天下制覇

Beats listening to the protagonist scream.

Pre-air special. The actual broadcast of this is scheduled for Sundays.

Impressions:

I feel like this probably should have been a lot better than this episode was, although as I sit down and write out my thoughts, I'm starting to doubt that. It is a potentially interesting premise of an anti-hero vs manipulated/deceived heroes in an over the top fight, but the fighting's all CGI, constant cuts to cockpits to see grunting, and overly brief, and the writing leaves plenty to be desired. The big fight in the middle actually contains an exchange like "We need to find its weak point!" "There's a giant glowing weak point on its back! I'm attacking it!" That wasn't a joke. That was actual serious dialogue.

The main problem is that it's shackled to an absolute dillweed of a protagonist who is simply tiresome. Half his goddamned lines are simply repeating back the last thing that was said to him in a questioning shout, and most of the rest are announcing to himself or the people around him that he has amnesia, which by the end of the episode, he doesn't. Let's say we just skipped that entirely. We could've cut off around four minutes of the episode and lost nothing. It also gets sucked into not one, but two different maudlin flashback origin stories, one of which for Generic Dude #82 and the other for a random NPC. One of them just had a hallucinated woman saying what the origin story would've been had their deigned to show it. The other showed it for about five seconds and then had a hallucinated woman review what it was.