天下制覇

"Oh, am I covered in blood? Goodness. How’d that happen?"

Impressions:

Bleh. The first half was basically just a giant expositional dump on the magic books and evil curses and yaaaaaaawn. Books evil. Cursed. Got it. Japan really needs to get its collective head out of its exposition hole and remember that even the best setting is ruined by crappy presentation and poor characters, and vice-versa, the most cliched story can shine just from just a vibrant cast. The most interesting character in the episode was the crazy/cursed woman. "Oh? He was killed right in front of me? Yeah, he was. Oh, I’m covered in bits of him. Huh. Forgive me, grandmother, I need to go make dinner. Also, I must stab you. Oh, have you been stabbed? You haven’t stopped moving? Huh."

Further on the unfortunate track, they decided to go the way of stock footage with Dalian’s magical transformation sequence and again read a book to win the day. It took the entire transformation sequence plus a paragraph to put up a barrier and then another few pages to cast Lit1, at which point, it was time for… wait for it… more reading to cast Lit2. Hugh’s willingness to pull a pistol on a golem doesn’t help when in crunch time, he just goes for the stock footage and then 2-3 minutes of reading a random book.