天下制覇

That was certainly different.

Impressions:

Similar to the other edition in this media blitz this season, this episode was a fairly bland parade of characters. Dissimilar is that outside of the intro minute or two, instead of recap and having its head shoved up its ass, trying to take itself seriously with gigantic robot teddy bears stomping around, it was entirely slapstick. And so much more palatable because of it. Kishi's been a lot better at comedy than anything else anyway, and maybe being able to go totally off-script will do him some good. I'll even say that going massively off-script has done certain franchises like Milky Holmes and Galaxy Angel nothing but good. And not that the comedy was great either, but it was actual slapstick instead of just occasionally screaming out a description of something currently happening. The pixel art interstitials didn't hurt either.

Of course, this still has the anchor of knowing that this ends in giant robot teddy bears which we're supposed to take seriously is an anchor around its neck, and it's not as if the dumbness of taking itself too seriously totally vanished after the opening bit either, in particular the game's actual protagonist, who was standing around, clutching his chest in insecurity and existential angst. There's also the issue of spending an entire episode and not really setting up where it's going to go or what it's going to be. If they're just going to dick around with the characters, great, but there's too much chest clutching and joy of youth bookending the episode for me to believe in that.