天下制覇

At least it didn’t surprise me by being watchable.

Impressions:

Let’s cut to the chase. Yes, the only reason to watch this is if you want to see sweaty, wet, glistening boys explore their bodies and friendships together. I’m not even sure that I’d say it’s particularly well animated either. All the effort seems to have gone into water effects, drawing their muscled bodies, and the creepy pop idol ED. If nobody’s naked and wet, then apparently the animation budget gets cut in half, and sure as hell does not have any kind of artistic direction going on despite its awful water hand-holding attempts to the contrary. They also like to play the game of "How many times can we surprise the audience by suddenly filling the screen with rippling pecs." It sure as hell did not go into the voice acting. I hate to play this card, but I usually don’t give a crap about VAs. These stood out within seconds with how godawful they were. They did get a little less bad once they stopped trying to sound like prepubescent philosophizing, but that’s a very long way from competent.

But let’s not let manservice, unimpressive production, or terrible voice acting get in the way when there’s the writing tanking things too. The lead here is of the sullen put-upon genius type, who opens up the show complaining to the audience about how awesome he is and spends the entire episode looking annoyed to be here. Boy, now that’s a character I sure want to care about! His antagonist/the top in the relationship is almost comical in how over the top he is in a show without a single trace of irony otherwise. He even has goddamned shark teeth. And he’s mad! Rrrrarrr! Again, the awful voice acting, not helping. Nor was the corny music that kept cutting in. It was mostly unremarkable, but there were two tracks, the electric guitar around 14 minutes in and the stinger music for the ‘cliffhanger’ at the very end, which were just utterly ridiculous.

I think I actually got more annoyed sitting down and writing this out than I did just watching it. I was mostly only bored after the grimacing from the awful start wore off. It’s a rather generic sports show. Better animated than most (which is a low hurdle to clear), and likes to jar the audience with sudden closeups of naked male bodies, but that’s kind of about it. Unless you’re counting "Giving awful voice actors work" as a positive trait.

Next Episode:

More wet boys.