天下制覇

Remember how this is a franchise that exists?

This is a TV miniseries starting broadcast in mid May, running for three episodes weekly then. The first episode just got an early premiere for funsies.

Impressions:

I still do genuinely occasionally think of Ikkitousen DD a little fondly. Back at the start, Ikkitousen had kind of a far trashier and urine-filled Game of Thrones thing going where everybody was having sex with everybody and it was pissing off its audience constantly by killing off fan favorites at random. DD even occasionally had decent fights too. But then marketing got ahold of the franchise and from then on, everything had to be in a holding pattern as it had to add female versions of every single warlord in existence without ever removing any. The animated side of the franchise basically died when Arms shuttered, taking all the fanservice fighting shows with them. It's a little weird to think about how many seeming trends were just one studio making a specific flavor of show. Your "girls with guns" were always crappy, Bee Train, but I do miss you.

Anyway, we return to a 'reboot,' at least going by a title, though I'm about 95% certain they killed Ukitsu in DD, where they also want a second go at the Sun Quan/Sonken Chuubou arc that the anime only GG already did once. Unfortunately, the holding pattern appears to still be firmly in place. The animation is quite crap once again, and Sonken 2.0 is pretty much a clone of Ryuubi; completely useless except for when juicing on dragon power where she's invincible with a dude's voice and makes people fall over just by looking at them. The other characters are… certainly there and are reminders of what fanservice of the past used to be like. It barely covered any ground despite this being 33% of the mini-series, and yet, I already feel like its pacing will be favorable to the actual shows starting in a few days.

But hey, I got to play "judiciously take screencaps to avoid nipples," which brought back the nostalgia of AT-X's evening T&A affairs. What I would give to have those back instead of 6-10 cheat power RPGs every season.