天下制覇

May contain fewer bee shooting dogs than advertised.

Impressions:

<Aroduc> Telepathy Girl Ran
<Aroduc> Has flamethrower dogs
<totali> ….
<totali> nice.
<Aroduc> Which is good because the first five minutes were horrendously boring.
<Aroduc> Then there was a possessed dog and I was thinking "it’d be great if it shot bees."
<Aroduc> So it picked up a lighter and shot flame.

Well, to be honest, it was actually a pretty decent first episode overall, but the start was just terribly boring. Everything got a lot more interesting towards the end when Midori shows up and starts mind crushing Ran’s crush, Rui. I don’t know why exactly, but I wasn’t expecting her to be an antagonist at all when I briefly skimmed over this series description. I’m also confused as to the title, since Ran seems to have telekinesis, not telepathy. Midori’s the telepath… Ran throws pencils.

As far as production values go, it was pretty decently done, but kicking things off with a 90 second shot of a shadow playing the violin that even Nodame’s bad CG instruments outclassed wasn’t a good idea. I could have also gone for a far subtler telepathy effect than GIANT GLOWING LIGHTS KALEIDOSCOPE EFFECT SEE SOMETHING IS GOING ON AND IT’S MAGIC OR SOME CRAP SEE BECAUSE THERE ARE GIANT RED LIGHTS EVERYWHERE! They were already toning that down quite a bit towards the end, thankfully, but it was extremely jarring and irritating.

I’m not sure I’ll follow along too closely since I’m already watching three other shows on Saturdays, and KKN is enough of a mindwarp to cover on its own. I think Saturdays are just a liiiiiiiiiiiiittle bit overdosed on psychic girls at the moment, truth be told. I was pleasantly surprised by how decent (the second half of) this was though, so as far as first episodes go, it’s got my cautious endorsement. I already hate Midori’s cookie cutter "my life is so sad and I’m a telepath" character, though I’m kind of interested in seeing where they’re going to go with it since I had thought this was some kind of crime solving/buddy show between the three main characters or something.

Well, if the next episode has more dogs shooting things, I’d be happy.

Telepathy Girl Ran OP