天下制覇

A robot… with a human arm!?

This airs early enough to cover before work. The rest of today's shows will wait until the afternoon.

Impressions:

The first couple minutes were the standard world-ending apocalypse with some mysterious girl and/or robot at the enter. The next seven minutes were pure banality; girls arguing about who told who they were going to make breakfast, going to school, and walking to school. Then some guy transformed into a rock, that floated up and became a battery or something for an interdimensional robot. That sequence also took a couple minutes. Then he demanded she tranform for punchies or he'd… punch some shipping crates. This 'fight' would then last the entire rest of the episode, and be occasionally interrupted by lesbian interdimensional snuggles, declarations of how much they care for each other, how they're family, and that mean old man trying to take everything from them and calling them monsters. But luckily, their combined giant robot has a human arm. Which it can use to rip off robot arms. Which is totally not monsterish at all.

I suppose that the takeaway here is that the pacing is a dumpster fire and the characters so far are a bit overly saccharine and there's nowhere to go on the caring scale when you start out by wailing on the heartstrings. Preferable to all those shows where it's just a stinking rubbish heap filled with banal and/or shrieking ninnies, certainly, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't have been greatly improved if it had selectively cut out about eight minutes. It's certainly one of the better animated shows of the season, especially among all the ones pretending to call themselves action shows. Not that it helps a lot when there's so many interruptions in a fight that only lasted about five punches and one arm-rip, but if they could figure out the pacing/structure, there's definitely room for it to really impress. They did do a really good job with keeping the direction really evocative, especially the music in scenes really meshing well with the (not at all subtly) ethereal visuals instead of just covering everything in a supernova's worth of bloom and deafening with violins, as well as not weighing down scenes with a lot of obnoxious exposition. It made some of the hamhanded and obvious setup a little easier to swallow and ignore.