天下制覇

Sounds like a plan.

Impressions:

This, like the later seasons of Sengoku Basara, managed to hit the sweet spot of being too silly to take seriously, yet taking itself seriously enough to be fun. I think the crowning moment came at the very end with the princess's declaration that despite a few mooks dying, she wasn't going to back down. The way that they impressed upon us how serious this was and how much it moved the rough and tumble protagonist is by having him flashback to an eight year old girl throwing some kind of tantrum. She apparently possessed the same indomitable spirit and he was so rocked by it that all he could do was stand there and gape. That also did a fantastic job undercutting his personality to that point which can be summed up as "Rarr! I cut things!" Other fine moments include him and Darth Mongol staring each other down for the better part of a minute before a brief clash and then Darth leaps about five hundred feet into the background onto a ship and vanishes, and Random Bodyguard Mook spending the entire rescue attempt bawling his eyes out at the tragedy of the princess being taken. She was their captive for less time than it takes to toast a bagel, man. Take it down a notch.

Trying to split the difference between historical accuracy and over the top badassery makes it miss both targets. Personally, I'd much rather go with the latter, but even that gets fouled up when they mistake shouting at arrows for doing cool things. There is at least some effort put into the fighting here, certainly far more so than most historical things, but it's not going to wow anybody with its animation. I've never been all that partial to these kinds of historical things in the first place and this doesn't really do much to wow in the first episode. It might be a little lighter on the melodrama, despite the one crying dude and godawful moment of supposed determination to end things, but that doesn't make it heavier on the hot blooded action or visual splendor.