天下制覇

But it sure is bloomy.

Impressions:

Well, to its credit, it's had the least expositionriffic introductory sequence of the shows this season so far. The problem is that they didn't really replace it with anything. Extremely loud music and the sheer majesty of this fantastic fantasy world we live in are not exactly rare things in animeland, and no amount of bloom or ugly CGI are going to make it as special as they clearly feel it is. There's also a metric crapload of characters all dumped out with the usual lack of purpose. The excessively breathy main character has amnesia, so starting around the halfway point, they start using that as an excuse to explain everything. Well, at least it's sort of organic. The problem is that it's still completely dull. As the transparent, vaguely desperate audience surrogate, she's also perpetually amazed by everything and constantly declaring how great people's powers are and how wonderful the world is. I guess we're supposed to be intrigued by the mystery of her flaming forgotten past? I have no idea.

Most of the effort went into the backgrounds and bloom too, which really shows at the end when they couldn't quite summon up the budget to make water wet. Drawing a couple drops on their faces is enough so show that, right? Otherwise, it's pretty much just talking heads and really, really loud 'soothing' music all the way down. It's in no hurry to get to anything that one might call interesting or eventful, despite a clear half-assed attempt at the end with a cliffhanger, spoiled by the next episode preview showing that no, nothing was really going on after all, just some rocks falling.

Next Episode:

Rocks stop falling.