Okay, so first off, describing this show as “animated” is something of a stretch. Unless .20 frames-per-second still qualifies as animation. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing, mind you. I find it immensely creepy that Sakurai Takahiro is voicing Genji. Something about that is downright disturbing. Especially in the rather QUALITY sex scene that the first episode opens with. I don’t know who should be playing Genji instead, but just about anyone but Sakurai would have been a better fit I think (I dunno, maybe it’s just something about the character design really not jiving with his voice). 

Oh yeah, might as well mention this from the beginning: I haven’t read the Tale of Genji yet, save for some small chunks, so I can’t really comment in terms of similarities to the novel or anything like that at this point.

The audio’s painfully out of sync in the [TV-J] raw for me at least–so I’d recommend getting another raw or making sure you use it with a player that you can adjust the audio delay on.

The artwork takes some getting used to. It’s pretty inconsistent looking, though it’s not quite QUALITY but just kind of off (some of it reminds me of some of the wankiness you’d expect to see in late 70s anime especially in terms of how faces get fucked up sometimes). Really the character design is fine it just doesn’t seem to translate well into pseudo-animation–too many lines and not enough budget (despite how it generally moves at about 1 frame every 5 seconds) is what it seems like. The male characters frequently have a bad case of TINY HEADS on GIANT BODIES like you might expect in some styles of BL manga from time to time. The ghosting animation cheat makes my eyes hurt in some spots (it’s fine if it’s just occasional but they use it quite a lot here to make up for the shitty frame count–though admittedly some of this could be coming from the raw encode, it’s hard to say). 

As for the plot, I’m not really sure what’s going on just yet, I haven’t quite gotten the hang of differentiating some of the characters yet (the designs don’t really help, some of the characters are pretty similar looking). Anyhow, it started out with Genji sexing up some lady, I wasn’t really paying that much attention so I didn’t catch the name if it was mentioned. And then it went over to focus on some young princess and some court drama with her or something–something about her step mother or something, I wasn’t really following it that closely. And she fell into a frozen over lake and stuff. HOLY SHIT THE LOLI JUST FRENCHED HER STEPMOM. D: Wait, is that a loli? I’m not really sure now… FFFFFF NOT A LOLI. That should have been obvious from the outfit, but the pigtails and the voice… Wait was that young Genji? I’m confused. I shouldn’t watch this only half paying attention.

On an unrelated note BAWWWWW @ butthurt Koreans getting Hetaila canceled.