天下制覇

Yes, yes, your father was awesome. Stop talking about him now. Please.

Season Premier Disclaimer:

I like to check almost every new show out. The value of a show is in its execution, not its premise. That said, my tastes are mine and mine alone. Some things bother me, some things don’t. I will attempt to be as cogent as possible as to my complaints or compliments for each show, but be aware that my views skew heavily towards the center. Nothing is perfect, nothing is irredeemable. That said, my tastes and my opinions are mine and mine alone and should not be construed as fact or, god help us, some kind of erudite critical analysis of the entire series based on the show’s first 20 minutes. Feel free to leave your own thoughts on the show if you’d like, but invective and similar will be mocked or deleted depending on which amuses me more at the time.

Impressions:

After sitting through all the other terrible CG and horrible art today, it was a relief to see that this show has… well… some pretty dodgy art. However, it used CGI like you were meant to, so kudos there. The animation was also pretty good for the most part, but the direction really let it down, especially at the end. I swear, choreography is a lost art these days. Yes, you can animate an action scene with two billion frames, and the camera swinging all over the place, but when all that the audience gets to see is some shuffling feet and a guy bobbing and weaving while attacks magically appear from off the side of the screen, I can’t help but feel unimpressed.

And that’s really the biggest weakness in this show so far, the direction. For one, the pacing’s a bit wonky. Luke’s spell at the end lasted for a full minute, and then he struck a dramatic pose for almost another 20 seconds in deliberate time filler waiting for the episode to end. To put that in perspective, Sailor Moon could have transformed twice in the time it took him to finish casting that spell. Those are the long versions of the transformations too. I also got a chuckle out of some of the more questionable camera angles. In particular, there was a shot of Luke literally framed on the top by Cecily’s crotch and on the sides by her legs. There were also numerous closeups on her impossibly overendowed breastplate, all of them forgetting her necklace that they went out of the way to point out at the start. The best bizarre directing decision was to show the end of the fight at the start of the episode, and then leave off just before those events happen at the end like it’s some kind of cliffhanger.

All in all, it’s produced pretty well and didn’t really do anything terrible wrong, although the musical choices were a bit odd at times. It didn’t do anything that blew me away either. While I don’t have much positive to say about the characters just yet, I don’t hate them either. I don’t really feel anything for them actually, which is something of a mystery to me. Well, I kind of hate the token loli for the horribly sung ED. I’ll probably give it another week or two to see where it’s going to go.