天下制覇

Or meat buns.

Impressions:

Hoods certainly hasn’t found any actual animating talent yet. The clips-montage OP was an early warning sign. Jin vs Ragna was the only fight of the episode that wasn’t embarrassingly poor and even that had someone getting a sword stuck through them for no harm whatsoever. Fighting with nerf weapons is not fun and reeks of DBZ-esque arbitrary and lazy "Your power level is not enough to harm me," made worse by moments later (and the cliffhanger being) Ragna wincing under the strength Hakumen’s power level aura or whatever. The structure is also kind of strange. The lack of introductions and whatnot make it very obviously targeted toward existing fans and everyone else can go screw off. It also blitzes from one event to the next, making me wonder if they’re trying to sort of parallel the game’s character/’route’ system and will be switching up to follow someone else every other episode or so. I asumed it was mirroring the game itself, but a cursory wiki check says otherwise. I could be wrong though, or maybe I was looking at the wrong storyline for the two or three iterations this has been through.

Aaaand since I am not one of the game’s fans, I was mostly just hoping for some eye candy, which was not provided. I don’t mind them assuming I know the characters too much since the opposite of hammering in and flat out listing characters and traits is far more common in Japanese media, but this is definitely too far on the other end of the spectrum and I’m certain will bother people who aren’t already familar with the games. The plot suffers basically the same thing as it rockets from one… not exactly event but let’s say area to the next with nary any chance to build tension along the way, further hurting the already subpar action.