天下制覇

A more serious Shaft show? Without cat eared vampires? Gadzooks!

Impressions:

ef is a little weird in that it’s not a romance game focused around a single person wooing multiple women, but about different stories of people that really don’t connect all that much or all that well. Instead of telling every story sequentially, Shaft has decided to tell them all at the same time, jumping from one to the next in their usual somewhat ADD fashion. This can make things somewhat challenging to follow… kind of like the romantic version of Baccano without a train called the Flying Pussyfoot.

As expected of Shaft, the production values are great. Excellent music (though they didn’t use the real OP this week), good animation, plenty of creative uses of color, camera angles and direction. It does often veer on the side of pretentious, showing shots of legs or the torsos instead of people as they talk, but Shaft still bothers to animate the body language, so it doesn’t feel particularly cheap. It’s a little on the slow side for my tastes, but so long as it remains a pleasure to listen to and look at, I’m pretty sure I can get over it. Shaft also inserted a bit more humor into the episode than the very serious promos seemed to indicate, but it was nowhere near the Shinbo-directed shows level of lunacy or random references.

Fortunately (or not), this is one of the more anticipated shows, so there’ll be no shortage of other people covering it, which means I’ll probably shy away from it. Omni already seems rather taken by it, and I know that Totali is an absolute whore for Shaft in general, so they’ll be all over this like… something… on… something else. I’m not feeling particularly poetic today. They’ll cover it thoroughly, so I doubt there’ll be a need for me to, though I’ll definitely be watching.

No summaries for the first episodes. I write as I watch, and I don’t know if I’ll care about a show until after the first episode.