天下制覇

Oh boy. My favorite things.

Impressions:

Wow. About the only thing it improved was making things a little more cohesive by having characters leap from location to location. Otherwise, it was a drastic step down from the first episode in just about every possible way. Estelle finds one of the magical widgets… gets put into a hallucination/flashback about her past. Estelle gets attacked by Renne, has a dream about Joshua. Estelle meets Leonhardt, gets to sit through another flashback. And of course, since we’re in basically digest mode for the flimsy plot, everything else just gets glossed over. Estelle uses her magical protagonist powers to hug Renne and make everything better out of absolutely nowhere. Then they leap off the airship to safety and the whole thing ends.

So… yeah. I thought they did a pretty horrible job of targetting the first one towards anybody but rabid fans of the game and this one just amped that problem up to 11. There’s not even any particularly pretty animation to look at this time around either. Just compare the rather excellent 9 minute fight in the first episode to the ~90 second fight here… and that was the second big fight of the first episode. That’s it. The rest is just chattering, dreams, and flashbacks giving an abridged version of an RPG starting somewhere about halfway through. Ugh. I’m going to go watch the Walter fight again and remember the better times.