天下制覇

I like how the powers so far are fire, ice, and grappeling hook.

I was originally soft-planning to cover whichever of Dragon and Combatants was less bad, but both had terrible second episodes. Dragon tried to do ten minutes on "a house with traps is dangerous" and then ten minutes on "a haunted mansion is scary." It sort of tried to parody things like Luigi's Mansion by handing him a vacuum, but that was as far as the joke went. Combatants was basically just a montage intro to the rest of the harem. Look at how crazy and quirky we are. Here's our Desco, except she announces that her schtick is embarrassing. Here's Hyatt from Excel Saga. Remember her? It might be tolerable if the production wasn't so low end, but the action is embarrassingly poor, so all that it has is those things trying to pass as jokes.

Impressions:

This episode wasn't much better than those though. It was primarily an introduction to the jock of the group, and while he wasn't the friendliest dude, our hapless crapbasket of a protagonist wasn't doing himself any favors either. "You can't protect anybody if you're dead, so why fight at all?" It was trying to claim that it was about Joe pushing himself too hard and putting himself in danger, but he never really did that, except to stand against the hydra-dragon he accidentally unleashed in the middle of the school where he is literally the only person present to do anything about it. Not exactly the time you'd think anybody would be preaching discretion, especially when not seriously put into harm anyway.

They could have certainly done a kind of "You have my back, and I'll have yours," kind of schtick, but the protagonist is too much of a sad sack, and they had to handwave why the regen-dragon was a threat. Almost worse, the animation fell apart a bit when the protagonist actually fought. How did he tie up the whole thing? Dunno, we cut right past all that. And that still doesn't excuse the first half of the episode, which was all intro and dragging sad-boy around so he can whimper in general. 

Next Episode:

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