Divine Gate

The legend of the Divine Gate is a story told to young children that depicts the merging of the living world, the heavens, and the underworld. "Adapters"—people born with unique elemental abilities gifted to them from the union of these worlds—formed the World Council, an organization which controls the chaos of the Gate by portraying its legend as nothing more than a myth. These Adapters train in a special academy owned by the World Council that allows the students to hone their skills.

Aoto, a teenage boy with exceptional water powers and a tragic past, rejects the offer to join the academy numerous times—until he is successfully pressured by the energetic wind user Midori and stubborn fire user Akane. Together, with the World Council and their mysterious leader Arthur, they seek out the Gate in the hopes of uncovering the truth. But in order to reach their goals, they must unite and overcome their own despair while dealing with behind the scene mischief.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Aoto Main

Saitou, Souma Japanese

Akane Main

Kakihara, Tetsuya Japanese

Arthur Main

Nakamura, Yuuichi Japanese

Yukari Main

Amamiya, Sora Japanese

Hikari Main

Taketatsu, Ayana Japanese

Midori Main

Itou, Kanae Japanese

Ginji Main

Yoshino, Hiroyuki Japanese

Loki Supporting

Yusa, Kouji Japanese

Oz Supporting

Ishida, Akira Japanese

Breunor Supporting

Murase, Ayumu Japanese

Cook, Justin Producer

Oda, Motohiro Producer

Matsui, Shouji Producer

Kohama, Takumi Producer

Reviews

Apr 10, 2016

BGdealer

Recommended

I really have never found such an amazing anime in the past four years of watching daily. This show made me KEK harder than I've KEK'd in a long keking time. This review will be spoiler free.




Story: With an immediate sense of who the characters are at heart and their troubles in the past Divine Gate really gets you excited quickly. Any parts of the story that seem unclear are explained efficiently with the flashbacks in the episodes to come as the flashbacks are few in number and are highly informative. The story follows multiple characters and their own personal grief and what they have ... to do to rid themselves of the guilt that has swallowed them. This is all done with the help of the expert writers at the forefront of this anime.



Art: Words cannot describe the beauty that this shows art style has. The mixing of 2D and 3D make the fight scenes not only entertaining but interesting to watch and then re-watch later. I've never seen an art style capture the story within it so well.



Sound: The soundtrack of Divine Gate really made me hyped up during the battles that happen throughout. While I'm not much of a sound critic in particular I will say that the music during the battles was quite enjoyable. The opening is quite amazing I have downloaded it on to my phone and wish to play it on the piano.



Character: They're all great, every single one. I'm not a huge fan of Akane but having someone that you don't like as much really shows why the others shine so brightly KEK sorry Akane.



This was my first review and I hope it made you want to go out there and watch Divine Gate right away! It will not be a mistake.


Sincerely, BGdealer

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Mar 25, 2016

Dangst4r

Mixed Feelings

*spoiler-free*
What happens when you bundle up all your favorite anime ideas and tropes and dump them into one anime? While I would say this anime, it is really hard to discern what even happened in this anime to find out, but dissecting it anyways!

Story: All in all, the story is well a mess. Constantly shifting focus from episodes to episode, there really is no clear main character nor main goal in the anime except for the idolized Divine Gate. But a lot of the time, the Divine Gate really just feels like its there and then everyone else is just sobbing about how they want ... it. There were a lot of cool concepts from technological sci-fi world with robots and elemental drivers that gave you cool weapons but besides that, the story is too confusing and underdeveloped

Art: The art for this anime is gorgeous! While it isn't mystifying or particularly memorable or even matching really a certain mood of the anime, the art is clear and polished, and a lot of the character designs and environments appear dazzling. Honestly, the designs of the main characters are great, but they lacked something about them that just would have made it all clicked. Oh right, their actual personalities.

Character: No character was thoroughly fleshed out. The anime starts off focusing on the woeful life of depressed water boy. Seems ok, but then the anime switches to the two government worker kids, earth girl and fire boy, without much transition and tries to detail us on all the reasons why we should empathize with their sorrow and need of the Divine Gate. Except its all terribly done for such a convincing synopsis idea, there lies little emotion nor compulsion for character actions in both their pasts or the present, so even when we get explanations, they don't make sense or fail to evoke any feelings of compassion.
Furthermore, practically every other character isn't explained at all but the anime tries to make you pity them or understand their warped ideas. The other 3 kids that the anime tries to show off as a contrasting trio? They add NOTHING. They randomly appear, and while they look cool and their contrast is cool, they literally follow the group around, disappear, come back but with opposing mentalities, only to be dragged off the show for an arbitrary reason (like really dumb and random reason). The anime will add a ton of government workers as characters and all of them will have backstories, and unfortunately, none of them are detailed and they all are basically minions until their deaths(?). (so imagine the Angel Beats cast except the useless half is twice as useless). Overall, poor character development.

Sound: You won't notice the sounds of the anime sadly, because there will be an obnoxious omniscient kid narrator constantly reading you ALL THE CHARACTER AND PLOT DEVELOPMENT, leaving nothing to be characterized by characters' actions, emotions, or backstory. Nope, a dude walking down the street? Suddenly, "the man felt regret as he walked down the street, alone as he had always been." Indirect characterization exists for a reason folks. It makes characters more human and creates an empathy link, but when I'm told that someone hates themselves, it's like k. cool.
But the opening song is rather catchy and probably the most promising thing of the show. if you only watched the opening music video then you would probably think this anime is really good.

Etc: So a lot of what I just complained about revolves around the fact that the anime tries to be something it is not. It acts like a vague mystery anime, reaching for some salvation and human futility undermined by the Gods (imagine the obscurity of Mekaku City Actors, the confusion of Steins; Gate, and some cool elemental concept of powers. Mush them together with Gorilla Glue and that's what you get), and this causes a lot of characters to be left out because the anime is indecisive. It wants to tug at your heart strings but it also wants you to try to warp your mind around it. It has a cool plot concept which would earn it a solid 7 if it went the typical shounen route or something, but it reached too far and ended up being incomplete. Lots of potential, but it's just a Jack of all trades and a master of none.

Enjoyment: You'll find yourself liking the first 3 or so episodes. They're not too bad. But then after that you'll start not comprehending things and things become loose and silly. Character behavior becomes inexplicable and trifle. But you really liked the idea of teens with element-charged weapons fighting similar counterpart adults for a all saving deus ex machina goal, so you keep going. But you won't find anything, just like this anime did, and that is why I give it a 6/10. Most people will find this anime, overall, unenjoyable, regardless of tastes.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Mar 26, 2016

Smugdear

Not Recommended

During this period, the anime industry suffers "Material lacks". Ideas are getting narrower but productions are getting wider. Many companies suffer to bankruptcy, and to anticipate this they must broaden the marketing ground. In order to broaden it, they throw many adaptations to stabilized the situation. Because of it, there is dozens adaptation appear in various sources. One of those sources is game. But the truth is until this period, not many game adaptation live up to its expectation.

Divine Gate, is a smartphone game developed by Acquire. While the animation is in the hand of Studio Pierrot. As the series went, there are some flaws ... that can be spotted.

As the story goes, they do throw out dozens of information to construct the world building. Unfortunately, it failed. There are too many things unexplained things and the story doesn't start explaining things but keep throwing information dump, hoping the viewer felt a mystery thingy. And if it's too late to explain those things, this can cause a backfire to the plot and can wreck any of the plot elements, make the story felt pointless. All of the elements could be floating in the water without any clear directions. The anime have a hard time to compel dark themes to the story, the truth is the story was failed to bring that feeling. It has terrible exposition and dull storytelling.

Next one is flashbacks. The anime didn't use the flashbacks effectively and producing a slow pacing to the storyline.

Animation quite decent, characters have different colorful designs. While there are some scenes using CG, but the fighting scenes still tolerable. The World seems to be set with advanced technology, with robots, gadgets and other futuristic elements occur.

Background music seems to be mediocre. Seiyuu do their job fairly. There aren't anything that can outshine this anime except the OP theme. It's quite catchy itself.

Divine Gate wanted to be more focused in characterizations than story, they trying to develop the main characters at the early episodes, but it's failed in the execution, the anime more like want to explain how it's their past, not more or less. It tries to blend dark past to the character but failed to relate those past with the story.

After episode 7, I'm totally disappointed by this anime. Divine Gate has a huge number of supporting casts. The bad thing is those characters are not getting any single development. They're purely just a plot device to help the fight more dramatical, which make it more pointless.

Divine Gate is a great example of a pathetic attempt to draws many viewers as quickly as possible. It has been coated into 12 episodes of disaster with forced conclusion in the end. This anime really makes you don't want to watch anime again, so it is obviously not recommended.

So what is Divine Gate? Even Einstein can't answer this.....

Overall 2/10

Reviewer’s Rating: 2

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