天下制覇

It’s going to be a trial for me to not make puns off of Sen’s name, I can tell already.

Protip: The Save Draft button is not the Publish button.

I watched a little bit of episode 2 for Star Driver, but it started off with Tact’s madcap adventures of… hanging out with the theater club. Then skipping around through generic council of evil, Pinky trying to seduce him in the bath and him being terrified (cooties… ew!), and as Tact was shouting about the galaxy, the evil robot turned into a motorcycle while they recycled the insert song. I think you’ve done that before, Utena’s writer. Both the recycling and the transforming into an automobile. I’m just going to tap out on it since I’m covering enough already, and I can’t take the show or characters seriously at all. Xebec is doing a better job at building a serious story than it is. Xebec!

Impressions:

Man, has it really been over a month? I hardly even remember what happened in the first episode.

Great start to the episode with the Jubei/Hanzou fight, but things trailed off a lot from there. I wasn’t execting great things from the writing for this show anyway, but they could have done a lot more to make all these tired cliches more interesting. Her power’s ‘mysteriously’ vanished, prophecy that she’s the bringer of death, and Sen’s brother is off being evil in the background. We certainly didn’t need all 15 minutes to cover it. They used the inkblots a lot less this week, but there was also a lot less to censor. I did like the way that they used them during the fight as platforms for Jubei’s air-running though. It’s a nice way to make that scene look less corny, especially with the Hanzou-copter.

Speaking of Sen, she was a little cuter this week, but I prefered her more evilish self in the first episode to this stammering and airheaded version. Muneakira also lost a lot of points by freaking out when confronted with a soft, cuddly, mostly naked girl. He flirts with all of them, then freaks out when confronted with the threat of cooties. What’s his damage? I also question his ability to calmly notice the samurai seal between her cleavage at the end after being completely traumatized by her flesh twice before. Matanabei and Hanzou seem destined to be little more than annoying gag characters though. Hopefully they’ll at least be useful for stripping their masters.