天下制覇

Aaah, porn game adaptations. You never change.

Didn't skip or drop Dororo. It was off yesterday. It'll be back next week.

Impressions:

I question the wisdom of starting any show with a long shot of space and a baby crying. Then again, I was pretty sure I heard a voice recording error a couple minutes in, and not long thereafter, two people were standing in a dark room talking when the door to a brightly lit hallway opened, but the room remained totally dark. Yes, that was something that bothered me. It had just done about a ten second slow zoom of a diorama sitting on a table. In short, it leaves plenty of time for the mind to wander, especially since the entire episode is just a tour of nondescript characters. How nondescript? There's a girl voiced by Kugimiya Rie and she sounds like a normal person instead of a shrieking banshee Oz munchkin. The protagonist isn't the worst, and is from a better age when they were actually allowed to have something approaching a personality, but that's offset by the rest of the cast being far more dull. But then we get to the magical mystery widget, disasters in the distance aaaand… it's back to a tour of characters for another quarter of the episode.

Mabe it's that the visuals and direction are just so unambitious and static that make it so dull, but easily 75%, if not more, of this episode is just the dude bumping into people, mostly of the harem variety, so the story is spending all its time doing pre-flight checks too. It could be worse (well, it could always be worse), in that we don't have a nonstop internal narration describing and redescribing each of their salient traits, background, bloody type, three sizes, and dental history, but I'm not ready to award it any points for that. Setup not only can, but should happen during the commission of an actual story, not exist solely for setup's sake, and that's where this episode struggles. The magic girlfriend? Traveling through time? That's the cliffhanger tease for next week. I don't know what there is to recommend this week's episode.