天下制覇

The fullscreen panty shot was apparently necessary.

Impressions:

And here’s a second fairly averagish magical (item) girlfriend show from Deen for the day. The zombie thing actually ended up being almost completely incidental instead of having any real focus. In other shows it would be "I’m just a normal kid who wants an uneventful life." Here, "I’m the undead." The whole setup is given in a flashback in the first few minutes while Ayumu fantasizes about Eu doing something other than sitting around sipping tea. I guess keeping her mouth shut and being cute does put her a few notches above most females this season, but still… I feel like my standards are starting to slip thanks to this season’s priming effect of mostly irritating or boring ones.

Unsurprisingly, it shares a lot of the same production similarities as Dragon Crisis… which is to say that it’s not great on the technical front. The music and direction especially leave quite a lot to be desired. There are shots that are held for about 5 seconds too long and far too much of Ayumu is internalized. While I’m sure the intention was to make him sarcastic and snarky, his one-liners were pathetic. He comes off as bored and exasperated with everything going on, which frequently undermines the scenes since the impression is that he’s complaining about the show to the audience. There are still some great jokes, especially his magical girl transformation at the end, but while the writing is more ambitious than DC’s, it misses its mark far more often as well.

Overall, this was also mostly enjoyable too. It definitely has quite a few direction and writing issues that need to be sorted out, but it should be at least a decent comedy with a few chuckles a week, even if they come at the expense of panty shots from magical zombie ‘girls’ and homosexual crustaceans.

Level E is going to have to wait until I get back from taking my tumorous dog to the vet.