Gibiate

To fully understand or rather to fully immerse oneself into the beauty and sublimity that is Gibiate one must have considerable patience and determination to follow through. To depict this in plainer terms: infamous Anime Discord Moderator and desktop wallpaper aficionado Drizzo, once said “You’ll have a harder time watching Gibiate than a 10 hour compilation of Nyan cat.” I was especially intrigued by that statement, so I just had to give this anime a try.

Gibiate follows a group of modern day Japanese militants, two Edo period samurai, a thicc horny monk, a useless teenager, her schizophrenic mom and a smokin’ hot doctor (who ... is also a licensed pilot and a pro sniper apparently) as they embark on their heroic adventure to the Japanese countryside. Their ultimate goal? That is supposedly, to develop a vaccine and use that to save the world from a deadly virus: a disease that turns infected into terrifying monsters called Gibia. However, their journey will not be proven easy for neither themselves nor for us, the viewers. Throughout the story we all get subjected to a variety of “complications” that might deter some from continuing to watch. Those came in a series of: random monologues, painfully dragged out and mostly irrelevant historical flashbacks, and the occasional fight scene with bad CGI monsters. Nothing ever really sticks to the plot for more than five seconds before getting overshadowed by one of these “complications.”

Without diving into too much spoiler territory, I would like to briefly touch on our characters, which have to be the most vital part of every story, unless we’re talking about Gibiate. To give you the rundown, we have our generic overpowered samurai protagonist Sensui Kanzaki, who can one-shot bullet proof monsters with his super sWoRD and his “friend” Sanada Kenroku, who can do the same, but this time with iron wires. These two must protect our useless female protagonist, Kathleen, for reasons unknown to pretty much everyone (probably the writers included). Unfortunately for our samurai friends, Kathleen is only ever good at mentioning the obvious, acting completely oblivious half the time and basically adding zero value to the plot besides “oh look, it’s a waifu and she has uh boobs!” The rest of the cast are too ridiculous to make fun of or too irrelevant to mention. Like seriously, what kind of doctor can pilot a helicopter and shoot guns on target in the middle of a freefall all to save a person that was going to die anyway?

Sometimes I wonder to myself why in god's name I watched 12 episodes of this. I clearly had many problems with Gibiate from the story to the production quality. Nevertheless, I really wanted to make this review short and sweet, so I will be ending it on a moment of self reflection. To sum it up, I consider the show to be a comedic masterclass, but even as a one it falls a bit short because there are instances where it actually tries to be one. The scenes where Gibiate tries to be funny and the ones I found to be the most boring. What it’s really missing aren’t better voice actors, a story that makes sense, deep and impactful themes, multidimensional characters; none of that mumbo jumbo that good Anime usually have. All it needs is the Comedy tag.

After taking everything into consideration, Gibiate is in the purest sense so unbelievably bad it’s actually good. With that in mind, I highly recommend it, easily 9/10, just wash your hands after watching and maybe grab a pillow to shove your head in every time the fight theme plays.

Thank you very much for reading.

Honestly, i discovered that people didn't like this series throught Ex-arm's reviews. Honestly, nothing really bother me that much, if not that the plot was predictable, as any shounen that we all know, and that the fights are meh, but not that bad as to be compare to ex-arm's ...
Or maybe is it because that i listen way more than watch anime ? Anyways, my 6 is a 100% feeling about this show, meaning that, i didn't found any enjoyment in this, but is wasn't that bad all along. I still watch it from the beggining to the actual end. Worst part would be ... misused of the seiyuus for me, and cheap end story, but overall there was hope !

Ah, Gibiate, the show where time-travelling samurai fight bad CGI to save what's left of human world. Then, everyone dies left and right and you leave more empty inside than the animators that phoned in those computer-generated abominations.

I mean, this is kind of a b-movie plot and the series starts with some of that low-budget charm. I also watched it after Ex-arm, so it's hard for shoddy CGI to shock me at this point. However, Gibiate has a unique feature that makes it miserable to watch: the more important the monster, the plotpoint, the scene, the worse it is.

While normal Gibia monsters look ... bad, the "boss" monsters important for the plot are both horrendously designed and so hideously rendered I could barely stand watching them.

While overall writing is cheesy and mediocre at best, the attempts at plot twists and dramatic reveals are so bad I wouldn't be surprised is a 5 year old wrote them.

While animation and pacing are generally meh, the closer the series comes to the climax, the more it pads the episodes with flashbacks and awkward pauses, killing any kind of emotional investment you might still have.

It's also utterly humourless, and generally too dry to laugh at ironically. It's truly a no-fun zone and I would strongly recommend not watching it even out of curiosity. I've seen worse anime both from the technical standpoint and structurally, so I give it a 2, but when rating enjoyment factor, it truly is a 1/10 - pathetic.