Honestly, quite impressed. It might have taken me two failed attempts at it to finally get my foot in. It was all worth it now. I do have some issues with the comedic timing that sometimes pisses me off, like when you’re in this really serious moment, the show just punches it with a joke. Like, we’re talking about dozens of minutes that went into building up a serious, somber or emotional tone that gets dissolved at the height of it by a mere joke. I don’t like this diffusal method. It lightens the punch.
Other than that, amazing show. The world building was pretty good and I love how the story uses that to subtly tell humorous sub plot stories. Hell, there are whole arc happening through random sub plots in the background. They even lead to comedic payoff sometimes. The creative and narrative control you need to make up so many random but funny things is so satisfying to see. Reminds me of gintama.
Sometimes, episodes completely blew me away. Like the nightmare ep. That was one hell of a ride, one of the best episodes of storytelling I’ve seen period. That was an episode where the comedy and seriousness was very properly balanced. So that one doesn’t take away from the other.
I love how everything sort of ties in together. When I first saw Laios go into the paintings, I didn’t think too much of it other than him being a glutton and the subplot being comedic relief. Afterwards down the line, our characters are walking through a sewer talking about what the magician is after. Laios adds to that conversation things that he never could have known. After the group asks how he knew it, he references the paintings. This made me literally click out of that episode and go back to the painting one. What I thought of as simple background happenings was in fact more world and character building for fucks sake. Serious ones at that. There’s so many of these tidbits stacked all across the show. Some are foreshadowing and some are as plain as the moon on a full moon night
Then there’s the Trigger side of the equation. When seeing the compositions, character expressions and background happenings I couldn’t help but mutter, of course its Trigger. Who else would put this much care into it that its literally reverberating.