天下制覇

Do I win anything for figuring out the ‘mystery’ before the show revealed it?

Impressions:

Talk about bizarre scoring. I think that Manglobe raided Disney’s office for "Themes To Be Played In Meadows" from 1943. The OP is weird enough on its own (though admittedly as a musician, I do rather like the thematic contrasting… NERD), but the rest of the BGM selections are just plain strange and really don’t fit the scenes at all. I’m also pretty annoyed by Keima. What is it about Japanese male leads where screaming is the appropriate response to everything? At least it’s not Kamiya yet again. Not that somebody else shouting 90% of the jokes at me is any better, but at least I don’t have an urge to strangle him… yet.

Pretty production for the most part outside of the strange music. Nothing impressive going on, but no major cost cutting measures or obtrusive stills that I can recall. The magical emptying and filling classroom at the end was a pretty humorous directorial screwup though. They’re clearly spending a lot of effort making Elsea look cute and it’s working. Nobody else was really touched on this episode, which I think hurt it a lot. All the episode had was Els looking cute, Keima shouting, Ayumi hitting him, and the entire time, idyllic Disney forest music playing. Mostly, it filled me with an urge to smack Keima too or go hunt Bambi’s mom. The show could definitely use more of the physical humor it had during Ayumi’s first run-in with Keima instead of him screaming as a signal to the audience that a joke has been made and they should laugh.

It certainly wasn’t bad at all, but a lot of the humor was of the usual LET ME SCREAM IN OVERREACTION variety which Shaft has already killed, then brought back to life so it can be killed again, so depending on how much that annoys you, you may or may not be able to derive too many laughs from this. Its primary virtue is that nothing else of note or value airs on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, so it’s a game of whether it can dig itself into enough of a rut where it’s not fun to write about anymore, and after Ookami on Wednesdays last season… well… it may have its work cut out for itself.