Smarter people than myself have pointed out that anime marketing usually gives a fairly accurate picture of that core product. That goes double when the salesman is an actual episode of the show. Fantasista Doll and Sunday Without God made the bold first steps into July with a pair of early-air episodes, and I’m definitely excited to meet them at the doorstep.

Fantasista Doll was, true to the promo material, a show centrally focusing on girls playing a collectible card game. The preair only contained the first 10 minutes of the episode, which was cute. Unfortunately, it also contained a number of very poorly-coordinated scenes, most notably one where a character was pushed slightly in a locker room and ended up hopping down a corridor and falling into an equipment room. Otherwise, the setup was very generic; Sam doesn’t speak Japanese and was able to guess the meaning 2/3 of the lines while watching it with me. I have a hard time seeing the second half of the episode being significantly better.

3 minutes into Sunday Without God, I had to go and look up the people behind production; there was so much orange in every single shot that I couldn’t believe the director wasn’t Oonuma Shin.* That said, that powerful-colors approach is not a style I dislike. It goes well with a plot that, by all accounts, seems to be a less-subtle approach to the same issues as Casshern Sins. I also enjoyed the female lead; she might not have been spectacular in the serious parts, but she sure was fun to watch eat way too much candy and talk nonsense in the rest of the episode. The male lead, however, had a very fake-sounding way of talking, though, something I hope gets better later. Still, having at least one seriously charming character bodes well for the show if it keeps up a balance of humor and decently creepy horror in future episodes. At least, I’ll probably watch more of it.

*Turns out it’s Yuuji Kumazawa, a fairly new guy at Madhouse who directed The Ambition of Oda Nobunaga in 2012.