天下制覇

Once upon a time, the title to this post was 2am. It’s been a distracting night.

So, after staring at and fixing alpha channels on the pixel level for the better part of three straight hours and a dinner of chocolate chip muffins and shredded pepperoni over nachos, I thought to myself, "You know what’d be a good idea? Watching an OVA for a show where I didn’t make it past episode 2." It was either this or turn on part 2 of "The Best of Both Worlds" for the fourth time in the last two months. MOVE ON TO A DIFFERENT SEASON, DAMN IT. I’m tired of half-naked, pale Patrick Stewart. But hell, it couldn’t be any worse than randomly jumping into the middle of Koihime Musou, could it?

Thus did another evening pass in the den o’ Aroduc. Always an adventure, let me tell you.

Impressions:

This was actually pretty fun, even despite having no real idea who Nymph was or what the whole very short little hatchet on chain flashback at the start was all about. Whatever happened, she spent most of the episode moping about not having a master to give her orders. A lot of my issue with the first couple episodes of the series was that Tomoki was an absolutely abhorrent character. He’s still pretty bad, but a lot easier to shrug off as comic relief when he spends 95% of the episode 1 foot tall or a floor instead of invisible and attempting to rape his friends or freebase their underwear. I also remember the show trying a hell of a lot harder way back when and that dragging everything down by trying to bash everybody over the head with how forceful they could hammer home the cliches.

It remains as good looking and as good sounding as I remembered though. AIC has really turned the corner in production over the last few years. Maybe they seized some of KyoAni’s key staff when they jumped ship. I should really pay more attention to that kind of thing. Anyhoo… I do think that it dragged a bit in the second half. It went for the "repeat a scene for a minute straight" joke (the height of modern comedy apparently), followed by Tomoki being as bad as I remembered, and then the rest of it was fairly maudlin nonsense about having your own dreams that I’ve heard so many times that I swear I’ve had dreams about people telling me to have dreams. Still though, it was fun, and even if it’s just because I’m still seeing after-images of Photoshop’s alpha channel when I close my eyes, it was worlds beyond what I remembered from this series. Maybe I’ll be on board for the next season starting in a few weeks after all.

Preview:

Angry Silmeria.