天下制覇

"There’s a monster in front of you!"

Impressions:

Oh. I’m sorry, Blandy McProtagonist. Is being attacked by a monster not exciting enough for you? Is that why you’re daydreaming? But thanks for being a part of that battle. Your shouts of "Be careful!" two minutes after it started attacking or "It’s getting away!" after it ran away were invaluable. I can’t even tell if I’m being sarcastic either given the brain cell living in isolation of the other protagonist’s head. I guess she was less overengineeringly obnoxious this week, but not much, and other characters more than pitched in to obtrusively list out that nonsense. Does switching something annoying from showing to telling count as an improvement? It was more focused on Blandy anyway and boy, is that a mistake. Particularly when all he really did was begin his journey from Blandy to yet another Shouty.

Anyway, the episode stopped entertaining me in any way the moment the fighting stopped, and even that was kind of pushing it. There was a lot less action this week in general, a trend I remember very well from the last KyoAni show like this and know exactly where that leads. There’s also something about that whole "their arms disappear at the shoulders and hands turn into a flailing mess where they’re in five places at once" style of animating fights that really turns me off, and "flailing at tentacles from off screen" is definitely phoning it in on the choreography, no matter how many frames you use for it. I’d much rather see a lot more effort in the direction of the fights (ala morphing the blood sword downward) instead of them just going "look how we’re wasting our animation talent!" while an obnoxious teenage shouts out what’s happening five seconds after the fact.

Next Episode:

Darkness.