天下制覇

I can’t take any show seriously where beginner level sudoku solving is considered amazing.

Apparently there was only one upload of this while I was asleep, and it had its audio desynced by five minutes. Blame that for it being even later than me rising this morning.

Impressions:

So… some kind of secret society took interest in him because he’s really good at Sudoku, sent him a few math puzzles to solve, and then decided that this was sufficient cause to chuck him into a death trap maze, but not really care if anybody else followed along after him. And the main puzzle test was whether or not he could navigate a maze where the path involved creating the shape of their secret society. Or at least the symbol of the guy dressed like a minotaur who is their representative for this, because I really hope that a secret society based on puzzles isn’t using an axe as their secret symbol. And the final test can be gotten right by randomly guessing 1/3 of the time. Oh yeah, and lest I be remiss in mentioning it, before he enters this death maze, Kaito shouts "Let’s begin puzzle time!"

So yeah, it’s not a tremendously sensical premise and none of these puzzles have been exactly impossible… or even anything above simple math and sliding puzzles. The cleverest one (to be very generous with the term) was the maze that had a sliding portion, but even that’s not exactly unheard of. Plus, Dawn of Sorrow had something similar to it as well, only it involved more than one move to solve. Otherwise, yawn. The whole thing seems very ripped off from Yu-Gi-Oh, only with a single spunky idiot sidekick and Greek mythology instead of Egyptian. Everybody already worships Kaito as king of games puzzles despite his main contributions to the episode being to scowl at everything and solve third grade puzzles in by waving his hand over them and this somehow writing down all the answers at once. Production’s okay for this kind of thing I guess. It’s certainly not bad, but the content… ugh. Maybe if half the puzzles didn’t involve sliding blocks. Have these people neve played a video game before? Who grows up nowadays without knowing how to solve sliding puzzles?

Anyway, no. Do we even need to have this conversation? It’s childish and could have easily been the opening episode for Yu-Gi-Oh 6xties: Disco’s Return. They just need to give him a deck of cards, a motor cycle, and some flaired pants and he’ll be ready for the card dance battles against the forces of Cronus.

Preview:

More sliding puzzles. Oh boy!