天下制覇

I can sense the Steins;Gates fans creaming their panties over it already.

As previously mentioned, this was a one hour broadcast on AT-X. It’s taking a week off on AT-X next week though, so the broadcast six days later will overtake it… by a day. Episode 2 doesn’t air until a week from next Friday on another channel.

Impressions:

Ugh. Just what I feared. Just like GOSICK, the lead is a complete waste of all time and space. He’s made of 95% milquetoast and 5% sweaty anxiety. He narrates every single thing going on in an incessant dull whine that only grew more annoying as the episode went on. Every other character is excessively wacky for wackinesses sake and would already be locked away in a mental asylum for life by any reasonable society. It also doesn’t help that every character intro is as cliched as it can get, half of them literally listing their character trait alongside their name.

Its production is competent enough, but there’s really nothing interesting or ambitious going on with it either. There’s a little bit of creativity in the direction, but they really lean on cutting off BGM to create ‘impact’ far too much. After the third or fourth time, it went from creative to obtrusive. The main problem is that there’s barely anything to this ‘episode’ other than character introductions. Yeah, sure, it’s a double broadcast, but I really suspect that may be because JC Staff realized that the first 20 minutes of this was painfully dull as all hell.

In the end, since this episode barely introduces any kind of mystery and spends everything after the first 3 minutes on slow and clumsy character introductions to a cast that I don’t like, that’s hard to get past. Everything in this episode is character driven, and the character who’s carrying the camera sucks. A lot. Since the second half is sitting right here, I may as well put it on and see if it does anything to catch my eye, but these first twenty minutes were slow and tedious at best. Seeya in 30 or so once I discover whether the next twenty are the same.