天下制覇

Because it’s cheaper to put up a fancy font than it is to animate an attack.

New Season Disclaimer:

I try to watch at least the first episode of every new show in a season. However, do not expect anything I say to be fair or balanced. I value my own entertainment above all else and there are some genres or methods of presentation that I just plain do not like and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I’ll attempt to at least make a cursory explaination of what did and did not please me about each show, but it’s just a simple fact of life that my tastes are mine alone. Feel free to express your own opinions in the comments, just keep it under control. This is just television after all.

Impressions:

So… this show has some severe production issues. It’s going for something like a Gainax or Sengoku Basara feel, but the problem is that the animation is extremely uneven and it abuses stills . It’s hard to get excited about what’s meant to be a heart pumping attack when the grunting was more animated than the attack itself, or when gun muzzle flash lasts about half a second. Hell, the attack names were often more animated than the attacks. Why is this show’s production so uneven…? Oh wait, found the answer. It does usually look decent enough though, and if your idea of a good action scene is a closeup of someone’s face while they scream out the name of their attack, you’ll be in seventh heaven.

The rest of the content was puerile at best, moronic at worst. Two of the leads are Adam and Eve, and the bad guys come from behind gate 666 to drink blood. Nuanced, this ain’t. Christ (Cruz? Whatever) is also the worst kind of worthless whiny protagonist imaginable: a little boy who spends the entire episode crying about his sister. He did have the only moment of comedy that made me laugh though. Eve took his shape and switched places with him, and when this was revealed, Chris gasped and asked "What am I doing over there?" The mind boggles at what he thought the possibilities could have been.

Most of the rest of the humor is the same kind of cornball nonsense that you find in Naruto or One Piece that nobody over the age of 12 actually finds funny, but they’re going to go through the motions anyway, consequences be damned. "My name is Eve, but you can use ‘sama’ when you refer to me." "Nobody asked you." Ha. Ha. Ha. "Who could have been so cruel to run him over?" "You." Ha. Ha. Ha. Hilarious. Sorry, Koyasu, not even you can save these jokes. I don’t even want to discuss the ED… 90 seconds of girls making out in between kissing each other’s breasts or butts. I wish I was kidding.

So in brief, it’s another Jump show through and through, only in a post apocalyptic wasteland instead of on a pirate ship, a ninja village, or in the afterlife. It’s childish, shallow, immature, and features a whiny boy hero supported by Kakashi and… I’ve exhausted my Jump knowledge, but I assume there’s a shapeshifter in one of those. I’m about a decade too old to enjoy that and sixty years too sardonic to stomach it without a full bottle of Mylanta close at hand. It could certainly be a lot worse, but none of the humor made me even grin, the characters are all cardboard cutouts, and production sloppiness right off the bat all don’t speak too promisingly for the future.

NEEDLESS OP

Preview:

When magical boys attack.