天下制覇

These character designs frighten me.

This is a short miniseries airing over the next month and a half. I guess that makes it more of an OVA than a show, but it’ll be airing weekly from here on.

Impressions:

Let’s start with the good. Thankfully, despite the bizarre world and the various factions and whatnot, there weren’t really any idiot lectures to sit down and spell it all out. The setting does seem like it could have been interesting too, or at least a bit different from the norm, although I don’t know why 99% of Japanese science fiction seems to take place either in space where everything is super ultra advanced, or on desert planets where everything looks industrial age… except with land-desert boats and mecha. The art is… also… uh… I’d say unique, but let’s call it unique for this decade.

Unfortunately, it’s just about everywhere else that lets the show down. The 80s character designs aren’t all it’s cribbing from the 80s. Lead character kid is after his titular evil brother (who wears an opera mask no less) and happens to save a mysterious girl along the way. They both then proceed to all but disappear for the last half of the episode while the crazy tarot-reading captain and her crew of wacky misfits technobabbles their way through the remainder of the episode. Thrilling. Better than exposition, I guess, but only because it gives the illusion of something happening. It doesn’t work when you string nothing but technobabble after more technobabble together leading up to just some CG turrets listlessly moving around.

So anyway, not impressed. It seemed like an exceedingly generic sci-fi adventure given the first half (albeit somehow showing up 30 years later than it should have), but then all of that disappeared in a withering hail of other people talking to screens and pushing buttons for the second. Maybe if you’re really really hardcore into sci-fi settings, you’ll find something more to like about this, but you better have one damn burning fetish for button pushing and technobabbling.

Preview:

People yelling at consoles.