天下制覇

Just look at that manbeef.

Impressions:

I quite liked the way this began. That’s how you combine exposition with humor to not just make it a ponderous info dump. Unfortunately, as soon as the framing ended and the actual love songs/poems kicked in, it was a different story. Some of the humor was still there, but it shifted hard into romantic which it didn’t do nearly as well. The half-episodic format does mean that it moves right along. Every love story is told in literally about 10 minutes, going right from introduction to meeting to jumping into bed to forward years later with children. Or in the second story’s case, nearly 8 straight minutes of internal monologue. Yeah, the second story was… a bit worse than the first, shall we say. At least it was also a few minutes shorter. That does make it a little hard to connect with or feel for the characters though, so it needs strong direction to provide emotion to these scenes because attachment can’t. And that direction is very much not there in any way. 

The show does like its archaic art style, but at the same time, it’s pretty poorly animated. The giant flapping two-frame mouths while they were quietly talking particularly annoyed me, but this is fairly low end on the production scale all around. The biggest problem is still the direction though. It’s just bland as hell. The music, framing, and visuals have to step in where a cohesive story can’t, and this has… some bad Jump-level sight gags. All the tracks are fairly generic tinkling pianos without any real difference between ones used for dead dads and sexual afterglow. Well, I think the first one had a few extra minor chords, but that was about it.

There’s some things to like, but the poor direction and semi-episodic format really kills any impact these two stories could’ve had. The first was significantly better than the second, but both of them lacked the emotion they needed to make them memorable or even particularly notable.