天下制覇

I don't think that's how it's supposed to go.

I suppose I should mention that Overlord's new season got an early episode 1 webcast (actual broadcast begins on the 9th). It consisted entirely of a tour of various talking heads and pointing at maps. I think the animation may have somehow gotten even worse. So… very easy pass once again.

Impressions:

Nothing left here but to wring whatever last vestiges of melodrama out that they could. Even had these been actual developed characters I might feel anything for, a five minute death scene for antagonists who spent 98% of the show sitting on thrones looking bored, turning into a dragon because magic (with requisite infodump, obviously), and then having that immediately reset so literally everybody gets a happily ever after would've caused the eyes to roll far back enough in my head to inspect my ever-building aneurysm. I still don't even know what Jeanne's crush on Zieg was supposed to be predicated on. But it's great that they reduced her to yet another insecure twit pining after a demure doormat so hard that it breaks the barriers of reality. Well, I say reduced, but it's not like she was ever anything more than that to begin with.

Final Thoughts:

This was about 12 episodes longer than it needed to be, and only had maybe 6 episodes worth of actual content to begin with. Some of that may have been filled with flashy action, but the writing was godawful every step of the way. Excessively long infodump sequences, practically everybody simply sat around waiting for something to happen, and characters that never got any kind of development, just some melodramatic backstory slapped onto them at some point. Everybody was driven by almost purely the abstract, and the vast majority of episodes were spent not even doing anything according to those 'ideals' at all. A weepy backstory is not character development, nor is it an arc. And especially not when most of them are already known by dint of being based on historical figures to begin with.

It did have moments, usually when the animators decided to show up, or when they decided to contract the hard parts out to someone else. Since the work had been flubbed so hard on the dramatic side, they never rose to more than eyecandy to put into the ol' portfolio, or to throw into commercials. And for every five minutes of that, there were still probably at least five minutes of people standing around tables explaining their plans, or the banal trivialities about how magical magicness works. Half the time to be immediately disarmed or defused through a wave of the hand and the power of another explanation. Watch whatever clips show someone puts together of the animated parts and call it a day if you absolutely must.