Plunderer

Alcia is a world governed by "Count": numbers engraved on a person's body, representing any number related to their life. These Counts determine a person's social status and power in Alcia. If a Count reaches zero, the person is sent to the Abyss, a place rumored to be worse than death.

Hina, a traveler whose Count is based on the distance she traveled, witnessed her mother get dragged down into the Abyss. Determined to fulfill her mother's last wishes, she sets off on a journey in search of the legendary Aces—heroes of the war that happened three hundred years ago, bearing a white star next to their Count.

While wandering around, Hina encounters Licht Bach, a mysterious masked man with negative Count, and Nana, the owner of a tavern. In the midst of having a good time, Hina is tricked into a battle with a military soldier. However, despite his negative count, Licht rescues Hina and reveals that he has another count, one with a white star, one of a legendary Ace.

Plunderer follows the journey of Hina and other inhabitants of Alcia as they discover the truth about their world, the Abyss, and the legendary Aces.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Adaptation:

Supporting

Touchi, Hiroki
Japanese

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Staff

Matsumoto, Hideaki

Producer

Kimura, Sora

Assistant Producer

Kanbe, Hiroyuki

Director, Episode Director, Chief Animation Director

Ebina, Yasunori

Sound Director

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Opening Theme

	1: "Plunderer" by Miku Itou (eps 1-11)
	2: "Kokou no Hikari Lonely dark" (孤高の光 Lonely dark)" by Miku Itou (eps 12-24)

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Ending Theme

	1: "Plunderer" by Miku Itou (eps 1)
	2: "Countless days" by Hina (Rina Honnizumi) (eps 2-11)
	3: "Reason of Life" by Hina (Rina Honnizumi), Lyne (Ari Ozawa), and Nana (Shizuka Itou) (eps 12-24)

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Reviews

Jun 24, 2020

810Teams

Not Recommended

“You are the ace I chose.” - Hina

A world ruled by numbers, you gain and lose points for specific things you do. The concept starts out interesting and promising, but the execution of the idea is badly done.

Story - 2/10
When you have a bunch of ideas and want to create something full flavor but what you did is you pour everything in together without proper filtering or organization, Plunderer is a result of that. Compared to food, it looks like a product of someone who doesn’t know how to properly cook.

Plunderer is messy and full of mysteries. Mysteries are getting revealed one by one throughout ... the story. While some revelations make sense, but some are way too absurd. They are way too convenient to be a coincidence, making me think the world is too small, probably not a way to connect everything together. In addition, some mysteries are not being explained properly, they are more like a rough explanation in order to be able to say that the show is not totally illogical.

The overall story is a serious theme but containing multiple weird and off-themed moments, such as cooking competition or drinking competition between characters who were just fighting each other to death.

Animation - 5/10
The animation quality is at the standard level but contains obvious flaws, which are stiff action scenes and intentional chibi-style art. In some scenes of Plunderer, the art turned characters into chibi-style, which I find not necessary, they resemble a lazy work.

Sound - 7/10
Standard theme songs and soundtracks. I am not a sound expert, so I would say that I find nothing outstanding and nothing bugged me.

Characters - 3/10
Plunder gave me a bad first impression. Licht Bach, a portrayal of a true pervert, who wanted to see Hina’s underwear at the first met, which she was a total stranger to Licht at that time. Normal ecchi is fine, but sexual harassment is not something to impress audiences with.

As mentioned in the story section, mysteries are getting revealed one by one throughout the story but having too much coincidence. Those mysteries involve characters and their relationships, which are mostly not convincing in a level that reading spoilers from Fandom does not ruin your enjoyment, but instead become more interesting.

After all, the characters of Plunderer are only tools to make the story proceed. The writing does not make characters important at all. Characters may have a background and unique personality, but their personality has no effect or has nothing to do with the story, which makes them easily replaceable.

Enjoyment - 3/10
The only thing that was able to keep me watching this show is the concept, which nevertheless did not get a proper explanation. I only wanted to see which direction would this mess go.

Recommendations
I do not recommend this to any people who are familiar with anime. If you are still new to anime, Plunder is something you may be able to enjoy.

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Jun 24, 2020

Goober-fish

Not Recommended

Writer James Beckett of AnimeNewsNetwork once said, speaking on the anime “Fire Force”, that it felt like it was written by “two middle-schoolers stacked on top of each other wearing a thick trench coat.” Sorry if I didn’t get that exactly right, James. Can I say the same applies to “Plunderer”? Well, as someone who was once a middle schooler thumping my feet to Slipknot and Green Day as I scrawled in the margins of my homework, I’d like to think my capacity to conjure a competent narrative was at least marginally better than whatever...the fuck I just saw.

I’m going to keep this review ... of Plunderer as brief as possible because I’d rather it vacate the mental real-estate it has occupied in my head-space now that it has finished airing. You think of anime like “One Punch Man” and “Attack on Titan” where absolutely every aspect of production had to fall perfectly into place in order for the celluloid to properly translate to screen, in other words, lightning in a bottle. Plunderer is like the inverse of that, imagine, if you would, a 2-liter bottle of shit filled to its absolute brim over the course of 24 weeks until...well...you get the idea. Plunderer is the type of legendarily bad anime that you only get once in a decade because anything that can go wrong with an anime during its syndication absolutely did go wrong.

Plunderer is juvenile, it seems to be under the impression that a good story is predicated on otherworldly plot-twists, tragic heroes, and romance, but that’s just not the case. At the core of Plunderer’s story is a horribly unlikeable protagonist, Licht Bach. Licht checks just about every box for how not to write a compelling protagonist. He sexually assaults any woman in sight, has a happy-go-lucky attitude about it, and hides behind a shield of tragedy to force some degree of emotion out of the audience.

I’m an unrepentantly perverse and salacious bastard, the furthest thing from a prude, but even I have to draw the line somewhere. For a character like Licht Bach to have as many love interests as your run of the mill harem protagonist is nothing short of insulting. The number of women queued up to swing their legs open for this dude is staggering, it gets to a point where they are actively embracing being sexually assaulted just to have this man’s dick. I don’t normally allow my convictions to bleed into anime, because applying real-world logic to a cartoon can have varying results. But in Plunderer’s case, I just can’t ignore how these female characters are presented, because it’s nothing short of reductive and dangerously exaggerated.

Is the story at least good enough to distract from the chaos of its forced character relations? Well...no, not really. Trying to explain the story of Plunderer would be like asking Charlie Day to expound on the modalities of working in a mail-room. It’s mired in minutiae and messy plotting, so for the sake of it, I’ll highlight some of the essential bullet-points. Licht Bach is some kind of super-soldier from the past that was forced to kowtow to his superiors to spare his peers, he bastardized his ideals when he was forced to kill others even though he was in a fucking military academy, and now in the present when the world is virtually unrecognizable he’s seen as a pariah known as the “Legendary Ace”, also there are aliens involved?

One of my absolute favorite scenes in Plunderer is when the main cast is forced to visit the past and during the school’s opening ceremony, the Commander straight up pops 3 punks in the crowd. It was jaw-dropping, to say the least, but it’s not until after the back and forth with Licht does he reveal that he actually shot them with a paint gun...even though they acted like they were dead the entire time. Like “Oh yeah, golly, I’m not dead!” Seriously, I checked out from this anime when I saw an attack-helicopter slowly rise from the smoke of the abyss.

The music is terribly anachronistic, mundane, and poorly integrated from scene to scene due to poor directing. The animation doesn’t even have to be spoken for in this case, but for the sake of it, I’ll say that Plunderer is so poorly animated that you can count the number of smear-frames per episode on your fingers. The coloring and linework is incredibly flat to the point where this show looks and feels like it was released over a decade ago.

Plunderer is…awful, irredeemably so. But it was never boring, far from it. With a bit of grandad’s cough medicine coursing through my system, it was actually raucous fun. Can I recommend it? Well honestly, that’s for you to decide whether or not I want the rest of you curious viewers at large to...share in my pain.

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Jun 24, 2020

slavemaster_1991

Not Recommended

I was glad to see that the manga I enjoyed was getting an anime adaptation. I was kinda worried it would be mediocre, or maybe it would be just a small 12 episode "prologue" arc or something, but I didn't expect it to be THAT terrible. It really takes some skill to turn a pretty solid manga into this abomination. So here is the list of problems:
1. Visuals. Here it feels exactly as it did with the latest season of Seven Deadly Sins: face animation and emotions are almost non-existant, all cool fights with great moves are a static image + some blinking "special effects" ... (and don't forget screaming AAAAAA for the whole fight). I swear, I have seen gifs with better animation, and to add insult to injury - even manga had better drawn static panels and frames for that exact fights. Why didn't you just colorise it if you didn't want to bother with actual animation? I have no idea. And outside of fights all charachers either barely move or it is animated "on budget" by two-three students who just did a part time job to get some food. It is trully terrible.
2. Sound. There are only 2 types of sound here: so dull you forget it at once and so irritating it makes your ears bleed. First category consists of openings and endings, second - of all the bgm. Military theme was so bad that I nearly skipped all the scenes where it was playing. If visuals were drawn by students, the sound was more likely made by a hobo for a bottle of cheap wine. I think even if you took a cat and pulled its tail - it would still be a better "music".
3. Pacing/story. Boy oh boy, THIS is the problem. The real one. While I have some degree of tolerance to bad looks/sounds, pacing just kills the source completely. Imagine a perfectly normal source, with nice fights, good plot turns and some ecchi jokes. Now take all the ecchi jokes, that take a panel or a page at most (with chapter being about 50) and stretch it to be 5 minutes long in a 20-minute episode. And now tell me, how can any joke keep up if you make it from a 2% time gag to a 25%? The answer is: you should not even try to do it, as this joke will become way too annoying and way too pushy and it simply will not be funny. And it is EXACTLY what they have done. All jokes - stretched, like they wanted to make it a full-time hentai but chickend out after prelude, all worldbuilding - infodumped in a few seconds, all battles consist out of 2-3 "moves", as heroes just repeat some 2-frame animation. Also there are a lot of lost moments, that may not feel like anything but a filler, but later it actually adds some lost elements to puzzle, as some characters did stuff that is really hard to justify without those small elements.
I think I didn't mention a number of smaller issues, but to be honest after mentioned 3 big problems I have already critisized 90% of the anime, at this point any more criticism will be just beating a corpse.

TL;DR: this anime is a horrible adaptation. The only reason I didn't give it the worst score is as a token of appreciation to the source material, wich is good, but this whoole anime is a waste of time, efford (although not much of it) and potential.

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Poll: Plunderer Episode 1 Discussion ( 1 2 3 4 ) Stark700 - Dec 8, 2019	191 replies	by Alelory »» Mar 5, 8:27 PM
Poll: Plunderer Episode 24 Discussion ( 1 2 ) Stark700 - Jun 24, 2020	85 replies	by nghuytoan1993 »» Feb 13, 2:34 PM
Poll: Plunderer Episode 21 Discussion Stark700 - Jun 3, 2020	18 replies	by nghuytoan1993 »» Feb 13, 2:21 PM
Poll: Plunderer Episode 17 Discussion ( 1 2 ) Stark700 - May 6, 2020	54 replies	by nghuytoan1993 »» Feb 13, 11:43 AM
Poll: Plunderer Episode 9 Discussion ( 1 2 ) Stark700 - Mar 4, 2020	70 replies	by nghuytoan1993 »» Feb 13, 7:45 AM

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