Chaos Dragon
Short Synopsis: A boy is forced to take the path of a king
This isn’t a good start. The pacing of this episode was all over the place as the story moved to scene to scene much like a skittish rabbit. Very little of it having artistic cohesion seeing as it starts in an orphanage and when a boy hits another boy and mentions a war we are suddenly thrown into a giant infodump regarding the land and the ongoing war. The show jumps from visions to flashbacks to other character to pointless bath scenes so rapidly that it’s hard to get a clear grasp of the situation. The villains are one dimensional and purposefully idiotically evil. Watch as a man calls people savages only to decide after a sneak attack by a small group that the most logical choice would be to kill everyone in the entire town. Animation was inconsistent with some scenes having some good movement but then others resorting to speed lines and terrible still frames. The episode opens with a bad circular pan of the characters to a poorly animated CGI dragon. There is some potential as Nasu’s and Gen’s characters seem interesting and you can see parts of their writing style in the narrative. I am hoping the pace slows down and now that a hefty amount of info dumping is done we can gather the main cast and have some narrative focus. I am so far not impressed as we have a character death in the first episode and quite honestly it’s hard to feel for a character we have known for about ten to five minutes. Her death was also rather odd seeing as the main protagonist makes a deal to save her life and then the Dragon demands that he sacrifices her so he can…get the power to save her…hmmm try to figure out that logic.I would be pretty angry at that dragon in that case. This could still have the potential to turn itself around but I am starting to reconsider blogging it. If the second episode continues this then I will trade this off for Ranpo.
Potential: 50%
Rokka no Yuusha
Short Synopsis: A dirty fighting man is chosen to fight an ancient evil with five other heroes.
Well I am most certainly surprised. The experience of reading Rokka no yuusha was a rather mediocre one. Yet now that I am seeing the story get a large degree of loving care in the adaption this has turned into one of the best first episodes of the season so far. There was some rather clunky exposition in the middle of the episode where two characters recounted the legend of the six flowers for only the audience’s benefit seeing as both were well aware of the legend already. But the fights are beautifully animated and the art is very pleasing. It also helps that the main characters constant repeating of being the strongest man in the world is not quite as annoying. The animators made a lot of little changes too which make the story a lot more charming such as showing the passing of time with Adelt marking the walls of his prison cell with a sword and the princess of blades cutting up the cell and pushing all the guards in. Admittedly I am still expecting this to fall flat on it’s face once the real story begins but now a potential possibility has been shown. It could actually happen that the animes strength of presentation could make up for the stories shortcomings in writing.
Potential: 70%
Overlord
Short Synopsis: A virtual reality MMO player has found himself in the MMO world turned real.
It’s decent but overall just pure power fantasy show. There was some interest in the grief Momonga felt at having all his MMO friends ditch the game for real life. Leaving him, the last person who cares, alone to watch the servers get shut down. I really question how successful this MMO would be in our current market as a game which allows you to customise everything is just asking to get exploited and mechanically broken. But the servers shut down and Momonga realizes that it’s all suddenly become real and he is now the overpowered leader of a group of overpowered guardians. One of whom is a girl who he actually edited to fall in love with him at the last minute. Which he would need to do if he ever wanted a human relationship considering that he’s a skeleton…which causes me to question why the girl didn’t find it painful to have a bony skeleton hand grope her. She even offered to have sex with him which I am truly mind boggled as to the mechanics of how that would be possible. There is a charm of being an overpowered god in an RPG that can one hit kill anything but I often find that can become boring after a while. I expect the same to happen here as it’s clear this won’t be a story about someone becoming mad with power and abusing his situation. CGI skeletons aside the animation is solid and art likewise. This could be fun to watch for a while but there only so long it can last.
Potential: 30%
At the beginning of Overlord’s story many of the enemies are weak as you said, but of course there are some who are dangerous even for an someone being like him. Strength is not everything. He also has weaknesses so it’s possible to win against him if the enemy is well prepared and uses clever tactics.
The light novel Rokka no Yusha did really let me down. It’s so bad it’s like a scam .
On the other hand Overlord was slightly boring so i drop it because there were too many interresting LNs at the time. I might get back to it, once i finish the others