天下制覇

Which, strangely, was not the most interesting part.

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, Ga-Rei certainly wins the award for the most unique episode of the new season, which is really no small task considering Kemeko around. At the end of this episode, the entire cast has been ambushed and seemingly killed, or at the very least, carved up quite a bit. I’m not entirely certain where they’re going to go from here… to show the past that they flashed back to a couple times that would lead up to this point, or start with one or some of the survivors from the slaughter and go on from there. At the very least, it’s got me interested to at least find out what the hell this show is actually going to be about.

I could have done without the GIANT CG ROLLING DINOSAUR ON FIRE, but otherwise, production values were solid enough. I’ll even go so far as to say that they were pretty good. The music really stood out and made this feel like the introduction to an RPG through the entire thing. There was even an insert song during the initial encounter with the GIANT CG ROLLING DINOSAUR ON FIRE. Natsuki rolling around on her motorcycle to kick the little grunts around was definitely the highlight. I also knew that nothing good was going to happen to the cute little girl in a ribbon doing recon, but I expected it about 5 episodes down the line. I didn’t expect her to be grabbed by a facehugger and then shoot herself in the head in the first episode.

So, all in all, I’m very impressed. Sundays are looking like a pretty light day anyway (aside fro me probably moving ZKC coverage to them), so even though the show looks quite a bit more serious than what I usually like to follow, I really am excited to see where they’re going to go now that the entire cast has been sliced up. No OP or ED this episode, just a credit roll at the end.