天下制覇

Ow, my eyes.

Season Premier Disclaimer:

I like to check almost every new show out. The value of a show is in its execution, not its premise. That said, my tastes are mine and mine alone. Some things bother me, some things don’t. I will attempt to be as cogent as possible as to my complaints or compliments for each show, but be aware that my views skew heavily towards the center. Nothing is perfect, nothing is irredeemable. That said, my tastes and my opinions are mine and mine alone and should not be construed as fact or, god help us, some kind of erudite critical analysis of the entire series based on the show’s first 20 minutes. Feel free to leave your own thoughts on the show if you’d like, but invective and similar will be mocked or deleted depending on which amuses me more at the time.

Impressions:

I feel like this show has stolen something from me. Something precious. After how beautiful Kobato was, getting 20 straight minutes of Noto monologuing combined with some of the ugliest character art I have ever seen, and the some remarkably hackneyed drama and I think my standards for the rest of the day are completely shot to hell. Okay, I’ll start with the good first. The backgrounds are very nicely drawn, athough they’re suspiciously brown (insert your own joke about next-gen gaming graphics here), and if you think that Noto is god’s gift to man instead of a one trick pony whose overly breathy voice has gotten her to be the most painfully typecast VA in the history of anime, then this will be manna from heaven for you. The musical was also decent enough.

Now on to everything else. The less said about the character art, the better. Animation was also… uh… let’s call it underwhelming. I’m not sure if this was moving at a breakneck pace or if the writing is supposed to be that volatile. I guess you could make an argument that it’s meant to be teenage hormones in overdrive, but that doesn’t make for a particularly sensical narrative. The cornball "Oh mah gawd, he knows my name PINK HEARTS AND FLOWERS EVERYWHERE" moment was bad enough, but then there were two or three more after that. Every single bout of angst, and this barely made it two or three minutes before building up some new issues, was solved about 15 seconds later by Kazehaya showing up and smiling at her. Hear that, girls? If you’re sad, that just means you’re missing a man in your life. Which, of course, also means that this will probably be strung along for at least another 12 episodes before one of them realizes that they might possibly like the other based on some misheard secondhand information.

Ooookay… I’m starting to get a little more vindictive than I need to be. Needless to say, I don’t think I could survive the melodrama, let alone Noto’s endless breathy whine.

Preview:

The love that crosses species borders.