[Sorrow-K]

I've been anticipating Utawarerumono for a while. I've always seen the visual novel anime genre as an interesting one since it's still only in its relative youth compared with most other genres in anime, but it has, as others before me have put it, a fair share of its own wretched cliches. However, I thought one of the better recent entries into the genre was AIR; it's aesthetics were absolutely topnotch and it really relishes in its story. Additionally, it wasn't as plagued by poor pacing as Kanon was. As far as other entries in the genre are concerned, I thought Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito had some great ideas but some terrible execution, Kimi ga Nozomu Eien had very unlikable characters and Shuffle was as cliched a harem as one could find. And then there are the plethora of other visual novel adaptations that aren't even worth mentioning. To get to the point, it's a genre that has a few gems, but the majority are very mediocre. In many ways, I see Utawarerumono as a bit of a gauge as to where this genre is: is the genre still plagued by cliches and mediocrity, or is it starting to enter an awakening of sorts with the ideas we saw in AIR (and have been seeing odd glimpses of in Fate/Stay Night), ie a focus more on the things that make great anime, such as plot, characters, music and animation and less on the tired "who will he pick" storyline.

The first episode of Utawarerumono hardly makes an attempt at answering my questions though. It's very early days, and this is still clearly in it's "establishing premise and characters" stage. But my impressions so far aren't great. It's starting off in a veeery generic fashion. The directing seems a tad uninspired. The characters haven't done a whole lot of interesting stuff, but I won't fault them, since it is only the first episode after all. As far as their designs are concerned (both appearance and personality-wise) there's really not much that grabs my attention. The pacing's very slow as well (for a first episode) but pacing has always been a bit of an Achilles' Heel for visual novel based anime, so it almost goes without saying.

Overall impression: Obviously it's completely unreasonable to expect an anime to deliver big things after one episode, but I'm not going to say that this has started on the right foot. I'm very intrigued to see where this goes, though.