天下制覇

A shame this won’t last.

This was an OVA bundled with the volume released a few days ago. I don’t really question where stuff appears from, I just find out once I know it exists.
Also FYI, I have class Tuesday and Thursday mornings which could potentially delay my coverage. I’m not dead, just trapped in the hellish world of statistical modeling.

Impressions:

All other things aside, my biggest problem with Jump stuff is that it takes forever to get in motion and once in motion, it immediately stops so it can review what just happened before everybody spontaneously forgets about it, they add another digit onto the power levels/spirit levels/bounty, and everything repeats. This on the other hand… This confuses me.

This OVA essentially comes off as a recap episode of Beelzebub set maybe two or three months into it. It blasts through stuff like you wouldn’t believe, not wasting any time on things like space filler or characters repeating what they were just told with a ‘crazy’ expression that has only been used forty thousand times before, and there’s only a little bit of that awful Jump style of screamy humor. It’s… almost pleasant in some ways. Unfortunately, it really does come off as a recap episodes, so I imagine that I just saw the best parts from two months worth of the show in a single 30 minute chunk. Knowing that does not exactly increase my anticipation for the show itself.

Even setting that aside, the show’s production is only average at best. While it rarely looks that special brand of cheap that only Zexcs, Feel, and Shaft can cultivate, the action scenes are either dull or embarrassingly lame (orange explosion background with speedlines…? That one’s going straight to the stock footage pile!) and while some of the jokes are good, most are still only a step or two above "Made you look" or mimes on the humor scale. Ogata’s sidekick also fulfills the yelly Jump humor quota, but thankfully, he’s not around much, at least in this version.

I imagine this could be a better watch for fans of the show to see what they’re getting, but for people like me who are now painfully aware that they probably just saw the abridged version of the entire season of the show… if not more… that will probably have the opposite effect. This was okay. The quick pacing made up for the relatively average content. Stretch every one of these 5 minute segments out four times as long though and… well… that puts us right back in Jump’s usual territory. At least it’ll make my writeup of it come Saturday all the easier.

I could have also done without the closeups of baby dick thrusting into the screen. Japan, what the hell are you putting on kid’s TV these days?