天下制覇

It’s hard to tell who’s winning.

Impressions:

Well, it’s certainly shouty. However, it does avoid the usual "LOOK AT THIS! HERE IS THE PUNCHLINE!" problem of many Japanese comedies by making the whole thing kind of off the rails without cease. I’m not sure that it works all that well though. The whole thing kind of reminded me more of a commercial, or maybe a show for kids like Keroro. Most of the jokes were pretty bad, but there were certainly a lot of them. That does mean that even when they worked, by the time you were chuckling, they were already halfway into the next one, which would probably be back to terrible. So it’s got some direction issues there that need to be smoothed out.

Production’s expectedly poorish. The art is consistently pretty poor and the animation is frequently still character art being bounced around, but they’re trying to do a lot with clearly a little. I’d be more impressed if they were pulling it off, but they’re kind of not. It can’t seem to decide whether it wants its style to be like the spastic flash shows it seems to be drawing a lot of influence from or more traditional and is splitting the difference.

I guess what it boils down to is that this was a comedy episode that didn’t make me laugh very much. The jokes are certainly there. In spades even, and with enough energy to masquerade a lot of the annoyingly shouted ‘punchlines,’ but without any decent rhythm, flow, or even consistent stylistic presentation. I guess I’ll ruminate and see how I feel compared to the rest of Friday’s stuff.

Preview:

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