天下制覇

Not to be confused with あきかん.

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.

Bandai Channel put up a special broadcast of the first episode. It won’t start airing properly for another week and a half, and since this episode was 20 minutes without an OP or ED, I imagine those will be added in to flesh it out to completion. Go ahead and watch it here if you’re bored.

Impressions:

Unfortunately, the "Empty Can" pun, among other terrible puns (oho, the childhood friend is named Najimi… hilarious!), are about all that this show really has going for it. Har de har har. The writing is the worst kind of stilted exposition, right down to classmates explaining other characters as they appear, and Kakeru is the worst kind of misogynistic protagonist. He’s a jerk carved right out of the Ataru (Urusei Yatsura) vein, only not really perverted or cruel enough to actually be funny. All the women start off the show fawning over him, even as he abuses and ignores them. Koharu Biyori’s lead comes to mind as a good comparison, but instead of forcing robot women into maid costumes, it’s locking women in closets. It’s hilarious because… she’s locked in a closet.

I suppose it does deserve a few points for steering clear of too many out and out fanservice moments. There was a closeup on Melon’s melons once, but that was about it. Everything else just came from relatively nonsensical innuendo that would take quite a few euphemisms and enough bodily gestures to make a sailor blush to actually sound dirty. Poor humor aside, the animation and art are both rather lacking. Reuse of Melon’s melon blast animation within the first 5 minutes was not a way to win any points. The music didn’t particularly enthrall me or annoy me, so I suppose that’s a point in its favor.

It wasn’t the worst first episode I’ve ever watched, but there isn’t a single moment in this episode that I could call good, let alone anything that would make me excited to see where this is going. I’m glad that it wasn’t as trashy as I had assumed it would be, but I’m not really sure who they’re trying to appeal to here, except maybe linguaphiles looking for new ways to talk dirty to their girlfriend in Japanese.