天下制覇

I kind of wish they ripped Slayers off more though…

Impressions:

This is apparently going to be going a mostly slapstick route, complete with the occasional breaking of the fourth wall for gags. It’s almost like it’s trying to be the gender-swapped version of Slayers, with the ‘evil’ snarky mage a male, the blonde swordsman a female… and just cheeky instead of a moron, and the pushy princess mage character has a drill ponytail. It’s lacking a number of things though, primarily pacing and direction. Everything just feels so slow right now. Even the giant golem ravaging the landscape felt completely unimportant and trivial. The Shion segments of the episode killed every single bit of momentum that the show had. There weren’t too many big issues in tone consistency since the serious and humorous sides were very clearly delineated and nary did comedy intrude on Shion or drama on Lyner, but neither bit was particularly strong at all and that stopped them from getting any kind of inertia built up. Plus, interrupting giant golems firing lasers for bad drama is a no-no.

Everything else was about what you’d expect from Zexcs. Good production, good music, but nothing that’ll impress you. The whole show just needs more drive to it. More comedy, more adventure, more drama, more anything. Well, preferably not more drama. It feels like there are a lot of pieces that are almost there in order to put together at least a fun little light hearted fantasy adventure, but right now it’s just a half-cooked mess of sludge served up with a delicious glass of riesling ritalin. Given the lackluster showing fom the other Thursday shows though, I’m probably going to end up giving both of them a second look regardless. Here’s to hoping that Zexcs can pull this one together a little bit better now that the intros are out of the way. This was easily their weakest first episode in a long time, and yes, I’m including Chuu-bra’s talking nipples in that.

Preview:

No more dango for you until you get more entertaining.