天下制覇

  

Yeah! You’re the true villain! That dude! For using second rate wood screws!

The first half of Rail Wars got a pre-airing yesterday (real broadcast on the 3rd). If panning around CGI trains was a sport, this would certainly be a bronze medal contender. It didn’t even make it to the OP without a cyclonic gust of wind and female lead calling male lead a pervert. And then there was this. *sigh* Season kicks off tomorrow with half naked boys. As always nowadays, I’ll get to stuff after work when I can.

Impressions:

I guess it was a valiant effort to end it, but not good enough. The fight was the same as a couple episodes ago where everybody just did their one attack, and then it was self-sacrifice time yet again. That didn’t last long though, as it started spewing magic liquid that apparently destroys anti-bug juice which I’m pretty sure we’ve never seen before and it was time to pass the Jesus-baton to the Visor-Boy, making this the very first thing of note he’s done.

And then the second half decided to go off into la-la land. At least the lightning pace was sort of reminiscent of better times. We skip ahead to everything going back to normal (not unexpected) and Kisara cutting off her brother’s leg (and magically bisecting him!), declaring herself the ultimate evil in a world full of psychotic clowns and killed parasites, and wandering off. Her brother, who declares himself an evildoer no less and that nobody will ever stop him from getting everybody killed. You know what? Whatever. If Brynhildr’s ending was a swan dive into the sewage tank, this is a ride on the black water slip n’ slide. It’s really kind of a shame. This would have been a perfectly valid excuse long long ago to actually add some conflict and depth to their moronic little “Will they, won’t they” romantic BS, but tacked onto literaly the closing moments of the show? Give me a break.

Final Thoughts:

The show started decently enough, with protagonists immediately jumping into the fray and unhesitatingly fighting manic clowns and giant spiders, with only a few exceptionally awkward asides to overtures about having sex with little children and awkward expositional dump, but it couldn’t keep that up. The writing was never great, but the first arc at least moved quickly enough to overlook some of the nonsense and focus on what the characters were actually doing. After that though, the budget dried up, taking the action with it, and the story slowed to a crawl. Instead of doing anything, they spent most episodes simply going from point A to B to listen to long lectures, meeting with characters who at best existed only to die in death scenes almost as long as they had previous screen time, or angst about the horrible cruel world.

And speaking of that, as with dozens of other shows before, they get as far as saying “these things could be really evil and that’s why regular people hate and fear them” and then proceed to show them being nothing but the opposite. Hell, it began with an army of them staring unblinking at the city with eyes glowing demonically, so you’d think changing it from mere lipservice into something substantial be an easy task, but the parasite kids are instead reduced to sponges to wring angst out of. And wring them out over and over and over again, both to give Rentaro an anguished expression and to show him and pals as being the only good guys in the world. It honestly really could have worked, but not when it’s this bloody one-sided, especially when it came to that one antagonist who tried to destroy the entire city just because he got cockblocked at work.

Decent start, but lacked staying power, collapsing under the usual LN adaptation problem of floundering past the first arc. The writing was the biggest issue by far, but the chasm that the budget and action fell into didn’t do it any favors either.