天下制覇

Probably not the best idea in an industrial slave labor camp.

This 'aired' as part of Crunchyroll's virtual expo a week back. It's a full broadcast series beginning in the fall, currently marked for October 7th, I believe.

E: I've bumped this up to most recent as it actually began airing today, but unless there were some small edits or changes, it looked like at a glance to be completely identical to the early preview episode.

Impressions:

I get that the tonal whiplash is largely the point, but, man. It definitely jumped from treating the kaijuu attack almost like Looney Tunes to having all their loved ones leap into a death pod to turn themselves into a bloody smear on the pavement on a dime. It's definitely styling itself as a more adult version of Gurren-Lagann, but having a struggling dad with an eternally tantrumming daughter instead of… a bunch of screaming teenagers, I suppose. Probably appropriate considering the age of the original fans of Gurren-Lagann, to be honest, and post apocalypse industrial mecha isn't exactly rare, but they aren't hiding what it's meant to be a copy of much either.

That said, it wasn't the most interesting episode. Any episode where you have a random airhorn blaring out a summary of the setting is not one with the best writing behind it. I definitely feel like the big sister friend/dudebro friend characters could have probably been combined into one to focus things a little better, especially if they were going to become the same blood-flavored paste. There were the dad bits and the daughter bits, but the designated martyr character(s) could have been used to connect them as the thing really holding together the family. Similarly, if this is going to be about them now piloting their own special mech like the ending suggests, there was definitely enough chaff in the middle to cut so they could have highlighted that and shown off the presumable standard mecha vs giant monsters hook while still reserving time to get weepy over their friends sacrificing themselves. Unless it's not about that, and the melodrama's meant to be the hook, in which case, the goofy chase sequence is even more out of place.

There's potential, at any rate, and it's Satelight, so well-produced all around (and this was a Covid delay from 2020), but the huge tone shifts in the back half are a bit of a mess.