天下制覇

Why did this episode feel like 90% bad harem show introduction?

Impressions:

Meh. I still can’t get into this. The episode was less Steins;Grey than the previous one, but the presentation is still completely uninspired. Maybe even moreso now since any of that potential use of color I talked about last week is now gone and most of this episode was spent on Okarin running into what basically amounted to a laundry list of your standard harem archetypes. I don’t even know what it’s doing with its colorization anymore other than having a weird glow coming from the side of the screen in entirely too many shots like there’s somebody holding up a spotlight slightly off screen.

It’s trying to sell itself on premise alone, but is too distracted to even get that right. There’s a murder! And time traveling bananas! But instead of any of that, here’s Okarin carrying groceries, and flirting at the cat-maid cafe, and running into some random new part-time worker. He even lost almost all of his mad scientist energy after Makise taunted him during the lecture. When the show actually does focus on the vaguely interesting parts, the visuals go to absolute crap too, electing to show close-ups of message boards, random white lights flying around, or my favorite a slow zoom-out of the sun. 

What it boils down to is that I prefer presentation to plot and this is all but ignoring it except in the most inconsequential scenes like the bloody cat-maids. The plot itself has some potentially interesting things going for it… maybe. It’s hard to tell with how slowly it is getting to something actually happening and how quickly it drops the interesting things in favor of visiting the local shrine ‘maiden’ to gawk at ‘her.’ White Fox just seems to have absolutely no idea how to make it interesting so has resorted to giving great expositional dumps while turning the visuals over to the interns.

Now to wait for the accusations of having a short attention span to ro— Something shiny outside the window!