Updated Final Thoughts – IDOLiSH7

You guys strongly suggested I give this one another shot, so I finally got around to it. While I wouldn’t say it was “great” (more on that in a bit), I will say that I liked it.

IDOLiSH7 is a good-looking production that has better character writing than any male idol show I can think of, and that’s at least partially because a) it isn’t completely overstuffed with characters compared to its runtime, and b) because unlike UtaPri, it’s melodramatic but without completely shattering your suspension of disbelief.

I can appreciate this one for a lot of reasons – for one, the heroine isn’t obviously a stand-in for an otome protagonist, she’s a character in her own right who manages the group and has to deal with their frequent screw-ups, and none of her employees are in love with her for no reason. I also like that the group (like the boys of Side M) are a mix of different ages and backgrounds, some of which actively contribute to the plot. I really like that the rival group TRIGGER (no relation to the studio) aren’t evil, they’re competent and are not responsible (and actively condemn) their company’s dirt-throwing behavior. Basically, if you’re looking for a legitimate, continuous drama about the idol industry, this one isn’t a bad choice at all.

The problem is that the shiny production completely stops once you get to the actual performance aspect. We never, ever get to see a complete performance (the show likes to feature the first few measures and then just transition to individual still shots or something), the largely forgettable songs are often just background music for montages, and the choreography we do get to see is really lackluster and rendered in poor-framerate CGI. This is still my biggest problem with this show – an idol-genre work needs this element especially to display a lot of effort, and IDOLiSH7′s just don’t, at all. There’s a sequence near the end where the title group’s dance expert is watching TRIGGER do really basic show choir steps and commenting on how difficult they look, and I legitimately had to force myself not to burst out laughing.

So, ultimately, IDOLiSH7 comes across as a good drama with tacked-on, lazy performances. I’m glad I watched it, and I’ll probably watch the upcoming second season, but if you’re really craving some decent male-idol genre goodness, this year was kind of lacking for you, and I’m sorry. Next year we get extra seasons of this, StarMyu, and B Project, so we’ll have to see how that goes, considering I’ve never been urged to finish either of the other two.

6/10.

Light Novel Impressions – Sword Art Online: Alicization Beginning, Prologue

Yeah, no, I’m not going away, but since I get so many responses telling me off for saying that Kawahara is untalented… I’m gonna read the part of the novel that corresponds to the premiere, and record my thoughts here.

Oh, and I will point out that I didn’t explicitly blame the author for the awful pacing that the anime has always had, I did however blame him for writing repetitive scenes where characters act unrealistically, and I’m holding that as fact. Here are my thoughts thus far on the prologue of volume 9 of the light novel, which is what the first episode covered.

* The first scene still contains a massive amount of exposition that was present in the show, but it’s a little bit more palatable in novel form since it’s explained a bit better and is broken up a little more by Eugeo’s internal monologue.

* When did Kirito study forensic analysis enough to instantly pick out the piece of bone that gave away the cause of death?

* I’ll happily say so if there turns out to be a good reason for this down the line, but having only two Cutters per generation seems like a horribly inefficient method to fell a tree that regenerates.

* Aside from those shower thoughts, I still don’t have much of an issue with the first half of the prologue. The show very strictly adapted it, and I’ll note that it would appear that the translator for Crunchyroll at least read the translation of the light novel ahead of time, as many lines were quoted word-for-word.

* There is still absolutely no rationalization present for why Shino is so eager to see Shinkawa again; he tried to rape and murder her after gaslighting her but the novel acts like she needs no reason to talk to him again. Speaking as someone who has been molested at about the same age by someone else my age that I’d known for ten years at that point, I certainly never attempted to go near him again.

* I’m still considering Kirito’s unstoppable godlike reflexes to be a strong negative, for the record. He’s not a Jedi, he’s a video gamer, and just obsessing over games does not improve your reflexes that much. Kawahara, of course, does not do his research (having admitted in an interview this year that he doesn’t play video games) and wouldn’t know that. I bring this up because Shino apparently decided she would never be even a third as fast as Kirito, and just decided to give up trying entirely.

* As an addendum to the previous thought, the first three arcs were written back when SAO was a web novel, and Kawahara took a long hiatus from writing it to focus on Accel World when that made him famous. In all that time, with all the revisions, he could have changed Kirito’s character to something resembling realistic, and he chose not to.

* The scene between Kazuto and Shino is moved up in the novel so that we get some acknowledgement of the fact that switching back to GGO means that Kirito (the avatar) has to be converted between games again. Point to Kawahara.

* That being said, even from what little we know about Kazuto to begin with, it seems out of character for him to work for a company that he doesn’t know anything about, given how much he’s been through with shady VR tech companies.

* I’ll accept that Kazuto could know all of the science he spouts off here because his employer explained it to him or something, but dear Lord, this infodump is actually way, way more boring and nonsensical than it is in the show, and the episode writer actually improved this half, because as written, it is literally 44 consecutive pages of a single scene in a cafe, 26 of which are mostly technobabble delivered by Kazuto. It’s grueling to get through and took me multiple tries because I kept having to force myself to go back, and I’m kind of shocked that Kawahara’s editor okayed the way this was written.

* The idea of writing data to the soul is kind of interesting, but belongs in a much more high-concept story than this one. That’s not necessarily a major knock against the author (at least not at this point), but it does pretty instantly mean that this entire premise should, again, be a massive red flag to Kazuto, who doesn’t seem at all concerned about it.

* Book!Asuna is indeed still referring to Kayaba as “the commander”, though at least here it’s in reference to the fact that he was an evil bastard, rather than with the weird respect she still has for him in the show.

* I’ve seen the word “fluctlight” maybe eight times total, now, and it’s already driving me insane. I’m classifying this as a knock against the translator, who did a valiant job of translating this insanely long scene filled with science jargon but didn’t come up with a better substitute word, because “fluctlight” is really, really cringy and fake-sounding, like how you read Orwellian newspeak and think that nobody would ever talk this way.

* Point to Kawahara for referencing the central theme of the series (that Kazuto didn’t realize Underworld was virtual because it was so similar to reality, and Shino’s comments about wanting to see a world above reality).

* A low-level nitpick here: A background detail mentions the existence of fully 3-D TV shows and movies that you could move around in as you watched, but if that were even possible, wouldn’t you see the cameras and crew?

* Correct me if I missed something that wasn’t adapted, but it seems pretty convenient that Asuna’s mom is apparently “much more understanding”, considering what happened in Mother’s Rosario.

And that’s it! I still liked the first half well enough – it’s a pretty decent JRPG setup for an author who doesn’t play them – but the real-world portion was way worse in book form, and was actually vastly improved by the episode writer’s addition of the two scenes inside GGO. In the book, it is an almost completely unbroken mess of technobabble that I had to fight to get through, particularly once the discussion of soul-based science began. While I don’t see myself directly criticizing him as much in the near future as we transition to being in Underworld most of the time and the story essentially gets a soft reboot (unless actual plot problems come up), I hope this satisfies at least some of the people who have been shouting at me for being uninformed (despite knowing that it totally won’t and that I mostly did this out of spite). I don’t do this for any other franchise, but not saying anything about Sword Art Online despite it being far and away the most popular slow while it’s airing would make me a pretty foolish critic, and the last thing I need is people accusing me of being unfair to the creator. For the record, nearly every complaint I leveled at him for the premiere did, in fact, turn out to be novel-based, and reading said novel was absolutely much worse than watching the show, despite a few concessions towards Kawahara. He doesn’t know a thing about his subject material and is in way over his head, not just in this prologue but in the long run of this utterly massive arc. (Oh, and reading this has also only made the pacing problems ahead in the show even more laughable – they essentially covered a hundred pages (half of book one, out of ten) in two episodes, so there’s gonna be a lot of brake-slamming and padding in the future to get this thing to be a year long.)

Final Thoughts – Steins;Gate 0

Steins;Gate 0 is insulting.

I said before that I was disappointed, and it only got worse and worse from there. In fact, with one pointless and stupid decision after another, the second half of the show is even worse than the first, consisting of lazy writing that rehashes the original in new and unexciting ways, utterly pointless death scenes that get undone minutes later (I mentioned before that Ruka had dropped out of the plot, that’s not quite true, 0 has one last insult to throw her way) and cheap production work.

And I wasn’t even that massive a fan of the original, but frankly this show should horribly piss off anyone with even the mildest appreciation for Steins;Gate. For one thing, once you become aware that the endpoint of this show is just getting Okabe to go back in time and get the True Ending from the original (hence the rebroadcast in advance), it becomes virtually impossible to get emotionally invested in anything that happens, because you know it’ll all be undone in the end, because Okabe will inevitably travel back to prevent it from even happening.

For another, the production is the worst effort I’ve ever seen from studio White Fox. It’s so flat, stationary and uninteresting that it becomes actively boring to watch just for the production alone. The only element of the production that works at all are the opening and ending sequences, because they found a killer opening way cooler than the show itself and didn’t replace it in the second half, thank God.

But the last thing is that the story itself is boring as hell, and it’s for a really obvious reason – the pacing on display here is Sword Art Online Phantom Bullet-tier garbage. It’s like the team felt that because the original ran two cours, this spinoff should as well, but the story of 0 could have comfortably been told in half the time it has. We spend so much time Developing Doomed Characters that the plot takes a major backseat for the majority of the runtime, and that wouldn’t work even if the story were any good. If Steins;Gate 0 had only been twelve or thirteen episodes, I might have been more charitable with it, but it just keeps going and going. The reality is that the story could have ended pretty comfortably without the overly predictable second half – you could even keep the first eight episodes completely intact if you wanted, and after that, have Okabe focus entirely on getting the time machine to go back far enough and recruit everybody to help him instead of the meaningless effort to stop World War 3 in a timeline where it’s bound to happen anyway (that being the point of the story).

I suppose that I’ll just be forever haunted by this thing’s MAL rating (sitting, three weeks after finishing, at 8.74, the 38th best-reviewed show on the site, though I admit that that’s fallen since the last time I looked a month and a half ago). This far after airing, a score doesn’t usually stray far from where it lands the week after it’s over, and the idea that so many people who love the original think this was anything approaching a worthy followup is disturbing to me.

Me? I’m comfortable awarding Steins;Gate 0 with a 4/10, and an honorary addition to the Hall of Shame despite it being two points too high. It has its moments, but they get drowned under a lot of really stupid, repetitive crap. I’m also dropping it 21 episodes in, because I don’t even care how it ends at this point.

Final Thoughts – Anima Yell!

What a surprise!

I mean that completely, as the first piece of music is an acoustic version of a BEMANI track I’m familiar with, set to a well-animated if not incredibly impressive cheer routine.

This is gonna be a new one for me. I’m dropping this after the first episode, but it’s not because I didn’t like it well enough. The story is paint-by-numbers for sure, but I do still consider having heart to be an effective method for hooking a viewer.

It’s mostly that I just have way, way too much already to watch this season and I don’t have room for it. If I hear amazing things about it, I’ll probably revisit it later, but if I don’t, I’m pretty comfortable leaving this at one episode and still giving it a 6/10. It’s not Anima Yell!’s fault for happening to come in the same year as Laid Back Camp and Comic Girls, both of which also starred pink-haired newcomers with boundless enthusiasm making friends with a blonde girl and a dark-haired girl.

It’s kind of a shame, but as you’ll hear from me when I post my Fall Impressions masterpost, it’s a necessary sacrifice. 6/10!

Final Thoughts – Ulysses: Jeanne D’Arc and the Alchemist Knight

Good lord, this is half-finished.

I mean that quite literally; the art looks fine right up until anyone moves, which is why it’s a good thing that most of this episode is taken up by talking heads. The in-between frames here are sorely lacking and it causes all of the animation to look incredibly choppy. It’s really problematic when the show employs moving backgrounds that look more like the characters are being badly inserted over a green screen (which, I suppose, is the case, but still).

The story isn’t anything special; honestly though I find the idea of a Joan of Arc adaptation tiresome. We already got the definitive Japanese adaptation of the story with Level 5′s Jeanne D’arc, a game that sorely needs a rerelease.

I don’t want anyone to think I’m just dropping it because of the overdone story, though. The production here is just not up to snuff in any way, and by the middle of the episode, characters are already going off-model. (I also can’t get over the fact that their arms appear to be three inches around at most.)

Basically? It’s awful-looking and boring, and you can skip it. 3/10.

Premiere Impressions – Release the Spyce

A ton of fun with a great soundtrack.

Release the Spyce pretty immediately cements itself in the modern genre of cute girls doing action things (see Girls und Panzer, Yuki Yuna is a Hero, Sabagebu!) and is looking pretty good thus far. While a sizeable amount of this episode happens at nighttime, the daytime aesthetic of bright colors reminds me most of Mikagura School Suite, and I have no issue with that at all. The nighttime uniform outfits that the girls wear look like they could have come from Trails of Cold Steel.

I know I’m rambling a bit, but the production here really is a highlight. It’s not an especially gorgeous show, but the music is on point and it creates the illusion of a much more visually fluid show, sort of the way that Kajiura’s score makes the action scenes in Sword Art Online feel much cooler than they usually are.

The plot is not too far behind, though. It’s a little crazy, but the whole teenage girl special-ops concept was done very well in last year’s Princess Principal and I’m willing to accept it at this point if I can get something so interesting out of the experience. I’m not saying that this looks like it’ll be quite that good, but for now, it looks like HIDIVE really picked well this season, considering that the only simulcasts they have for fall that I’m not watching are Tonegawa and Gakuen Basara.

Premiere Impressions – SSSS. Gridman

It’s Trigger, how is this so far down the seasonal popularity chart? Did FRANXX really do that much instant damage to their reputation?

Well, at least for now, Gridman looks like a return to form. Not everybody is gonna be as into this as I am, but it’s been a while since we’ve gotten a Super Robot show not explicitly for kids, and this one is shaping up really nicely so far.

Like I’ve said many times, execution matters more than originality. While the setup for the episode seems pretty standard (boy with amnesia starts hallucinating a robot on a computer screen that’s telling him to embrace his destiny), I have a feeling, based on the end of the episode, that there’s gonna be a good ol’ Trigger twist coming up in the near future.

I appreciate the fact that we’re essentially starting with only four characters to keep track of (five if you include Rikka’s mom), since a number of Trigger properties have tossed much more into the mix and come out of the gate struggling a bit to get us invested in all of them (Darling and Kiznaiver are especially guilty of this, though I’m not sparing Kill La Kill from this criticism either). We get a bit more of an idea about what they’re about, and while Main Kid Yuta is pretty archetypical for the genre, I like that Rikka isn’t immediately coded as a tsundere as would be normal for female characters in her position.

Basically, if you want more Trigger without A-1/CloverWorks’ involvement, this is what you’re gonna get this year. Get into it!

Premiere Impressions – Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san

I think I’m in love.

This show seems so specifically designed to appeal to me that I cannot help but imagine it to be some kind of divine intervention. By virtue of my own bookseller bias, I’m gonna take it out of the Best of Season running right now, but honestly it’s so perfectly hilarious that I can’t think of anything else to say about it content-wise.

One thing I’ll highlight aside from the spot-on perfect comedy is that I like the heavily destylized parody covers of popular titles like Gakkougurashi and Boruto: Naruto Next Generation, being that I recognize them from my own job.

But really, you’ve already seen plenty of GIFs of this at this point, so if you haven’t watched it, you’re doing yourself a disservice – I mean, if nothing else, it stars a Spooky Scary Skeleton at the height of Halloween season.

Premiere Impressions – Sword Art Online: Alicization

Thanks to the double-length of this premiere and the fact that I’m not expecting much out of this but am choosing to watch it simply because I’m afraid I’ll be out of the loop if I don’t…I’m gonna compile my thoughts here in order as I watch.

* Sword Art Online does not deserve to look this good. The production has improved dramatically from SAO2.

* They’re really taking advantage of this double-runtime, because the first scene is boring and goes on forever, and basically consists of an extended infodump of the grand tradition of this series being awful at delivering exposition.

* Kirito displays far more personality in the first ten minutes of this episode than he has in the last forty. I also like child!Kirito’s costume design.

* I understand the need to establish that we are in a strange and unfamiliar universe, but the characters drop way too much jargon in the first quarter of the episode for me to remember, and nearly all of the Proper Nouns are presented without context, so they’re pretty much meaningless.

* About twenty minutes in, I realized that the director must have changed, and Tomohiko Itou has been replaced by Manabu Ono, most recently responsible for The Asterisk War and The Irregular at Magic High School, which is…unfortunate, though they are both pretty much slaves to source material anyway (which is why Itou’s best work was done with shows like Silver Spoon or Death Note). This might have something to do with the ridiculous and terribly unnecessary 52-episode length of this season, since Itou directed Ordinal Scale last year, so I can’t imagine A-1 wanted to just drop him from the franchise.

* I’m not sure why Ono appears to be very fond of shots of characters’ shoes, but the same exact angle has been used four times in the first half of this episode alone.

* Of course, within thirty seconds of our first sight of Sinon, she gets a crotch shot. Klein cannot save this scene. Also, as cool as Asuna’s GGO outfit is, it seems even less practical than Sinon’s.

* There’s a composited action shot essentially recycled from the Ignite opening of the previous season, and the background still looks just as fake as the characters float over it.

* I’m still confused over the benefits of PKing in Gun Gale Online – do you get everything the other person owns? Nobody would ever play this game.

* We’ve already got a cafe scene! Though, given that it involves every major character and not just two people infodumping at each other, this one isn’t quite so bad.

* I had already heard about the blatant, disbelief-shattering ad for Fatal Bullet, but I’m disappointed that the scriptwriter didn’t (or wasn’t allowed to) mention the Squad Jam from Gun Gale Online Alternative, especially since there’s an acknowledgement of the events of Ordinal Scale.

* Why the hell is Sinon visiting her attempted rapist in the hospital like they’re still friends? We could have just never mentioned Shinkawa ever again and the script would not have suffered for it because the audience should not care about what happened to him after his arrest; girls should not be friends with dudes who tried to murder them.

* Now that I’m thinking about it, why are we playing GGO? DIdn’t we establish that switching between games resets your character?

* It’s hilarious that Sinon teases Kirito about the possibility of him cheating on Asuna when she is by far the girl who has gotten the closest to him out of the Rejected Waifu Club.

* The stupid Fluctlight thing seems to be an attempt by Kawahara to reclaim the original central theme of the story (that real life and virtual life can be blurred together and can be equally important), but it’s so ridiculous for a show like this to suddenly declare that the human soul is scienceable that it just comes across as being really clumsy and easy to screw up. I do think that the element of accelerated time perception is an interesting one, though, and would actually be great in real life – being able to play a game for hours, while only a few minutes have actually gone by.

* I will also point out that right after the bar scene I gave a pass to, we get a second one that I do not give a pass to, for the exact reason I mentioned – it’s just three characters dumping exposition at each other. Kawahara is really, really bad about this, and these two scenes together comprise almost fifteen minutes of runtime.

* Asuna still refers to Heathcliff/Kayaba as “the commander”, which is still dumb. He is personally responsible for as many deaths as happened in real life on 9/11, and should not be treated with any respect by anyone at this point.

* Kawahara still defaults to villains who are comically insane, though I suppose that this one is still pretty much just the leftover Death Gun who we knew was insane, so this isn’t quite as poor a decision as it could be.

And that’s it! I admit that I didn’t hate the overall episode and, after watching it, I get why this needed to happen all in one sitting, but the frustration mostly comes from the fact that Kawahara is a bad author who doesn’t learn from his mistakes. The first half was quite a bit stronger than the second, if only because of the inherent mystery of Underworld, and the second half is a whirlwind of Kawahara’s worst habits as a writer.

That being said, because Alicization will be the longest show I’ve covered on this blog, I’ll be writing an Updated Impressions post on it every six weeks or so, just to force myself to keep up with it (because if I fall more than ten episodes behind, I know for sure that I’m gonna give up on it).

Here’s to an entire year of this…

Premiere Impressions – Goblin Slayer

So going into this, the first thing to be aware of is that the first half of this premiere is brutal, yet more or less predictable garbage.

Our heroine teams up with a generic party of heroes that inevitably end up getting savagely killed (and raped, onscreen) by the goblins they adventure to fight. It’s obvious from the moment they set out that none of them are going to survive, and that makes it hard to really be upset when it happens, but luckily it also means that Goblin Slayer only wastes the bare minimum of development on them until the title character shows up.

So, based on that, Goblin Slayer can be described as a fantasy series in the modern vein of Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, where it’s essentially an MMO world, except it’s not actually an MMO and the universe just works like an RPG. However, Goblin Slayer’‘s world is less Final Fantasy, and more Dark Souls. It’s damn brutal and terrifying, and while civilization still exists, venturing outside of it is dangerous to the point of needing a license to do so.

The second half of the episode follows through on this, with the hero being a pragmatist who has analyzed the environment and takes all necessary precautions for fighting in a dark, narrow cave. He takes no prisoners and does what he has to do. This instantly sets him apart from most fantasy protagonists, shying far away from idealistic, wide-eyed Chosen One-types.

I’m actually eager to see where this is going, though. The latter half of the episode is very strong and unlike much that I’ve seen before, and aside from having a problem with the animation of Goblin Slayer himself (whenever he’s not in close-up, he’s rendered in CGI), this one is shaping up pretty nicely.