天下制覇

Didn't that franchise somehow end up a Harry Potter knockoff?

Impressions:

This arc is where the manga source actually begins, and I'm going to be very fast and loose with the spoilers for it since I did thumb through at least these few chapters when I was looking things up about the show. Mostly because its big reveals were already done by the first episode, so that's going to pretty majorly undercut the climax of this whole arc. Specifically that the dude is a seasoned semi-immortal oni pit fighter and not a goofy clown, so when the sweater twink reveals that he's a secret Nazi Hulk just out to frame humans because he thought vampire Jordan Peterson has some interesting ideas and the two start brawling over vampire supremacy, that's going to be a lot less of a surprise. But we're already halfway there with everybody doing over-the-top gasps halfway into the episode over the severed head. You're vampires. This can't be the weirdest thing you've seen.

Anyway, this kind of Japanese mystery has never been all that engaging to me. BBC Poirot or the like? Sure. Whimsical priests or travelers with witty conversation, meeting all sorts of strange countryfolk with a murder on the side. Rockford or Columbo? Absolutely. They're charismatic and engaging. But when you're spending entire episodes blathering on about how unsolvable the mystery is, going over every detail of the case? The characters involved are afterthoughts. There's no progression or learning new things as they explore and interact because they don't do either of those things. They'll drag in somebody obvious out of nowhere, but the detective will say "Wait, it can't be that obvious," and they'll spend most of an episode faffing over how it must be. But then there's just typically a few details that get left out, and then the actual culprit when accused turns into a frothing mad lunatic, or in this case, a Nazi Hulk. And we're still probably a whole episode, if not two, away from even that point, and as I mentioned every other time I've talked about this, the big reveal is that the murder weapon was an icicle, which is around the level of a mystery for nine year olds, so it's hard to look forward to two or three more episodes of just this awful mystery.