天下制覇

The production meetings for this show must be interesting.

Impressions:

You know, a pretty solid twist on that corny-ass opening segment would have been revealing that it was all AI and the actual characters hated it for how utterly generic, overproduced, and lazy it was. Alas, no. That is the magic of music, and meant to be taken as the glory of idols singing about… the magic of music, and doing one's best, and how magical music is. Things get even more on the nose from there with some staggeringly poorly written exposition. "Boy, these parking regulations sure are strict." "Yes, that's because we live in a dystopian society, but strong laws keep the peace." "I am thankful for our dystopian society managed by AIs that have outlawed music." The best part was when Cleopatra fully took over, shut the idiot up, and just tried to sleep with every dude/stab every woman. Those are things I can get behind. It ends with another bizarre sequence where she tries to tell her friends what happened, but it turns out she's a magic girl, which means she's ultra cursed, and her evil aura makes her former friends start physically assaulting her, and so the drones crash in and laser them to death. Things went off the rails multiple times.

Then there's also what happens any time it actually tries to animate anything, which, oddly enough, didn't really include the opening concert. It… does not use CGI well. But it also doesn't use it consistently at all. She'll just spontaneously transform into CGI running down an alley, and then be right back to 2D animation in the next shot. But it also doesn't use it for when they start doing magical girl transformations and carpet bombing each other. But one summons rocks, and those are CGI. Then the Symphogear sequence starts, which I'm pretty sure is just a straight up advertisement for the crap this came from originally… but that's also barely animated despite the dramatic letterboxing and lyrics being printed on screen and looks like they probably literally just took a standard half-assed Vocaloid song like you'd see on Youtube and slapped that into the episode. It's baffling. Which sums up the whole episode, honestly.