天下制覇

…Why.

This actually starts broadcasting on July 5th, but HBO Max/Hulu put out a three episode premiere today and will be following it up weekly, but it's also only 10 episodes, so by the time it's over in early August, at least one summer anime show will be on… episode 2. 

Impressions:

This is an unusual complaint for me since I'm usually fairly ambivalent to it, but man, the dubbing/voice acting here was rough. Rough enough that I tried swapping between languages, but the English dub was somehow worse. I've heard every flavor of Harley, and man… this one is just flat and bad, even not getting into other kind of weird deviations on her character/relationship with Joker, which has zero abusiveness towards her. There are actually quite a few awkward production issues all around. The fight at the end was pretty well animated, but the chase scene and fight with the ninja at the start? For some reason, the framerate collapsed to around 15 FPS for most of that. I guess it's a pleasant surprise for the animation to get better as an episode goes on, and maybe they'll fix it for the actual Japanese broadcast, but it looked rough.

Everything else is exactly as "made by marketing" as you'd expect. Multiple characters at both the start and end of the episode loudly announce how this is totally the latest new hot fad of people going to a fantasy world of magic and dragons that's in all my favorite anime and manga! Eh!? Eh!? See, kids! Aren't we cool too!? …And that just makes my eye twitch uncontrollably. Plus, we have to go through the entire rigamorale of the standard Suicide Squad origin story that having already seen forty eight times, the forty ninth does not engage, leaving the script for this episode largely just an announcement of cliches that I've seen a hundred thousand times over. I get not everybody is familiar with it, but that doesn't excuse the lack of quips, character chemistry, etc, and doing a montage of slapping every character up on screen for 10 seconds with a nameplate hasn't gotten any less cheesy.

I'll almost certainly at least post something on the next couple episodes, but I'm in no hurry to get to them after this one, and actually have quite a few meetings and other work stuff to do this morning, as well as try to finish up the belated season preview now that we're up to three shows having premiered.