天下制覇

Goddammit, I needed my ears.

Impressions:

For maximum enjoyment of the show, I highly suggest you navigate to the mute button and press it as hard as possible. Hell, you may want to just sever your ears to make sure that you’re safe from this one. The musical direction is simply horrendously terrible. They’re trying to go for overly serious here, but Bee Train’s idea of "serious background music" is wailing chants that are louder than the foreground vocals. Maybe their audio muxer was drunk. It’s overly pretentious anyway, but you’d think they’d at least be smart enough to not have the BACKGROUND drown out the foreground. I’m not even going to get started on the OP. If you ground down orphan fingerbones into a sharp point and ran them across a chalkboard, you’d get a similar sound.

Also, while we’re talking about the sound in general, Tomokazu Seki… how’d you get pulled into this? You don’t belong here. You’re not a badass. You’re the comic sidekick, or the useless male lead at best. You don’t fit, and trying to make yourself sound gruff and badass is just embarrassing all of  us. Your Sousuke voice does not work here. A shellshocked teenager is not what we’re looking for. You just make matters worse when you try to imitate One Piece’s Zoro too for that matter.

As far as the other production values go, they were pretty good in parts. The start was well done enough, as was Manji’s (brief) fight with… I already forget his name. The end fight was just horrendous though. Instead of action, we got stills of the target looking stunned while strobing over different angles with the brightest colors in the entire episode as a background. It defies logic or description. I’ll be fair, Bee Train has only turned one other show into a steaming pile of refuse, but if the budget’s already run out to animate a swinging sword 15 minutes into the first episode, then I don’t think they’ll be distancing themselves from their reputation any time soon. It’s not like I’ve liked any Bee Train shows outside of maybe Murder Princess anyway.

I did enjoy how much of a lunatic Machi was. I was all ready to rant about how she seemed like she was snorting the Japanese opium, but it turns out that she really was completely bonkers after watching her brother’s head get cut in half by Manji. Unfortunately, she died towards the end (amidst the STROBE EFFECTS and CONTRASTING BACKGROUNDS), so no more insanity. Just back to the talking heads and Manji holding his severed foot.

Finally, I question what Freddy Mercury is doing in the feudal period.

I can’t imagine I’ll care enough to even check the second episode out. Overly serious shows aren’t my thing, regardless of my expectations for it to go downhill fast in Bee Train’s capable hands. The long long periods of talking heads with wailing chants in the background didn’t help much either. It did ‘crazy’ well enough though, so it gets props from me for that much at the very least.

Blade of the Immortal OP

Preview:

The entire preview was covered in the pink version of Windows Starfield screensaver. I have no idea what that means.