天下制覇

Holy Zeus. Shut the hell up about your hair.

Despite the terrestrial broadcast not starting until April 4th, Niconico has apparently already started broadcasting episodes and will continue to broadcast an episode a week for an indeterminate time. I’ve really got to pay more attention.

Impressions:

I wouldn’t call it a rule exactly, but whenever a show begins with CG, I don’t exactly get excited, and boy does this show love its CG. Admittedly, it’s slightly more competent with it than most, but only slightly. It’s not exactly impressive on the other fronts either. Not that there were any awful moments besides the godawful CG cars or occasional CG person walking around or closeup of a CG wooden floor, but there’s nothing at all interesting about any part of the technical production here, whether you’re looking at art, animation, music, or direction.

That just leaves Japan’s inexplicable love of glacial pacing. Good lord. If you cut out all the faffing over her cutting her bangs in this episode, the first half would have had literally nothing but the usual awful wallflower girl archetype with zero distinguishing features whatsoever. Hell, even with it, all we have is "She cut her own hair. Also emits EMPs at dramatic moments because MAGIC! Gods!" I think I learned more about this from reading its Wikipedia article for 30 seconds than I did from the entire episode. We even have the main two bishies laid out for her, tempermental bad boy who can’t leave her alone and primped up loner honor student. All we need is the prince archetype and we’ll be completely set. Oh, and we’re already having childhood flashbacks about them.

So no. It was not a good start. Technically boringly executed unless you count excessive CG as a thing and a cast of such boring and cliche characters that it’s hard to even think that the awful pacing could be to develop them. You need actual personalities for that. The hint of one of those would be a drastic departure from what this episode showed.