天下制覇

Why, JC Staff? Wait. Don’t answer that.

Impressions:

Surprising. This wasn’t half bad. I’m not going to go far enough to say that it was half good either, but JC Staff actually put a little bit of effort into animating it. Not a ton, mind you, especially considering that it began with a car chase/mob fight that was probably supposed to hook you but clearly lacked the budget for that, but they pulled it together a little more for Felicita taking on daddy. At any rate, it’s more effort than they put into most episodes of Shana or Zero. Yes, I realize that’s not saying very much. Besides those brief bits though, it was very clearly made on a shoestring budget.

Now on to the worse, or the better as the case may be. The exposition in this show is handled so poorly that I’m not sure whether I should laugh or not. I should’ve realized it after the opening segment when a random woman on the street stopped a passerby and said "Oh, you don’t know them? Well, let me explain." That was only the beginning though. The worst of it was when they literally paused in the middle of a party so Antagonist Du Jour can go "Have you forgotten that we all have magical powers? Allow me to explain them down to the last detail" as the entire crowd watches him in silence. Then after the minute or so of pure info dump, "Duh. Like we needed you to tell us that. We all knew that already." And it just keeps going like that. "Gasp! It’s X! His Arcana is Y, which gives him the power of Z!" "Gasp! Q? He has the power of R thanks to the S Arcana!" All of them with the exact same little splash image too, probably taken directly off a website or out of the game’s manual. At least it livened up those dull parts.

So it was an okay episode. Far from great, but not horrible either. Enough to win it a stay of execution for another week at least to see if they’ve completely exhausted the budget already. I don’t particularly like Felicita, which is never a good quality in a lead, but that could just be the cliche violence combined with every single character idolizing her for ill-defined reasons. The ones that don’t worship the ground she walks on instead talk about getting the pants of a teenager half their ages. Even better. I also can’t take the show seriously when it talks about being the "Papa" and "Mama" of their little mafioso organization. Ah, Japan.

Preview:

Girls kicking boys for having dirty thoughts is always hilarious.