[First Impressions] – Shingeki no Bahamut Genesis – Episode 1

Is this hyped? If so, why is this hyped?

Here’s my first impressions on Shingeki no Bahamut Genesis.

Most people’s first reaction would be, “does this have anything to do with Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin)”. Nope, Shingeki means attack in Japanese. So yeah, just to clear things up. And apparently, this was inspired/adapted from a card game which I have never heard of.

In my blog I have constantly rambled on and on about my hate for “No context action scenes”. I hate it when the an episode opens up with a dark unexplained scene and for a good 10 minutes, I’ll sitting there wondering what the fuck is going on. Shingeki no Bahamut Genesis is extremely guilty for doing that.

As a prelude before the opening song, we get to see some sort of monster war going on. Dragons, demons, knights. Everything is so dark and gloomy. It wasn’t exactly animated well, the OST didn’t do it for me. If there was fighting I would like to have soe lighting to see what’s going on please?

And magic circles surely do remind me of Fairy Tail.

That prelude to Shingeki no Bahamut? Not my cup of tea. 2 minutes of sitting there trying to identify things. People be like “Oh that’s a demon”, “oh thats a dragon”. Well done.

Nah, but I’ll be forgiving. Just an introduction. No biggie.

The problem continues by throwing audiences into a random scene. I totally hate it when this happens. We get to see a relatively long scene of two guys on horses having a sword fight. Action without context = nonsense. You already spent 2 minutes grinding away at my patience watching a badly done intro, and now you wanna aggravate it further?

Action without context. I have no idea why are these people fighting nor do I really care. Just finish the action scene and tell me what’s going on. This is how many films, movies, anime, shows in general start anyway. I don’t mean that it’s wrong, I’m just saying I don’t like it personally. Action has to have some meaning to be actually watchable.

We get introduced to the MC of the series, Favaro.

I hate his character design and attitude. He looks annoying, sounds annoying and behaves stupidly. Kinda reminds me of a love child of Twelve from Zankyou and Hoshino from Ping Pong. I’m off to a really bad start huh.

And then before we even get any context, we get bombarded by yet another mystery.

Le wild naked girl appears. Apparently she wants to make it to some place and her compass is broken.

So apparently after staggering in the dark for awhile we get to know that Favaro and Kaiser (the two dudes who were sword fighting) are bounty hunters. Whatever that means.

We see Favaro capture a wanted man. The fight was so badly lit that it wasn’t funny. But we did see Favaro capture him in a card by the end. What is this, Cardcaptor Sakura for boys?

To be honest, it was a bore. I have a problem with the directing and lighting of scenes. Everything is just so gloomy and dark that it gets on my nerves. The dialogue seems poor and everything felt like a big mess.

Favora meets the naked girl and she asks for his help to get him to where she wants to go. At that point, another enemy attacks. Having two fights in an episode is okay if you have enough lighting. Gosh, c’mon.

Favora loses conveniently and the naked girl jumps in to save the day. She transforms into Mira Jane’s demon form from Fairy Tail and owns the shit out of the weak random enemy.

I don’t have a problem with that but all I can say it’s that it’s been very cliche so far. Cliche is okay and can be good sometimes, but clearly, cliche with bad lighting = disaster.

To prove my point further.

Here’s what you see in a typical day in Shingeki no Bahamut Genesis.

And then all of the sudden Favaro wakes up with a demon tail. No idea how it got there but I don’t really care.

This series does have potential, I don’t deny it. But it suffers from poor execution and visuals. I want to watch anime, not strain my eyes. The dialogue is lacklustre, characters dull and unoriginal. The art lacking in many ways. From how i see it, Shingeki no bahamut has nothing going for it so far. I’m hoping to be proven wrong in the next episode.

Despite suffering serious flaws, I still think it was an okay first episode. I’m giving it a 5.2/10 and placing it under reconsideration. I’ll probably be thinking if I should drop this by episode 3.