天下制覇

Oh for the power to reach into the screen and slap some people.

Impressions:

This was an hour long premiere like that Shield Hero thing, but actually numbered as two episodes. Might as well combine them as well. It's made extra easy because the first episode is little more than dead air. We're stuck following a magically animated sack of pudding as it stumbles around, various girls chirping at it. Some about trivial school matters. Some just random quasi-philosophy about the human spirit. The biggest insult of this part is that it goes "Oh, yeah, I'm here doing supernatural stuff cause there's supernatural stuff happening and a monster and danger and way more interesting things." Then, a scene later, it was apparently all wrapped up offscreen by someone else, so I'm leaving now, bye. So, what? Is this a flashforward then? Are we following the non-adventures of non-people doing no-thing?

The second half was significantly improved, but that's in large part because it totally jettisoned goddamned near everything from the first half… er, first episode despite happening (mostly) chronologically alongside it. We see all the randos that Puddingman ran into or heard mentioned were actually part of The Greater Story, but Puddingman and Girlfriend are nowhere to be seen. Not improved enough to actually be all that engaging though. There's some dude with a shapeshifting people-eater who's a clone of some alien and can both mind control people and give them unspecified powers, and also some other girl running around investigating things. One of the things that she investigates is that there's some other girl running around investigating things. Oh dear, we've hit a recursive loop. It seems like that covers a lot of ground, but it's all just exposition dumps, many possibly written with the help of Microsoft's Clippy. "I see you are eating a person. You are like a manticore. Did you know that manticore means people-eater?" Maybe that it jumped around chronologically was supposed to make it more interesting instead of just adding a little more mental fatigue, but I'm not sure how things like seeing that the narcissistic sociopath's origin story was being strangled for a moment rather than just always being a narcissisic sociopath adds much.

The visuals weren't trying for much (and succeeded at that), the characters, especially the first half's, bored me to tears, and the story after two episodes exists almost entirely in infodumps. I was bored and this made a stronger case for continuing with Index as a Friday show to its bitter (non) end than I think Index possibly could've done itself.