天下制覇

Not a good start to what promises to be a grueling day.

This was going to be a long day to start with 7 expected premieres (8 if you count that Chinese one about boy pop stars doing a Milli Vanilli that I skipped in the preview, and am not exceedingly unlikely to give further mention here regardless), even before this show got preempted yesterday. Let's start getting through it, but there will be breaks. I'm already grumpy from being up late for work and then wake up to 7 shows on deck with more to come… and also having to go back to work.

Impressions:

This just kind of depresses me and wipes out any few lingering feelings of warmth I may have had for the opening episodes of the first season. The entire thing is, predictably, just the exact same as the previous series, except high school. Like it's supposed to be quite the lark that instead of the Date Clan versus the Sanada Clan, it's the Date baseball team vs the Sanada soccer team, or that instead of fighting wackily with six swords, he bats wackily with six bats, or that instead of the big imposing guy being a gundam, the big imposing guy is a gundam. That's both the level of the humor and the amount of creativity put into it.

Maybe it could've worked had they started from scratch or if you're totally new to the Basara antics. That way, it might come off as new and quirky. It would still have been a barrage of characters all popping up to do their one thing and then vanishing again. If you've watched a Basara show before though, this is just quite literally more of the same. Any positives from the removal of angst are offset by its insistence that you marvel upon how wacky it's being as it just runs down every previous bit of 'wackiness' that it itself… not even other shows… but this series itself already did to death half a decade ago, except now not as a flavoring in an overly dramatic war epic, but served up as the main course.