天下制覇

Damn you for putting that in my head.

New Season Disclaimer:

I’ll make a post for almost all new series (barring sequels) with a wrap-up and bullet point opinion of each once the premier week is over. Remember that these are just my kneejerk reactions to the first 20 minutes of shows, many of which in genres that I don’t even particularly like, but I do believe in giving every new series at least an episode to interest me.

Impressions:

Hrm… well… there was a truckload to take in for this first episode and a whooooooooooole ton of really bad exposition doing most of it. The entire first two minutes after the OP were sequentially zooming out shots of the city while Akina told us all about the demons and such that attack it, blah blah blah blah blah who cares. There really are quite a few parallels to Rental Magica here with a from the president ruling over a harem of mostly girl demon hunters (and one snarky butler) and him being the one with the big power to finish the monsters off, but mostly useless on his own. The main difference is that the whole demon/human thing is pretty blurred here and all the magic and powers seem to be public knowledge… more or less.

What’s really appealing to me are the characters and the existential angst, or specifically, the total lack of it. Everybody is in their demon extermination agency 100% (except for, I guess, the spirit that they take in) and they’ve all got their powers and confidence in them. I still have absolutely no idea where everybody else’s previews were getting the idea that Akina was an ordinary guy, since… you know… he’s the one with the power to force a connection to the world of the demons and send the evil guys back, but hey… another personal win for me. ^^ The only powerless (or at least, didn’t use any powers this episode), and coincidentally only character I don’t like, is the damn butler that chases Hime around. It took me a moment to remember that was her name too since everybody calls her Hime or Ojou. And on the subject of Hime, her sentai scarf is rather amusing.

Production values were good across the board. I’ve certainly seen better, but nothing here to really complain about. I did really like the effects they used for Ao’s satellite mind search or whatever it was called, although it did remind me a lot of the same type of thing that the Dark Knight used… Oh well, swiping from Batman can only improve most things. The action scenes were about average. I was glad for the lack of stills, but it did feel a little lacking as the villain was basically bumped from one character to the next. Even the TV host nurse that he took hostage got a chance to knee him in the junk.

It’s certainly a more unique setting than most, and a complete cast of (mostly) charismatic characters is a lot more than I can say for a ton of shows. If they cut down a bit on the clumsy exposition and beef up the action, we really should get what Rental Magica should have been. Hell, we’ve already got a villain lurking around that looks like he could pass as Ao’s father and an evil looking nun in the next episode. We’re already further than Rental Magica got after 24 some odd episodes.

Yozakura OP

Yozakura ED

Preview:

Nuns and big blue balls.