天下制覇

The added style points make up for the lack of vision.

Bloody hell. This was also out last Friday. I should just give up on paying attention to OVAs altogether until they just drop into my lap.

Impressions:

I can’t say that I possess a particular familiarity with the game series it’s based on and this functions extremely poorly as a standalone. There’s no real introduction to the characters, no reasons to care aout them or what they’re doing given This just spews out some exposition about the world and drops the audience in the middle of a few different things right off the bat, one protagonist kissing another before disappearing, cutting away to a mecha attacking a school at the behest of a man in an mask named Blublanc (which sounds even more hilarious when bad Japanese voice actors try to pronounce it) after the secret princess there. Of course, it doesn’t stop just there. I liked how they cut away from the mecha after it got knocked down to have some conversation time between Claudia and Blublanc, and by the time they cut back to the mecha, it was in fire and falling apart while Estelle was standing in front of it with her little stick. How she managed that after being completely incompetent thus far is beyond me.

And yes, the CGI was corny as always, particularly when you could distinguish individual organs on a worm 50 feet away but the people in the foreground were losing their elbows from a lack of detail. The production outside of the action scenes was also… inconsistent, shall we say. Some backgrounds looked very storybookish, warped and artistically crude, while others were extremely detailed. The long long period of exposition and general nothingness in the middle didn’t help there either. Nothing to listen to, so the mind wanders and begins wondering why Josh’s harmonica is forty times more detailed than anything else or why the trees in the background are eerily flat. Don’t get me, wrong the fight at the end against Walter was very good and took up a solid quarter of the show. Sure, they had barely led up to it, introduced him on the spot, and then Josh showed up to save everybody’s bacon after all of about 20 seconds on screen to that point, but it was rather purdy, and at the very least, looked like people actually fighting each other instead of constant cutaways and convenient camera angels to hide the director’s inability to choreograph and/or be kind to the animation budget. It’d be worth watching just for that fight… if I hadn’t pasted it below at any rate.

So overall? Meh. The overwhelming issue was that the story and characters are basically not there at all, so it’s all very insubstantial at best. Even after forty minutes, they’re all the same cardboard cutout as they were in the first 15 seconds. Instead of taking Symphonia’s approach and sacrificing focus on secondary characters to keep the drive and focus on the main ones, this relies on exposition and people pointing at maps with a very bland RPG plot direction of "We’ve gotta go here" and they just kind of stumble into the boss fight for no good reason. I’m pretty sure that’s exactly why they had all the females get naked about halfway through the exceedingly tedious middle too. Perhaps fans of the game will enjoy it more, but be aware that if you’re not bringing in attachment to this from somewhere else, this ain’t going to make you care about anything going on. Very nice fight regardless though.