天下制覇

 

If I shouted it, would that pass for a joke?

Impressions:

Ugh. Right from ending one show with an idol dance-off to starting another with one. Well, it’s certainly a Silver Link comedy. Much of the same artistic and directing style in general carries over here as was seen before in C³, BakaTest, etc. Not so much the rest though, particularly the characters. They all lean very heavily toward the LOUD NOISES variety instead of… god, I hate to say subtle, but maybe the more subdued kind of humor that BakaTest or C³ employed. Some of the character dynamics are okay, mostly when it comes to teasing each other, but even then, it often oversteps when there’s no actual joke, but for some reason SUDDENLY EVERYONE’S SHOUTING. ONCE IN SPANISH.

For a pure comedy, it didn’t really make me laugh though, and that’s probably the most damning thing, especially for an episode where someone climbs into the simulated body of a girl to have a little cry. That seems like it’d be a good vehicle for a number of jokes or comparisons to Buffalo Bill, but they just kind of leave it at “that’s really pathetic.” There was almost a moment of not wit, but subtlety, when they listed a bunch of phallic vegetables for one of the SHOUTY PUNCHLINES THAT REALLY AREN’T but I underestimated Japan as that was merely the setup for the punchline explaining that they look like penises. Yes. That is the joke. Not making lewd overtures about cucumbers, but “What do cucumbers look like? Penises.” Laughter and accolades to follow.

So much was tortured and unabashed introduction to characters. Nobody internally narrated it to the goblins that live in their frontal lobe, but them all listing their hopes and dreams and/or listing out a character’s personality traits and common actions before they then immediately disappeared from the episode entirely isn’t enough of a step above that. The whole episode seems like it’s something that should have been the first five minutes before the OP played, if even that long. Stretching out the one to two second setup premise for an entire bloody episode doesn’t speak well for what it’s going to do going forward, even if it somehow does manage to find a better sense of humor somewhere.