天下制覇

If you're not willing to break a finger, don't bother playing.

I did try to watch Active Raid this morning, but by the time I reached the 6 minute mark, I had to start skipping forward. Granted, the fight wasn't totally embarassing this week, unlike the first episode, but the rest was completely faffing around. The fight ended unsatisfactorially as well, pulling out the "Oh, wait. I have a super power up!" I decided to just throw my eggs into this basket and hope for the best. Also, everything's first episode has aired at this point. Not sure when I'll do the traditional wrapup. Next Tuesday at the latest though. In hindsight, I really should've done that two days ago when Stride was busy boring me by already mostly ditching the style and content. Oh well.

Impressions:

This sure was… Japanese. Well, above and beyond the "Look at my breasts!" "But I'm shy!" 'joke.' I'm pretty sure that a quarter of the episode trying to riff off kinako (basically sweet/nutty soybean flour) was about 7.5 minutes too long. But then they went and replaced it with the old "drunk off nothing" 'gag' and made me kind of long for another kinako apocalypse. Unless you're going to actually do something with it, it's just a transparent excuse for random non sequiturs. If you're going to go that direction, then for god's sake, be snappy and quick about it, not drag everything out ridiculously. The budget also seemed to take a pretty bad hit during that portion, which was especially sad since there was almost nothing to animate. Didn't stop the mouths from gaping wide like they were going to swallow a child though.

I'm not sure what there's to say about the sidestory in the second half about the not-life saver who grunted like it was constipated instead of whistling. You'd think there would have been a punchline or something at the end of it, but no, it was just some 'inspiring' little aside that went on far longer than it had any right to for misunderstanding nonsense at the end. This was then followed up by a game of pogs menko. Again, you'd think they could go for a parody of Yu-Gi-Oh, Beyblade, or whatever, but the only thing they seemed to muster up is "the one who had no idea what she was doing… is really good!"

Well, at least the punchlines here continue to not be screamed at me, so it's not causing me to wince. It ain't making me laugh either though. And I did go back and watch a couple real Komugi episodes over the weeked to make sure that it wasn't just rose tinted glasses coloring my dim view of the brief period Japan understood satire and comedy. Alas and alack.