天下制覇

Still make me laugh.

Impressions:

That was… uh… weird, and I’m really not sure what to think of it or where it’s going to go from here. Let’s start with the bad then. CG banners and soldiers make me giggle. The characters are not great, particularly the females. They’re trying really really hard to make them all cutesy and squeaky and they’re almost universally annoying. Goemon deserves special note for being the most horrible of them all, although I was a little confused as to why they changed Yoshimoto from kemari to soccer. My years of Samurai Warriors playing probably taught me all the wrong lessons about him anyway. Back to the point, there’s an absolute glut of them introduced in the first episode, some getting nothing more than one line plus their name and a little factoid about them, so Dousan of all people ends up with the most focus. Noisy Male Lead also doesn’t seem particularly well-handled, particularly given Nobunaga most definitely did not even come close to conquering Japan, so him simultaneously being a neverending vat of historical knowledge while just sort of ignoring that big big thing is a little bit of a disconnect that I’m having trouble swallowing. How fast the plot went charging along probably didn’t help his characterization either.

On the other hand, it is pretty technically well-made, and the plot blitzed right along, glossing over him getting dumped into the feudal era, the real Hideyoshi’s death, his recruitment, intro to everybody, and then the treaty between Mino and Owari. That would be practically half a season for any of the various other timeslip/gender bending historical schitcks, if not the whole thing. Maybe they know the characters are bad and weak and want to spend as little time on them as possible in hopes of covering a dozen major events or battles from the Sengoku era. That would certainly be an interesting way to go about it, but given the LN source material, I kind of doubt that. If they can keep his internal exposition/introductions to characters as short and to the point as it was in this episode, that’d be a good start though. Then again, half of it was fairly irrelevant since said characters didn’t do anything, but at least we didn’t then dwell on them.

So I’m not really sure what to think of it so far. The characters aren’t great, the direction’s wonky as all hell, but it got further in its first three minutes than some other premieres did in their entire first episode. I’m not sure what the show’s trying to go for after this episode between the squeaky obnoxious girls and the (admittedly short and to the point) historical fact dumping. We’ll see what it does with itself next week, I guess.

Preview:

Boobs.