天下制覇

 

I’m not sure you can really call that a horse though.

Impressions:

This certainly covered a lot more ground than most of the light novel magical girlfriend schlock this season. Like Black Bullet, it just threw you into the thick of the teenaged main characters already having their adventures and messily killing strange things, although this had a whole lot less exposition. It didn’t have quite the same amount of talent or budget in the animation either though. Still, it got a little more dull in the later parts of the episode and wasn’t exactly tearing it up to begin with. They made sure to make sure that the childish magical girlfriend got covered in goo nonetheless. And the abusive boss/elder sister character as well. Gotta hit all the LN cliches after all, right down to a supposedly immortal (or at least supposedly formerly dead) protagonist. Even when they make no sense, like beginning showing (and saying) how great the protagonist is for being magic and knifing unicorns in the neck, only to three minutes later give a speech about how he’s the worst person ever.

It was kind of okay overall though. As I said, it moved right along without feeling the need to give lectures and there was unicorn knifing. It tried to make both the start and end interesting and exciting. The problem is that it didn’t really succeed, but in particular there also wasn’t anything that stood out or impressed. The action was all competent but not impressive. Events didn’t drag much, but still had less depth than the first 10 minutes of Breath of Fire 2. Characters and their interactions were (mostly) passable but cliches that if you’ve watched any anime in the last five years you’ve seen their ilk a hundred times.

I guess my overall thought is that cliches are cliche for a reason, and while this is cliche as all hell and then some, at least it shows a little more faculty with them than just blindly aping what’s popular. Relatively competent (ignoring how low relative is, mind you), but also kind of boringly unambitious. A rallying cry for a show if ever there was one.

Next Episode:

Still night.