天下制覇

  

With everyone in different rooms. And trying to one-up each other.

Impressions:

After the first episode kind of bored me, I glanced through the second, and it was enough of a step up to make me feel like it’s worth writing something about, although that’s in large part because the issues were completely different. Well, some of them. The first half was once again largely a parade of blathering heads talking about how things were totally happening and people were totally going to do things… somewhere else at some future time. It was certainly a large step up in a lot of respects though, particularly the animation and action, although once again, the fight was eventually won with a magical girl-esque pose while the target was suddenly stricken with dramatic moment paralysis. Speaking of him, another large improvement is the reduced focus on Dullo von Boringface.

However, the increased focus on the rest of the main cast started to bring up the unsurprising result of putting a bunch of writers who don’t know the meaning of the word restraint together and them then trying to one up each other. This results in a cat-girl on a giant carnivorous horse with leg-blade-wings, a guy who carries a giant revolver cylinder that he pulls single-use magic swords from, and the very picture of restraint, a giant breasted religious ‘assassin’ wearing high-heeled two-toed flippers, carrying a coffin that absorbs the power of darkness, and using a sword that hypnotizes everyone who sees it into killing each other. Oh, and they fight a woman whose legs are filled with the tortured souls of dead children and detach when she fights so she can float around in the air between them. It’s weird that the guy with a fishbowl for a head may be the least ridiculous. Which would all be well and good if the rest of the show was as flamboyant, or at least showed some awareness that it gave up control of its character designs to the nuthouse, but it’s only when they’re being ridiculous that the show has any sign of life. The rest of the time it’s all morose talking heads doing their best to be as boring as possible, and all of them would like nothing more than to go home and mope. It also continues to murder random children to try to get an emotional rise.

I did glance through the third too (and some of the notes above are from that episode, not this one), but I’m not going to cover it, at leats yet. It wasn’t as boring as the first, but lacked as much of the animation/action of the second. After three episodes though, the hero’s journey doesn’t really seem to have kicked off and it has serious consistency issues, but I guess we’ll see how I feel in a bloody month when the fourth episode airs.