天下制覇

  

This is a show searching for a punchline.

Early broadcast on NicoNico. I really need to pay more attention. Will air normally on Sunday, July 6th.

Impressions:

This wasn’t anywhere near as close to as funny as it should have been, and I was a lot more amused by some of the random incidental stuff, like the giant muppet ghillie running around or sitting in the middle of class, or the stagehand clothes instead of any of the actual jokes. Part of it was certainly the weak budget. Splash backgrounds and the protagonist making shocked faces don’t provide a lot of expressiveness to the affair and that’s all you get. If you watch this expecting there to be any slick action, you are going to be extraordinarily disappointed. There is a lot of slow motion and time stopping to narrate though! That’s like… the opposite? The episode was split into three parts too, yet still found time to keep pausing to narrate.

Mostly though, the issue is that almost all of the jokes could be split into two categories. There’s the standard protagonist, Momoka, shouting “This is an unusual thing!” and/or making a shocked face with its addition to that formula being her declaring things annoying, so there’s some real creativity going on in the writer’s room. The other latter joke that makes up most of the show is over-narration, which I guess shows slight awareness that a joke should go somewhere, but delaying the weak sight gag 15 seconds to give a lecture on rappelling isn’t doing it any favors.

There was some potential for a decent comedy here and there, but the lack of a decent budget is forcing them to be overreliant on really weak narration half-jokes and overreaction punchlines. Well, neither are rare at all for Japanese comedy, but I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt. Still, I can’t say I enjoyed this episode overly much, especially toward the end during the ‘action’ scene when it wasn’t even trying to be funny anymore and certainly not exciting even without all the pausing.

Next Episode:

Wrestling. And more faces.