Taiban!

While playing AMQ (animemusicquiz, a site where you have to guess from a song what anime it was featured in) you are sometimes bound to come across really obscure titles by choosing the hard option. That’s how I initially came across this one, a girl band anime from a few years ago which didn’t quite pick my attention at the time. After listening to its ending song I decided to give it a shot, more so considering it was available on YouTube and lately series like Bocchi the Rock and Girls Band Cry made me more interested in the genre. Little did I know what ... I was getting into.

For starters, the anime looks like a compilation of cutscenes from a Wii game. This isn’t an exaggeration, it’s the kind of 3D anime with exaggerated gestures all over the place from the hair to the arms. The background is filled with used assets and foggy textures and the camera doesn’t help with the way it either stays too static or slowly pans after a change. Maybe this wouldn’t have been much of a problem if it didn’t come out in 2021, 15 years after the Nintendo console, which leads me to believe there was no budget or something in the production went horribly wrong. As a result, it takes some time to get used to how it looks in order to start focusing on the characters and the story, which even in a badly presented series can sometimes be its saving grace.

Unfortunately the writing wasn’t that versed either. There are four main characters forming a band and along the way they run into some issues regarding their aspirations, motivations and relationships. They each grow with each other and become more mature in the process, expressing that journey through their songs which must have been the plan in theory. However, in reality it falls flat due to pacing issues, some personality quirks that quickly fade and how little time is spent on the song practice itself. There’s too much talking at times and the episodes are on average longer than your typical anime series so the time isn’t seized for what it should be worth. There was even a point in the YouTube series where no more English subtitles were available so I had to infer everything from context. Funnily enough I was able to do so thanks to the predictability of the situations and the aforementioned gestures the characters have.

All of this culminated in a project that got cancelled after 7 episodes leaving no resolution as well as a dead channel and some fans questioning whether what they had watched up until that point had been worth it. Personally, I don’t deem it as bad as other shows I’ve watched, in fact, after the beginning I was starting to question why it wasn’t given a chance to finish. Nevertheless, I can’t really recommend it to anyone at this point with the number of good series they could be watching instead. At the very least it’s free.