天下制覇

Except that I’m immune to everything from the 90s but Jean-Luc Picard.

New Season Disclaimer:

I prefer to give every show a chance. You never know when your dream-eating insect wielding Mai HiME knockoff will turn out to be a psychological romantic thriller, or the strange moeblob show will be full of wit and urine jokes. However, my preferences are still my preferences, and while I’ll endevor to at least convey why I do or do not like things, there are genres of shows that I just plain don’t particularly enjoy. My opinions are based on nothing more than a gut reaction to what I watched literally 10-15 minutes prior and should be construed as nothing more and nothing less than that.

Impressions: 

Well, I think fans of the series will be happier with this episode than I was. While I’m familiar with the overall plot, this dumps you right into the middle of a bunch of things with about 30 different characters and the only introduction coming from Kabuto and most of that was about himself and his mech. The rest is just an rushing torrent of people, places, and things that just plain overwhelmed me. What the hell is he fighting? What just blew up now? And now there’s a robot groping another robot’s breasts. Allllrighty. I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt and just assume that it’s aimed at longtime fans, but that’s really not a good approach to draw new people in either. If I’m wrong then… uh… it was extremely confusing for everybody and not just me.

Production was a mix. They seem to be unsure what style they want to use and for this episode, are somewhat haphazardly using both modern techniques and ancient early 90s oldschool ones. A lot of the time, it really does look pretty good, but then they spit up a still like this, shake the camera rapidly, and zoom in on various parts of it while the character continues to talk. Mouths are cheap to animate. It’s okay to use techniques developed 10 years ago. For the most part though, they really do a good job in keeping the oldschool thick character lining and bringing it up to modern animation standards. Casshern still did it better, but it’s certainly not another abomination like Cobra.

So, honestly, I defer to the opinion of pre-existing Mazinger fans here. It does a horrible job of selling itself to anybody who doesn’t already know the entire cast is, so aside from pointing that out, there’s really not much I feel particularly confident in saying. I’m more than happy to keep trucking along with Regios Felli on Saturdays anyway, so whatever. *shrug*

On a side note, this episode was significantly shorter (3 minutes actually) than most broadcasts. If they include an OP next week and keep the same episode length, that means that episode will run for about 18 minutes instead of the usual 21 (21/24 including OP/ED). Weird.