天下制覇

I’m ready to go back to the cafe now.

Impressions:

What? No parody fanservice heavy introductory scene? I feel cheated somehow. It probably would have helped things too because this episode was fairly devoid of… well… everything. I do like Asuka a bit. Setting aside her fairly arbitrary decision to focus on and go out with Takashi, she’s open, friendly, confident, and generally good-natured. Takashi on the other hand is basically just a motile lump of clay. As the original personality of the group, it’s more interesting to me when his control starts to slip, but other than one of the first scenes, it mostly pitches him into Gretagard, his fantasy world, instead of letting aspects of the other personalities take over.

Speaking of Gretagard, the world that he’s summoned to as "Hawk," that’s where the other half of the episode takes place, with more characters thrown at you than you’d find in a Japanese dictionary. Most of them are carryovers from Takashi’s life in new roles, half of which (himself included) have new names. That could have been better handled too though. As the Gretagard segments went on, they just kept getting more and more silly until the last one was outright schtick. With only about ten minutes of introduction to an entirely new set of cast and characters, a little consistency in tone and presentation would have been nice.

Preview:

Does anything I say here even matter for this show?