天下制覇

Because ugly CG makes everything better.

Impressions:

Beginning with nearly two minutes of mostly distance shots of the back of Gilgamesh’s head… fantastic. Apparently Assassin’s ridiculous dance last episode ate up the budget for this one too because it was another episode of talking heads with as little movement shown as possible. It’s much cheaper to just show one character blink than to animate a moving mouth after all. As much as I don’t like Shaft for their recycled and repeated gimmicks in recent years, at least they try to spice up these totally dull sections with the direction. Just having the camera sit there while the characters announce what’s going on is the epitome of both lazy and uninteresting writing and direction. Give the audience some credit here. Show, don’t tell.

Even Waver and Iskander weren’t safe from it this week, although they still remained the most animated pair of the bunch. I guess Iris came in second, having a clumsy loop of spinning around in the water, although that was mostly just so much generic "girls standing in the wind" porn. Maiya was introduced as well, but was just another talking head with all the rest. I guess at least it ends with Saber and Diar confronting each other, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all at this point if they just spent the first five minutes staring at each other. If they do putz it up though, I’m probably relegating this to BloodC-like coverage because I’m getting really sick of saying "the characters stood around explaining themselves, half of the time offscreen. Waver was the only one who seemed to actually give a crap."