Dragon Quest: Dai no Daibouken – 02

Straight down the middle for Dragon Quest so far.  It’s meeting expectations at pretty much every turn, for better or worse.  A good, solid kids action show with pretty decent visuals and not a tremendous amount of subtlety.  I’ve heard some opinion suggesting that changes a bit as the manga’s storyline deepens, so I’ll certainly stick around for a while to find out.  Seems pretty unlikely there’s enough here for me to cover, though.

I like Dai pretty well as a protagonist.  He’s sort of generic but doesn’t play up the sometimes annoying aspects of the trope.  I could say the same for Leona, who didn’t get off to a good start to say the least.  But I warmed to her – she seems more blunt than genuinely tsun, and isn’t a damsel-in-distress by any means.  There’s too much CGI in the battle sequences but apart from that Toei seems to be spending a bit of coin on this one, by their standards.

One thing I would note is that things are moving incredibly fast for a show that figures to run at least a year and probably longer.  I know the source manga ran for a long time – seven years or so I believe – but my goodness, is there going to be this much packed into every episode?  I rather hope not, because by necessity there’s not much time for character development beyond the very superficial when the plot zips along this quickly.

Hanyou no Yashahime: Sengoku Otogizoushi – 02

Well – it wasn’t terrible, anyway.  But there was a pretty clear dropoff in the writing from the first episode of Hanyou no Yashahime: Sengoku Otogizoushi to the second, and that’s certainly not a surprise under the circumstances.

For me this episode played about on the level of a good Inuyasha fanfic, so I guess your enjoyment level of the series would depend on how appealing that prospect is to you.  The plot seems to be a rough rehash of the original, with some cute girls doing fighting (and other cute things) elements thrown in.  None of the new characters really made much of an impression on me, and  everyone apart from the three main girls seems to be pretty much on NPC level (including the Inuyasha carryovers, sadly).  The animation was also a good news bad news scenario – it looked pretty faithful, as did the character designs (Rumiko actually had a hand in those) but the fight scenes were pretty bland on the whole.

The big twist here seems to be that (as far as I can tell) everyone seems to have forgotten that Inuyasha and Kagome exist (ironically).  That’s no doubt connected to the fact that Setsuna has forgotten who Towa is.  I’m just barely curious enough about that to stick around for a bit to see what the deal is, but my intuition is that I have too much emotional attachment to the admittedly flawed original Inuyasha to buy into Hanyou.