天下制覇

The OP makes me want to kill babies.

Impressions:

If I had to pick one word to describe this show, it’d be sparse. The production is bad. Really bad. Oh sure, it’s more animated than some things, like… say, New Prince of Tennis, but the art’s also exceedingly simplistic and it doesn’t have background music so much as it occasionally have long sound effects that just sort of become background noise. A lot of shots look like all they did was color in the original’s art, throw up an incredibly generic background, add voices, then nip off to the pub. Maybe taking on six shows this season wasn’t such a great idea after all, eh, JC Staff? This becomes especially notable in any of the Agiri segments as things slow down quite a bit because she talks like she’s high on at least 15 different narcotics. That said, her jokes were significantly stronger than anything Yasuna and Sonya did. They did detract some from her jokes occasionally by yelling out what the punchline was after the joke had already been made, but if I close my eyes and just wish for them to shut up, maybe they’ll stop that.

Production woes aside (and woeful they are), I think they actually did a decent job otherwise. It got the same thing right as GA Art Class with these kinds of adaptations in that it actually kept things moving right and bounced from one joke to the next without trying to unnaturally stretch things out long enough to make me start clock gazing and much of the humor was of the slapstick format I so very much prefer over the usual Japanese "Scream the punchline, make a face" formula. I even chuckled a few times, so high praise indeed. Unfortunately, most of the Sonya/Yasuna parts were fairly mediocre too, so I can’t really say that it deserves particularly high marks. I could see watching Agiri screw around with them, but better direction and production would go a long way to selling this slapstick. It all just feels so vacuous and empty… like I’m watching some kind of flash web short.

It also bears mentioning that as a Thursday show, it’s also up against the comedy powerhouses of Milky Holmes and Guilty Crown, neither of which had (new) episodes today. That may recalibrate my opinion significantly.