天下制覇

I hope you like extra pretentious internal narration.

Impressions:

Because Christ, this episode is an almost nonstop torrent of it. It's a shame too, because I actually kind of enjoyed the end of the episode when everything went to hell. I think they were going for a kind of dawning horror thing as the characters slowly realized they were living in a world that was being constantly adjusted to keep them complacent/happy, but we never left the protagonist's head for that, and the primary sign of it happening was the replacement of that one girl's anorexic mother, so utterly divorced from him entirely. It should've either made much more of an effort to be an ensemble affair with the triggering speech thing being what shattered the looking glass for all of them, or more personal; the tweaks happening around him constantly so that his little speech about suddenly noticing something was the matter wasn't so completely out of nowhere, and we can just catch the rest of the characters up later. Trying to do it both ways just splits focus.

Unfortunately, that does mean that the vast majority of the episode is pretty obnoxious and dull. Hell, it's literally just reciting psych 101 drivel most of the time, done to explicitly illustrate how smart the author is in creating this setting. It's just so much pretentious drivel though, throwing out vague musings on the nature of happiness or conditioning and then moving on to the next chapter. The little bit that lets the director take over and ceases the internal rambling is solid enough, and comes at the end as the promise of where things are going to go, but knowing what I do about the game source, I'm skeptical of how well or how much it's going to follow through on that.