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Jun 30, 2017
Ah This show, I thought this might be the one show that would prove to me that Toei as an animation studio isn't as bad as I thought it was, after all, every reboot/sequel of a show they've done recently has looked bottom of the barrel cheap (with sailor moon crystal season 3 being a weird exception) and their only good shows this past decade only make up for looking cheap with impeccable or eccentric art design and directing (kyousugiga, Mononoke) so when i see there first real attempt at a 3d show actually look decent I had some hope. add that to the shows
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premise of a more serious first contact with higher beings science fiction story and you got yourself an interesting show with some potential.
Before I talk about what ruined the show in detail Ill talk about what grabbed my attention about this show in the first place. questioning the ideas of certain human concepts like war, the formation of borders and countries, and the gap between developed and impoverished nations from an outsiders perspective is inherently interesting. This begs the question from that outsider "if humanity is capable of being the dominant species why isn't it as a species able to put aside their interests as nations and unify as a world nation capable of solving world problems more efficiently?". It also asks of whether help from an outside source to artificially kick-start human productivity through alien technology is indeed even the right move or would our reliance on it be harmful should it ever just vanish out of thin air as well as the ethics of tampering with the natural state of the world as it stands and just letting humanity progress at its own pace.
Now aside from a lot of technobabble about the devices used to raise these questions, this show does at the very least a good job of getting the viewer to think about this type of subject matter. Add to that very adult characters and the tone of the show staying serious and morally ambiguous for the first 9 episodes and you got yourself a good thought provoking type of show.
Unfortunatly the last three episodes ruin the whole idea of what the show was building towards and instead throws away all interesting discussion and intrigue the show could have had as mentioned by other reviewers, In favor of out of nowhere deus ex machinas, little to no setup to some of the more dramatic moments and plot twists, and terrible writing that throws out the serious tone and gray morality in favor of creating a contrived as hell scenario for a "humans are good/outsiders are bad" type of conflict. And to top it all off the show doesn't have the guts to stick with whatever impact the new technologies introduced could have on the world long term so it just hits a magic reset button to make people incapable of using any of it or interact with the people who made them so it basically wastes your time as viewer by not really exploring these ideas deeper or predicting how humanity would really progress with the advanced tech and plays it too safe. Because of that the whole buildup of what "The Right Answer" was in the title was thrown away so it fell flat on it's face.
In short this show is a waste of time with OK 3d CGI but in a couple of years even the CGI will be dated and I don't recommend anybody to watch this only to be disappointed.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Jun 7, 2016
This is a review for the whole movie series and should be taken as such.
Tell me if you have heard this premise before, an organization of super-powered teenagers/children that are in hiding have to combat and rebel against an authoritarian task force created to weed out super-humans with lethal enforcement. if you thought this show is the X-Men you'd be kind of right. this show is basically an X-men clone. if it were to make enough interesting deviations from the formula I might have given it a higher score. but the only real selling point of the show is the animation AND BY GOD IS
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THE ANIMATION IMPRESSIVE IN THESE MOVIES. If you have seen One-Punch Man or Death Parade its on that level of animation at points. also despite the lack of originality, the exciting fights and easy to follow story make it a very entertaining ride. the characters in this show can also an issue. the entire cast doesn't feel at all fleshed out and relies on two dimensional character archetypes to convey their personalities most of the time. the only interesting character narratives are the main character, Qwon, and one of the opposing cyborgs they fight, Epsilon. the main villains' motivations are also a problem as they are inconsistent throughout the story. Then there's the ending that screams read the manga which is annoying. despite all these flaws if you want a action series that you can turn your brain off to This can be a fun thrill ride that's basically a 12 episode anime in the form of 6 movies.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Apr 27, 2015
For those who have long awaited for a reboot for Trigun... you are going to have to wait a little longer. Until then you can watch Yasuhiro Nightow's other manga get adapted in what I am sure is going to be the best anime of the season that feels like the spiritual successor of Trigun. Kekkai sensen aka Blood Blockade Battlefront.
story and character 8/10: the story itself is not very complex. it can be simply put as an organization of super-powered people fighting against disorder in New York which has now turned into supernatural zone between the underworld and the real world that has been
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renamed Jerusalums Lot. What makes the story so good however is the execution. the way it goes about episode by episode is definitely not textbook "Monster of the week" type predictable battles where they have to simply find some weakness that was only apparent to the main character. There really is a lot of variety to this show as there are many important antagonists that shaped the way that Jeruselums lot functions. Its story telling style is a lot like Baccano or Durarara where there isn't really a main character and more of a main cast of characters to tell the story it presents. The characters in the story at the moment have not fully developed at the moment of writing so ill hold off on that till the end of the show. the character designs are unique and well done as are the plethora of background "beyondians". The show uses naming conventions that are similar to Trigun that seem so stupid for characters that they somehow end up being cool and memorable like Zap Renfro or steven starphase. Overall the entire cast is solid.
Art and sound : 10/10: The artwork and animation in this show is too impressive to put to words. studio Bones went all out to really capture the setting of new york overrun by supernatural beings with such great detail while also giving all of their effort the extremely well animated and over the top action scenes. this is partly due to the director of Kyousou Giga, Rie Matsumoto using extremely interesting and stylistic camera angle choices and overlays to better convey a scene or simply keeping things interesting even when its simply characters doing some exposition. On the topic of sound I am currently waiting for the whole soundtrack to be released as I haven't heard a ost this good that incorporates jazz music since Kids on the slope. The musical composer Taisei Iwasaki is just starting out with making music for kekkai sensen so he is one to keep an eye out for in the future, the Implementation of the music in the anime is also well done as there are never times when the music feels out of place. there are no complaints on the voice acting however there is a small issue at hand with this series when it comes to audio. This show almost demands an english dub simply because of the setting they are in and that during certain moments of exposition it is almost impossible to keep track of everything all at once in an episode in one go requiring multiple re-watches to get all of it and naturally hearing it in a dubbed version would alleviate this problem.
Overall: 9/10: This show has the artistic flair and character writing to shine and each element of the show embodies the theme of what made New York City an ideal melting pot of cultures and ideas from a diverse cast of characters to many different genres of music (with jazz being the most used) to the diverse population of monsters and super-humans and diverse stories they tell. this show is a definite must-watch this season
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Jul 28, 2014
When I saw the trailers for this show, I like most of the anime watching community were expecting this to be either one of two things, 1. To be the next Nagi no Asakura, one of the most well known romantic dramas to have come out recently, or what I was expecting, a slice of life story of a girl who wishes to be a glass artisan like in the synopsis. Let me just say it dropped the ball for either one of these mindsets. For a romantic drama, everything feels forced and it uses love triangles and polygons that have been done time and
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again, and as a slice of life about glass artisans it shows only 3-4 minutes worth of screen time in which the main character is heating glass and messing it up on multiple occasions at the place she works at and it never even talks about her goals to become a glass artisan IN THE LAST FOUR EPISODES. The show instead uses glass as some kind of plot device that allows our main character to see the future for some reason. I wouldn't mind if it did this if it did it properly, but they don't. When this future sight happens I am left clueless as to what future events are going to happen despite seeing them myself but for some reason the main character gets the entire gist of it.
Speaking of characters most of them are one dimensional and forgettable except for the main one, you got the new guy in town, a bookworm girl, and a few others. That's right there's 5 side characters we as viewers are supposed to care about in addition to Touko, the main lead, and three of them don't have any distinguishing traits or personality. And Touko only has a few traits, like caring for chickens and sketching them and making glass stuff and being the main reason romantic tension randomly happens. The reason I am sort of ranting on the characters is that if the genre is romance or slice of life, having good characters matters more then usual as they are what we focus on during romance and dramas. In my opinion this show is not the worst but there is better out there
My alternate recommendations would be the currently airing Ao Haru Ride or the just finished airing Soredemo Sekai wa Utskushi due to both of these shows being better in the romance genre then this show.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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May 12, 2014
There is a reason why anime with a setting that revolves around a high school rarely becomes successful. Because it is to me one of the most overused settings for the last few years and only once in a while does it work out particularly well like in the case of the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Now with this show there is a lot of hype around due to the proclaimed success of its light novels. I personally haven't read them myself so I can't say for sure how good it is. But after viewing six episodes I feel I can give my unbiased review
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of this show that was adapted. For starters it brings up a topic that's been been shoved down our throuts since any of us as children started school. bullying and discrimination. Yes it tackles this issue head on as the issue many people in this story face comes in one of three types. The oppressed victims who see no way out, The overconfident and biased opressors, and the realists who realize true equality can't exist but can be made better. I feel that part of the reason this show got so popular in the first place was because of how relatable it's premise is because everyone at some point in their life has either been bullied or was the bully for the sake of popularity. Now in this show that reasoning for the bullying or harassment has simply been about perceived intelligence due to grades. Because this show separates people in two classes with outfits that easily distinguish them "course 1" the honor students, and "course 2" the remedial class students". The general idea in this school is that if you are in course 1 then for some reason you get the right to be a complete dick to everyone in course 2. They even have a different, more straightforward but offensive term for the course 2 students and have called them "Weeds" while course 1 are "blooms" due to their potential as magic users and weeds percieved inability to grow. Now that we got the premise here the main character is something that contradicts this class based system. There's Tatsuya Shiba, he is a course 2 student with skills that are in practical use, far superior then even those of course 1 but this is due to how the school evaluates certain qualities in students way more then others which is pretty realistic given how they work. His personality as a character is to be cool an reserved and his motivations are simple. Get the diploma from magic high school and become a magic scientist. Now I know what you are thinking, why did I give this show a 7 out of 10? Because there are some serious faults when it comes to this show.
List of problems
#1 the main character has a blood-related sister who loves him and the relationship is one sided and extremely echhii. I don't understand the big deal with brother-sister relationships in anime and can be extremely off-putting if not in the right light. I have seen this work many times like with attack on titan with Mikasa and Eren and even the show currently airing Hitsugi no Chaika makes it work because they aren't echhii or blood related. If they didn't put too much focus on this I'd probably have a a better time watching this show.
#2 Too big a cast of supporting characters and not enough variation in character designs. There are way way way too many people in this show to make this work for a 26 episode anime, so many that I highly doubt that you can remember half of them as their character introductions are also very short and abrupt and they also all wear essentially the same uniform with the only two things that can possibly make them different are the flower or grey shoulder patch or the the pattern on the blouse for females. It's made it so I can only focus on the main character and what his main focus is for the time being. Because of this I can't feel like I should care about most of this supporting cast as they more or less take up space.
#3 the main protagonist gets all da bitches. Yes just like in sword art online literally every girl in the school is interested in Tatsuya for no real reason. This is serious wish fulfillment right here as some of these girls from course 1 should be shrugging him off but instead are flocking toward him. And that brings me to the final problem
#4 easily distinguished class structure. If a school wants to make honor and remedial classes, that's fine, if they want to categorize these classes, that is also fine, but whoever was the genius to that decided that giving kids uniforms that clearly differentiated their grade level from one another wouldn't cause discrimination has got to the biggest idiot on the planet and isn't realistic as to how schools are ran.
So with that I give this show a 7 out of 10, it can be an interesting show when the magic starts flying around but don't get your hopes up too high
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Jan 30, 2014
If there was ever an anime that screams "most terrible anime of 2014" then pupa will be known as the anime to fit this title. This was an anime that was supposed to premiere in the fall and it got a lot of hype for having a really interesting story based on the synopsis and being a psychological horror. Then bad news hits this series with about as much subtlety as a brick to the face.
First, it went from being a 23 minute runtime per episode to about 4 minutes. Now with that in mind one would assume that they did this to preserve
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animation quality. But this only works with comedy series where a 4 minute runtime isn't completely unreasonable. Because this is a show that's supposed to have a deep story and plot, there would need to be time dedicated to telling a backstory in this world and all the complexities it presents. By having the entirety of the series be the length of two episodes (48 minutes) of a normal anime, This would lead to extremely fast pacing and a story that will either never be explained properly or having the original story gutted for the sake of time with characters that will be left as boring and underdeveloped by the end of the series as they are right now in the beginning. With story elements aside people would at least think animation would be decent if the story is told terribly.
This sadly would be an assumption that most people would get wrong as this shows second biggest problem is the art and animation. The art is so crude and poorly drawn at times that it makes me wish to watch an anime series from the early 90's rather then this crap. Sure there are moments where the art is above average but only for mere seconds, nowhere near enough time to appreciate it. And during the first episodes' most climatic moments, it gets heavily censored with a giant horizontal black bar that is faded at the edges leaving the impact of the moment to be nonexistent. there are moments like these all throughout the series. The character designs are also really boring and bland, the only thing the main character of the show has is a scar or mark below his eye and aside from that he's your typical high school teenager who wants to make sure his sister is safe.
Sound is the best thing about the show but that's like having a broken hand and saying you like the index finger the most because it's the only thing that isn't completely screwed up. The opening is mediocre at best and the background music they use comes off more corny and cliche than creepy like it intends to be.
My personal enjoyment? There is none.... None whatsoever for this series. If anyone reads this, do yourself a favor and watch literally ANYTHING (and I mean anything) but this garbage. I know there's an unspoken rule that you shouldn't judge an anime until you are at least three episodes in but I feel this one series in particular is the exception to the rule.
This series gets a 2 out of 10 on the whole solely because the opening music ranges from Meh to mediocre
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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Jan 3, 2014
This is what the average viewer should expect when coming into this anime. the setting takes place in the early 1900's in the U.K, with most of the events taking place at the Walpurgis Academy, a School designed to teach children the art of Machinart, a fusion hybrid of technology and magic that lets a mage control a magical robot by using their own mana in a manner similar to how masters in "Fate/Stay Night" control their servants. the students at the school then compete in a spectated combat competition to prove who has what it takes to become the "Wiseman" a position of power
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in the military which gives the person who holds the title of Wiseman to be able to ignore the taboos of magic set by the world. the Main Character, Raishin , goes to this prestigious academy with a Magical robot in hand named Yaya, a cute girl who looks very indistinguishable from the other female characters in the show as she was made by one of the best machinart engineers in the world. She fits the yandere archtype to the tee as she loves Raishin to extreme lengths. Raishin then uses Yaya in the competition in order to try to become the Wiseman, but sadly as soon as he gets into the school he is forbidden from entering the competition because in order to participate you need to be one of the top 100 students in the whole school to be eligible and he is almost (and I place a LOT of emphasis on the word almost) the worst student in the entire school grade-wise. his entire purpose in being there is to gain the power and experience needed to take revenge for his slaughtered family by killing his brother Tenzin who happens to attend the same school as he does (where have I seen this before). that is the overarching story for the anime in a nutshell and along with several different story arcs that take place in the show. now that I have given my summery of the anime I will give my Scores based on Story, Art, Sound, Character, and Personal Enjoyment.
Story: 6/10
While I appreciate that this anime gives a new twist on magic and combining it with machines, I have to say the story isn't that great or original, as both the whole "taking revenge" story and the setting being a school have both been so overdone in anime that I cant really give it high remarks. also while some of the arcs are really enjoyable to watch at times I am more or less confused at the end of the series as it leaves a lot of questions left unanswered in this world.
Art: 9/10
the animation quality in this anime is definitely above average, the fight sequences are great (except for the cgi but that's my taste so I won't knock the score off for that) and is very fluid overall. not at the quality of Fate/Zero or the likes of that but good enough.
Sound: 6/10
overall the soundtrack isn't something to brag about. the music fits the show during it both suspenseful and emotional moments but nothing really catchy or something I could listen on its own except for the opening song which is ok at best on its own.
Characters: 5/10
in this series there isn't a lot of character development for most anyone in the series except for the Main Character and the Female Lead Charle. most other characters can be described in just two words. their Archetypes, while overused, did not make the series or its characters unenjoyable.
Enjoyment: 8/10
I really liked this show despite its faults. The interactions between characters were always either really silly and comedic or really heartwarming. I really did like the fight scenes in this series and there is also the idea that there is always an underlying case to solve in the series which was also entertaining to see unfold.
Overall Score 7/10
this anime isn't the best but it isn't something that should be outright avoided. all I can say is if you like the Magical world Genre, you will definitely enjoy this anime the same could be said if like either mystery or action anime. but it is not an anime that will be put into high regard anytime soon
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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