天下制覇

Shut up, Kyohei.

Impressions:

Like I thought in the preview from the promos, this episode was made of tone consistency issues. Kyohei himself bad enough, spending most of the episode acting as the "Um," "Er," "Uh," "Durr," brand of protagonist with a touch of "I woke up touching a female? AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!", but luckily, the entire world revolves around him as usual, so here’s a bunch of people with robots crashing in. The rest of the cast doesn’t fare that much better. There’s cutesy devoted loli with power robot, crazy guy with power robot, and love interest with breasts slightly larger than the characters on Ro-Kyu-Bu. The tone problems are the worst in the little showdown between girl and maniac. He’s trying to be menacing, she’s blushing, hiding her panties with a super deformed comical face, and accusing him of tentacling her. Figure out what you want to do with the scene and commit. You are not going to have your cake and eat it too between mass murderers and little girls acting ‘cute.’ And oh yes, the next episode preview is done with sock puppets.

I can’t say that I’m a fan of the writing either. So far, it’s relying heavily… very heavily… on the old standby of "important things happened that every character knows about… but we’re not saying," preferring to show glimpses every now and then and have characters talk in vague terms. I don’t mind things being unexplained, but it’s not the show’s job to point out how they’re not explaining things. I’m sure some people think that’s intriguing, but personally, I’ve always found it annoying due to it disconnecting the characters and story from the audience. Production was otherwise fairly decent, though not really ambitious either, even during the ‘fight’ if you can even call it that. I didn’t like the music that played when they were controlling their dolls, but that’s just another one of a billion consistency issues with this episode.

I’ll give it another episode or two just because Tuesdays are dead space otherwise, but eh. I can’t say that I’m much of a fan after this episode. It’s impossible to take the thriller parts seriously when there’s a little girl making faces and panty jokes in the corner and those parts were honestly the only time the show did anything interesting. Admittedly, it was interesting then, but unfortunately, that was only about four minutes of the whole thing and the rest just stuck on Kyohei being a moron and half-assed cuteness for cuteness sake… which unpleasantly blended into the interesting sections too.