[Switchblade]

Okay, so first things first: the wee little puppet ghost is actually pretty cool. It is not the height of quality special effects, but it works well enough and he's amusingly dickish. He is not Mandora Boy (de gozarimasu desu). That is a huge relief.

Second: The episode was incredibly rushed; there was easily enough plot here for two, maybe even three episodes. A lot of it was also stuff that we knew from all the promo material and pre-release info. It's unavoidable that we had to actually see all that in the show itself, but it's still always a bummer when you have to watch an entire episode of set-up that you've already read all about. This is obviously not going to be the best episode of the show and definitely not the best judge of what the average episode is going to be like.

That said, I still liked it. The characters are pretty basic for the moment, but Takeru seems like he'll be pretty cool. I'm not sure about his friends, though. The monk (Onari?) is obviously a major source of comic relief, but he's so lower key than anything on Drive that I don't find him overly annoying. Akari, on the other hand, I'm going to get real tired of if she's going to spend the whole season trying to Scully everything. Sage seems reasonably amusing, though; reminds me a bit of Ninninger's grandfather, only not insufferable. Wee little puppet ghost is, as mentioned, amusing dickish. Honestly, though, I'm going to need a couple episodes to get a full sense of the cast.

The action is looking pretty good, though. We're getting a lot of new fight locations so far, and that's always fun. I'd love to see more natural setting and less of the same old warehouses, industrial zones, and goddamn Ajinomoto Stadium. I'm liking the suits and weapons, too. The belt's standby noises don't bother me that much - I watched Wizard for fuck's sake and anything is better than Wizard in that (and many other) regard(s). I kinda like that Ghost is invisible while fighting, too, it reminds me a bit of Ryuki and the Mirror World. Again, I do want to see more to get a better idea of how everything will work.

Last point: Takeru is so damn lucky that was really Musashi's sword hilt and not something his dad bought at a thrift shop that belonged to the samurai equivalent of a Shocker mook or something.