天下制覇

At least it had stabbing.

Given my CPU issues, I’m going to skip any sarcastic comments on Monogatari. Nobody expected me to cover it anyway. At least I hope not.

Impressions:

Christ. Did someone announce we were having a competetion for the blandest Saturday magical girl show and not tell me? I would have brought whiskey. Okay, maybe that’s not totally fair. Unlike Fate: PI, there was at least one part of this that really stood out in a decent way, our protagonist having a completely dissociative episode as she goes all murdery (well, it was a monster trying to kill her), as was the whole dark voice thing shortly thereafter. Both her watching herself from the outside and the quick cut after that to the funeral with her did a good job selling that, although it could just be really bad writing too. It can be hard to tell with Japan. Dissociation did look like what they were going for though. I really liked the visual direction for both those parts. It did dial it back a bit to just more generic magical girl action for the ending bit, but at least it was more impressive than Illya put forth.

However, getting there was a bloody tortuous 15 minutes of goddamned nothing. It was cheap, ugly, cliche, hardly animated half the time, and showed none of the same visual direction as the last 5 minutes. It’s not like they really introduced us to the characters or anything either. It was just watching the lead prance around and occasionally get wrapped up in vines. I’d be more sarcastic about it, but it was the closest thing to anything of worth happening during the entire first two thirds of the episode.

So I don’t know. I’d give this the edge over Illya just for the last 5 minutes, but it spent a lot more of its time being a mind numbing boring pile of slop. If the rest of the show is like that last bit, especially the darker "murder the hell out of the people-monsters" side, it could be interesting, but it was near Blood-C levels of absolute tripe until it got there.