Upfront warning: Review contains decent amount of profanity. Read ahead on your own accord.
It just so happens that I was out of my house, descending into madness due to cold, wasting away hours of my life on things that aren't anime (BLASPHEMY!) and, as all of us, at one point I came back home, saw that the last episode of Charlotte was out and decided to check it out for shits and giggles. By episode 9 you already realize this is a major clusterfuck of raid-wipe proportions and you kind of stop giving a single bird for it. So, why am I writing this review? Uhm ... dunno, because I can?
Story. Fuck this story. No, seriously, Fuck.This.Story. Here's a thing about storytelling: everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, can come up with AWESOME, SPECTACULAR, BALL-DROPPING ideas on the fly. Thing is, only 1% of them are able to make something off of it. Sadly, Charlotte falls in 99% category. The story has no direction - and by direction I mean it litearlly doesn't know what the fuck to do with itself so it just kinda starts throwing random things in your face expecting you to just go 'meh' and look the other way - from a small-scale, let's save a couple of people from this 'death machine' that is goverment, to a motherfucking 'SAVE THE WORLD' idea? Erm ... what? No. No. No.
All the aspiring writers out there, here's storytelling 1 'o 1 for you: the scale of your story should be set up immediately. Why? Because sudden outbursts of your egoistical personality where you make your character a fucking prophet destined to save the world don't work. And that's exactly what this anime did. Out of nowhere, literally 1 episode before the ending, they decided 'oh fk it, we have 2 more episodes let's just throw in random shit'. Don't get me wrong though; it's not the last 2 episodes that are the reason I gave the story of this show 1, it's just the overall damn thing. It has no purpose. The reason, the goal, was never set from the beginning. Instead you're strung along for what feels like filler after filler, with a bunch of "OH IT BE SAD YOU MUST CRY HUR DUR" moments. Foreshadowing, twists and any resemblence of actually good storytelling cannot be found in this clusterfuck. I don't know who wrote this thing, or who directed it, so I can't compare it to his/hers previous shows, but damn, if the supposed 'drama' moments are exactly the same, I better watch out. Drama? Does this guy even know what drama is? Say, your sister dies, right? It's obvious you're gonna go down the spiral of utter self-destruction while also harming others, 'cause, you know, it's the first thing that comes to mind. But, you know what you need to be saved from that whirling chaos? A single line from a cute girl. Yup. All the shrinks of the world, learn from this show. If your patient is about to kill himself, bring in a hot model and have her say 'You still have reasons to live' and bam, one more saved human on your record.
Being a bit serious for a moment, jumps from moods are so often and so ... unnatural that it's mind-crapping how terribly they were executed. You can have laughter and tears in the same episode, no one is saying you can't, but the transition between the two moods can't happen so abruptly that no viewer can understand why the fuck it happened. And that's my main problem with this show: lack of balance, both in characters and in story. Either they go full drama queen on us, or they're like "oh no, this be funny show, no tears here man". People can be depressed and happy at the same time, you guys know that, right? Anyway, if you're still not sure that the story is bad, answer me these questions:
- How did the scientists figure out it was a meteorite that gave them powers? Who thought of that? How did they test it?
- How did the scientists learn about their powers in the first place? How long it took them to build the facility?
- Why does everyone in the show assume that the scientists are bad people? Because they do experiments on the out-of-the-norm kids? Yeah, it's a moral issue, but from the logical standpoint it makes complete sense. But no, story claims they're bad through and through and leaves no openning for dispute.
- During Yu's amnesia days (fuck me that's stupid), why did none of his abilities trigger on their own? We've seen that the emotional state can have a huge impact on casting certain powers out of your will, but is it just 1 power out of millions? And why just that one? And if not, why did no other ability activate? Like, if he'd just randomly ran into the wall, why didn't he fly through it? Amnesia doesn't explain it because he still had time travel ability by the time he had recovered it.
And so on ...
Anyway, moving away from the shitstorm that's story, let's look at the production. Art design is okay I guess. I mean, there's really nothing unique about the characters' designs, and no mind-stunningly-beautiful scenery, but it does its job well enough for you not to care. Animation, on the other hand, is crap. If I had to take a bet, I'd bet my entire livelyhood that whoever directed this has no fucking clue what makes action exciting. Yes, if you're going to have action in your crappy anime, at least make it so I don't feel like skipping each time it comes along. Outside of action, barely any decent animation occurs (outside of the teleport ability I guess, that was kinda cool) and you're just sitting there going 'meh' alongside the show. Sound department ... well, let me lay out this first: a lot of the composed songs were actually pretty good, some even bordering amazing. The problem? Say you have a sad song that should accompany sad scene, right? Key word being 'accompany'. But nop, creators of this thing just went fuck it again, and made the music be the main part. Even me, who's never directed shit in his life, knows that's a terrible thing to do. I don't care how good your songs are, if you use them terribly, I'll point it out. Voice actors are probably the best part of this anime, and that's saying a lot. Each gives good enough of a performance, but damn the VA of MC was kind of off-putting. I don't even know why. It just seemed like the voice and variations of such just didn't fit with this character.
Speaking of chracters ... aaaaaaaaaaah. Does anyone have an bottle of acid? Or lithium? Or anything that could potentially kill me in large doses? Like MnM's? Characters are godawful. Characters are terrible. Characters are disgusting. And here's the catch: they all started out great, and turn into complete fuckups within 2 episode. How? Please tell, oh the mighty one, how the flying fuck do you even manage to do that? How do you take an interesting character with a truckload of potential and turn him into shit? Are you Jap version of M. Night? His long lost child perhaps?
Anyway, what's wrong with the characters? Everything. Everything is wrong with the characters.
Our MC, I think they call him Yu or something. Starts out great. Really interesting. And you think to yourself: damn, this guy could be fun to explore more. But nop, 15min later he's running away like a little bitch, crying and whimping for his mother's tit. And he gets even worse. Honestly, and I mean honestly, this dude is just flat out crazy. Yeah, if you're fanboying over this show you're going to say 'but hur dur he had hard life and hur dur it's understandable' ... no, just no. It's fine if he acts depressed, but goddamn it at least make his transition back believable. Don't make him act like a 15 year old girl on Xanax.
Rest of the cast doesn't matter, they're irrelevant. Yeah, they kinda matter for like 5 episodes and then it's like "fuck them, hit dat thing Yu!". They don't get any development. They don't have anything relevant for you to even give an inkling about them. They're your standard tropes of comedic relief, mysterious, love interest, full-on young sister (I'm just waiting for a day when young sisters are portrayed real-life like in anime; I bet about millions of dreams would be broken at that very day) and bunch of other shit that doesn't matter. Man, fuck the characters.
Anyway, first like 3-4 episodes maybe were good enough to bump this score up to 4. Otherwise this show is a failure on every layer. I was even bored writing this review. No, seriously, if I had a mirror I'd probably look like Hawking but with looks instead of brains. That's how impressive this show is.
And, in essence, that's what the show really is: boring. Everything is boring: characters, story, dialogue, action, art - you name it. It's like no one put more than a flipping fuck of effort into making this thing. Well, aside from composers. Man I feel bad for them, like, I'm so sorry your pretty good scores were used so terribly.
Overall? I exploded, and spread virus called boredrom. Now every teenager in the world will eternally be bored until they're of age. (by the fucking way, why does the virus just leave our body after high school or whatever? viruses don't just fucking leave; they either kill us, or we develop immunity system ... man, fuck this anime)
