天下制覇

Yeah, that's what this series needed.

Impressions:

Well, it's gotten a lot more bright and colorful over the original iteration, which does make the CGI not stand out as glaringly awful, but it's not helping the tone much and also comes across as a hell of a lot more generic. Also, more culturally speaking, their clothing looks ridiculous. More importantly, instead of sexy, wacky dad having sex with an evil snake lady, we get a kid. A screaming obnoxious kid. Great. The girl is basically the exact same as before, only introduced much earlier. So is the action. The monster actually looks monstrous instead of "Guy Tied to Wheel," but the song and dance is the same. Put some effort into the animated part, then as soon as they transform to CGI, immediately one shot the monster of a week. I guess at least this week they had some handwavey magic excuse for why he didn't transform immediately, but they still ruined it by filling the 'action' scene with unneeded dialogue. My two favories were "This is a barrier!" right before a bunch of walls popped up, which was then repeated about 30 seconds later when he got around to trying to escape, utilizing the rare "tell, show, tell again" form of presentation, and the other was after transforming when Combative Female Sidekick told him to hurry up, so in response, he sat there posing for another minute. Thanks for both pointing out how stretched out it was, and then stretching it out further.

So, for every half step forward over the first iteration's relatively dull opening episode this took, it also took a couple steps backward. Trading out Randy Dad Mentor for Shrieking Child Sidekick was easily the biggest sin. It's also lost a lot of its visual style as well. The original was overly dark and the CGI never once meshed well with it, but it did make good use of shading to give it a darker and more serious atmosphere, and was especially good for making some of the more visceral scenes like burning mothers stand out. This is more cartoonish, especially with the often odd musical vaudeville piano to indicate 'silly' scenes, and it really makes the corny darkness in people's hearts business seem that much more rooted in Kingdom Hearts-esque fluff. Along with the plucky sidekick, that's probably what they're going for, but I really don't think that rebranding move did this any good.

Next Episode:

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