天下制覇

Well, until the monologuing started.

I wasn’t too sure about this show after the weak first episode, but after flipping through it and noticing the ending bit, I definitely had to give it a second look.

Impressions:

Well, I can’t say that the first half here was particularly good. It was more or less the same as last time. Hilarious jokes about how Fear is cute, Konoha is jealous, the generic class rep character is a generic class rep, and the lesbian is… well… a lesbian. And then they have a competition over omelets while Fear was humped by the lesbian. I assure you, it’s less amusing than it sounds. I do like the job they’re doing with crazy-woman though. Contrasting her with F-Zed’s craziness, within the first seconds of her appearance, she kicked a crate across a room in frustration and bit her lip until blood was pouring down her chin. And she didn’t even have to tell me that she was crazy either. I somehow managed the arduous task of understanding that because of her mannerisms, blood tinged coloring, uneven lighting over her face, drunken/swaying movements, and wildly fluctuating moodswings. Also, chewing on her own arm. If only the protagonists could be so interesting. It’s a sad state of affairs when everything about Konoha is improved when she turns into Muramasa an inanimate object.

Unfortunately, like Uryuu and Gilles, she does lose a bit of her menace factor by spending almost the entire final five minutes of the episode in a long continuous rant. Thankfully, there is a lot of rather good action going on beneath it, but the fairly weak music and endless monologuing gets in the way of the ending scenes having a ton of impact. Less is more. Well, better music would have helped there a lot too. It felt like the audio and visuals just weren’t syncing up at all until practically the last few seconds. Otherwise though, this is doing the dark side of the show actually rather well. If they could get the happy/funny side a bit better so it’s a contrast between fun and dark instead of boring and dark, this show could really come together. Doesn’t bode well for my Saturday mornings, but this episode was also a very marked improvement over the first and I think it’s worth another week or two at the very least to see how berserk/evil Fear plays out.