天下制覇

Starring Chris Hansen.

You know, I’ve gotten used to having weekends free. I can just sit around, catch up on random stuff, translate some tentacles, make a week’s supply of muffins and then have muffins for lunch and dinner for the next two days… you know… the good life. And then random new shows air their first episode a month ahead of time. Dammit, Japan.

Impressions:

Well, this was… something. The ‘touching’ story of an admitted pedophile and the restaurant he works in. I hope you are a very very slow study, because the jokes in this show are repeated so many times that Xerox should be sueing A-1 for infringement. The entire first half of the episode is "Taneshima is small… ISN’T THAT CUTE?" I think A-1 may be getting a tad jaded with the anime viewing population lately. It’s a shame too, because this show is actually pretty well made from a purely technical standpoint. I’m not going to do anything so crazy as to say that it impressed me, but the animation and movement was a lot more fluid and resorted to far fewer formless blobs than most shows of this ilk, and especially the ones that A-1 makes. This is probably the closest that they’ve come to striking a decent balance between character art, background art, and animation.

Sadly, though, the writing is where it really collapses. Keitaro The pedophile is just about the only interesting one of the cast, and that’s only interesting in the same way that I find loach interesting. The rest of the cast is cut right out of the same cookie cutter collection as a billion other terrible pseudo harems. The idiot loli, the older girl sensitive about her age, the one afraid of men, the one with a sword (except when they forget to draw it), and both a sullen and a friendly male sidekick. Maybe they’ll differentiate themselves from the moulds eventually, but given that they spent 10 minutes on "TANESHIMA IS SMALL!" I wouldn’t put any significant amount of money on that bet. Belated Edit: Scamp pretty much nailed the show’s entire humor formula, and there’s really very little outside of that.

Overally, I don’t really have a strong feeling about it. If they picked up the pace a bit, or varied the jokes a little a lot more, this would be better, but I’m already really tired of the only four or five jokes that were in this episode, and the thought of hearing them again week after week fills me with something other than enthusiasm… although there’s probably at least even odds that that’s actually just one of the three blueberry muffins I had for dinner fighting back.

The actual broadcast starts on April 4th. Maybe I’ll reevaluate my opinion then. Or once I figure out what the hell is even airing next season.