天下制覇

Boy, when you go RPG, you really go RPG.

AKA Branch/Petals of Reincarnation.

Impressions:

I know I made the obvious Persona connections in the season preview, but I'm actually a little surprised how overt the adaptation is about it being literally legally-distinct Persona. If I didn't know better, I'd have assumed it was a video game adaptation from how quickly it dispenses with any formalities about the setting and jumps straight into tutorializing and then right to boss fights. Just… in a random lot. Because everyone showed up to have a fight. Like, almost literally, manic pixie dream girl goes up to him, declares him the protagonist, hands him a knife, everyone starts cutting their throats, he's declaring that of course he'll fight evil magical monster dudes because he hates his brother and wants to collect all the personas, and we're doing this five minutes into the episode before going off to fight Vlad the Impaler. I feel like it probably would've worked better skipping the intros entirely and beginning in medias res if we're blasting past absolutely everything.

It's definitely different to have something going way waaaaaaay too fast instead of padding out every scene for a million years, and a little refreshing, but it's definitely not well animated enough to get by on only raw style. The art side is trying with the vibrant colors and contrast, but the animation simply isn't there. Not anywhere near as bad as the Hero Scum show, and the breakneck pacing helps smooth over the… let's call it less than stellar writing and characters as ridiculous as, well, the RPG tropes they're born from.