天下制覇

How is the bird the scariest of the lot?

New Season Disclaimer:

I’ll make a post for almost all new series (barring sequels) with a wrap-up and bullet point opinion of each once the premier week is over. Remember that these are just my kneejerk reactions to the first 20 minutes of shows, many of which in genres that I don’t even particularly like, but I do believe in giving every new series at least an episode to interest me.

Impressions:

Well, I wouldn’t call it a stellar start, but it wasn’t an awful one either. I like Ryuuji quite a bit, but it may take a bit for me to warm up to Taiga. She does get a shout-out because I too am very snotty and would wipe my nose on Ryuuji’s furniture if I could. Kugimiya Rie did her normal capable job with her, but you can hear the Shana and Louise leaking through on occasion, which I guess is perferable to Miharu or Momotaro leaking through. Still, it’s a deeper voice than her normal loli roles, so other people may be able to shrug it off pretty easily. The still relatively inexperienced Junji Majima (voice of prinnies!) did a fine job as Ryuuji. No other character had more than about 4 lines this episode, so really… that makes the core voice acting pretty easy to note.

The show did a very good job with facial expressions and emoting in general, though the music could use some serious help. Luckily, they usually kept it quiet enough so that the heavily heavily distorted guitar theme that played whenever Taiga got mad wasn’t too irritating. It was mostly well animated enough as you’d expect from JCStaff. Nothing to be ashamed of, but certainly not the second coming of Kyoto Animation. The random attempted beating scene was somewhat funny for me because I kept thinking to myself that it nearly rivaled anything ZnT3 put out. Also along those lines, aside from Ryuuji’s top-heavy other, there really wasn’t any fanservice at all, which was a pleasant surprise. The drooling mentally handicapped bird probably counts as anti-fanservice anyway.

Overall, I’m not really hooked yet, and since I haven’t read the manga, I don’t really know if the show is expected to get better or worse from here. Wednesdays aren’t exactly crowded for me though (Hyakko’s really the only other thing on my ‘maybe’ pile), so I’ll probably stick around at least enough for them to actually flesh out the other two main characters and get the whole premise under way. From looking around at other reactions though, fans of the manga seem pretty pleased so far. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll watch the streams on future weeks though. I’m just still a bit sickly (mostly just constantly leaking snot at this point) from my trip across the country and back and tunedin.

No OP this week.

Preview:

School with Taiga and Minorin.