天下制覇

Sorry, couldn’t help myself.

I guess someone did record the Niconico live broadcast of this episode after all! Actual broadcast starts on the 8th.

Impressions:

The main thing that really stands out to me with this one is the music. It has a very unusual scoring that doesn’t really match well with the actual content at the moment. I don’t know if I’d go so far to say that it’s bad, but it felt like it belonged in more of a sci-fi RPG than Madoka happily skipping around town. It fit better towards the end, but early on in the episode, it was rather obtrusive and honestly, kind of obnoxious. Production was fairly average otherwise. Early on had quite a few budget friendly pans and whatnot and the fight at the end was far from impressive, but it rarely looked cheap.

As for the rest, pretty average all around. It has more than its fair share of eye-rolling cliches though, like Madoka going into some kind of flashback/seizure just from touching one of the magic mechs as well as her being the super awesome utlra pilot omega bonus wonder cat supreme by happy coincidences along with a ‘mysterious’ past that they couldn’t have less subtly beaten you over the head with if they had used a walrus tied to a stick… tied to an elephant. The mechs were also color coded so you knew exactly who the good and bad guys were.

Madoka herself may be the weakest link in the show, being of the utterly clueless but cheerful variety. Not the usual angsty lead that populates mech series that I so despise, but still completely oblivious to everything going around her, which just makes her more of a cariacature than a character. After watching a salvo of missiles decimate things and being told aliens are attacking, she makes silly faces and spaceman sounds. And then uses a German suplex pin with a three count to ‘beat’ the enemy at the end. It’s hard to tell what exactly they’re trying to go for there in terms of overall tone. Nobody else really does much of anything to distinguish themselves as either good or bad. Lan seems like the best of the lot, having a sense of humor to go with the Ayanami Rei knockoff personality that is requisite to this stuff, but all she really does is drown, sneak into the shower to spy on Madoka naked, bark, and toss Madoka into her mech.

In the end, I don’t really have too much negative to say about this episode, but I have precious little good to say about it either. I’ll give it another couple more to figure out what it’s doing, although I probably would have anyway since it’s on Sundays with nothing else but Aquarion, which will likely have everything I hate about mecha and more. I don’t think there’s much to be excited about from what this episode showed though.

Preview:

Lan vs men, Madoka vs vibration.