天下制覇

And the excessively overlong prologues.

Impressions:

Not the best of starts for a number of reasons, but the two that shine like the Beacons of Gondor were the excessively long prologue that wasn't really going anywhere or doing much of anything, and the inexplicable fight scene, particularly the end of it. Aha, I have cut down the bridge the poop monster was on, thereby making this mass of refuse fall back into the stream where it came in the first place, thereby defeating it. Uh, if you say so, writers. Who knew that the twenty foot tall amorphous monstrosity's only weakness was… falling about ten feet into a gently moving current? Anyway, that was also my face, so I'll regrow that now. You'd think they'd try to work the body parts into the monsters. This is a studio that had no problems conjuring up giant chairs and wheels in Garo after all.

Which isn't to say that the rest was great either. The prologue, as mentioned, just kept going on and goddamned on. Yeah, I get the point. Stoic jerk. Deal with the devil. I get the gist. We could've covered it in about two minutes. Instead, it consumed over half the episode, with most of the rest being a fairly generic meet-cute between plucky child and stoic warrior she would attach herself to. Dororo herself winning any awards. She spends most of the episode being an obnoxious brat before shifting seamlessly into her role as deliverer of exposition. The action was animated well enough, but with the goop monster, hard to follow and even harder to understand how it was even defeated. For all the overtures of body horror with Hyakkimaru, you'd think it'd be even slightly gory or visceral, but all the people eating and dismemberment happens entirely offscreen. Oozing baby-doll thing though? Great. Close up on that.