天下制覇

Needs more robot apocalypse.

This aired both episode 1 and 2 back to back, and while there are quite literally a dozen Saturday shows this season, nine of them I believe new, only this one broadcasts today, so I'm going to split episode 1 and 2 into two posts for MAXIMUM SCREENCAPPING. Actually, that's a lie. I could more easily post hundreds per episode rather than paring them down. Anyway, I expect to regret this when unexpected week-early simulcasts flood the netwaves, but we'll see.

Impressions:

Well, it starts out with the robot war, although it'd be more accurate to call it the abrupt crazification of robots. Less Animatrix, more, uh, Sigma virus? Anyway, the episode takes a very poor turn from there and spends most of the rest of the episode in expositionville. At the start, it's bad, but tolerable. A sort of I Robot history lesson advertisement doing an intro for AIs. Then we get to the titular Vivy character and spend about the next six minutes stuck listening to her explain basic AI things and have basic AI things explained to her. The story, as it were, picks up again when the teddy bear virus shows up, but his schtick is being a motor mouth, so going from being slowly pumped full of useless minutia to being overwhelmed in rapid fire by plot dumping isn't a huge improvement.

Eventually, she saves an AI advocate dude from a bomb, and… uh, that's it. Back to motormouth ranting. The middle of the episode is consumed by a long chunk of the usual "I don't believe you" stuff that doesn't really go anywhere. I can't help but wonder if they pushed all the fun stuff to the second episode, because this one had absolutely none of the martial arts or gunplay promised by the promos. A silly thought with the second episode sitting right there which I'll watch in a moment, but it still meant that these opening 20 minutes dragged quite a bit. Weirdly too. Usually anime can't wait to have their idol characters do a little concert, or if they're an action show, have some kind of bit to show that off. Even the bloody robot coup at the start was just one woman having her face crushed, some people getting shot or brained by flying drones with generic shots of carnage. Here's to hoping the next episode really picks up now that she's apparently accepted becoming a secret agent and is fighting SWAT assassins.