天下制覇

Whoa, where’d this come from?

Impressions:

Let’s start with the bad. This show is very very clearly straining at its budget. The last third or so of the episode was excellent, but almost all of the rest of the action in the show fell into either two categories, quick stills with speedlines, or what I like to refer to as Dragon Warrior Attacks, where they show someone swinging their weapon, then cut away to an explosion (or stills of people getting knocked down). The stills were quick enough so that it didn’t look like they were hurting for the budget too much, but the sheer number of them through the first half is astounding. They also used a lot of that blurred animation thing that JC Staff in particular loves to do to cover up that someone ‘attacking’ is only two frames repeated over and over again. I also don’t usually say anything about voice acting either, but the VAs here are… well… let’s say that they need work. Quite a bit of work.

The rest though was otherwise excellent. Like I said, the last third of the episode was great, but even besides that, there’s a huge cast and they were all introduced fluidly and by what they were doing instead of having Yamato just list out who they are, as well as the war game itself. It’s called incluing and it’s the exact opposite of exposition, which I have already had more than enough of today. You get to learn character personalities and traits, like about Chris being rich, from incidental dialogue instead of a long drawn out sequence plus someone telling you about it. What an astoundingly amazing thing. Yes, at some point, they probably will need to address why there’s a robot throwing a light saber around the field at some point, but as far as a first episode introducing each character through showing them actually doing things instead of just listing all that crap out? Lerche hit it out of the park.

So yeah, I’m relatively impressed, particularly compared to the other stuff today, although there are definitely some weak parts, particularly in the first half. I doubt they can keep up this same level of action though, and I’m pretty sure that this show is meant to be a comedy as well. The comic parts of this episode were present, but very weak. Lerche did show that they can do comedy with Carnival Phantasm though, so I’m hopeful for this continuing in either direction.