天下制覇

 Obligatory shonen post.

Impressions:

I don’t have a particularly good relationship with shonen stuff, as you might have been able to deduce. It isn’t helped by the fanbase. You can set your watch by the ranting about new shows. It’s basically a yearly ordeal where One Piece, Naruto, Fullmetal Alchemist, Bleach, D.Grey Man, Claymore, etc gets praised as the second coming of the holy ghost and within two months, the animation budget has dried up and characters are spending episodes alternatively arguing about their power levels, giving detailed Powerpoint lectures on how their magical power is better than the other person’s magical power or for some reason… now in a tournament.

I’ll say this for Soul Eater at the very least… it starts a lot stronger than everything I’ve mentioned above. Unfortunately, it has its own slew of problems unique. The voice acting is completely flat and horrendous, the background artwork is about forty times better than the foreground, it took only 10 minutes before it was making boob jokes and nose bleeds all over the place and I think actually managed to make more cracks about breasts than even To Love-ru, and the mouth animation is… let’s call it inconsistent. It was extremely well animated otherwise, though hampered by some really awful fight direction. The choreography and animation was top notch, but the camera lept around like a hyperactive frog on speed which made it impossible to actually follow a damn thing. The mouths also… the first two thirds of the episode, they were just poorly animated. Snapping back and forth between completely closed and jaw splitting in a single frame. Then all of a sudden at the end they became extremely overanimated to the point where Maka and Soul looked like they were having seizures as they talked.

If none of those things bother you (and if you’re a sub watcher, you won’t be paying too much attention to the spastic mouths anyway), then it was a great first episode. Like every other shonen show from here to Dragonball and beyond though, I remain skeptical that it’ll be anywhere near as impressive in a month. Luckily, I don’t think anybody expects me to cover this anyway. This kind of stuff is more Omni’s domain… or the swarm of everybody else eager to jump on the latest and greatest shonen show before the power level debates begin.

Soul Eater OP

Preview:

One of the rivals/friends gets an episode.