Some Quick First Impressions: Sekai de Ichiban Tsuyoku Naritai, Ace of Diamond and Strike the Blood

Sekai de Ichiban Tsuyoku Naritai!

Short Synopsis: Our lead character “wrestles” in public.
What can I say? This show is just outright porn. Karuta gets Chihayafuru, Go gets Hikaru no Go, Football gets Giant Killing, Shougi gets Shion no OU. And then wresling gets to do with this vapid excuse of a show. Har har, it’s funny because it looks like they’re having sex! I mean, what’s there to say about it? I could spare some words about the whole set-up perhaps, because that also is just an incredible sellout. With the premise of this series being hot girls having sex with each other under the pretense of wrestling, the creators had to find some excuse to get enough of them in there. Their solution? Idols, making this even more of an insult to the sport. The female lead is basically incredibly stupid and ignorant which leads her to just have a match with a professional wrestler without knowing anything at all about the sport, in the middle of a huge audience. In a way this is a good symbol at how the idol business has spiralled out of control at this point, and how idols have forced their way into places that they totally don’t belong with their cameos, just because they’re famous and that their loyal fanbase will basically just support them no matter what, to the dismay of people who don’t have anything to do with them. But you know the thing with parodies, right, Sekai? It’s not a parody if you’re just adhering to the things you’re supposed to make fun of.
OP: Bland song, bland visuals that just show a bunch of bad wrestling scenes.
ED: Just reverting back to the idol part isn’t going to save you here, guys.
Potential: 0%

Ace of Diamond

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is a pitcher.
So, did this series live up to the incredibly high standards that the baseball genre has set in the past? Nah, it’s just a Major-clone, and not really a good one at that. The creators here need to lookup the meaning of “laying it on too thick”, because that was exactly what they were doing in this episode. There is a ton of overacting, but the biggest problem is that it’s got a Marty Stu as a main character, as much as this show tries to hide it. He may make mistakes, but this series always points at him as being right, despite being a brat and making a ton of mistakes, and you also have the strange paradox in which the guy really values teamwork above anything, yet stands at the center of everything. It’s like “teamwork is awesome! As long as I’m the center”. The only redeeming factor here is how this series showed the difference between small baseball teams and the top tier of teams and it at least slightly tried to stay away from the “underdogs good established players bad” cliche. It nearly failed at even that though, but thankfully that catcher and manager ended up saving it.
OP: Generic cheesy opener
ED: The song is generic, but at least the art style is interesting
Potential: 30%

Strike the Blood

Short Synopsis: Our lead character is a vampire who threatens to nknowingly destroy the world.
This turned out to be another one of the bad series this season, unfortunately. At first it looked like it might have potential, but there is one thing that really holds it back: its chronic lack of creativity whatsoever. This entire episode was cobbled up with cliches from other stories without any attempt to turn them into something new. Everything here was done before thousands of times, which made for a really, really boring first episode. And they’re not even the good cliches, but the lazy cliches, varying from the riduclously complicated universe rules in order to give the main character special powers while at the same time making him just a normal guy, the way that a panty shot is the biggest source for interaction between the lead male and female, how an international police organization tasked with saving the earth sends a teenaged girl to do this mission, not to mention the amnesia, the generic setting that throws all sorts of monsters just together without any sort of cohesion, the “not any person could block my uber-attack”-cliche, the “I am so stupid that I have no idea that I suck at tracking people”-cliche, the “random assholes who assault a girl”-cliche, and of course the “really sad flashback in the middle of a fire”-cliche (Miss Monochrome did that too, you know). Add that all together and you have a really boring show.
ED: Generic fight scenes and music that was just copied and pasted.
Potential: 0%