天下制覇

How is that the strongest character in the show so far?

Impressions:

I'm still baffled by this adaptation's existence, and this episode did very little to justify itself. It's a PS1 RPG. The entire script is only like 4-5k lines to start with, and this is 'adapting' only one of the three possible 'main' stories of it (and not the one I played some twenty odd years ago), so there have to be a whole lot of liberties taken just by necessity. Why then do we end up with an episode that goes nowhere and does nothing? Because they're trying to stretch out maybe 1k lines worth of story into an entire series without adding anything? Dude A has a dream saying he's the chosen one. Dude B shows up at his house and… that's the whole episode.

Dude A spends the whole thing going around the village of weirdly dressed people, most of them some flavor of hobbit, though also a nightmare-fuel scarcrow and creepy-ass CGI tree until eventually they go to a cave. All the random CGI is probably the weirdest part of the production. There's little rhyme or reason to any of it, especially when it randomly switches to CGI for things that seem like they might take some effort to animate. It almost feels more like just a tour to show off that they put in all the obligatory X of Mana monsters and races. See? It really is an adaptation of the game! Except for the part where it's an RPG about adventuring and fighting monsters. We don't need that as a hook. That's the hook for next episode.