I had some decent hopes for this thing going in, and at first, it was alright. The part with Shun in the crystal shop reminded me of my own adventures as a child, marveling at shiny rocks in the wellness shop downtown.
And then the rest of the episode happened.
The visuals are... alright. It might be the residual love of Hai to Gensou no Grimgar's background work and mild, but memorable color palet talking, but so far, nothing has really stood out to me aside from the weird crooked angles of the swords and the decent character designs. The colors are both ostentatious and muted at the same time, which just makes everyone look like darker-toned versions of the characters from Comet Lucifer or No Game No Life.
The dialogue was flat and frustratingly vague for something as important as a first episode of a Shounen-Fantasy series that ought to be centered around its characters, their relationships and their struggle to, I suppose, beat the villain that they barely set up with the worst explanation I've seen for a character's motivation in a while. Hell, the entire first conversation we see between Emilio and Shun is basically Emilio snapping at Shun, and Shun rephrasing what Emilio said back to him as a question. That's really the epic first meeting they want to set up here? Shun and Emilio talk over eachother's heads the entire episode, basically, and it really doesn't do anything to set them up in even the most basic way to the viewer.
And oh God, the progression between scenes was teeth-grinding. There is no connective tissue or logic behind what happens, it just does, in such rapid succession and with such a resounding lack of gravity that I'm thankful I hadn't just picked this up on a whim. If I hadn't had my interest piqued by the plot summary, I might've dropped this on the spot. Some scenes flip-flopped so hard from one moment to the other that I had to pause and just take in how bad the pacing was. A few key examples here may be how one moment Emilio snaps at Shun to put away his sword, then literally the next minute he snaps at Shun to take it out again. Why? What was the point of that? Exposition? Why do that here, in such a clumsy and flat way, when you could take your time to better explain this in episode two, and have the characters bond over training or somesuch? Or how about that one part where Emilio says the guards will find them no matter where they hide, and not more than a few minutes later, suddenly they'll never be found in the conveniently placed sewers (which was connected to the river they fell in? What?) - and don't get me started on the counterfit Wolverine fight in-between. Flat set-up of a flat mook mini-boss, more bad dialogue between Emilio and Shun, and nothing of import happening whatsoever. Why was this even here? To set up the special squad of baddies the main villain has? Again, why not do this in a way that actually makes this feel important?
Damn it, this was such a flat and frustrating first episode. I still have hopes for this series - a bromance-centered Fantasy show still seems appealing to me, doubly so because it's a 24 episoder. That's a lot of character development and bromance you can cram in, if you know what you're doing... but well, first they need to figure out how to do scene-to-scene progression in the next episode. Then we'll see what happens, right?
TLDR; 3/5 stars, with an arrow down. Poor pacing, bad dialogue, flat characters, shit scene-to-scene progression, rushed as all hell, needs to set itself up way better than its doing, but I have hope that it gets better in the coming episodes. There's still promise, it just needs to fix how it goes about directing the plot and characters better. |