Dragon Goes Househunting #01 — Obligatory NES Status Screens

April 4th, 2021

 

No. Bad anime. Stop that.

Impressions:

Boy, not a great showing for supposedly subversive fantasy humor today, on either the production front or the "understanding what a joke is" front. "You can live with me," said the fish monster. "Oh no, I can't breath under water." Great scene, guys. Up there with "You can live with us," says the flying monster. "Oh no, I can't fly." Stay tuned for next week when we expand this formula to "This dungeon has traps in it." "Oh no, traps are dangerous." And the animation is bad. I was originally going to remark on how awkward the dragon running looked, like they hadn't really put any thought into how animals move at all, and then in literally the next scene, he's 'walking' on his back legs only by having his image bob up and down, legs not moving at all. Observational humor doesn't strictly need a big budget, but we're not that far above flip cards here, and the jokes are struggling to reach the level of those found on popsicle sticks.

The part that feels especially weird to me is that it doesn't seem to want to fully commit to the corny NES RPG aesthetic. There's a couple status screens and the non-fight slaps a menu up to reference that stuff, but that's as far as it seems to want to go. But at the same time, it very much is relying on gamification and knowledge of it to drive what I can only extremely charitably call its attempts at humor. Like the heroes who show up and rant that heroes defeat monsters. But he's just some innocent dragon who hasn't done anything, and it is not a normal thing for people to call themselves heroes and go roam the countryside looking for things to fight. Which even for a joke about an RPG is not exactly reaching for the high fruit.

Posted in Househunting | 1 Comment »

One Lonely Comment

  • Anonymous says:

    and as importantly were is the hook? Why should I want to watch the next ep? to see a whiny dragon or flawless mao do their thing over and over again?