天下制覇

   

At least it hasn’t lost that.

There was an EVOL OVA broadcast along with this. As it’s an old/OVA factor, I’ll cover it some time in the evening after all the new premieres are out of the way.

Impressions:

Oh, darling. Darling, darling, darling. You can mash on the piano all you want, darling, it’s not mystical or creepy sounding. And no, that doesn’t mean that I wanted you to replace it with kazoos. Or then replace the kazoos with waiting on the guitar and synthed up 90s chanting. The music is… special, shall we say? And then from there, we bring a swarm of CGI scrolls to life which apparently messes with words, resulting in sushi coming to life, people being strangled by their ties and belts, and storms. The Japanese language, yo. Oh, right. And there’s a girl with a stuttering problem who explodes into bloom every now and then.

It does the traditional boring as hell anime thing where it meanders around various cast members without any sense of purpose, context, or immediacy, so you might as well just pick it up at around ten minutes in because anything you missed you can pick up in the little 5 seconds of their life that are interrupted When Sushis Attacksâ„¢. The protagonist is also kind of obnoxious, although I guess he gets credit for being a different kind of obnoxious from usual. He basically barges in, declares “I am the protagonist. I am the chosen one. I will defeat that. I will save the world,” and, uh… that’s his entire personality aside from his obligatory Aquarion naked ballerina leap and orgasm. I guess at least he just literally magic hand yanked the girl to him to force her to combine with him, so we can add rapist naked ballerina leap and orgasm to the statement, which, don’t get me wrong, was more ridiculous than anything. I get the feeling they are probably going to try to play his personality (or lack thereof) off for at least some laughs, mostly by the very end of the episode, but that really wasn’t where it needed to be for this one.

Well, I guess it’s still pretty firmly Aquarion, but certainly lacks the relatively on point and focused start that Evol had, not to mention that the production was in general quite a bit weaker. The cast doesn’t seem to be quite as colorful or as fun as Evol’s, and I already really don’t like the whole “go to another dimension to fight the magical whatsits that are having magical effects on our words” deal because that is just made as an excuse for bad writing.