天下制覇

Who turns you into transforming CGI sentai ripoff.

As for the other trashy light novel airing today, let's put it this way, the dumbass protagonist walked in on a naked girl in the bath and stood there staring for a full 30 seconds. Please, count out how long that is. And that's after already watching her sit in the bath and then her ass get up and flounce to the door. Then again, with all the steam and the obligatory Japanese Dutch angles, I often wasn't sure for a moment if I was supposed to be seeing a crotch or cleavage. Also, the 'funny moment' shown for the post-OP sponsor message (that doesn't even exist for AT-X) was just underwear thrust up against the screen. So… yeah. Not even trying for 'cute' any more. Stay classy.

Impressions:

An improvement over last week, in at least the overall tone and not interrupting things every five minutes to have to suffer through bad fanservice or a shrieking blonde. Also, unlike its magical fighting yada yada ilk, it remembered to keep the focus on the magical fighting yada yada this week instead of devolving into nothing but fanservice, infodumps, and hastily spitting out every character archetype to make sure the boxes were all checked. Granted, there was still way too much talking, especially talking with goddamned inanimate objects, but it was nice to see a little animation after the other two yada yadas didn't even bother trying… and this started out with the awful clip montage pretending to be a fight between the leads.

Which isn't to say everything was rainbows and unicorn blowjobs either, despite what the bizarrely out of place bubblegum pop OP would have you believe. The character and plot stuff… still not quite hitting the right notes or flowing naturally, especially prior to Random Evil Wizard™ deciding to wreck a city block, although speaking of that, the CGI still looks like butts too, made worse by all the closeups on the talking gun. The obligatory flashback/tragic past dump came out of nowhere and was very transparently just for making sure that box was checked, and the magical quirky dispassionate girlfriend/armor/gunsword/I can tell you're chosen one and protagonist from the feeling in vagina that demands to be one with him astral journey nonsense was likewise eyerollingly awful. I know Shintoism is your schtick, Japan, but not everything needs to happen because it is what is proper and right according to the universe. Then again, when they try to use character motivations, it's typically things like "I sneezed and he said gesundheit… MY WOMB BURNS FOR HIS SEED."

Once again, the episode ended a hell of a lot stronger than it started, and especially is employing its cliched everything relatively well and without constant obnoxious comment on them instead of aping them cluelessly and proudly pointing that out. What would help really elevate this is doing a bit of a better job on the characters and interactions through the whole thing, not just in the last 30 seconds of the episodes, and keeping the action scenes a lot more focused instead of being dominated by conversations with the peanut gallery.