天下制覇

  

NYC is cleaner than I remember it.

Impressions:

Another show that needs to pick what it wants to be instead of throwing weepy sentimentality, obnoxious ‘zany’ comedy, over the top action, and gritty drama all in a blender and hitting frappe. I’m kind of impressed by the way they continue to manage to work over-narration and exposition into every single oriface. The attempts at comedy is what’s most dysfunctional. Not the background weirdness of the setting. That’s perfectly fine. Smooth even. I wish there was more of that and less of the protagonist self-narrating to the great goat in the sky that controls the world. The exaggerated ‘wacky’ face, overreactions, and shouting? Not so much. Good job. You’ve made the irritating character really irritating. Now you have an irritating character yelling at the screen and I’m irritated. Are you proud at what you’ve accomplished? Is this really what you wanted? Is that where you saw this going?

The main character is also fairly dysfunctional, hitting all the greats, from being sucked into weepy flashbacks about the unfairness of life that have little to do with the current situation, openly weeping from the sheer emotions of everything, and blithely stumbling about here and then just to have people give speeches to him while he stares blankly, with eyes closed. You’re going to have to get over this whole “center show on the least interesting character in the entire setting” thing at some point, Japan. It may as well be now. No, his magic eyes does not make him more interesting, especially not if he’s going to spend the entire episode not using them… and when he finally does, it’s to find a magic tick… to a goddamned ‘inspirational’ insert song no less while the camera swings in a wild circle around him like someone duct taped it to a very helicopter that’s winding up for takeoff.

Production is fairly strong, CGI elevators, buildings, roads, people, and random long shots of the skyline notwithstanding, but they’re trying to do the same thing as Kill la Kill and throw attack names up all over the screen so characters can pose, which I like even less here than I did there, and that worries me for the future of action scenes that have greater stakes than “save the monkey.” There are direction and tone problems to work out, I suppose is the takeaway, and I’d trade this protagonist for just about any of the other characters in the show in a heartbeat.

Next Episode:

Glowing dicks.