天下制覇

 

I’d hate to see anybody actually fight.

Impressions:

There’s no lack of directing effort put into this one, but just because they’re trying doesn’t mean that it works. The music especially can mostly only charitably be described as synthetic noise, particularly in the beginning montage when there’s nothing to do but just listen to it blare obnoxiously, but especially the goddamned ED which is just screaming and someone savaging a poor guitar with a wheat thresher. I’m also not sure why it occasionally looks like someone was standing off screen with an industrial paint sprayer, blasting floral patterns across one side of the characters. I imagine it’s because they probably thought the “nothing happens” portion of the show should match the directoral style of the “things happen” portion, and that’s the conceit that they came up with.

The animation is also a bit… lacking, particularly for the ‘exciting’ opening of men blurring between frames in lieu of actual movement. It eventually picks up, but they forever love doing that and is still firmly more in the “making poses” or “jumping forward with speedlines and then a pose over basically a still” school of action. They could have also put a lot more into Jacky getting gutted. First it looked like he was just shrugging it off and went on killing things, then he suddenly collapsed basically dead on the spot. For all the contrasting colors in that part and dramatic posing/speeches, it’s not abundantly clear what was actually going on or what the rules of magical space beetles vs possessed pseudo-mecha English serial killers were.

The main character is also not great. While she doesn’t narrate every single thought she has nor introduce herself and give her life story to the imaginary people in her head, she does still feel the need to regularly announce what’s right in front of her and occasionally simply explain how she feels to the air, especially later in the episode. I’ll probably give it another episode because effort, bad or good, is at least a talking point over the blandness that is the norm, but the director is definitely trying to make up for a lot of deficiency in the writing and budget, and having some problems of his own with it.

Next Episode:

This was less a preview and more just a tagline, but whatever.