天下制覇

Bring night goggles.

New Season Disclaimer:

I prefer to give every show a chance. You never know when your dream-eating insect wielding Mai HiME knockoff will turn out to be a psychological romantic thriller, or the strange moeblob show will be full of wit and urine jokes. However, my preferences are still my preferences, and while I’ll endevor to at least convey why I do or do not like things, there are genres of shows that I just plain don’t particularly enjoy. My opinions are based on nothing more than a gut reaction to what I watched literally 10-15 minutes prior and should be construed as nothing more and nothing less than that.

If you’re wondering, Tears to Tiara aired its first episode early on Nico. I’m happy because it’s one less premier this weekend, bringing the grand total down to only about 20 over a 48 hour span. Normally though, the primary broadcast will be Sundays.

I’ll play nice with the spoilers this week.

Impressions:

It’s a little hard to get a good read on how well this is made because of the low quality of the video itself combined with everything taking place at night. It looked about as expected, which is to say nearly identical to Utawarerumono, but with fewer CG lizard-horses roaming around… so far. The action scenes with Arthur were pretty underwhelming; entirely too many slashes on a black background, and then random grunts falling over. Hopefully they’re saving the budget for the actual fights since we have yet to even reach the tutorial battle. Or maybe for Arawn ‘fighting’ with any of his half dozen wives and only slightly fewer mistresses.

Speaking of that… Given that I did play through this (well, the PC version) a few years back, and played the first hour or so last week to refresh myself, I’m not even going to try to divorce myself from the source. I’m a little surprised at how slowly this first episode progressed. They did bring a lot more focus on Arthur and the Gael tribesmen in general through this early part than the (PC) game did, which was nice considering how often the tribe lurks offscreen as just that formless blob Arawn’s leading. Arawn being a huge demonic energy cloud is also new to me. He just casually strolls out of his crypt with Ogam and starts talking trash about humans in the game after some dream foreshadowing. I think I like this version more. At least Arawn seems a bit menacing as a cliffhanger… assuming you know nothing about the game and didn’t watch Riannon nuzzling him in the OP at any rate. I’m also glad that they cut out about 2/3rds of Riannon’s "The North Star is really great" speech from the very start of the game.

This is a lot like Tales of the Abyss for me, only with my feelings about the characters and story reversed. I played the game, I liked the story a lot, but good lord could most of the characters piss me off. So far, the changes please me, and I really did like how Oriental Lights and Magic handled Utawarerumono, so I’m inclined to stick around just on good faith. However, there are something like 10 other shows airing on Sundays, and this episode really didn’t impress or excite me on any front. Just the fact that they let Drwc live through an entire episode made me sad. It really depends on how the other shows on Sunday pan out.

Tears to Tiara OP

No preview this week.