天下制覇

Was this novel written in the second person or something?

The first episode was broadcast today, but it looks like Chinese streaming sites got the first three episodes. I'm not totally sure what the deal is, and am not versed enough (or at all) in Chinese to really figure out what's going on. No mention of the second and third episodes on the official Japanese site, and certainly not English. Well, whatever. I've got 'em at any rate. I might do another later, but having flipped quickly through, it doesn't appear to improve matters.

Impressions:

That said, I was very unimpressed by this start. It's certainly trying to look artistic, but the actual animation is mostly fairly poor, and the writing is dreadful. The only thing it really seems interested in animating is when wind blows things, for maximum artsy-fartsy, and then gets stuck in the usual awful-looking CGI for the land-ships. Mostly, it pans over shots of scenery while the omnipresent narrator drops factoids about the setting and explains character backstories. Adaptation for a different medium? I think you mean book on tape while browsing a coffee table book of landscapes. It's also super wanky when it fades from janky animation into a super detailed illustration… presumably from the novel? Hell if I know why we're fellating ourself for this random image.

Like Northern War, it's doing a super awkward silent protagonist thing, so it has people constantly hovering around her, explaining to her what she is doing and thinking while she just stands there with a thousand yard stare, or if it's a dramatic scene, bites her lip and a tear appears in the corner of her eye. I think her first full sentence doesn't come until 18 minutes into the episode despite having been in every scene to that point. At some point, somebody is really going to need to take anime directors aside and slap them with a trout until they promise to stop doing this. Even visual novel adaptations, which always had protagonists with less presence than grout, usually tried to inject a little more presence and personality than this. Usually.