天下制覇

This episode could have been okay if not for the music.

Impressions:

I’m starting to really think that JC Staff actually hired an orchestra and is now just trying to figure out ways to use them. You know how it is. The first time you installed Photoshop, you spent the next day adding light bloom to everything. It’s getting really obtrusive here though. Mei’s dream started out decently, but then the flutes came in and the nightmare had the most bizarre operatic death imaginable. I mean, come on here. Merry punches it in the face, it gets slightly scuffed, and then it spends the next two minutes slowly dying. The Nibelungenlied has quicker deaths with fewer wailing string instrument than that. Other production woes continued as well. This episode was rife with shoddy art, poorly framed shots, and flat-out mistakes. Wasn’t it night when they entered the dream world?

I will admit that these last two episodes have been much better than the first couple. It’s almost fought its way up to below average. I did really like the scene with Forehead Girl (I can’t even remember why she’s evil anymore, let alone her name) on the train platform. Despite how prevalent the theme of blurred realities in the show, it usually does a horrible job of drawing the audience in because it makes the dream world so obvious and jarring. It still needs to elevate Yumeji to something beyond a cheerleader and find a way to incorporate the dream world much more smoothly instead of just dumping it in and having Yumeji notice at almost random every week before it makes it up to average. Also, it’d be nice if we got back to the plot. Remember how the first two episodes introduced three antagonists and had one girl get eaten? Shouldn’t we be addressing that now that we’ve introduced it? Oh right, this is JC Staff. We’ll see them again in episode 11!

Preview:

Okay, we’ve established the formula. Time for something different now.