天下制覇

For when you want panty shots, but are afraid your audience might think you're too trashy.

Impressions:

Ah, here's our third light novel adaptation featuring a fiery-haired fiery-tempered heroine and a put-upon protagonist. Only one more to go after this. …I think. Anyway, after the cold open, this launched into five goddamned straight minutes of exposition. At least it was delivered in a soothing monotone, nearly putting me to sleep. That would make the little things later, like the incomprehensible speedlines as it very slowly panned over calves, just as awful as they would've been without it. The relatively poor production here made certain parts especially horrifying, like how two characters would have a ridiculously extended conversation about mundane trivialities while an entire swarm of girls were frozen solid behind them, eyes and mouths locked open wide, staring into the void, screaming the silent screams of the truly damned. If it was in the promos, it was decently animated. The other twenty minutes, welcome to filters, bloom, and speedlines.

I hesitate to call this a comedy, even moreso than I hesitate to call almost any recent Japanese attempts at humor comedy. It seems to be aiming more for "cute" over "funny." While probably wise because the few jokes are mostly just announcing the situation via shouting at the top of his lungs. Not that it really succeeds there either. It doesn't have characters as much as a single ridiculous archetype that strains even the show's ridiculous premise's credulity. The mere sound of a phone ringing sends paroxysms through the crowd. The sight of dimestore books elicits oohing and aahing. Basically, they all act like they're from Mars. Or is the obligatory 'kooky' character from a Final Fantasy game. Same thing, really. The ones that don't have extraordinarily early onset dementia exist only to dryly and patiently deliver exposition, so maybe it's a symbiotic kind of thing.

Next Episode:

Abandoning all pretenses already.