天下制覇

 

I couldn’t help myself.

Impressions:

I tend to be more forgiving of recaps at the start of episodes, but that’s assuming that they’re actually recapping. A concise flash over the important things that you may have forgotten and that will be relevant this week or a lead-in to where we left off the previous week. That does not extend to simply cutting and pasting the last 90 seconds of the previous episode into the start of the next one. Especially when it goes straight into some bear-like moron announcing his thoughts to an empty room. The cliffhanger was already weak, but that was just taking any scant tension that there might have been out back and shooting it in the face. And we’ve just now reached the title card. Eesh.

Things did get much better after that though, especially in the second half. Well, mostly. At least as far as the action and flow went. Until the truly awful info dump featuring every single character simply standing there stock still. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed the episode mostly and I’ll take it over the weekend LN awfulness any day of the week, but like Black Bullet (again!) there were more than a few things that knocked me out of it and made me feel like I had missed something entirely. The hand-in-a-jar went from being SUPER ULTRA IMPORTANT AND DON’T SWING HAMMERS AT IT to serving a triple role as projectile, shield, and club, rolling a random cart smaller than the CGI quasi-tank’s wheels is enough of a threat to make it swerve out of the way, and being upside-down apparently robs you of all your magic. They’re all minor things, yes, but they could have been easily dealt with too. They’re like random emus running through that just took me right out of it with a noisy WRONK. It also ended with them strolling up what appeared to be a 100% grade hill, so I can’t say that I’m confident that the director is paying a lot of attention.

It certainly is lurching quite a bit at times, the start and end of this episode especially, but it’s still putting together a competent fantasy adventure. They kept up a decent job with the production action too, CGI wheeliemobile notwithstanding. The protagonists could stand to be a little more into it though. They’re competent and not whiny, which is nice, but there’s not a whole lot else you can say about them. Hell, for the call to adventure, one went “Eh, I’m bored” and the other, having ovaries and being related to him is incapable of having her own thoughts or being more than 100 yards from him for more than two hours at a time. Not that they need to be the destined heroes or have a sworn blood oath to do whatever, but they should have a little more investment in the adventure than “Why not?”

Next Episode:

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