天下制覇

I kind of want to refer to this as reverse Cop Craft.

Impressions:

Let's start with the biggest issue. The audience insert character is… just a complete and total mess. She's the idealistic newbie in the den of iniquity, willing to overlook blatant racketeering, but a kid getting beat up? That's a bridge too far and here's a whole speech about how she's not going to tolerate any injustice. Aside from, you know, all the corruption happening right in front of her. Until, wait, at the very episode, I guess she changed her mind about it after all. She's also a bit of a goober, having to be constantly saved, whether it's from water monster or just because she ran out into traffic. At least one moment where she did something vaguely competent would've gone a long way, especially if she had, for example, provided the electricty to zap the water dude, or dumped some concrete into it or something. It was a very anime-ish just kind of hop-around fight scene until the time was up and it was time to one-shot it, which never feels fulfilling to me.

There's quite a bit of production weirdness going on here too. The CGI and action scenes full of speedlines are obvious, but there are brief moments when they obviously skipped out on frames, like the janky dancing at the start, but also moments where it looks like they animated it a bit too much and somewhere in editing things got sped up, like when she ran into the monster fight. What it did accomplish was laying down the foundation for the characters, the setting, and the direction that the story will go in without too much overt exposition, or at the very least, nobody sitting down and giving a lecture on it. The monster-protagonists were handled with a pretty light touch, but that could also be how much of a walnut the character things did focus on ended up being.