天下制覇

I love closeups of hands slapping instead of an actual fight.

Impressions:

And just when I thought they were pulling it back to an actual fight, they pause on a still of her getting hit for about five seconds to explain why magic punches hurt extra. That would be how the first half would go. Frequently almost approaching an action scene, only to unpleasantly yank things back and turn focus to the peanut gallery for an unnecessary minute or two explaning the banal trivialities about how flying daggers are magic, or worse, the protagonist simply stands there, prompting a long internal monologue about how awesome he suddenly is, whereupon he… continues standing there, through more monologues. And then that fight unceremoniously ends. His big catharsis moment after three episodes was… standing there. But a music box played during the idiotic denouement, so it must have been important.

The second half took that and decided that it'd for comedy instead, and if there's anything that this show has been worse at than unneeded exposition during action scenes, it's telling jokes. About the best it can hope for is slapstick, and it exhausted the animation budget in the first half, so we were stuck with longwinded internal narrations about the situation, what the character is thinking, and what the character is going to do before the obvious then happens. A keystone of Japanese humor, I'm aware, but one that has yet to endear itself to me. It didn't even have the grace to show her being stabbed at the end either.

Next Episode:

I am sure her injuries are severe.