天下制覇

It should be a crime to be this bland.

Impressions:

So much for this director putting together an action series. This was dull to the point of tedium for the most part. Talky talky talky about absolutely nothing interesting in the slightest. He can see auras, there are cats in his dreams, his teach has a terrible name, and here’s some shots of Merry wandering around town with a black and white/static filter because that makes it meaningful somehow. The brief action scenes could have been decent since the choreography in them was quite good, Merry vs Chaser especially, but they were so badly let down by terrible animation and poor direction it’s simply more notable that they’re a lot of bluster for being only a few frames above just throwing up stills.

The production in general was pretty poor all around. Disproportionate bodies were common and the animation for the rest of it was even worse than the action stuff. The scoring was also very bizarre for the most part. It worked all right with the dream sequences since they were supposed to be jarring and out-of-touch with reality, but like TWGOK, the flute riffs and other flowery music was completely out of place with… well… everything. Just to round things out, the voice acting was pretty terrible too. Not quite Omigawa level awful, but still bad enough that I was sick of hearing the main cast’s awful delivery by the end of the episode.

I’m probably coming off more negative than I really feel, but the simple fact of the matter is that there’s next to nothing in this show that I think it did well and it did very little, if anything, to distinguish itself from a thousand other shows that have come before it. The dreams were the only parts that weren’t a parade of boring, poorly drawn talking heads and the poor production really destroyed any hope of that being interesting to watch either. Rio at least had the completely inane metaworld of draw poker. That’s at least fun to talk about. This just had about 15 seconds of weird cats.

Preview:

Honestly? That fairy terrifies me more than the cat nightmares.