天下制覇

Combat cyborgs that explode when punched seems like a design flaw.

Impressions:

How curious. Given the visual style, that this has the staff of Yo-Kai Watch, and is being made to sell an RPG coming out in about a month, I expected a lot of bad slapstick and screaming. There's essentially none. It's all played basically straight (though the rest-of-show preview does have quite a bit of goofiness, particularly with the psychic would-be assassin klutz girl). Well, as straight as you can call that jank-as-absolute hell CGI. But the whole mecha angle is kind of isolated and tucked away at the end of the episode following the obligatory infodump about how the world was destroyed and everybody is living in a Truman Show dome. But they do make time to have a quite well animated kung fu fight against cyborgs set to hip hop. 

It's not quite what I expected, and that goes for more than the flamboyant scientist who is one part Prince, one part sexual predator. I wouldn't say it's the most compelling opening episode though. The back half of the episode slows to almost a halt as we abandon random psychic assassins and brawls with cyborgs and are instead trapped in exposition and flashbacks. When we finally return to "something happening," it's suiting up (with a robot dog pet) for the episode to end. You'd think a mecha show would want to make some time to show off the mecha, even as jarring as the CGI is. Maybe the OP was meant to do that job. I'm not sure it even needs or wants them though. Seems like we could make a perfectly fine show just fighting cyborgs and crazy Psylocke wannabes.

Next Episode(s):

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