天下制覇

The show could use more of both. Or pretty much anything for that matter.

Impressions:

This was extremely hard to watch. I’ve never really been a fan of Production IG’s textureless animation against highly detailed backgrounds, but at least in stuff like Chevalier d’Eon there’s action or intrigue or something interesting going on. Ghost Hound has… a lot of looking at stills while minamalistic music plays and video distortion filters are used to try to make things seem artistic. There’s some kind of observation to be made when when the CG work is better detailed than the drawn, but I’m not entirely certain what it is.

The show is definitely going for an atmospheric feel though, but the problem I have with it is that the atmosphere isn’t interesting in the slightest in this episode. There’s very little music, outside of some chimes, and most of the visual ‘atmosphere’ is really half-assed video filters which even I could do given 30 seconds and a trial copy of Adobe Premier. Some things really do look great… the brief flowing water in the river for example, but lots of other things, like showing peoples’ backs when they talk, or using the same eyes on the black background about five times through the episode along with the reuse of the dream scene, just seem cheap… or more likely, done to make things seem deep, rather than to try to draw you in.

I’m not sure the show will live up to a lot of peoples’ expectations. In my mind, the only thing it has going for it so far is the names involved. It was a pretty thorough introduction to the whole dream walking premise, but they didn’t actually do a damn thing with it. The entire episode is just a lot of chattering and/or closeups of lips. It was a chore for me to pay attention through the first episode, even with the only thing distracting me being the fairly awful Bruins/Lightning game. If you want a comparison… let’s call it Mokke’s slightly more refined sibling who went off to Art School and decided to show how deep it could be. Sadly, there was more action and interest in Mokke’s first episode than in this one. That’s just pathetic.

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.

YouTube is being a pissant little jerk at the moment (ie, very slow processing speeds all day), so here’s the OP.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=GWDLW78M

There we go, took them the better part of an hour.

Ghost Hound OP
[youtube]prMLsMQcc2o[/youtube]