Black★Rock Shooter 01-04
There certainly are a few things that would inspire an "oh, anime" moment, but they make sense within the context of the show (and that's a bit of an old argument to fall back upon). I can see some of Okada's writing traits - focusing on small things like that and giving them grave importance, and the general melodramatic nature of it all, but as I said with Wixoss, I'm not seeing anything that's really tapping into the inner wells of rage/facepalming I should(?) be having. The macaron cannon was silly and Kagari was a little creepy, the idea of "someone else taking on your pain" would normally be sketchy as a coping mechanism, but at the halfway point, I still have the entire rest of the show to provide the bookend to all this.
The fights are still cool to watch, and seem to be happening concurrently with the events going on in the real world this time, as opposed to the timeline of the OVA. I do like the lack of dialogue in them, relatively. The audience is left to figure things out for themselves. Using the original song as the OP is also a nice choice. It's not as subtle, but that's not necessarily saying it's worse, at least from what I've seen so far. I'm surprised at how Kagari basically did a 180 from the moment we first saw her to the end of this episode - the link between the Otherworld and this world is more overt this time, being played as more of a supernatural mystery as opposed to a quest like the OVA iteration.
Maybe the really crazy stuff happens in the second half, because I sat through two hours of this and am so far intrigued.
