天下制覇

  

But with so much more BS. And that’s an accomplishment.

Impressions:

I don’t really know what I was expecting or hoping for, but after a first episode spent blithely watching a parade of characters, I didn’t think that the second episode would be spent blithely watching the exact same parade of characters. Okay, so some got slightly more focus this time, some got slightly less, and they moved the ‘fight’ from the middle to the end of the episode, but it was no less bouncing from one person to the next with nary a thought or ambition beyond “Ooh, let’s see what’s over there!” I also don’t remember the backgrounds bothering me as much in the first episode. Anime usually has the opposite problem; the zits on a ladybug’s knee discernable from half a mile away while the foreground is filled in with the paint bucket (or gradient!) tool. Here, the buildings especially, all too frequently look like they’re made out of Duplo.

I really despise the Mario Kart ballooons fighting thing too. I guess at least they’re not using arbitrary numbers like some things I could name, but I still don’t see how “hit the magical not-balloons” is a possible improvement over “hit the person.” It’s a bad gimmick through and through, and neither incoporated nor executed with any faculty. I don’t even want to mention her stumbling into a random room and her astral journey of magical awakening. Weirdly though, that seemed to be the trigger for them to start actually animating the show. Granted, it’s in that style where the character art gets all blobby, elongated, and makes certain pretentious people flood their panties with a cry of “sakuga!” which I have never been a great fan of, but still an absurd improvement over the laughable animation of the other 42 minutes of mostly non-animation that the show has put out so far.