天下制覇

  

If you’re going to annoy me with them, at least make them accurate.

Since it’s of interest to some, the Robot Girls Z OVAs finally got actual broadcast dates at the end of May, and the new Lupin series was finally officially pushed back from April to May… still just an Italian broadcast though with the Japanese broadcast not for months later, so…

Impressions:

Apparently this is how things are going to go now. At least the animation isn’t as embarrassingly awful as it was in the first episode, even if the art during the real fights is getting blobbier and blobbier, and it seems to be starting to find some kind of direction for the plot. Maybe by the time the show ends, it’ll be able to put together an entire 15 straight minutes of that. Of course, eliminating the especially blatant padding would probably help too. Why for god’s sake does the countdown begin at 15? For the extra twelve seconds they can spend staring at each other before their awful non-fight? And you’d think that if you’re going to call attention to your damn timers, then you wouldn’t have one start at 60 and reach 0 forty seconds later.

What would do nothing but help is if it got over its manic need to equally involve every single character in every single episode. It’s hard to string together any kind of narrative when everyone but the lead shows up for all of two or three minutes before abruptly vanishing back into the ether from which they came. Also not helping was Seisa’s “I automatically win” ability. Japan is in love with the whole “person stands there doing nothing, is simply immune to everything, and then wins by seeming to do nothing” routine and this was an especially bad abuse of it. It’s basically shorthand for “director couldn’t be bothered to try.”