天下制覇

Japan has some weird ideas about twins.

Cuckoo's Fiancee, the last of the new spring shows, finally airs today, but it's one of those super late airing weekend shows that tend to not pop up immediately unless you catch the live broadcast itself, and I've got some errands to run, so might not get right to it.

Impressions:

Every time I start this show, the OP and immediately jumping straight into the two screaming sidekicks makes me immediately rethink my decision, but then there's always at least a little bit of a decent fight, and segments that aren't totally overwhelmed by pointless exposition or purely spinning their wheels because it's past week one and that means that it's time to soak in the status quo for the next eight episodes. If the humor was just a little better, just a little more meat to the story, or especially if the characters it chooses to focus on were less obnoxious, I could be a little more unequivocal. What the show really needs is to kick out the main three and just make it all about the pink one. She gets all the animation budget and fight scenes, brief as they are, for god only knows what reason. It's still more action than at least half a dozen of the 'action' shows managed this week though, which is the truly depressing part of this whole thing.

Neither segment was particularly good, mind you. In the first half, they sparred with the creepy twins from The Shining in a three-leg race setup to show teamwork, and 'succeeded' by one just climbing onto the other's leg, which required a whole lot of artistic distortion, but that was just a dream anyway and the real lesson was the friends we made along the way. Uh, if you say so. For the second half, they played man-tag, with the teacher being the evil oni/man out to eat all of them. It seemed like it was almost going to be doing a kind of horror parody at the start, but then the montage kicked in and this somehow became a story-focused cliffhanger when she let it slip that men aren't flesh-eating monsters. Again, this is a really weird conceit to make when you're also claiming that men are constantly about fifteen feet off-screen right behind that tree.