天下制覇

Who needs characters when you can rules lecture for a whole episode?

Impressions:

I've certainly seen this setup a bazillion times before. A traumatized teenage boy is given godly powers and thrown into a battle royale and reacts to all of it like a goldfish, simply gaping as a codex of rules are dumped on him by some kind of cutesy mascot and/or a screaming teenage girl. Probably both. And then he summons his inner power and motivation to do the absolute bare minimum. It doesn't need to be this way. You can have a character who is shocked and taken aback by the crazy situation they've been thrust into without them being a spineless, worthless, deer-in-headlights-for-fifteen-minutes-of-exposition-dump doormat. Yet here we are again. With a goat dude spending a paragraph trying to talk up how the protagonist staring blankly as he was eaten by a giant sky eel showed his verve… somehow differently from the protagonist staring blankly as he was told how to call up the tutorial on his personal Navi.

And since it was about fifteen minutes of rule lecturing, interspersed with five minutes of traumatic flashback, it wasn't a pretty dull episode. It ended much better than the 22 or so previous minutes began, but that could have also been the montage of nonsense character designs getting splattered across the pavement. The art style is definitely trying to be a little bit different, and evocative of its roots in Korea instead of Japan, but about the only thing that was really animated in the first twenty minutes was the eel. I'm not convinced that it has the budget for the super duper awesome battle royale the ending is trying to tease, especially not when it'll likely just find some other gimmick to talk about for another twenty minutes.