天下制覇

  

Apparently this is our theme for the day.

I don’t know what the deal is with Nobunaga Concerto. If not for them announcing the broadcast would be delayed 20 minutes today, I’d doubt it even existed. It should have been out a while ago, but is still MIA. I’ve got stuff to do though, so it’ll have to wait for a while, assuming it exists at all.

Impressions:

So… I had known this was written by the same guy as Ga-Rei Zero, but I hadn’t realized that it’d be a prequel. Or maybe an alternate dimension set like… months before GR0 but with psychics running around everywhere? Yomi and Whose-Her-Face are the first characters that pop up even. And like Ga-Rei Zero, the promotional stuff seems to have been a complete lie. Remember the orange suited characters in it that facehuggers and Yomi murdered the hell out of in the first episode? They’re back too, although don’t get chopped into hamburgers and eaten by facehuggers this time, just fight Nightcrawler Swordsgirl.

It’s incredibly reminiscient of Ga-Rei Zero’s first episode for the most part, without the slaughter at the end, which was the defining scene really. Instead of monsters, it’s psychic terrorists going nuts on the city. The budget’s strong, but I would have preferred a little more focus on the action scenes to really make them wowing. Give me some highs to point at and go “This right here. This is what was great,” guys. Like GR’s opening episode, it also doesn’t give a whole lot of focus on the characters, who I just assume are the kind of boringish people at the end with powers saving people from a bomb. I’m fine with the lack of exposition, especially for an opening episode, but it does need a lot more focus and structure going forward. Given the pedigree, I’m relatively confident it’ll have that, but you don’t come out of this episode with much more than “psychics and terrorists and stuff exploding!” There’s also the chance that again, 75% of the show will be a flashback with a completely different set of characters than were here. Who knows?

It’s a hell of a lot more serious than I expected, especially when it was advertising itself as a show about a girl chasing a magic penguin (seriously, I think I count one character in its promo image that I saw in the episode, and certainly not the samurai luchador), but I can’t say I didn’t like what I saw. It does need to settle down onto a set of characters as the main protagonists/antagonists, and it lacks the hook at the end of its predecessor, but GR was a solid action show for the most part and I wouldn’t mind a similar show in a more X-Men vein at all.