Final Thoughts – Grimms Notes The Animation

Okay, it’s a world of fairy tales where everyone has the phone from Future Diary?

Not literally, but this story takes place in a world where fairy tales are both known stories and also actually happen in real life, and everyone receives a book at birth that details their entire lives start to finish. This is a very high-concept idea that I have absolutely no faith in a show this boring to actually explore, because it looks like it’s just going to be an episodic snooze where the Story Police go around and make sure everyone’s following the script. This one’s a safe drop.

Also, side note: I know that “the animation” is not in the Japanese title, and I would really like to know why localizers keep adding it to English titles as if it signifies something good. It makes sense in shows like Persona 4 the Animation where the source game is well-known and there are story differences that should be kept track of between the two continuities, but the mobile game this one is based on isn’t especially popular, and it’s a mobile game. No good mobile adaptation I’ve ever seen has used this stupid naming convention, I’m just saying.

3/10, Brain’s Base, are you trying anymore?

Final Thoughts – Dimension High School

Oh my god, it’s the best worst thing ever.

Dimension High School isn’t just bad, it’s transcendentally bad, the kind of bad that comes back around to being completely mystifying. It’s not often that I come across something this awful that doesn’t actively offend me!

Every element of this show is completely awful. All of the characters are insufferable, the live action segments are cringe-inducingly shot and the animated portion appears to have literally been made in Miku Miku Dance. All of the dialogue is hilarious, and the plot is stupid beyond belief.

I love it.

There is objectively not a single redeeming factor to this show aside from how marvelous it is to watch something that manages to be this bad without being completely offensive.

3/10, and my highest recommendation for a good Bad Anime Night.

Final Thoughts – Kemurikusa

This show wants to be interesting, it’s got plenty of interesting building blocks, but it’s like a toddler crashed through and scattered them all over the room.

Starting with the obvious, just because bad CG worked for Kemono Friends doesn’t mean that the director doesn’t have to try any harder than that, or not try and invest more. That was fine for Friends because it wasn’t trying to be anything especially ambitious – it was a show based on a kids game with an interesting metanarrative but not too much in the way of unique components, and Kemurikusa is going for something much more original, but even if it were good, the animation leads the concept to be totally wasted in and of itself.

Not that the execution of the story is working, either – at no point in this episode did I have any clue what was supposed to be happening, particularly when I thought the show was going for a heroic sacrifice scene only to reveal minutes later that the character who died has four clones ready to go, and the cast was aware of this the whole time.

What the fuck?

Look, this is so difficult to parse that I would recommend just passing it over entirely instead – director Tatsuki very clearly has no idea what made his own previous work appealing to a surprisingly broad audience, and is just throwing stuff at the wall to see what works. The Punch Line formula doesn’t work without a masterful writer on board, and Tatsuki is very much not that.

2/10, dropped after one episode.

Final Thoughts – Meiji Tokyo Renka

It’s not terrible, but we’ve been here before.

Watching Meiji Tokyo Renka wound up giving me strong flashbacks to Phantom in the Twilight, if only because it was the most recent show of this kind that I saw promise in before dropping halfway through, and while it at least looks more interesting, I just can’t shake the feeling of deja vu and I’m not gonna waste my time giving this one the benefit of the doubt.

We have a reverse harem story about a girl transported back in time to meet famous historical figures who are all very handsome men, and if that doesn’t raise flags for you, you might be turned off by the fact that the main guy – who brings our heroine to a fancy dress party before he’s even given her his name, just to save that reveal until the end of the episode – is very creepy and wastes no time getting in her personal space. While she takes it pretty well, the fact that he gives her an unwanted and cringy nickname – Little Squirrel – before even properly introducing himself just makes it worse.

The other twist involved here is that our heroine can see ghosts, which is why she has no friends in the present day, though how related this is to the story is anyone’s guess, since thus far it seems like it’s just an excuse for her to be a loner who is drawn out of her shell by this cabal of pretty boys who will inevitably fight for her affection.

Look, if this is your bag, more power to you, but I’ve been here before and this show would be much more interesting if it didn’t have the main girl around.

5/10, dropped after one episode.

Final Thoughts – Rising of the Shield Hero

Wow, I was pretty okay with this one for like a good half hour before it became The Worst.

It’s interesting that three different high-profile and long-form isekai shows are airing at the same time this season, and this is definitely the one that goes for the edgy suffering angle most, though it’s doing so in a very poorly conscious manner. (It’s literally mentioned in this first double-length episode that the highest crime in the fantasy world is rape, though this is unfortunately explained in a situation in which the woman coming forward is very maliciously lying about it, so what a perfect show to air at the height of scandals like #KickVic!)

Which is a shame, because the straightforward concept was going alright for at least the first half of this premiere. I like the idea of an isekai hero who has a lot to overcome to even be at a baseline of power, without it being because of some stupid contrivance where his power cancels out everyone else’s or something dumb like that, but unfortunately after The Worst Thing That Could Happen, he rather immediately goes from Nice Guy Seeking Girlfriend to Edgy Antihero Threatening Merchants, which carries so much awful social connotation that I can’t see straight, but let me just say that the Red Pill crowd is really gonna embrace this one.

The more I think about this one, the angrier I get, and the fact that it is the single most popular show of the season (above even Mob Psycho 100 II) with an 8.5 rating on MAL and utterly wasting the talents of Kevin Penkin only motivates me more to give it my very first 1/10 of the year.

Final Thoughts – W’z

I may not have watched Hand Shakers but that doesn’t mean I don’t have something to say about this project…which is that it’s really, really sad. Director Shingo Suzuki (and co-director Hiromichi Kanazawa, promoted from series comp for Hand Shakers) really seem to think they’ve got something in this concept that is just not there, and they’re throwing all kinds of money behind it but absolutely do not have the talent to actualize it into something watchable.

Let’s talk about the production for a second, because we don’t often get to see cases where the production value and directorial ambition are running high but are completely wasted on people with no talent to utilize them! We get a short fight in the beginning of this episode that easily illustrates this point – having the camera swing wildly around all over the place costs a lot of money in anime, and the animation actually doesn’t look half bad, but the editing is so incompetent (and the camera crosses the action line so many times) that it becomes so confusing to watch, I didn’t even realize there were more than two people fighting. I only realized it when I went back and rewatched that minute of the episode, but it’s also completely unclear what’s actually happening since it immediately follows a timeskip and appears to take place in The World That Never Was from Kingdom Hearts II. The individual cuts don’t look half bad but the directors (and the storyboard for that matter) are so awful at putting them together into a cohesive scene that it falls right the hell apart and you just get a vague sense of people swirling around the screen and swinging things at each other, but your eyes can’t quite digest it, hence why I didn’t notice their faces.

And, already knowing by reputation that the writing in this is going to be absolute trash, I see little worth sticking around for, but I did want to at least comment on what I could parse from the first scene.

2/10 for wasting perfectly fine art! Dropped after one episode!

Final Thoughts – Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka

Look, I gave Magical Girl Site way too much of a chance last year, I’m not falling for it again.

From the director of Strike the Blood comes yet another project that continues the reputation of LIDENFILMS as a studio that will take on basically any project with a staff for hire (their only projects in the last three years that I’ve actually finished being Boarding School Juliet and Hanebado, both of which were good-not-great) and this one continues the trend of magi-girl adaptations that just bleed edge all over your floor, except this has neither the engaging premise of Magical Girl Raising Project or even the Shadow the Hedgehog Hot Topic Try Hard syndrome that made Magical Girl Site at least a little interesting to watch.

Let’s start with the production! It’s awful. It’s not as bad-looking as Saint Seiya but it is another action show that clearly has no budget for action scenes, because there is very rarely motion happening onscreen and it pretty much always looks bad. The characters aren’t always hideous, but their designs are very inconsistent and every attempt to put the heroine in a flattering outfit makes her look hilarious (especially given that her bust noticeably changes size depending on her shirt). Even in an unrevealing school uniform, her shirt clings to her awkwardly and her skirt is so short that it would be showing her butt, except she doesn’t appear to have one. I don’t normally spend this much time criticizing fanservice, except that this is just such a failed attempt at it that it kind of ruins the rest of the show. If you’ve not seen the manga, every cover shows one of the magical girl characters with heavy clothing damage, hinting that this is trying to be gritty and sexy, and dear lord is it ever not.

Speaking of gritty! The story is handled so clumsily that I found myself laughing at the gratuitous gore seen in just the first episode – we see innocent people executed by gunfire near the end in a manner so comically handled that it makes Modern Warfare 2 look positively classy in comparison, as the horrible-looking villain dude just arms himself and his accomplices in the middle of the street and appear to be running around just shooting anyone they can find for completely unclear reasons. Conveniently, the main heroine gets PTSD flashbacks from seeing mascot characters, but not from the sound of heavy gunfire and screaming. Basically, what it seems to be going for is Madoka Magica meets Call of Duty, but without the writing of the former or the production value of the latter, so it just ends up being stupid and lazy.

3/10, dropped after one episode!

Final Thoughts – The Price of Smiles

Tatsunoko Production celebrates its 55th anniversary with an original project that looks like it was copypasted from A-1 Pictures and reads like discount Macross for kids, and I’m sorry, I’m really picky during Winter since it’s the only season I go “light” on, but this first episode was just not impressive. A lot of it was spent on a meaningless fight and setting up how hard it is ruling a country as a twelve year old princess, and I’m not down for it at all. Sure, there have been plenty of child rulers in anime, but they’re usually portrayed as either being proxies (like the Emperor in Akame Ga Kill) or highly intelligent, capable prodigies (like Sora and Shiro in No Game No Life), not just normal children who inexplicably appear to be making authoritative decisions despite having no desire or skill for it. I understand that the point of the show is that she doesn’t know that war is happening on her own border, but honestly, how much of a show can you really extrapolate from that?

The mech fights don’t look terrible, but given that they look about as good as the ones in Planet With, which I only tolerated because of the strong writing in the premiere, it’s not a good enough reason to give this show a pass.

5/10, dropped after one episode.

Final Thoughts – Saint Seiya: Saintia Sho

I’ve been debating for a while whether I could even justify doing Impressions for Winter since I’m so late on finishing last year, but I finally started with this early premiere from December, and twelve minutes in I decided that I needed to say something, because dear God, this is awful.

Let’s start with the most immediately obvious thing: this show looks like garbage. I don’t know how Gonzo has found the staff to produce three shows airing at the same time (this one, Hinomaru Sumo, and Conception) and this one definitely joins Conception in the produced-on-$10-an-episode club. It looks like a bad HD re-render of a show from the nineties, but the character designs are even worse. I don’t know whose idea it was to give every single character eyes that are way too far apart, but it looks hideous in practice and makes the entire cast look evil and ugly.

Next! This is an all-female iteration of a show that normally features a male cast, and apparently that means it’s Sailor Moon, if Sailor Moon had a tentacle rape scene halfway through the first episode! I can’t even begin to express how awful this is to sit through, it’s something that has to be seen to be believed, but when the main character’s sister shows up to save her, her creepy facial expressions make it look much more like she intends to finish what the tentacles started.

I can’t imagine why anyone would want to watch this, and looking at MAL (where it currently sits with a 6.10), it seems like most people agree with me. I’m going to be even less charitable, though.

2/10. What a rotten start to the year, enough that I almost want to just abandon it with last year’s dregs even though the majority of it is airing in 2019.

Final Thoughts – A.I.C.O.: Incarnation

It’s so very “eh”.

Netflix threw around a lot of money last year in directly helping to produce several shows, like B: The Beginning, Devilman Crybaby, and least of all, A.I.C.O., which launched with such a disastrously bad dub that they wound up re-doing the entire thing.

Of course the dub isn’t really my issue with A.I.C.O.. My problem lies more in the fact that it’s a little bit of a ripoff of Parasite Eve, only handled with a lot more tonal inconsistencies and with a 3rd Birthday-era level of stupid plotting. I only got halfway through and I could predict all the twists I wound up looking up, and none of them are even all that meaningful, up to and including sharing an entire Tomato Reveal with said 3rd Birthday. A.I.C.O. is just dull and lacking in substance or even a decent production value, as aside from a couple of moments of fluid motion, this is easily the worst looking Netflix-financed show of 2018. When you consider that A) this is Bones, who apparently spent much more on making My Hero Academia and B) that unlike B or Devilman Crybaby, this is a direct adaptation of source material – meaning a great deal of the work was already half-done – I don’t get where the money went here. It’s not the worst-looking show of the year by any means (not in a world where we had Master of Ragnarok and My Sister My Writer) but it just doesn’t live up to Bones’ standard at all. I’m really hoping that they can give the upcoming Fire Force adaptation the same love they give MHA.

While it had the advantage over B because the plot actually makes sense, it loses way too many points for the plot being stupid – again, it’s a near-direct ripoff of Parasite Eve, down to the biological catastrophe being caused by a medical procedure gone wrong, but without any of the thought that went into most of Eve – and six episodes in, I didn’t have much of a desire to see it through.

5/10.