天下制覇

  

Boy, this is an episode I haven’t seen this past week at all.

Impressions:

I can’t help but think both this and Chaika would be improved if you swapped the hitsuji (sheep) and hitsugi (coffin) of their titles resulting in “The Great Library’s Coffin Keepers” and “Chaika the Sheep Princess.” It’s thoughts like this that got me through this drek. Bland protagonist with the personality of a damp dead shitzu goes on a tour of all the girls (each pigeonholed into an archetype), including the obnoxious best friend, spending most of the time narrating everything to himself, while tackling/groping the first to indicate main heroine status, before ending up in a club with them all that just happens to have an animal mascot. How many first episodes with that formula are we up to so far for this season? Four? Five?

Surprisingly, especially for Hoods, it looks slightly better than the promos let on. Then again, the promos looked like deep fried ass, so the upgrade to mostly ass isn’t that much of an improvement. At least they’re trying to embrace cheapness as an art style every time they have to actually animate something. Doesn’t help the direction, in particular all the weird sound effects that abound. At one point, I thought they were doing the Prince is Right sad trombone “Wah waah waaaaaaah,” but that ended up actually being part of the BGM. Unlike the other VN adaptations this season, this one seems to be entirely trading on “has cute girls” without bothering to foreshadow that anything might eventually happen. Or more worryingly, perhaps they think they have.