天下制覇

I DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS WORLD.

Impressions:

This was confusing. After the relatively cliche first half of "war’s brewing, gotta summon us a hero, here’s some kid that likes jumping off of high things" we go into the second half where battle between the two kingdoms breaks out. Except that it’s more like Takeshi’s Castle than it is actually war. It almost reminds me of Dual!! PTA in how their ‘war’ is kind of a joke to them, complete with announcers and everybody stopping to listen to the announcement of Shinku’s arrival. I really hate the character art for the generic ‘soldiers’ too (they turn into cat heads when ‘killed’). Seven Arcs is clearly abusing CG like a mofo for this, and while it’s relatively transparent for the backgrounds, it doesn’t work so well for the soldiers, and keeping the art style looking gimpy like that is just making my brain itch. It’s like watching a bunch of Dragon Force/Fire Emblem/Ogre Battle characters bounce off each other. In a Takeshi’s Castle ‘war.’ Seriously, I have no idea what to even make of that.

Production in general was pretty lacking this episode too. About all that the battles really had were posing from actual named characters and then your standard "swing sword, everything explodes" attacks. Like I said in the preview though, Seven Arcs production tends to wax and wane with the moon. Asura Cryin’ was abysmal until around episode 3 and Sekirei/StrikerS had similar issues. It’s disappointing, but not alarmingly so… yet. On the up side, the cast is relatively decent. Aside from the very conflicting tones in the first and second half, everything’s pretty lighthearted. Shinku’s voice doesn’t fit him well, but he’s competent and is more than happy to take on the role of being Biscotti’s hero. That alone puts him far ahead of 95% of protagonists out there. He also somehow has managed to be in an almost all-female show without having his face stuffed into someone’s breasts or panties. Again, yet.

Overall, it was an okay episode and did little more than introduce the world and characters. It was far from great and didn’t really have any kind of hook outside of being somewhat weird. I really hope that they can do a better job figuring out if they want to be silly or serious because doing both did not work, or at the very least, pit some of the non-generics against each other. The less we have to see of those disgusting things, the better.