Endride

So far, I've only watched 7 episodes, but I can already tell it's a pathetic series.

To be honest, I'm still only watching this for the ridiculousness of the plot. Characters don't stand out, setting's a rip-off of Final Fantasy, and don't even get me started on the animation fails.

First off, the MC is just so irritating. It's like he's there for the sake of the plot. He really doesn't stand out much. It's the 2nd male character that does. Also, the female character's dead weight. Seriously, I would've hated everyone in the series if it wasn't for Louise and Demetrio. Without these two, the show ... would just be a Yaoi fanfest.

Next is the setting. Actually, it's pretty clever how they made the underworld look beautiful. But again, every scene looked the same. Same cliff, same jungle, etc. And I know that they're trying to make original monsters and everything, but yellow boars with unicorn horns won't cut it.

Let's move on to the animation. One of the reasons I'm still watching this series is to look for errors in the animation. No offense on the studio, but I think it could've gone better. Also, pants. I mean, how come no one's realized that the MC's pants is backwards? Is it a trend in the other world or something? Seriously, it's gonna be a recurring meme at this rate.

I know this comes off negatively, but please understand, this is my opinion. I hope it gets better in the future episodes. And if you haven't seen this series yet... don't. If you're not into fantasy and/or recurring tropes, don't watch it.

Originally, I had no intention of writing a review for this series but when I found out it was an original and most of the reviewers hadn't finished the series; well, I couldn't help myself.

I'll start off with my sympathy for those who dropped the series early on. I completely understand. If I wasn't so stuck on always finishing series no mater how poor they are in hopes of it turning around at some point, I would have done the same.

In all honesty this series is extremely shallow. It's like a rough draft that somehow made it to the publishing stage without fleshing ... it out properly. The dialogue is shallow but the banter between Shun and Emilio always makes me smile, mostly because it's two teenage boys fighting with each other for no other reason than the fact that they're teenage boys (as far as I could understand). The characters as a whole were very hard to relate to or make any kind of connection with. There was dialogue but very little introspection into what the characters were doing and why. All you really get is that Emilio is bent on revenge and Shun is perhaps overly optimistic and accepting. Alicia is a dead weight throughout the whole series. Most of the time you don't know what she's thinking because you aren't given the proper information, whether actions in sequence, or internal dialogue; it's just not available. For most of the series I was almost dead set that Pascal was a traitor just because the series wasn't fleshed out properly. He makes foreboding facial expressions at crucial times but then nothing is every done about it. No explanation is giving as to why he's making that expression (similar to Alicia). Demetrio and Louise were done quite a bit better and I really feel like these two characters saved the series. Demetrio is pretty bad ass and you have a decent amount of back story given to him. His reasons for fighting are also very clear and you get a good sense of how he thinks and what his personality is like. Louise was a little harder to figure out but her personality is pretty constant, her actions and expressions are also explained well enough for you to make a semblance of a connection to her.

The weapons in this series were outright ridiculous. Louise's weapon...dear god it was awful. Demetrio (once again) is one of the few with a decent looking weapon, most likely because it IS, it's a normal weapon compared to all the Warp Relics everyone else possesses. Speaking of weapons, the fight scenes were so horrible I just wanted to laugh. No one really gets any stronger during the series, Emilio and Shun both suck and continue to do so throughout the series but somehow manage to defeat the bad guy all the same. Which reminds me, the bad guy's weapon seriously looks like Dr. Octopus from Spider Man. Seriously, no lie! There's a lot of issues with coordination as well during the vast majority of the series, if I didn't know any better I'd say it was a rush job. (Even though the episodes were released slowly.)

The plot is a mess. It's a typical 'stuck in fantasy world' series that honestly reminds me a little of Tegami Bachi (with the whole crystal in the sky thing). The pacing is quite bad and things don't start to get interesting until Shun and Emilio end up on the surface. (Literally the last four episodes.) Other than that it's a bunch of nonsense, while it makes you laugh and could be interesting at times, it's nothing special. You could easily brush it off and not think twice about it.

I honestly don't know why I was hyped about this series, maybe I read the summary when I heard it was coming out and thought it would be an awesome show. When I heard Funimation was taking it up I was even more excited but was disappointed when I didn't see a lot of advertising for it during the time it was airing. Now, I understand why. It's like the red-headed step child no one wants. As a rough draft, it's not bad, it just needs to be fleshed out, but for an original finished series, it's horrible. To publish something like this is just, wrong. You can tell at least one person was working hard and put their heart into the series but no one else followed suit. It's really sad because it could have been a decent series had they really worked hard on it.

Shun's facial expressions are much the same throughout the series and while Emilio gets time to grieve the loss of his family, Shun seems unfazed by his own personal loss, which doesn't make sense because he was agonizing over the person in question for a whole episode. Inconsistency was the main downfall of the series and perhaps a lack of understanding regarding what makes a good series come alive and pull the viewers in. Regardless, I wouldn't recommend watching the series, especially if you can't stand horrible pacing, useless characters, and only four episodes of interesting and moderately good anime.

I have given up on the series. I have dropped this anime and it will be a long time before I finish it. I went into Endride expecting a decent show. Instead, I got a show I dread to think about watching another episode.

The only good parts I found, trying to scrape together something of my expectations was the animations and the sub-par story. I found the art style good for the setting and the story line. The story reminded me of a "Journey to the Center of the Earth", except getting out of the center. It is a bit unique on that aspect.

The ... rest of the parts, I wish I could say the same. The opening and ending songs for me were horrible to listen to. I constantly skipped them after hearing it the first time. The plot never really picked up, making it a chore to continue watching. The characters were not memorable at all for me. My enjoyment of the show continually dropped with each episode as from the reasons above.

This show manages to get a score of 2 from me with its animations and the story line. I don't recommend watching this anime and finding something else to watch.

It makes me sad to give this anime such a low ranking because the art is beautiful and it has some of my favorite voice actors. However, I can not look beyond the fact that this anime was painful to watch. I had to force myself to play each episode and each time it felt like the show was never ending.

I believe a large part of this had to do with the story itself. The plot drags on through the 24 episodes with repeated tropes throughout. The two main characters fight nonstop and everyone else, except for one side character, are utterly useless. The show ... had little to no character development until the very last few episodes and it was frustrating to witness.

Endride also held potential at the beginning and waisted it. So disappointing.

If there's a word I'd use to describe Endride, that word is "stiff."

It's there in the writing, it's there in the characters, and it's there in the animation. Just a general feeling of stiffness that takes away from most positives you could hope to find.

At first glance, Endride is a very pretty show. The character designs are nice and clean, the weapon designs are elaborate but fun in that Tokusatsu way, and in general it has a really nice palate and everything going on. But when you actually watch it move, it's just... well, stiff. The staging is perfunctory and unambitious, ... the characters move to a limited degree, and the action scenes are devoid of life and energy. It gives a very cheap and underwhelming feeling to an otherwise nice-looking series.

Unfortunately, that just continues in other elements. The story itself is fairly banal - a young boy, who hilariously is a rock and crystal collector, finds himself launched into a mystical fantasy world. More isekai good times, right? Well, kind of. The thrust of Endride is that there is a world within our world, an underworld, that is full of fantasy action and monsters and has been concealed from mankind through history. Our hero, Shun, wants to make his way back to the surface, and the only way to get there is with the "Babel" in Babylon, a city that has now been taken over by evil. Along the way, he finds a ragtag group of adventurers, including a rebellious prince.

So, yeah. Nothing here that you haven't seen before. The only real twist is the underworld idea, and it doesn't really play into much, as it still just looks like a fantasy kingdom with no real differentiation. You have humans and beastmen, and kingdom intrigue that's extremely shallowly developed.

Because to go along with stiff, you can call a lot of things here shallow. The main two characters, Shun and Emilio, are classic rivals - one in red, one in blue, one with a sword, one with a spear, a classic dynamic that's been around since Voltron. However, there's no reasoning behind it, and little development, at least as far as I watched before tapping out. It's kind of funny that they're two teenage boys that just kind of can't stand each other, but that's about it.

And no one feels very lively. We get lengthy mid-episode flashbacks trying to give our characters dimension and backstory, but it doesn't seem to connect a ton to who they are in the modern time, and it doesn't actually add depth to a lot of their actions. They just feel like a group of stock characters, fairly lifeless, and animated in lifeless fashion.

That's before we even get into the fact that the story moves along at a glacial pace. Those flashbacks? They eat up a ton of run time each episode, leaving us little time to actually... do anything. One episode is largely spent with the main duo teaming up with their happy little Robin Hood band - and doing laundry and chores. On the one hand, there's the potential for it to be charming - they're with mysterious revolutionaries, and being tasked with doing legwork and grunt work in this socialist commune environment where everyone has to pull their weight. But while it should be a comedic and light-hearted scene, there's barely any comedy actually pulled off in it, and the characters don't get a ton to do. Instead our effeminate seer takes a tumble into the lake, is revealed as a man despite his womanly appearance - though he does have a manly voice, too - and we find out that he has bad luck. And if it's a scene that's really played for comedy, or intended to be - and it seems like it might be just because I don't know what other response I'm supposed to be getting from it - it fails. It's just a series of events that happen.

I'll be honest, I went in wanting to like this show to a degree, and not even knowing the full bad press it had gotten, because I just kind of added a ton of shows to my watch list and forgot about them. I like going in blind. But going in blind didn't make it any better. It's just a nice on the surface package that falls apart as soon as it starts moving. Or not moving, as is far more often the case, because this show just kind of meanders through much of it's run time, going nowhere.