天下制覇

The deadliest enemy, besides bears.

Impressions:

Yeesh. When did Lerche discover CG? It kind of makes me wonder if they got some new guy on staff or bought some new software and thought to themselves "Gotta prove this was worth the money!" and have proceeded to inject it into every single crevice possible until it’s seeping out all the edges while still not having a great grasp of how to put together a decent fight scene with it. Unfortunately, that kind of excess doesn’t extend as much to the regular animation, which is about sufficient at best. It’s nice that at least the main characters fight without transforming into CG thingies, but they actually fought for only about 10 seconds, and to make sure you noticed that, it was shown in its entirety twice, once in imaginary vision and once in reality vision.

Production’s a bit lacking then unless CGI gives you a rager. Characters fare a bit better, less by what they do than what they don’t, primarily any obnoxious internal monologues or complaining about having to be a mage with a sexually frustrated robot girl. That’s not to say I particularly like them yet either. Yaya’s a little too annoying for me to find her cute and Male Protagonist takes everything a little too much in stride. Confidence is good, but for probably about 75% of the episode, he could be replaced with a rock. It wouldn’t be a whiny rock like most shows, but still a rock.

Not a horrible episode though. It moved right along and still managed to end on a hook into next week without bludgeoning anybody over the head by explaining that brief flashbacks of bloody people on fire are a motivating thing. There’s still a lot of cracks in the facade here that hopefully it can address, beginning with the action and rounding out the protagonists a bit better.