天下制覇

Meh.

Let’s see… when was the last one? December 2009? Oh, well. It’s only been 19 months. If it took that long, it has to turn out amazing… right? Right!?

Impressions:

Unfortunately, not really. One of the biggest complaints I’ve had with the later episodes of this series is that ever since the London stuff started, the ‘action’ in most episodes has primarily consisted of shooting/eating random civilizians/soldiers/zombies, and this continues that trend without making any waves, beginning with Maxwell’s purge and segueing into what felt like nearly thirty minutes of watching Alucard’s mostly-CG undead horde mill about. At least when the Germans weren’t recapping the story to date. Yeah, so maybe some of it was required after 19 months, but ye lords. Don’t put a bunch of crazy people together and then cut away to watch a fat German do recap.

Things didn’t improve much for the Alexander/Alucard showdown either. Oh, it started promising enough, with about 90 whole seconds of the characters actually moving and attacking each other, but then they cut back to the Germans and by the time they got back to the fight, Alexander was just hacking up generic zombies once again, CG and otherwise. When the rest of Iscariot showed up, it was more of the same. And when it came down to the big fight scene at the end? What did they drag out for the big showdown after 19 months of waiting? A bunch of barely animated pans. Sigh. When they were standing around staring at each other with their vines and… uh… darkness pulsating… that was more animated than when they were actually attacking each other. …And lasted about five times as long for that matter. Remember the first Alexander/Alucard fight… back in like… 2006? That was better animated, better directed, and far more visceral. These days, more time is spent watching them pose than actually fight.

Seriously. What made the early episodes of this series fun was how visceral and well-animated the action was. Episode 7 was close, but this was definitely an ugly step backwards to the same mistakes that Madhouse made in episodes 5 and 6. When the production is decent, the content is meaningless ((killing generic zombies/soldiers). When the content is meaningful, the production is terrible (any fight between named characters). Get those things together again and give the important parts the attention and thrill that they deserve. I am not and will never be excited to see a bunch of pans and people staring at each other for minutes upon minutes on end. I get that enough with my dogs and they don’t randomly inflict CG people on me.