天下制覇

Now the song's stuck in my head.

Impressions:

Can't fault it for trying with the visuals to create a surreal dreamworld, so let's fault it for the characters, excessive exposition, and direction. You know, the usual stuff. The direction I'd go the lightest on since, again, at least it occasionally tries. Not sure why it loves the frame in frame thing so much, or the sliding transitions during conversations, but beats shots of walls or scenery. The protagonist I can only defend as far as "Doesn't shout all the time," but that's because he's largely apathetic to everything going on. He exists almost entirely to be a straw doll to say "What's going on?" He triumphs by… not believing that what's going on matters, having the not-really-tragic-at-all backstory jammed into his head, and then telling her to believe in herself. Hooray for… indifference and self-esteem speeches? I'm not sure those two are supposed to go together.

And therein lies the issue. I feel like enough pieces are there that this could be at least interesting, in a kind of "guy solves messed-up character-of-the-week's-issues-while-slowly-uncovering-the-mystery-of-the-world" thing, but the execution on almost every part is flubbed. They go out of their way to explain the rules of the world then decide to completely ignore them, the protagonist's personality jumps around at random with a default of confused and indifferent, instead of coming to the resolution through any effort or insight of his own (or anybody's), it's simply handed to him, and then it's all resolved with a particularly insipid self-esteem speech. Some genuine surreality is welcome amidst the morass of mundane claptrap, but everything else is all over the place. Hell, just use Dreamtime as the framework for the episode and it probably would've come out better.