天下制覇

What? Where? Huh? The hell is going on here?

Impressions:

Uhhhhhhhh…

Where to begin… where to begin…

Well, let’s start with a pat on my own back. I nailed it. The direction was… truly beyond this world. Mindblowing really. The show tried so hard to be serious, and then would shift gears and start dropping puns and overblown reactions more worthy of Dokuro, and then attempt to shift back into serious again like nothing had happened. The direction didn’t get much better from there. The lion’s share of this episode was spent on explaining every single goddamned thing. At least we got to look at some pretty scenery a few times, but after the twelth minute of just being flat up told "this is our scenario, we paid a lot for this writer, so here’s every single trivial detail that he wrote" my eyes were rolling back in my head. I don’t even want to talk about the concert scene at the end. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to juxtapose "Oh crap, super death angel!" against bad pop and cut between the two constantly for no reason? Why was the concert even there in the first place?

On to the good. It’s very very pretty. Really. It’s easily the best looking show I’ve seen for a long time. Of course, I’m not sure if they’ll be able to keep that up at all. Like I said, there was a LOT of exposition and shots of backgrounds this episode and we saw Tenshi stab Kyon Not-Kyon at least five or six times. Resorting to cheap tricks already is not a promising sign. PA Works has also finally sold their soul to the devil completely. A lot of people will be happy to see Haruhi and Kyon TOTALLY NOT Haruhi and Kyon back in action in another well animated and more actiony show.

I do think that if they settled the direction problems in the next few episodes, this could get a lot better. This show veers off into bizarre gag humor directions all the time though, and clearly has immense problems deciding what kind of show it even wants to be and has instead decided to eschew all hope of sense and throw a pop concert in for absolutely no reason. I may check out the next episode out of grim curiosity, and I will admit that I was laughing my ass off at the show by the end, but for the same reason that I eventually came to enjoy Princess Lover in its darkest days.

FYI, I’m off to the vet in a few minutes (dogs somehow managed to pick up a few ticks somewhere), so Devil King will have to wait for awhile.