天下制覇

This one goes out to all the ladies.

Impressions:

This begins with the titular character stripping as the camera pans all over his shimmering muscles and rippling abs, while he stands in glistening light, rubbing himself. And then it goes into a little expositional schtick where he's still half-naked, before the OP starts and he's still half naked, chained up, and flexing. I think I might have an idea who the target audience here is. Overdramatization is the name of the game here, unsurprisingly. Just once, I'd like someone to say "I think this surgery might go faster if you stopped flourishing the suture and splattering blood everywhere, and when you were getting dressed, did you really need to throw back your head and bask in the light cascading down on you?" It pervades the whole thing though, from the literal (metaphorical) crown of thorns our anime Jesus here wears to the train crash that causing this taking 30 seconds from when people started gasping in shock, to the brakes applied for nearly 20. Stop and count just how long that is.

Production was already on the low end, but the animation all but stopped by about 2/3rds into the episode. I'd probably say that how melodramatic it takes itself combined with the weird old style of art is the bigger issue though. It's hard to take the heartless pragmatic doctor seriously when he looks like he might accidentally swallow an entire dachshund whole when he yawns. The lack of a budget hurts most in the operation at the end which is reduced to basically stills, exposition, and suture/scalpel flourishes, both metaphorical and otherwise, for almost five straight minutes. Not even stills of the surgery either. Mostly just their eyes while they talk about how fast and how amazing he's being about 2 feet down from the camera. It's all smoke in the hopes that you miss that there's no actual content, letting an already pretty dull episode peter out completely in a puff of lipservice and all the animators going home for the week after a Tuesday lunch.

Next Episode:

He's naked again.