天下制覇

Why does everything have issues with capitalization and/or exclamation points this season?

Impressions:

Wow. This covered the premise in the first two minutes of the episode with a declaration of "now it begins." How low my standards have fallen when I find this to be the story moving notably fast. Then the OP played and it went straight to wildly bouncing tits and the protagonist being decked by the main heroine for the crime of being in the same zip code as her. Every time it tries to be funny, I cringe a bit, mostly because of that really awful cartoonish style it uses that doesn't mesh with otherwise washed-out visual style. It got a little worse in the second half too as they were trying to play up the quirkiness of the heroine. While I welcome the levity from the characters in not treating everything like it's some big melodramatic apocalypse, the sudden jumps to pastels or total Looney Tunes scampering noises are jarring and uncomfortable. However, JC Staff clearly put some effort into actually selling it as an action show and I really hope they keep that up, even if the fight at the end of the episode was clearly running low on both the animation budget and the OST.

The characters are mostly worth mentioning too. The protagonist's reaction to being charged by a brute is a hip throw and elbow drop. He doesn't freak out when randomly attacked nor ascribe to some inane notion of chivalry about not hitting girls. He's still a fairly blank slate, but not one that spent the episode bitching and moaning about things happening and instead immediately confronted and dealt with them. The heroine is confident, self-assured, and capable. The excessive cuteness and quirkiness from her could work, but it'd be nice if it was a little better integrated into their interactions instead of the sudden visual shifts. Compared to the casts from the rest of the season so far, they're downright masterpieces. And in a show that has already set up its premise and a vauge direction going forward. It could've set the story arc quite a bit better though. I suspect they ran out of time because they had to fit in the obligatory huge hits muggle for no reason other than to check off that particular box.

Next Episode:

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