天下制覇

Get ready for head puns, probably.

Impressions:

The director here is certainly making a concerted effort. The visuals are expressive, the animation of the fight is pretty good, or at least stylish enough to make up for the budget. It's just that the story basically stops about eight minutes in and the rest of the episode is consumed by recruiting the dude by talking his head off. *ba-dum chss* Anyway, the director tries to spice things up with some overly elaborate stylized shots, but it's not witty or interesting conversation. It's just explaining the premise and then repeating the explanation of the premise. Any will-they, won't-they was spoiled by the OP ten minutes ago, but we're still faffing around that, so I can't say that this is a better introduction to the whole thing over the source's silly "holy water icicle murder" schtick.

I want to like this, just for the imagination that the director is showing at least trying to spice up a very, very boring ten minute conversation, but I can't help but assume that the latter is much more how things are going to be from here on out over the start. Even the start's expository text slapped up on screen wasn't great, particularly the explanation that this is a world that has magic, and therefore is a different world from the real one. Thanks. I'm not sure I would've gotten that from the goblins and talking severed heads running around without being told so. Hoping that a Japanese show will cut the needless explanations by about 80% to fix the pacing issues is a recipe for disappointment though.