weirdly, the first ten or so episodes of ranking of kings reminded me most of kaiba: a tragedy centered around royal succession and the price of immortality, with weird magitech and everyone betraying, manipulating or hiding their true intentions from each other (to excess, imo–the show erodes a lot of its credibility for pulling off twists by making nearly every named character either a secret good guy or secret bad guy). of course it doesn’t actually have kaiba’s class commentary or anything because we need to have Good Kings and Bad Kings but sure that’s fine. i think this part of the show is both more emotionally affecting and more fun. partway through one ep, the protagonist falls down a pit, meets a hermit who teaches him how to make sacrifices to the forest god, then threatens to sacrifice him before he runs off and then it never comes up again; later episodes don’t really make time for that sort of stuff because they drop the “going off on an adventure” thread really fast
then bojji powers up from pollyanna to shonen protagonist and the animation budget shifts from sign language during dialogue scenes (which owns) to everyone fighting each other, and that’s fine i guess, and the fights are good to look at, but it didn’t stick the landing for me. fighting shonen are fun to me when the good guys outsmart their opponents or do weird shit, instead here you take a shot every time somebody is saved by another guy showing up at the last moment or we cut back to somebody who only looked like they got owned and then you die of alcohol poisoning. nothing feels earned or particularly clever. the pacing is a mess with people only taking breaks from stabbing each other to deliver exposition or have traumatic flashbacks (which also involve stabbing each other). the antagonist’s tragic backstory hinges on a very obviously racist/nationalist allegory to the annexation of korea so that undercuts a lot of it too.
anyway, i didn’t like it. the dub is good though
i liked the LOD models
