天下制覇

Because this show hasn't been enough about Haku getting bogged down in bush yet.

Edit: I did turn on BBK/BRNK, the all CGI action thingy, and let it run while I was photoshopping multitudes of buttons. The first half was extraordinarily unimpressive and slow, and while the second half did actually show a decent amount of effort and condensed the setup for the plot and character intros competently in a way that any number of first episodes this season haven't, the action mainly consisted of a number of things exploding. Beat the hell out of the CGI action provided by things like PSO2 or Luck and Logic, but… eh. I still wasn't feeling it. The West embraced CGI years ago and uses it to fantastic effect. Japan seems to still be lagging badly behind, and seem to not understand the full range of things they can do with it in terms of shots, camera, etc. Probably unfair to compare given the different audience sizes and budgets. Such is life.

Impressions:

Well, the episode eventually pulled itself together to make it all the way up to sort of passable overall, which is still world's better than the last two goddamned months, although Saturdays this season are so weak, maybe it didn't need to. You wouldn't know it from the first half though. Putting the clown together with the fat guy was a perfect storm of obnoxiousness, followed up by more girl shenanigans in the carriage, followed by Haku continuing to be the world's moistest towel and calling into question why he's the protagonist at all if he needs to be goddamned dragged bitchingly every step of the way. The action was also all over the place in tone. You can pick comical with the enemy cartoonishlyy having their clothing shredded and left naked while also being beaten up by giant chickens, or you can be full of blood and beheadings, but if you try to mix the two of them, you're only going to get a mess.

The second half did come together though, introducing a new character through some particularly ridiculous exposition completely unneeded after the far more effective introduction in the middle of battle. Also helpful is that the particularly obnoxious princess characters shut the hell up and simply hit things. And even more shockingly, the fighting was actually animated pretty well. Unfortunately, it didn't do a lot for the enemy side. The insects they fought in the first couple episodes were more of a menace than an entire army fighting dirty, and it's hard to feel like they really achived a victory when everything went exactly as planned and the only resistance to speak of was the random guy at the end. A child throwing food was the greatest threat to them.

Next Episode:

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