天下制覇

Did you just have an intro, followed by setting up the old intro?

Impressions:

That managed to somehow be even more asinine and abrupt than I was expecting, multiple times over. After almost four minutes of pure wanky padding, it was time for… more padding. About eight minutes into the episode, we had reached the same place we were about a minute from the end of the previous episode. That's a lot of time spent just go back about a minute. And this was when they decided it'd be best to put in some schtick. And as I (and everyone) predicted, deus ex love saved the day. Jack just had to say "I love you," and that was the magic trigger that took things from peril to completely resolved in approximately 60 seconds, or closer to 30 if you cut out the time travel sequence. But that's not where the abrupt lurching ends. Looks like they're going for the sappy happily ever after ending, but then paradox kicks in, and since everyone from the series's opening training montage from around the world made it to the wedding, we can estimate the time before paradox kicks in to be a month or two. Thanks, dramatic timing!

Final Thoughts:

Started strong, but the more it relied on the writing, the worse things got, especially in the middle transitional period, but the ending was a mess as well. Characters kept having epiphanies with little to no fanfare, then go on a journey of discovery to reach the conclusion that they declared 10 minutes prior. Sometimes, as in the case of 'evil' inner Jack, it just straight up lied about past events. A lot of time was also spent on needlessly fellating the old series. And then it tried to interject romance into things. It might've worked had Ashi been presented as some form of equal from the start, but she was framed as naive and immature, especially during her little rebellion against her mother. It would've worked perfectly well as a mentor/student thing, and that's the direction it seemed to be going in right up until that painfully cheesy romantic episode where both of them were reduced to bad awkward teen cliches.

The action and direction also kind of took a nosedive. It was fantastic for the first three episodes. Well-animated, visceral, evocative, great scoring, creative choreography, so on and so forth. The direction did a fantastic job of selling the desperation and grit of it, even while still having some fun (at least in Scaramouche's case) and being a treat for the eyes. It still wasn't bad in the second half, but the difference is stark. The first few episodes also had strong antagonists, which trailed off. I wish they had spent more time building up the final Aku battle instead of having him just show up when the episode count ran out, but he ended up losing mostly to the power of love anyway, so maybe it's better that they didn't.