No Game No Life had some cool color schemes and showed some respectable chemistry for the main duo. Unfortunately, the games proper this episode showed off (a game of chess and a cheat-heavy game of poker) were written in fairly pedestrian ways. The presentation seemed a lot more focused on making the main duo into cool characters than it did on creating compelling scenarios. That approach can work in some cases, but it’s not doing it for me here. Dropped.

Hitsugi no Chaika managed the first couple of minutes peculiarly. I’m not really used to seeing action shows introduce their characters to each other in low-key comedy scenes; more often, they tend to either already know each other or encounter each other in the middle of a fight. I tend to prefer the latter, since it starts the show out at a faster pace. And while I did feel like the show was a bit of a slow starter, the lower-key scenes felt like they at least worked individually and the infiltration at the end where they had to figure out how to get the coffin in was actually kind of neat. I’m giving this one another week to introduce more of the story.