天下制覇

What a joke.

If you want to watch the first half of Fantasista’s first episode, you can do so already. I however, am lazy and passed. Also, I have some personal things starting this week MWF mornings for a while that will keep me from getting to some shows (unless they air unusually early or late) with my usual alacrity, although it shouldn’t be more than an hour or two. It’s not like much airs on those days anyway.

Impressions:

Really? It’s just for a gun? Did we forget that these mechs effortlessly destroyed entire fleets earlier? Somehow, the big reveal that the key was for an orbital cannon. And they then opened fire with further weapons of mass destruction while Team Cultist… uh… got blown up. Repeatedly. Who exactly is oppressing who again here? Oh, and Chamber vs Striker came down to a staring match for a while until they remembered that they had lasers and other weapons, but that took I think 19 minutes… Not that it stopped Red from giving speeches and screaming himself hoarse while trying to body slam it. But hey. I’m still trying to understand why they needed a pilot period if these things were completely autonomous.

Oh, and in case you were worried that they had completely forgotten the squid plot, then fear no more. In the closing seconds of the show, the squids clustered around Chamber’s husk and bleated, which is apparently the sound squid things make. Unless it was Striker’s. These robots all look alike to me. Is that racist? 

Final Thoughts:

An Urobuchi work with flat mouthpiece characters and an unsatisfying ending? Stop the presses. But really, the main distinguishing feature here is how utterly nonsensical the plotting went. First we have our stranger in a strange land, starting to learn that his ultra military upbringing is at odds with the peaceful people. Trite, but cliche for a reason. Then that’s dropped for… nothing, basically. Tits and ass. Then we get the big reveal about the squid and horror over it which goes literally nowhere. And finally, we end with a cult lead by a robot that they defeat because Team Protagonist brought orbital weaponry and bombs the size of houses against antagonists who couldn’t even fight off a single mechanized lobster. I don’t think all your scriptwriters were on the same page. Finally, tell this all from the point of view of a character who is almost completely passive to all events around him, utterly lacking in even a shred of personality, and what little he has vaults from one end of the "killing people is bad" spectrum to the other for absolutely no discernable reason. Good lord. Even in the final episode, his total contribution to events was a big fat goose egg.

So the writing is an utter mess, made worse by the glacial pacing and dismal characters. I guess it could occasionally be pretty, but if you want to look at nice set pieces, even Deen manages those more than half the time. I don’t understand why they bothered to animate, or overanimate as the case may be, certain things either. They typically weren’t important and more often than not were just the cheesecake moments It certainly wasn’t trying to be an action show either, despite lobster mechs, squid aliens, and laser duels. I really don’t know what they were trying to do with it and I suspect that they didn’t know either.