天下制覇

Monster design is hard, apparently.

Impressions:

Last season began with crash landing a shuttle and it was almost all downhill from there. This one begins with Hibiki whining about how bored she is before being brained by a shoe thrown from a helicopter. It seems like there's probably nowhere to go but up from there. So naturally, they travel to the jungle and spend more of the rest of the episode fighting the Wehrmacht, until the obligatory new magic girl singing antagonists show up, eat all the Nazis, and summon a dragon. Certainly can't fault it for being boring or nothing happening. No, I won't deny that punching tank shells and catching bullets in their teeth isn't cool, especially when done just along the course of action and not singled out and lingered on for the length of an entire commercial break. The music's seen better days though. The first song especially was… not good.

Of course, they showed the path to boring last season by spending the next 10 episodes rehashing the same two episodes over and over again, and I can't really say that this is making even the slightest attempt to tread any new ground, which worries me. They could refocus on a new protagonist (or deuteragonist) and make it a little more character-focused, or flip the script in some way like have the protagonists seemingly go all Justice Lords, or gruesomly mutaliate one or all of them, but they seem content to just rehash the first episode of the last two seasons, only trading a pop concert for Nazis, and putting off the transformation/fights with the new antagonists for next week… if they even get to it at all while playing with the dragon. That's not a great sign for a series that spent an entire season suffering on its inability to come up with anything new.