天下制覇

And hands that explode clothes.

New Season Disclaimer:

I’ll make a post for almost all new series (barring sequels) with a wrap-up and bullet point opinion of each once the premier week is over. Remember that these are just my kneejerk reactions to the first 20 minutes of shows, many of which in genres that I don’t even particularly like, but I do believe in giving every new series at least an episode to interest me.

Impressions:

Well… that’s a very Shana OP.  The similarities don’t go too much past that though, unless you really really really reach and call Mikoto a loli and her coin-firing railgun a flame sword. Overall, it was a relatively decent first episode, though I did expect a little more on the action front and a little less on the "Index is a big puffy marshmallow" front. She was a little bit cuter than I had hoped and Touma was a bit more mature and self-confident than your normal action show faire, so it worked out, just a little bit differently than I had thought it would. I’m certainly happy to see a snarkier male lead that isn’t drooling over his marshmallow sidekick, and is instead attempting to feed her trod-upon sandwiches. Neither of them even cared all that much when he exploded her clothes, aside from… well… her being naked for a couple seconds. After she was all safety pinned up, it was back to business as usual. (Late Edit: I just noticed that Index has her safety pins on in the OP too. Neat!)

Like pretty mcuh all JCStaff shows, the art was uniformly excellent, and the animation above average, though I’d be lying if I said that I thought it was the best that they could have done. I am curious what happened to the knife that Index hauled out. It just sort of disappeared partway through that scene… unless that fleshy sound was her sticking it into Touma’s ribs. They did like to use CG stuff a bit more than usual, but it was reserved for the little trashcan bots and vehicles mostly, so it wasn’t too obtrusive for the most part, although I will admit to rolling my eyes a couple times. The background music was really funky throughout the entire episode and I wasn’t too pleased with it. Lots of random synth tracks and things that could only be loosely called music in that they were a series of repeated notes that were not too obtrusively dissonant. A little less Tron and a little more melody would definitely help matters there quite a bit.

So overall, I’m pretty pleased with the first episode, but there’s definitely a lot of room for improvement. Index and Touma are both very likeable characters and I have supreme confidence in director Nishikiori. Here’s to hoping that the badass at the end of the episode will kick next week’s off with a bang.

Index OP