天下制覇

I'm pretty sure I only watched this for the cat anyway.

Asterisk airs at around 430 am tomorrow morning, and the other LN clone of magical teenagers at magical fighting magic school 7 am. I'll get to them at not an ungodly hour of Saturday morning.

Impressions:

Oh, K. You go and overanimate some knife throwing, and then immediately afterward, the camera is in between some woman's thighs, her ass covering a third of the screen and her panties peekout out, and then you move it so as to catch just the sides of her torpedo boobs, flopping wildly with every little movement. And do this every single time she's on screen. Sure, the men get to have super powers. The one woman's only fighting ability is stripping and waving her tits and ass. At least the eye candy was actual candy, godawful CGI backgrounds they were skimming over and neon filters notwithstanding. I'm not forgetting that the first season began similarly though before it all disappeared in an endless parade of talking heads. The direction could have used a lot… and I mean a lot less wildly spinning camera and close-ups of T&A flopping around like gelatin though. Well, and providing a little more context and actual plot direction to it instead of basically being a montage of random vignettes. Oh, and lets remember that if I can't tell what's going on because giant balls of flaming light are constantly covering the screen, that's not helping either. Instead of being a complete scene, the focus seems to overwhelm and exhaust the audience with shining lights and noisy music, so while the animation is there in spades, the direction isn't really. All style, no substance, which is where the first season fell apart so badly. That and the budget that died a horrible death almost immediately, taking style with it.

The second half was more where it busied itself on exposition and recap, although there are certainly worse ways to do that than little 8-bit sequences. For example, with CGI skateboarders over a maudlin song and flashbacks, which is what came right after that. It seems to really be playing up the video game angle this season, although I'm not sure that I expect the random Tron bombers to be sticking around too long after attempting to bomb and shoot everyone, but the entire red/blue teams simply standing there and ignoring it thanks to their magic powers. Even at this stage of the series, it's not generally a good idea to advertise that the writers' whim controls everything.

Like Noragami, this was in no real hurry to do or set up much of anything. It was mostly seemingly reveling in the fact that it got the green light for another season. I doubt that it can keep up the budget it showed this episode, especially given last season and GoHands' track record in general, and it looks like it'll be doing the opposite of solving its past issues with the terrible writing and unnecessarily huge casts by re-refocusing on the red/blue crap. Also, I can still taste the neon colors when I close my eyes.

Next Episode:

Kitty cats.