天下制覇

Did we really need to end the episode on a primal scream?

Impressions:

Around ten minutes into the episode, I was thinking to myself that while the character designs made everyone look like they were having a permanent ongoing attack of the squirts they were terrified people would notice, this had been a surprisingly and pleasantly yelling-free episode and that foregoing background music was helping the setting feel isolated and alone. Then it started screaming at me. Apparently it couldn't help itself. Hell, it ends with them successfully de-stoning a bird and this is punctuated by a nearly ten second long "OoooohhhhhhhaaAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!" like some kind of demented Tarzan yell, which is especially creepy because the animation is pretty poor here and a lot of the time when characters talk, their gigantic jaws are flapping wide open and closed despite the rictus affecting the rest of their faces.

Far be it from me to compliment a Jump show, but after the last two shows, I'm probably pretty well primed to appreciate something that has an actual premise and setting instead of faffing around with nothing at all and shocked screamed realization that round things can look like boobs. The supposed ultra-genius's failure and retry montage is definitely a better way to endear him and show his intelligence and perseverance than either Okada's preachy smarter-than-thou BS or Astra's instant 700 IQ success. Aiming a little lower and not framing things as a super serious survival drama is probably also helping grease the wheels.

I don't know that I'll continue with this past another episode or two, especially given how the amount of yelling increased leaps and bounds as the episode went on, but I'd certainly much rather watch another episode of this than either of the two high school girl things that came before it if for no other reason than it actually makes an argument that something will happen and that these characters are ones worth rooting for.