天下制覇

Oh wait, one has a slightly longer ponytail.

Don't count on early writeups all the time. I watched this before work since it's nice enough to air that early and snuck in time to finish sorting caps and write up during a meeting. Usually these days though, I prefer to sleep in. And not have meetings if I can help it.

Impressions:

This show has some real work to do. Mostly in figuring out just how stupid its characters are supposed to be. I throw around the word "gormless" a lot, but good god, I may have to give it a rest this season just because this show has already set a baseline that I'm not sure any others will be able to match. Please don't surprise me in that regard, Japan. For the first half, they acted like spastic chihuahuas on a Sony product placement kick, and then turned into drooling imbeciles as soon as they hit the magic world, even after leaving it. Maybe the joke is that they're all collectively demented. Something in the water. That certainly seemed to be the joke they were going for with the grandma who had an identical conversation with both Asukas back to back. The rest of the cast, even seeing them standing next to each other, decided it must have been a dream and that was the last we saw of them for the episode. You know, a dream that creates a time-slipped clone of your friend that you just helped carry home.

It does show some flair for putting together a fight scene, which is nice. Being gorpy CGI, less so. The interesting part is the other world, and it does tease a number of things, from Asuka2 mournfully whispering about friends to figures lurking in the shadows. But if you remove the fight against rabbite-weasel-hydras and those few moments, you're left with about 17 minutes of teenage girls bumbling around in two different flavors of obnoxious stupidity. "I don't much like the characters" would be the takeaway, I suppose. They could've done a lot more to tease out what was going on and what was going to be the driving factor of the show. As it stands, it's mostly old Sony product placement and "there's a magic world with magic girls, and a thing is going on with it." A little more bait on the hook and a lot less time spent vapidly puttering about having coffee, having dinner, and having baths would've helped. I fear, as always, that those things were the bait.