天下制覇

…What? No gigantic infodump and overlong origin story?

Impressions:

This will be complicated, not the least reason being that this eschews a lot of exposition on its setting, and said setting involves everybody having magic destiny books, and a male protagonist named X who transforms into a magical girl, traveling the world, righting wrongs, and hitting jealous murderous magical wolf girls until they stop being murderous with his probably-girlfriend, and a pair of probably-siblings in some kind of roaming hippie do-goodery thing based on fairy tales. Think Kingdom Hearts if instead of summoning a weird key sword, Sora turned into a magical girl. The thing that really gets me is that the foursome of two guys and two girls transforms into a four hero set of two guys and two girls, but two of them get their genders crossed in the process.

Surprisingly, especially for Brain's Base, a real attempt was absolutely made here on all fronts to make a show, not just recite the setting or copy paste a game intro sequence. Even the animation of the fight at the end, even if it got a little weird in a few moments with a little dance to cast healing magic and needing to kiss the sword to power it up. It's not going to blow you away, but it's not entirely stills or spent posing while reviewing a status screen, so relatively speaking… The direction, quick cuts especially, and back and forth dialogue using the Red Riding Hood structure around the reveal that she was the baddie also helped effectively build to the climax of the episode, and can I just mention how great it is to have an episode with a self-contained plot? Introduction, investigation, reveal, climax, denouement.. the works! …Oh, my poor standards… I think it would've been better had they actually taken a more bloody end to it (this is the Brothers Grimm after all) rather than the more saccharine "and everything was reset to be perfectly happy" approach though. It would've been more impactful and would've let them really make her creepy during the start of the fight rather than just grinning.