天下制覇

Man, JC Staff, you really have fallen hard.

Impressions:

Not that JC Staff was ever amazing, but this kind of light action show used to be their bread and butter back in the Index/Zero/Shana/Slayers days, and absolutely could put an impressive amount of effort into the most random of shows, like Taboo Tattoo. This was pretty embarrassing though, on both the animation and the pacing. The big fight against a giant troll had it stomp on a dog and then stand there motionlessly for the next few minutes while everybody narrated around how much effort they were putting in and how dangerous it was. All just to one-shot it. Stupid thing barely even moved at all. Take it down about a dozen notches. And then the godawful introduction bit where the animators gave up entirely and it was just a bunch of stills.

The best thing that I can say about it is that the characters are all decent enough. They're affable, empathic, and good natured with each other even with a little bit of friction and teasing of each other. Competent and curious, rather than petulant idiots. It's a nice change of pace from the usual anime cast. It would've been nice had they been in a story that wasn't consumed by an entire episode of meet and greet, or had any kind of animation budget whatsoever, because I'm not sure that they're enough to carry the rest of this mess.