天下制覇

The music director here was juicing on something.

Pre-air Nico broadcast. Actual broadcast is next Friday, meaning episode 2 will be on the 12th. Scratch that. Looks like Nico’s just continuing on next week too. Same bat time, same bat channel.

Impressions:

This was an… interesting start. Not many shows go from info dump to sister samba on the sleeping brother, to teasing her back, to him doing the entire awful light novel protagonist internal intro thing while watching bacon cook. I actually kind of liked the teasing and the samba. At least compared to what was going to come next which was drawn out, dull, and the bad side of cliched. Archetypes are archetypes for a reason, but using them is different from just slapping them in. "Look. It’s the mysterious genius transfer student. Let’s stare at her for 30 seconds." Fascinating! The entire middle in general was just kind of dreadfully boring. Nothing says great like the protagonist’s annoying friend mincing on about nothing. Or operatic wailing.

It picked back up a bit again once the mech-girls arrived and/or fought, but on the other hand, Itsuka’s stock just kept sinking as his entire remaining contribution to the show was to sit there looking stunned. The rest of the episode was mostly just more info dumping too. Production was fine when it wasn’t doing that, which was unfortunately only maybe 4-5 minutes of the episode, maybe less. Otherwise, it was extremely weak. Except for maybe the BGM, although that was just uneven as hell. The samba, okay, amusing. The repetitive viola crap in the info dump toward the end… ugh.

I kind of liked it when it wasn’t in full on info dump mode, but that was just maybe 3-5 minutes of the episode. Not that I’d say I was particularly impressed, but the fighting animation wasn’t bad and it the dynamic between him and his sister v1.0 was amusing enough. But then… exposition, exposition, and more exposition. Exposition is not development of events. Or plot or characters. And if you’re going to bother having a protagonist, then make him something more useful and interactive with the story than rubble, especially if you’re going to start out by pretending like he does in fact have a personality and functioning brain. Kill the rampant info dumping and maybe we’ll talk.