天下制覇

And now we know that David has computers.

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:

Now that’s how you put together a truly repulsive first few minutes. A blank white room with a CG phonograph, and a guy repeating it, before cutting away to a shot of cleavage with more CG, and then Ali Project OP that looks like there wasn’t a single artist involved in its making. And then the first shot after that is a giant CG tanker. What I’m trying to say is that this show abuses the hell out of the CG at every opportunity. It did look okay at some points, like the shot of the past with the grass blowing, but all the CG boats tooling around on badly rendered water, CG smoke, the CG ‘books’ and even the occasional CG person, really not the way to win my favor.

Even the rest of the animation is pretty unimpressive since it’s mostly just people jumping around and waving their arms or swinging their weapons against speedlines and then something explodes. The animation was definitely there, but the direction was a bit lacking. The episode in general also took a nose dive in the second half and turned into just one long string of talking heads giving exposition. Show, don’t tell. And for Zeus’ sake, don’t show, tell, and then tell again. It got especially bad at the very end when our meat-friend was found by one of the nobles, who proceeded to just randomly start explaining the piece of the ‘book’ that the kid was holding before basically just wandering off again. "Hi, I’m evil. By the way, that thing you’re holding is yada yada yada yada yada yada yada. Man, I hate talking to you."

Overall, I’m not terribly interested nor impressed. CG is one of my pet peeves and this abuses the hell out of it. If that doesn’t bother you, then great. Even taking that aside though, the direction through the entire episode was rather lacking and there was no effort made to even subtly work the exposition into real conversations. If anything, it felt like a third rate RPG just laying out the entire plot before telling you "go take this package to the village of summoners." I wouldn’t be too surprised if it improved greatly, or got far worse, but I’ll probably leave that to someone else to find out.