天下制覇

How to make a murderer.

Impressions:

Certainly the most impressive visually thus far for the season, with some actual semi-impressive action sequences, and piques my curiosity if it's going to continue in a similar vein with a character story each week, or if our heroine is going to shrug off being gut stabbed, as all too many Japanese characters are wont to do. They have magic powers, which was introduced at a pretty late stage of the game after seemingly being all grounded in reality. It's not clear where they start and end, which puts a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. Nor do I like the entire extended sequence of her imagining what her plans are going to be and showing the action scene that could've happened, but didn't.

And then there's the talky talky talky. Not that they spent a lot of time going over the dumb, basic rules, or gassing on about how crazy the entire setting is. They just ran with it with barely a comment. …Usually. And, to its credit, a lot of the internal narration was a hell of a lot more organic than Japanese writing usually manages and not just repeating what is currently being visually shown, but the episode was, ironically, probably at its strongest during the flashback when she was breaking her sister and driving her to suicide. Didn't make a lot of sense why she, the failure, took over for her task master father, and all he could do was watch helplessly as his chosen disciple was driven insane, but I'm still calling the writing and directing especially far better than usual. Still, it could either use a little more panache ala noir, or just shutting the hell up and going for a tense atmosphere.

It's got my interest thus far, but it needs to lay down some better rules for the magic in the setting for the battle royale to not come off as an endless stream of ass pulls. I kind of fear that a lot of episodes are going to be mostly flashbacks while the central murderfest advances each episode only inches at a time. Hopefully it'll manage to keep up the animation at the very least.