天下制覇

  

We’re going to kill your family. Ha ha ha.

Impressions:

This show would work so much better if it was just a pure comedy about a bunch of corny incompetent workers (and their incompetent robot) retrieving malfunctioning robots, only springing that they all eventually go crazy or whatever (this is not actually shown, let alone done convincingly) for the obligatory end of season drama with the main character breaking down. Or at the very least, start things off with wacky adventures, not going straight into taking away robot family members distinguishable from humans in absolutely no way, aside from the female protagonist who announces errors occasionally, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that from ‘normal’ Japanese girls in anime too. This crap wouldn’t even fly if they were doing it for the family guinea pig, guys. Instead, it tries to mix drama into affairs by slapping the audience in the face with the sturgeon of weepy melodrama every five minutes, and that functions about as well as you’d expect hitting people with a faceful of fish to. They laid it on especially thick by showing up to take someone’s ‘son’ away and dispose of him, but ten times thicker at the end.

It’s really hard to get into the comedy when the protagonists’ job is to take away beloved pseudo-family members forever because the palm flower says it’s time to die, but especially when it starts making piss jokes. Yes, that is how the episode ends. We are taking away your pseudo-granddaughter to euthanize her, and man, I’ve gotta piss so bad! Ha ha. That wacky Japanese humor. To say that there are issues with the direction and writing is like saying that the surface of the sun can be a little warm. Production’s… okay, I guess. Not impressive, but not awful either. Functional, but the show’s not ambitious. There were a few moments when weepy violins guy was asked to write ‘comedy’ music that clearly did not work out for anybody involved though, least of all that trombone or clarinet.

The drama and comedy does not mix in the slightest, each undermining the other, and one is delivered with the force of a whale at terminal velocity, which is a shame since it does have a little more understated comedy for the season (and Japan in general), and I might have been able to get on board with that if it wasn’t trying to mash at the heart strings every five minutes like a heavy metal guitarist. Alas, it wants to wrench at the cockles of my heart, and that is a losing proposition for something as hamfisted and, if the music direction is anything to go by, drunk, as this.