天下制覇

Still closer to a real mystery than anything GOSICK’s pulled off!

Impressions:

The best thing that I can say about it is that it’s a good thing that the character the entire episode focused on has apparently left the show for good because he’s the most unlikeable sack of crap. Otherwise, this is highly reminiscent of Ookami-san, but since this is a prime time Jump show, the lead’s a brash young male and everything is about eight times louder. Yeah, we’re here in the "volume = comedy" comfort zone of Japanese adolescent humor, but it’s barely even built as a comedy. Most of the jokes are so tired and cliche that I can’t imagine anybody who has been watching anime for more than 3 months hasn’t seen them all before. "Here’s an info dump on the female, and her measurements are…" HILARIOUS!  

The show was pretty well produced at least and the music was quite good. The problem is that I’m not sure what they’re going for. The comedy’s weak and they really don’t commit to it. They almost had a little mystery for a short part, but didn’t run with that either. Also, they showed a guy looking at fish while saying that there were no fish, and this was a major point of the episode. Lies in Paintywaist’s flashback, yeah, sure. He’s lying. But when you start involving other people’s flashbacks in it like it’s some kind of shared mass-trout hallucination, you’re pushing it.

I won’t say that it was bad, but it wasn’t much of anything at all aside from technically well made. None of the characters are particularly strong and all the focus was on a particularly spineless little whiner that if the OP is any indicator, we’ll never see again. It appears that the show wants to be a jack-of-all trades, but this episode didn’t do anything well enough… or even notable enough… to catch my attention and make me want to keep watching it. And since there are nine other Thursday shows, it’ll take a lot of sucking from the rest of the bunch to get me to give this a second look.

Preview:

Friske: The Sharpmaker.