇

THAT IS THE SIGN THAT YOU SHOULD LAUGH.

Impressions:

Oh boy. A Jump show by Pierrot. That has all the appeal of a steel wool sponge bath administered by a 300 pound German nurse named Lothar.

If anything, this show reminds me of Arakawa, mostly because the two share that one joke of a non sequitur presented followed by the straight man screaming "What the hell!?" or "Shut up!" Level E’s spin on the formula is by having Yelly grab Prince by the shirt collar every time. And that’s it. I have now just spoiled all but maybe two of the jokes of Level E for you. Hooray for Jump comedy. It’s hilarious because it’s loud. Certainly not because of the visuals, unless you find CGI puppets to be the height of comedy. There actually were a couple good jokes here and there of the less shouty variety, but the comedy only lasts maybe 7-8 minutes and is not even close to the focus for the majority of the episode.

Direction and pacing is probably what hurt the episode the most. Direction is obvious. The show has no idea what it’s trying to be and jerkily oscillates in atmosphere and mood from scene to scene with no consistency or transitions whatsoever. As for pacing, it’s the usual Jump business. It takes Shouty almost five minutes just to make it to his apartment because he has to step off the train and tell the audience that he’s a baseball player, then talk to the cabbie about being a baseball player, then talk to his landlord about being a baseball player… so on. If their goal was to have as uninteresting a hook to the start of the episode as possible, then they succeeded magnificently. Unfortunately, the last 5 minutes or so is similarly dull as dishwater. Hell, it took nearly two and a half minutes between Prince saying "I am now going to show you my true form" and it ending on a cliffhanger of seeing his true form. And that came after confirmation, reconfirmation, and rerereconfirmation that he’s an alien.

Even if the comedy was all great, that’s still only a third of the episode with the rest being plodding and dull to the extreme. As much as Shinbo annoys me, at least Arakawa had silly character designs and focus on what it wanted to be to go with its shouting. This just has… consistency, direction, and pacing problems instead. Good lord. A poor man’s Arakawa… I never thought that day would come…

Preview:

Oh look, it’s that same joke again.