RWBY: Hyousetsu Teikoku

I don't really watch seasonal anime anymore. After a solid streak of two years, I started falling behind on weekly shows when life got too busy for me to juggle that form of content consumption, on top of the shows I used to get through the behemoth that is my plan to watch list. But when I heard there was going to be a RWBY anime when I woke up March 25th, made by Shaft of all studios, I thought I'd make an exception for the sake of history.

RWBY is a franchise I have a strange relationship with, it’s been around since I was a ... wee teen. And as I matured, I began to see the series for the faults it had, to the extent that by the time volume four released I had completely lost interest. But I still have fond memories of discussing RWBY's initial run to my best friend at the time in Freshman year English, only a few short weeks before he rescinded from the public education system entirely and was home schooled, because he hated every second of high school from the moment he stepped foot off the bus.

I would never see that kid again, though I did have his number, and one of the last things we talked about before he went radio silent was, funnily enough, RWBY.

I wanted to tell this story to communicate as best as I can that I don't hate RWBY, in fact, despite all of the discourse that has followed the show in last half decade, part of me is ostensibly still interested in the show. In all honesty, part of me was excited, in that I could reconnect with this evanescent figment of my adolescence but in a format that my contemporary self could appreciate. Unfortunately, that goodwill would be slowly tarnished over the course of three months, in short, want my hype back.

RWBY: Ice Queendom, is the worst show I've finished from the last four years. That isn't to say it's the worst show I've seen (Ex-Arm easily takes the cake by miles), but in terms of me sitting down and suffering through an entire obnoxious ugly snorefest for the totality of its runtime, Ice Queendom can go home with that participation trophy. And even though I didn't want to believe it at the time, I could've seen this coming from a mile away even by the announcement, I'll explain why.

The general interest in Ice Queendom mainly belied in two brands: Studio Shaft, and Gen Urobuchi.

Gen Urobuchi is one of the few anime screenwriters’ western fans know by name—due to his work on three highly acclaimed and exceptionally popular original projects or adaptations of things he wrote, Fate/Zero, Psycho-Pass, and Madoka Magica respectively. However, much like the other anime released with Gen's name on them in the near decade since his ostensible departure from the industry, Ice Queendom isn't actually written by the man. In truth, the Ice Queendom’s Series Composer is Tow Ubukata, someone whose shows have never entirely cracked the western market, outside of Psycho-Pass 2 which everyone says is bad. It feels like the only reason he was chosen to be lead writer is just because he has written for Gen projects in the past, and he has somewhat of a relationship with Director Toshimasa Suzuki from Fanir of the Blue Sky. Outside of those two things, I can't tell why they picked him specifically.

It's a shame too, because I personally don't think Ubukata was suited for the show. The pacing, for one, was all over the place. Blazing through a season's worth of content in two and a half episodes, only to then drag out the main arc of the series for eight when it's clear to anyone watching that it wasn't necessary, appearing like a lack of poor planning. On top of that, many of the original characters and concepts found in Weiss' dream, such as the sillies, are to me extremely obnoxious, notwithstanding their names which come off as stiff and pretentious whimsy. What this amounts to, is me saying "This is so stupid" out loud for a majority of the show's runtime, which doesn't really add to a viewer’s experience. Outside of that, the story itself was pretty placid, there really isn't anything to comment on because it's all so uninteresting, the plot gets from A to B fine enough, the characters are largely fine enough. I honestly stopped caring about the plot once the chess pieces started showing up, but it's not like I couldn't follow what was happening. The show thankfully doesn't puddle at the sight of its racism commentary so I have to commend it for that. Though to be fair it's a Japanese anime and my standards for that particular theme are very low. To cut to the chase, Gen was basically used as marketing for the show, more than anything else which sucks to see, given that he's on a level far above what most screenwriters could ever dream of.

If the writing was the sole problem of Ice Queendom, I would've probably given this show a 5 and wouldn't have penned a review, but unfortunately much of my disappointment with Ice Queendom comes from the animation department.

Shaft is somewhat of a darling among anime fans for its experimental but always consistent aesthetic sensibilities, featured in highly acclaimed titles such as Madoka Magica, Sangatsu no Lion, and the 100-episode Monogatari series. Shaft is understood to be a studio always willing to push the envelope as to how anime can be presented, and how digital techniques can be used to disrupt the transient-like motion picture and turn it into something even more absurd and dreamlike without breaking immersion. And I consider myself an anime fan who accepts the medium holistically, I don't need every show to look or move at the level of visual quality or consistency of Kimetsu no Yaiba or Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. But RWBY: Ice Queendom looks like hot garbage, with super inconsistent—if not sometimes atrocious looking character art, with designs that move stiffly like action figures. Animation that starts out solid, but by episode 10 devolves into Yang running in place and having to jump cut away from character movement to save on animation time. The backgrounds look cheap and digital, despite clearly trying their best to be dynamic and interesting, at least in the dream realms. CG that ranges from solid to off-putting when it’s eventually used in the MIDDLE of action sequences (ironic, given that it's RWBY). With the most pedestrian looking storyboarding I have ever seen from Studio Shaft. Honestly, if you looked at the show, outside of episodes 1, 6, and 12, you probably wouldn't even know it's Shaft at all. Episode 10, despite being decently written (It's action so it's hard to mess up), is one of the worst episodes I've anime I've seen in years, because it includes all of the problems I mentioned above.

It's clear that Shaft has fallen on hard times in the last few years, Covid I'm sure not helping this show's production in any way. But I honestly could tell the show's look was going to be a problem just from the staff list alone. Outside of Huke on the designs and the producers, the rest of the head creative staff were people without any serious credits. But with four Chief Animation Directors and six ADs on episode 6 alone, an episode that served as an interlude to cool down the pacing, speaks to me as a deeply troubled production. Even the compositing looks bland, which, given that the director of photography is Takayuki Aizu, who worked the first six entries of the Monogatari series—including the immaculately crafted Kizumonogatari film triology, designates a level of wasted talent that is insanely common in the industry. A problem Shaft was dodging in large part due to the creative visionaries who’ve worked at the studio in the nearly 20 years since the arrival of their golden goose.

Speaking of which, the main concern I had with the staff list of Ice Queendom, outside of Tow Ubukata as the head writer, was the lack of one man, Akiyuki Shinbo.

Akiyuki Shinbo is one of the great outstanding directors in anime's metatextual cannon. Much like other contemporaries of his generation such as Kunihiko Ikuhara or Hideaki Anno, Shinbo is an animation savant who genuinely tries to push the cinematic limitations of anime as far as he can. One of the main reasons Yu Yu Hakusho holds up visually as well as it does is because he seemingly became the most influential creator on the project despite NOT being the lead director. It's unclear these days how much work Shinbo even does at shaft, given that his role as "chief director" on shows tends to be quite nebulous, nevertheless Shaft's style exists because of Shinbo. But Shinbo wasn't to be found on Ice Queendom, which surprised me at the time but honestly shouldn't have. Shaft has made five serious projects since Zoku Owarimonogatari in 2018 and Shinbo only worked on one of them. If this indicates anything, it's that Shaft has been in a massive identity crisis since their staff bottomed out due to their workplace environment being uniquely poor for the industry, and that's REALLY saying something.

By episode 7, while stewing in a regret-filled overtired haze, I asked myself a simple question, why in god's name was this made? On the surface I could understand, because of RWBY's popularity in Japan, and so the boys back in Austin could claim that "there's an anime about a show I made" to impress people at parties, a 2D RWBY anime sounded like a natural conclusion. But after seriously considering it, the question still stands, WHY was this show made? RWBY as a series has been out for so long that anyone who would have been interested, has already seen it. So outside of emboldening a preexisting fanbase, and maybe reminding a few thousand people whom, like me, don't really think about the franchise that often, the brand is not expanding its audience in any significant way. So, the production seems almost a bit frivolous, that is, until you look at one of the top companies funding the show—Good Smile Company, an anime merch distributor that specializes in figures.

Meaning, effectively, RWBY: Ice Queendom is a fancy toy commercial.

That isn't to say that anime designed to sell toys is intrinsically bad, I mean just look at every mecha since the 70's. But with Ice Queendom particularly, it coats the project in a kind of cynicism that becomes apparent when paying attention. That's why every character gets an alternative outfit, if not multiple outfits, with slightly different weapons than the normal series. A bunch of the dumb anime exclusive concepts or characters suddenly make sense, in that they are created to have models made based off of their design. Not to say the entire project is cynical, Takanori Aki stated in an interview about Ice Queendom that the idea of a RWBY anime came from a correspondence he had with Monty Oum following the release of volume 1, so in some loose way the show was made to posthumously fulfill a promise. But nevertheless, the justification for a RWBY spin-off show was to excavate for new ways to merchandize the RWBY brand. It leads to a show whose intention is messy from the beginning and it becomes apparent in the final product.

RWBY: Ice Queendom ultimately leaves me disappointed, which is what I really didn't want from this show, I genuinely desired to like it. But I knew even in March that there was a solid chance the series was going to be bad, I just purposely looked over the red flags. What surprises me about the show after finishing it, is that I didn't hate it more; given everything I've written, I honestly should give Ice Queendom a lower score. However, reflecting on my experience watching Ice Queendom, I can recognize times where I was somewhat enjoying myself, where my own irritation washed away for a few brief moments. I remember specifically in the final episode, when RWBY threw down a binder on the lunch table and emphatically announced about her plan to have a best day ever, followed by this show's luxurious rendition of one of the most iconic sequences of RWBY, I can't help but admit I had a tiny smile on my face. A small memento from a time in which I innocently liked the writing of basically everything I watched, the sentimentality of the sequence in light of everything that has happened in the years since the volume's airing definitely added to the effect.

And the show's ability to sincerely tap into the small twinges of nostalgia I have, with the earnestness of Ruby Rose herself—the least amount of manipulation intended, is something that I at the very least, can respect.

Have a nice day.

RWBY: Ice Queendom is the weirdest adaptation I ever saw. Imagine if Naruto was nothing but introduction and then non stop filler. At this point it isn't an adaptation, but more of a RWBY inspired anime. So is this fanfiction any good? Well to start off this anime is clearly made for those who watched the original RWBY with skipped content and rushed relationships which makes it a lot worse if you are going into it blind.

Introduction is more of a rundown of events and feels rushed as anime wants to get as fast as possible to the dream arc. RWBY is introducing concepts and ... characters that while making sense for the original story are completely unnecessary for new content making things needlessly complicated. At the same time in those first three episodes we don't get enough from the characters to establish their strong commitment to each other that will be so important later on.

Original content of Ice Queendom is quite bizarre to say the least. Storyline is constructed to explore strong links between the characters, but those strong links weren't really established in the first place so we have to just accept them. Another problem is the fact that it obviously feels like a side quest. With none of the established antagonists it is easy to figure out that beside relationship nothing else is progressing in the actual story. We know that everyone is going to be ok and we don't care about the drama between them. Plot that should have been a side story in a far future is taking the center stage which is hurting this adaptation. And why are we doing this side story? To explore wacky ideas writers put in. As we are dealing with a dream anything is possible: cool character designs, interesting concepts, strange society, game like mechanics, plot conveniences and disregard for reality. This weird dream world in itself is a very cool idea which unfortunately is being undermined by its place in the story.

Comparison between Ice Queendom and the original also doesn't work out in the animes favor. Voice acting while ok by itself is nowhere near the original one, music is much less memorable and action while sometimes good is mostly mediocre. Animation quality is surprising as you would expect anime from Shaft to have top quality, instead RWBY often felt cheap with only select few moments having a spark of brilliance.

RWBY is a piece of fanservice/fanfiction which can be appreciated by the fans, but can't hold up as a standalone story and as such watching it without knowing anything about RWBY will be at best confusing and at worst a waste of time.

On an international stage, it's of utmost doubt that Western media would have enough influence to trickle its presence down to Japan, and throughout the decades many have made its way into various forms of media. But anime? Never in a million years...that is until now with (Rest In Peace) Monty Oum's highly praised animated series that is RWBY. And yes, even though RWBY had already made its influence on Japan years before, it's for the same exact reason that Japan LOVES the hell outta RWBY, so much so that Ice Queendom was commissioned and was in planning for a few years before it got ... the announcement in early of this year.

***Side note: You can read the ANN interview (which was well documented) on the development of Ice Queendom, and normally the details are filled here, but there's so much insight to share that I will spare the explanation in this review (some excerpts will be taken and reviewed here).

It must be said that every die-hard RWBY fan will tell you to go watch the original 3 volumes in its entirety, and this is mentioned with merit that this "canon-adjacent" series tries to pump as much content as it does, trying to ensure in a way that the introductory stages don't feel rushed (which it certainly does). And as scriptwriter Tow Ubukata and executive producer Mitsutoshi Kubota mentions in the interview, that the first 3 episodes a.k.a the 3-episode rule is the trickiest to lay down the narrative since the original RWBY actually took time to flesh out its story and pacing beats, and all of this (Volumes 1 to 2, scraping Volume 3's beginnings) to be cut short in 3 episodes of 20 mins runtime each (minus the OP & ED) isn't a cinch and was at times, hard to overcome and quote "almost like we were making a (recap) movie". It's only at Episode 4 onwards that the Ice Queendom's story starts, and this is stereotypical fare for anime standards, and progress the story however they wish according to the concepts that were laid down by the scriptwriters.

And for better or worse, the scriptwriting in RWBY: Ice Queendom may have been its own Achilles' Heel into trying to make RWBY an anime where all people can enjoy despite its origins. First and foremost, the segregation between "Dust", "Semblance" and pure magic for newcomers (like myself) would've been better integrated if they had more time to flesh this pointer out (which they did only basically describe but didn't explain no more), and then again, only the die-hard RWBY fans can easily identify which is which. Secondly, the Grimm is and always has been the core feature of RWBY, and Tow Ubukata's version of a "Nightmare" Grimm that branches out a newly developed side story certainly is no gold, no silver nor bronze at best, but just getting Rooster Teeth's approval for a self-contained series is just good enough, which basically hints that people crave for more RWBY content, even if it's a spin-off or what-have-yous to at least earn the commendation of the new fans. This is especially hinted towards established RWBY fans whom already have a firm grasp on the Grimm, and the Nightmare Grimm that's keeping it true to the Rooster Teeth formula while being the basis for the new story, certainly helps set a story path to come for Ice Queendom.

Don't get me wrong, the belief that Gen Urobuchi is still "the man, the legend" himself that has created countless memorable series over the years, but the fact that he's largely worked like a freelancer who's more into animation concepts since the mid-2010s (as is such the case for Ice Queendom here), there's a noticeable gap to fill. And this leaves the scriptwriting work to others like Tow Ubukata, whom was a cinch for freelance director Toshimasa Suzuki, who has worked with him in the past on Soukyu no Fafner (Fafner in the Azure) and Heroic Age, and the stage is set for Urobuchi's concept story that would turn out to be Weiss's dream sequence of her own Ice Queendom reign. So, a recap if the gist isn't understood: Gen Urobuchi on the concepts, and Tow Ubukata (plus the rest) on taking all of the concepts and making it into a cohesive narrative while adding his own ideas.

Obviously, in terms of production focal points, there is a distinct divide between both Western and Japanese counterparts, such as is with the case of racism and discrimination between Weiss Schnee and Blake Belladona, something that is not widely shown or emphasized in Japanese media, and certainly something that's very new in terms of concept for Ubukata and his team. And taking thos into focal aspect on Ice Queendom, it was done decently to show the disparity between Weiss and Blake being that of the discrimination between humans and Faunus (creature-like humans). As for Weiss's dream sequence and introducing the standalone character that is the professional Nightmare Grimm hunter Shion Zaiden, I don't know about you, but even by anime standards, say what the staff will about concocting a great story that'll satiate old and new fans, it's certainly a mixed bag towards the average side. Trying to nail a canonical story within the space of the remainder of 8 episodes feels like a chore to watch that's largely no thanks to the amount of padding, which might suggest that Tow Ubukata's story is "all show and no go/substance". I would've liked to believe that this story should have been just as grand, or at least matched to Monty Oum's standards of storytelling despite the cultural difference even if the original creator isn't around anymore and supervised by series writer Miles Luna, together with the production team with original character designer Huke (who's the original creator and character designer for Black Rock Shooter). But like said series, it's hard nailing what a side story wants to be, and for established classics, it almost screams like there shouldn't be any room for error, and unfortunately for both, Ice Queendom (like Dawn Fall) got the short end of the stick as a standalone series that's "connected, but not connected" to the main plot.

This spatial disconnect also takes a nosedive in the production schedule of Ice Queendom. Due to COVID, the staff were all working separately, and this is apparent in the final product's showcase where there are many inconsistencies with its overall presentation, despite the fact that it's Shaft at the helm of it all with its unique levels of "in your face" sakuga and animation to boot. However, when even the OP has to use recycled assets from the show to showcase its best efforts, I think this speaks for itself of the endless arguments that "animation didn't carry the show" (and so too, did the story), something which cannot be revised. It's such a shame, that it took 9 years for RWBY to reach from wonky-ass Ameerican-ized 3DCG to stylish 2D with the CG mix, and then even again got me thinking that how Monty Oum animated it (that was really ahead of its time) just looks so much better than the 2D treatment that it got here just for flashes and hooks.

Where Ice Queendom didn't skimp out was with the OST, which certainly was one way to make it a Japanese Nippon-ified version of RWBY for the fans at home. It wasn't a surprise that Ice Queendom was actually hyped up before the pre-screening the week before the official release, and the best thing that came out of it was the involvement with Ryo Takahashi's Void_Chords for the OST, with a specialized song for the OP, which actually slaps. "Beyond Selves" is just perfect at how I imagined RWBY was like in the transition from the US of A to Japan, which speaks volumes for the fans in Japan to get a banger of an accompanying OST just to energize its action. Saori Hayami's "Awake" for the ED, I thought it was fantastic as well for literally being the Japanese version of Whitney Houston for high-pitched insane-but-clear vocals that's a novelty to be praised.

When it all comes down to it, RWBY: Ice Queendom is in a league of its own. And what I meant was barring all of the various media affiliated with the IP, this standalone story just allows me to take notes that animation isn't gonna carry the entire show if even one aspect of it screws up a.k.a a shallow story, some janky character development etc. The era of Shaft being the standard of animation when everything else is shallow has long since gone, and good luck trying to convince global fans that RWBY will always be superior in its home country.

A better analogy would be this: You think that the Earth is flat, but you ain't seen how the Earth is round yet a.k.a the disparity of differences between Western and Eastern media.

The original RWBY was an anime-inspired western production that became a sensation among a lot of early Rooster Teeth fans. It lacked the polish but it was making it up with passion. Then the original creator died and those who carried on with the show made a huge clusterfuck that alienated most fans with its loose plot and lack of direction. The anime version of RWBY seemed to be a reboot at first. They remade the early episodes with a far higher budget and expanded certain events for fleshing out the characters and for introducing the world in a smoother way. On paper it was ... a remake that could surpass the original if they intended to rewrite the rest of the plot in a more tight and comprehensible way. Something which they didn’t.

Plot-wise, the anime starts as a fast-paced reboot and after a few episodes turns into a slow-paced side story that can very easily be labeled filler. Everything takes place in a dreamland, meaning whatever happens in it has no importance and no effect on the world of the series. It matters for the character who dreams of the world and it helps in the fleshing out of her character, but that aside it has no impact on the events of the core plot. That effectively killed most of the interest in the show since the community didn’t feel like it was important to know what happens in a damn dream that will pop out of existence as easily as it was created.

Visually-wise, the most obvious change was the switch from motion capture which was making everyone to be constantly moving or shaking even when they weren’t talking or fighting, to typical android animation that has the characters being frozen when they speak. So basically, everyone moves a lot less and the explosions are a lot more impressive. Aesthetically-wise though, this anime has no value. The appeal of the original was an amateur creating a low budget show, inspired by everything he liked about anime, back when Rooster Teeth was a studio by fans for fans, and not the failure of a corporate cashgrab at the brink of collapse it ended up becoming. Basically, being cheap and cringy was part of the appeal of RWBY, since you were seeing the passion of the creator more than you were seeing the overall quality of the show. The new version on the other hand is clean, made by a corporate studio, with a mainstream appeal in mind. Even if you try it out without knowing anything about the original it will not feel special in any way, it’s another fighting chicks anime in a medium with hundreds of similar shows that will come and go before you know it. And sure, you can still enjoy it for the occasional sakuga moments even if they are nothing special when you compare them with something like Symphogear.

Speaking of sakuga, there’s not that much of it. The first episodes have most of it and then the animation quality gets halved as soon as the dream filler begins. Supposed the pandemic was the cause for the sudden drop in quality but the end result would be bad either way since this show can’t compete with its contemporaries no matter what it does. Plus it doesn’t reuse the same soundtrack. You could describe the original as having passable animation and plot but the music score was amazing. The anime version doesn’t have it, it replaced it with generic and forgettable songs that alienated the fans even further.

As a whole, anime RWBY was a dud. The fandom expected a better retelling of the western version and all they got was a stiff-looking filler arc. Without sticking out from other fighting chicks anime, and with the plot going nowhere, it became yet another throwaway series that everyone forgot almost immediately.

TL;DR Monty Oum's Legacy deserves better.

Story: If you are here for story go watch the OG on youtube. There is more detail as the new anime is rushing the first 2 volumes in 2-3eps. It is the same plot other wise.

Audio: The sound effects are dull and just stock SFX from a cheap library. Along with the timing being off or the wrong effect being used. It is likely to be "fix" when the DVD comes out.

They also changed how most of the guns sound and shoot making Blake's MAC 10 full auto into a generic semi-auto 9mil, Yang's pump-action shotgun gauntlets into ... a cannon, Ruby's 50 caliber sniper rifle into a laser gun, and Nora's grenade launcher now sounds like a magical girl attack... This is a change for the worse and I don't see anyone fixing this.

Them not using the original OST is probably the dumbest thing they could have done. Not using "Red like Roses" is silly but to go in a completely different direction and make something akin to the Persona 5 intro with "Beyond Selves" is a complete failure by the audio director. Not only does it show that you don't understand to your target demographic, it shows a complete misunderstanding of the source material. From Power Metal to Jazz/pop. Disappointing.

The rest of the OST is just as disappointing as the intro. To put it bluntly I haven't heard one Kick Drum go in during a fight scene so I don't care. Do you know the first few seasons of RWBY they used the OST to accent each fight letting slow parts of the fight hold a note and the action parts of the fight increase tempo and intensity to match. Well the new anime decided that generic rock music just play would be the best way to go.

Animation: Congratulation shaft you managed to adapt one thing from the original. Having really poor animation quality that only gets better during the fight scenes! Sadly you didn't match the quality of one guy from 2012. When Shaft was announced as the animation studio behind this project, people thought we were going to get a show that looked like Bakemonogatari. Instead we got a show that looks like Pani Poni Dash! Okay that is a bit of a stretch but my point being made is that they did not meet expectations with animation quality.

For a show that is rushing through its adaptation material quickly the shots in the show all move really slowly. There's a scene that takes place at the end of the second episode of the new show and in the 8th episode of the original show. It's the scene where Ruby jumps onto Blake's elastic thing to launch herself at a flying grim. In the original show it takes about 15 seconds from the moment she touches the band to launching herself. In the new show it takes almost 30 seconds. I don't know how they made an abridge sequence take longer than the original. Oh wait I do it's because they're not animating everything instead they're just cutting to random close-ups and “implied shots” where you get to see a still or only a few frames of Animation instead of getting the see the cool thing happen. I would have really liked to see the cool thing happen. The choreographed fight scenes in the OG RWBY were its bread and butter. In the new show you can barely keep track of where characters are let alone having the semblance of pacing and choreography implemented into a fight scene.

Overview: This show feels like the creative directors were told to make it look like an American cartoon from the mid 2000s. I could see the new show appearing alongside Ben 10 and the kids next door. The new show feels like a cash grab but I don't know who is making the money I just know I feel ripped off.

I have seen the first three episodes. I recommend watching the original series instead of this anime thus far, as the anime expects you to know things, but is also... So low quality.

The rush of stuffing 2 volumes into three episodes shows. The animation is lazy and has literally no effort, animations aren't played even when the sound for them is, character's aren't lip-synced, character's run animations are placed over the background layer which sounds good until there's a pillar in their way that should've blocked them out. The quality is just... Not good. The story is even more rushed, as character development is scattered ... across the place, to the point where it doesn't even make sense. Music is lackluster apart from openings and endings, or just not even there, or improperly used. Character's defining moments from volume 1 and 2 are erased, and it's just not all there. Comedy is removed, a LOT of comedy is just fucking removed! Lines are even added that make little to no sense as to why they were added, and to add to the rushed-ness, what doesn't help, is adding new stuff in the middle of it! Are they trying to destroy the quality?... The only good part is the sound design.

Maybe it will get better once it goes off on it's own, but for now, it's not good at all. I recommend waiting until the rest comes out, and for you to go watch RWBY Volume 1 and Volume 2 of the ORIGINAL series, and just skipping these three episodes.

*spoilers for RWBY Volume 1 and Hyousetsu Teikoku, TL;DR for this behemoth at the bottom*

Before dissecting what makes RWBY: Ice Queendom such a nightmare, there’s one thing that has to be discussed, and it’s that for both us fans who stuck with the original series since the early days, and the team behind the franchise’s inception, this show is a dream come true. When Monty Oum created RWBY and got his friends (Miles Luna and Kerry Shawcross) to bring his ideas to script in the early 2010s, he provided several anime such as Cowboy Bebop as homework so his friends could get more acquainted with ... his ideas and vision. RWBY was always inspired by anime as well as anime-like games such as Blazblue, with entire scenes and fighting styles being lifted from those aforementioned titles, among others over the years.

When the four main girls of the series got to be part of Blazblue Cross Tag Battle in 2019, one can only imagine how happy those friends must have been, keeping the series and Monty’s ideas afloat 4 years after his tragic and sudden passing in 2015. Likewise, even with the troubled production that was no-doubt hampered by COVID-19, RWBY becoming the very thing that inspired it should be seen as a testament to how far the dream of a man and his friends has gone.

Furthermore, fans of the show have needed something to lift their spirits up in years, and no, the Cross Tag inclusion doesn’t count given its own controversies regarding the handling of the RWBY cast (among other things). RWBY has long since abandoned its school roots in favor of an adventure series, and most of the later volumes have justifiably received large amounts of flak compared to the early entries. Adding how COVID-19 impacted the production of Volume 8 and how for the first time, a volume had to be split in half and the release of the next volume would be delayed by an entire year. After the rough road fans have endured following Monty’s death and the myriad controversies that have plagued both the show and the company that produced it (Rooster Teeth), this show’s announcement must have seemed like a beacon of hope.

Unfortunately, we had to learn that damn near ¼ of the show would be spent recapping the first volume of the show before launching into its own original arc.

Let’s not play fools, RWBY is an awful, broken murikanime that has lost any of the life and charm that kept it afloat during its early days. None of the writers, not even Monty, have ever had a good grasp on the characters or setting they wrote, with retcon after retcon, character shift after character shift, and the myriad of ridiculous time-wasters and other baffling decisions that made Volumes 5-8 so especially galling. Even back in Volumes 1-3, most of the aforementioned issues were apparent. Hell, the fact that the OG writers decided to add an overarching subplot about human on faunus racism leading to a civil rights turned extreme terrorist group into their pseudo-magical school adventure fantasy and that it was reportedly inspired by their understanding of the Black Panthers, should set a military base worth of alarm bells inside your head. Amidst all the sloppy, amateurish high-school sitcom-esque writing where character arcs are horribly clunky at the best of times, we have racism and bigotry to sloppily contend with.

It’s important to highlight much of what makes RWBY so bad even from the early outset in order to show where Ice Queendom stacks up in comparison, and how it somehow manages to be even worse. However, one must start with the obvious aspects this show improves upon. Where Volume 1 started with Ruby busting a shop robbery ala Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, Ice Queendom decides to flesh out Ruby and her family on the day of the event, providing some extra pathos and grounding to her character while also taking the time to do the same for Weiss regarding the White Trailer. To hype up the then-upcoming main series back in 2013, four trailers were produced to focus on one of the main leads each, and given that Ice Queendom focuses more on Weiss, focusing on her trailer and expanding upon it was a smart decision. Furthermore, the original series pretty much only has Blake and Weiss have any discussion on the White Fang nonsense and how it has led to Weiss and her family company’s racism towards the faunus, whereas Ice Queendom lets Ruby and especially Yang weigh in more on those topics. As such, the girls have more agency on one of the main sources of the group’s many fractures throughout their early escapades at Beacon Academy. Sure, Volume 1 should have had more of said pathos and agency to begin with, but that does mean that both in subtle and more overt ways, Ice Queendom improves on a few of the main show’s shortcomings.

Alas, the show somehow manages to be so much worse than what it covers and spins off from. Let’s start with how the show’s bigger issues affect the V1 material before delving into how the new content suffers from similar problems.

The show has some of the worst pacing in an anime, period. Hell, Sword Art Online, a show infamous for its first arc being time-skips and rushed ideas galore, has better pacing. Volume 1 was almost 2 hours long, though Ice Queendom opts to skip most of one infamously bad arc, so the 67 minutes that make up IQ’s first 3 episodes cover around 90 minutes worth of material. However, it’s already been established that they also cover the White Trailer. Ideally, given that the show often combined scenes together, the show would be able to cover what it’s working within a reasonable amount of time, but there were two gigantic wrenches thrown into the cogs of the machine.

For some ungodly reason, episode 1 decided to cover and expand upon the Black Trailer where Blake defects from the White Fang, even though the show provides more than enough information on why she left that sinking ship of ever-worsening morality to restart her life in a more honest way at Beacon. They covered this in episode 1, when, if there was any place to put it, episode 3 would fit the bill as that is where the White Fang and racism ideas in V1 are brought to the forefront. That’s about 5 minutes of material that could have been spaced out better to set up the big forest test the group must pass in ep 2 to establish teams, so that ep 2 can have more time to breathe when adapting that mini-arc. As it stands, several explanations for why characters do the things they do such as being forced to permanently team up upon eye-contact are tossed aside. Sure, they added one scene to explain how Weiss and Ruby wound up encountering a giant nevermore, but everything else suffers as the pacing has to tighten up far too much for comfort.

Episode 3 has it so much worse with its big wrench. In episode 2, they introduce an original character looking for an anime original type of grimm known as nightmare grimm, and both Weiss and Jaune find themselves affected entirely offscreen with weird, mysterious markings showing up on them out of nowhere. Cue the middle ⅓ of episode 3 being original material of Jaune being trapped in a nightmare by said grimm and the new huntress sending Jaune’s teammates to help him. Even discounting how only close friends can enter even though Jaune’s team does after only a day of them teaming up and having barely any time shown getting to know each other, this entire sequence is a rushed disaster focusing on Jaune’s insecurities regarding his disappointment, which have two tremendous issues of their own. Firstly, given that Jaune’s arc with his bully was skipped and only the parts of him getting whooped by the man and later having a talk with his teammate Pyrrha were kept, this means that the explanation of him forging transcripts to sneak into the elite Beacon Academy were skipped. A core aspect of his insecurities which explains why he is unusually weak at combat and ignorant about basic mechanics such as a person’s aura, is skipped in favor of general shittalking by suits of armor before he is quickly rescued. Secondly, the effects of this original scene being inserted here end up resulting in the stories covered in the first and last ⅓ of the episode being utterly eviscerated.

Weiss has two problems the show tackles relating to her stubbornness and lack of respect, those being her refusal to accept Ruby as her team leader, and her racism towards faunus such as Blake (who she didn’t know was one until ¾ into episode 3). The first part of episode 3 has her finding herself increasingly annoyed at Ruby’s behavior before snapping at her, leading to the two getting talks from their professors on their weaknesses and lack of faith before they make up at the end of what was a single episode of RWBY Vol 1. Originally, we saw how Weiss' ideas for the group's living room arrangements got vetoed the morning before class began proper, as well as Ruby’s myriad antics within the classroom which led to Weiss getting angry at Ruby and deeming her childish and incompetent even if she was still in the wrong for being so confrontational so quickly. Here, we only see Ruby dozing off in class and backseating Weiss during her demonstration as opposed to the many times Ruby goofed off. Combined with how oddly warm Weiss was at the start of the episode, now it just feels like Weiss is almost entirely in the wrong, so the scenes with the professors talking to them work so much less and the complicated reigniting of the conflict given both girls’ issues comes off as lesser if not senseless. As such, when Weiss gives Ruby a specific cup of coffee –that she asked RWBY about in V1 instead of somehow already knowing here– after seeing Ruby having passed out during intensive night studying, there’s even less impact than before.

The last ⅓ of ep 3 has the arrival of stowaway Sun and the fallout of several dust robberies trigger the White Fang conversation and heated arguments regarding Weiss’ racism, her baggage, and Blake’s baggage before she snaps and outs herself as a (former) member and dips. The bulk of the material with the girls is actually improved, but then we get the climax. In Volume 1, Roman Torchwick, the criminal boss from early in the volume, reappears with his White Fang members (for reasons that don't get explained here or make sense when they do in Volume 2) to rob a Schnee Dust cargo boat before Blake, Sun, Ruby, and their new friend Penny all arrive to fight him, in that order, after Weiss and Yang discuss Blake’s reveal and fleeing. Not only is the ensuing spectacle the best fight in Volume 1, Ruby re-encountering Roman provided some semblance of natural conclusion, and Penny forcing him and his team back after revealing her OP robot powers was a fun cherry on top that explains why he did, in fact, have to retreat. Ice Queendom skips EVERYTHING in favor of cutting to Penny having swords and rocket feet out of nowhere with Roman retreating from what we didn’t get to see, completely deflating any and all tension and spectacle leading to everyone’s reunion. Perhaps if Jaune’s nightmare plot was removed from ep 3 and turned into its own episode immediately after the V1 material ends, there would have been enough time to give these other parts of the episode the time they desperately deserved and allow for things to breathe and make sense…well, more sense than they do now, given that RWBY Volume 1 is still broken. Maybe if we had 4 episodes instead of 3, many of the problems would be alleviated, but given how troubled production was, perhaps that wouldn't have turned out well, either.

Alas, one can make the argument of "ofc the recap content is bad, it's adapting RWBY, the original stuff is probably better". Yeah, it is, inherently. This arc isn’t horribly rushed. However, most other issues remain, but transitioning into why they exist in the current arc and what said arc is even meant to be about requires acknowledging one more weakness that both V1 and Ice Queendom’s 3rd episode share. Even though Blake was the most active in confronting Weiss’ racist views before running away, it’s only through Ruby and especially Yang that Weiss starts to reconsider by the time everyone reunites with Blake. Perhaps having Weiss stumble upon the battle with Roman and the supposed White Fang or something could have been the final push she needed to reevaluate both Blake and the faunus at large, but as it stands, she only gets the ball rolling and gets everyone to look for her and make up. In the main series, this is how Volume 1 ends before Volume 2 has her Kirito it up by having already developed offscreen so she can immediately be a more pleasant person. The majority of Ice Queendom is an interquel theoretically designed to fix this issue by further delving into her headspace and using V1’s content as a jumping off point to begin showcasing that offscreen development to bridge the gap between the two volumes. In fact, the finale is dedicated to focusing on early Volume 2 content, further lending credence to this idea.

To get to the meat of the issues with how they handled said idea, let’s not dwell in matters like how the mechanics of the nightmare grimm world things Jaune and Weiss have in terms of how the characters are affected by the victim’s perception are inconsistent between the two. Nor should we focus too hard on how nothing about new character Shion’s semblance and overall powers make sense in the context of RWBY’s world. RWBY’s worldbuilding is notoriously broken, with contradictions and retcons all over the place, and the real issues start with the mere conceit of how things here are meant to play out. If you haven’t seen RWBY Volume 1 it can be easy to conclude that neither Weiss nor Jaune should have had anyone close enough to rescue them at the point in which they’re trapped. This is because Ice Queendom completely skips over the throwaway line explaining that there was a time skip of a few weeks between the Ruby and Weiss leadership spat story and the rest of what episode 3 covers. As such, the mere conceit only works on any level if you assume that the V1 continuity and Ice Queendom’s continuity are the same despite all the subtle and less than subtle alterations. Better make your peace with it pronto cuz while Jaune’s nightmare lasts 8 minutes, Weiss’ lasts for 8 whole episodes. Both have plenty of baggage to unpack but since they cut out what would have substantiated Jaune’s deal for the sake of brevity, we’re gonna spend an eternity with Weiss’ dream. In an instant, the show goes from being incomprehensibly fast-paced to being unbearably slow, and the fact that neither Yang nor Blake jump in immediately like Ruby did so that we can drag things out longer doesn’t leave a positive impression of the arc’s start.

The dreams also muddle what is the real person trapped in the dream and what is a predatory version of them and their insecurities about both themselves and others created by the grimm. The idea does explain why Weiss seems out of character in her dream after a while, and the dream settings do allow for some neat main series callbacks while theoretically allowing for more insight into their character with their interpretations of characters invading them and how those who do are altered to Weiss’ perception of them. It does get rather baffling when Team JNPR gets thrown into the mix, especially with Weiss’ portrayal of Pyrrha. Said depiction doesn’t work on a textual level given she’s in the dummy jail with the rest of her team despite being idolized by Weiss, and even on a subtextual level of Pyrrha being this girl alone on her figurative pedestal and how she sings “Mirror Mirror” to convey it…why would Weiss know that? Even going the route of projection given that Weiss has sung songs for her family in the main series, it’s still such a threadbare connection that even discounting how it can only come about with knowledge of later mainline RWBY volumes, it's such a threadbare, tenuous reach that the non-sequitur event is perhaps the most puzzling moment in the show. Hell, even the later potential explanation of Weiss wanting to keep the visages of people she cares about trapped doesn’t work because she barely got to interact with anyone in Team JNPR barring like 2 minor conversations with Pyrrha and Jaune. What, did they do all of that OFFSCREEN, like in REGULAR RWBY?! Fuck off with that shit!

Needless to say, even though the bullshit per minute quota is mildly lowered for the big arc compared to the V1 retread, the show’s still dumb. It does eventually try to develop Ruby’s insecurities about being a leader. The execution is…fine, minus how Ruby doesn’t even remotely feel like any version of her from the show at this point as she feels more and more like a stock heroine who cries a lot. A lot of her early V1 quirks like her asocial nature and love of weapons also had to get dropped given how late V1 practically rewrote her entirely. Everyone else also feels like facsimiles of their main series counterparts, like Blake being ridiculously cold at first before being just there, Ruby feeling a lot less homely in her childlike manner of optimism, and Weiss being weirdly too warm and sanitized compared to her V1 self.

Furthermore, exploring Weiss’s family baggage in a weird, loosely canon interquel is a bit of a tricky prospect, as we aren't allowed to learn anything important that won't come up in later volumes otherwise it would have to and thus make no sense here, but it can still allow the others to get to know her more. Unfortunately, they hardly expand on any of Team JNPR, that group’s dynamics, or how they interact with members of Team RWBY considering they didn’t get to do that all too much until Volume 4, and with only Jaune being able to tag along halfway through the show, the rest don’t get to do anything. It’s especially annoying considering Weiss idolized Pyrrha and empathizes with the idea of being isolated via being put on a pedestal, yet they never get to interact past episode 2, which, again, is volume 1 content. The fact that a non-speaking dream version of Pyrrha has more involvement than the girl herself is criminal.

Neither the old writers, nor script writer and series composition writer Tow Ubukata have any understanding of RWBY’s cast and it shows with how utterly stilted and devoid of any semblance of expressiveness or banter almost everyone is 99% of the time. It honestly makes the entire excursion feel like a waste of time, as there’s almost no real expansion of any character or dynamic, and it doesn’t even remotely develop Weiss, either. Weiss doesn’t actively grow or struggle with curbing her family-ingrained bigotry, she gets trapped and warped into a muddle perversion of herself who has to be rescued. Any insight that can be gleamed is utterly minimal, and once the arc is over, it’s clear that the dream story has just been one useless cul-de-sac not actually progressing anything. If it weren’t for episode 12 FINALLY progressing that shit for the first time by having Weiss properly make up with Blake after the final V1 storyline and later sit with Sun while her friends question if she’d be comfortable doing that, the entire purpose of the show would have been completely and utterly wasted! Now it’s just mostly wasted…

Speaking of the arc’s conclusion, the latter half just devolves into contrivances galore. Critical explanations are overlay delayed, important items to keep the characters safe and alive crop up outta nowhere for the sake of plot armor, and apparently the Jaune nightmare grimm that was imprisoned wasn’t even taken out for over a day for literally no reason other than because the writers needed it to be given to Blake as a last-ditch cop-out effort to help Weiss and make Blake the final boss in the “Weiss Struggles To Not Be Douchebag Hitler” show. It’s nothing short of maddening. By this point, a lot of critical pieces of information the show previously used as tension against the characters and their lives just get discarded for no good reason other than “the plot said so”, as is tradition for RWBY.

Honestly, even if the show was consistently well-animated, which it isn’t, it’s hard to say that Ice Queendom would be any fun. While the characters were jittery and not well-established for the most part, what made the early volumes of RWBY fun was the comedy and the few character dynamics that did naturally exist and result in banter. The show wasn’t exactly batting a thousand regarding its comedy, but there are some legitimately funny moments here and there thanks to how characters like Nora were presented, and how the show took the time to show its cast chilling, throwing pillows, getting quippy and smarmy, etc. Ice Queendom is just so unbearably dry that all of that gets thrown out the window, so the more in-your-face wildcards like Nora get toned down to oblivion and said moments of life got removed entirely, Attempts at jokes are few and far between given how stilted, stoic, and stock everyone is. Outside of a cute nod to V1’s background shadow people in episode 2, even chuckle-worthy moments are scarce enough to be counted in one hand. The only one with any life to her is Yang, at least until episode 12 when the show finally lets the girls be cheeky dickheads to each other and get into lively food fights and whatnot. Still, it’s not through sitting through over several unbearable and lifeless storylines just to get to the finish line and start seeing Ice Queendom attempt to have fun.

Another contributing factor to the lack of fun in this show is its visuals, which are woefully inconsistent. Studio SHAFT isn’t exactly a stranger to terribly rushed production cycles that require serious post-airing BD patching, and sadly Ice Queendom is no exception. There are certainly some bursts of fun, lively, fluid Hiroto Nagata sakuga and even shading to add a sense of dynamism to the fights and a few other moments throughout. Occasionally, the show’s art direction provides some striking colors, and the show’s commitment to trying to sell a coolness factor pays off with some well-presented and shot sequences. Then you have the other 95% of the show which looks bad even by seasonal standards. It’s clear that directors Kenjirou Okada and Toshimasa Suzuki want to preserve the “coolness” and “aesthetic” the series tried to give off from the initial trailers and character designs, but there’s a myriad of reasons why things didn’t quite pan out.

Frankly speaking, the presentation is all over the place. Just like how some scenes manage to look sick and mysterious, there are other frankly baffling creative decisions. Occasionally, the show presents this awful GATE level split-screen for no real rhyme or reason, leading to several instances of abysmal editing throughout. Throughout the V1 portion of Ice Queendom, the texturing on the character models, backgrounds, and sometimes freakishly thick black outlines often results in a very sloppy, muddy look to everything. Even most of the animation is lacking in impact compared to the simple yet well-choreographed fights Monty Oum did in the early RWBY volumes back when he and his team relied on Poser for their 3D rotoscoping. Furthermore, There’s very little crunch to most of the animation, outside of strange places like Ruby’s victory pose in episode 2, and the vast majority of attacks, landings, and general collisions all feel limp and weightless. As a result, most of the fight scenes range from mediocre to downright terrible compared to being among the few saving graces of early mainline RWBY. On that note, while the CG in early RWBY can best be described as the level you’d see from Vtuber models, the CG in Ice Queendom is perhaps less flattering, and it only increases once the anime original content kicks in. The show shuffling between overly glossy and ridiculously flat artwork for its characters doesn’t help with the show’s either, especially for the male adult characters, which leads us into the topic of huke’s take on the original character designs.

huke made a name for himself designing for Black Rock Shooter and Steins;Gate, among other works. His artwork has this wispy, mysterious, ethereal quality to it, especially for the female designs of those aforementioned titles. Sadly, they do not translate well for RWBY’s approach to anime-esque character designs, as they feel far more ho-hum than enigmatic. The resulting mismatch results in a jarringly ugly look that often swaps between greasier than a fry cook’s face after work, and flatter than a pancake, and the early premiere versions of episodes 1-3 had it even worse than the proper airing versions and the rest of the show, probably due to the rushed production cycle. The art style benefits the snowy dream Weiss presents, but the redesigns for each of the main girls are all over the place.

Nega Weiss and Nega Blake are interesting extremes of their views, with the former being this complicated multi-piece imperial design that can be stripped down for combat, and the latter resembling Adam, the embodiment of how far the White Fang has fallen. Ruby’s redesign is also fine, highlighting the kiddy that Weiss sees in her while still feeling appropriate for the weather and maintaining her primary color. Yang’s is more complicated than before with a new emblem and more brown to resemble her V5 design, and as usual for her, there’s no yellow barring her hair despite it supposedly being her primary color. Blake’s main redesign for this season is an absolute dumpster fire. While the inconsistent purple highlights on Blake’s hair in the show’s take on her original design was done for stylistic purposes, here, it might as well be her primary color for her new outfit rather than black. The white has been kicked largely to the curb in favor of grey, and the stitches and ear patchwork along with the colors and nature of her new outfit in general make her look like a trashy, beat-up, sexualized and oversized stuffed animal. It’s as ridiculous and displeasing to look at as her V7 design. As for the JNPR redesigns, they’re fine, as they’re more or less similar to their main designs while keeping their primary colors consistent and exaggerating what little specific elements Weiss could possibly gleam from them.

Unfortunately, the visuals somehow manage to tank considerably in the 2nd half, as by the midpoint of the show, the wonky animation and modeling which seemed to be kept to a minimum in episodes 4 and 5 compared to 1-3 come back worse than ever. Grotesque CGI fights and incomplete drawings not masked by moving panning shots in time are some of the wilder instances of the show’s production issues in episodes 6 and 9, respectively. Episode 10 is where 2 good cuts get surrounded by the animation completely melting, as the stilted character movements are cranked up to 11, shots break continuity and the 180 degree rule consistently, and the embarrassing choreography can’t even be seen half the time with the animation constantly being cut away from while also constantly being reused in a show that reuses animation like a Super Robot or Mahou Shoujo anime. Sure, when episode 11 isn’t looking like total dogshit it does pick things up quite a bit, and there are some occasional stylistic switch-ups in episodes 1 and 9 that look great, but generally speaking, the show’s visuals are complicated in how bad they are. Honestly, Ice Queendom looks worse than even RWBY Volume 1 on the whole, and that was made by amateurs at a gamer internet animation studio that wouldn’t have remotely been considered pro-grade back in 2013. At least V1 looked kinda consistent, even with the obvious shortcuts and awful walk cycles. Even the Mistral Arc volumes of RWBY are animated better than this, and considering how equally catastrophic most of that section's fights are, that's saying something.

Perhaps the only saving grace of RWBY’s that was kept somewhat intact here is the music. Sure, none of the tracks by Nobuko Toda or Kazuma Jinnouchi are as grandiose or beautiful as some of the more whimsical and wispy tunes of Jeff Williams’ early RWBY score, but it’s a solid OST nonetheless. It takes a while to pick up, but there are some solid orchestral tracks and guitar pieces to match the theoretical intensity of what RWBY tries to present in its big arc. Similarly, the inserts by Void_Chords are decent, even if they can’t match up with most of the alt metal songs Casey Williams performed for the main series. The OP and ED do fare a little less well though. “Beyond Selves” by Void_Chords feat. L tries to be a bombastic and triumphant jazz tune, but the mixing is so muddy and the compression goes so overboard that the track feels overly restrained and muddled. “Awake” by Saori Hayami is an ok, if still over-compressed attempt at an epic song. Honestly, the music in the show feels a little unremarkable, but that’s still the best thing the show has going for it, unfortunately.

It’s still utterly insane that the sound effect editing is so bad that not only are some effects mistimed, but artifacts from unused storyboards were left in. Is it worse than early RWBY’s horribly compressed sfx? Who knows?

What happened here, exactly? Was it Gen Urobucnhi’s planning, Tow Ubukata’s script and series composition, Eddy Rivas’ supervision? SHAFT’s scheduling issues? Whatever the case, RWBY: Ice Queendom is an idiotic, lifeless disaster that can’t live up to how it tries to present itself 95% of the time. It’s two distinct shows that each fail spectacularly at their own ways while barely feeling like the OTHER piece of shit it’s trying to harken back to. There are some decent scenes and ideas explored once in a blue moon. There are some bits of solid if not stunning animation here, with more to follow once the staff has to clean things up for the BDs so that the show doesn’t stay looking like Assassins Pride or some shit. However, the pulseless Ice Queendom wastes a lot of time and chances to justify or explore anything, as is RWBY tradition. Unless you really miss the early days of RWBY and don’t feel like watching the first volume again, this show isn’t worth your time. At best, just watch the last two scenes of episode 12 between V1 and 2 when you rewatch RWBY in preparation for V9. Better yet, if you were interested in this show and haven’t seen the franchise yet, steer clear of both! RWBY has long since lost any of the soul, style, humor, chemistry, or occasional inklings of compelling character writing that propelled the show to stardom in the mid-2010s. If you found yourself woefully disappointed after thinking this spinoff had promise, just know you’ll be feeling that a lot by the time you’ve caught up to RWBY proper. If you’re one of us veterans, you know the drill.

No, using Monty’s name to discredit Miles, Kerry, Eddy, Kiersi, or even Tow, is not part of the drill. Hate the show, not his friends and their collaborators. The man’s dead; let him rest in peace.

RWBY: Ice Queendom is a fascinatingly in-depth misfire, and a hastily put-together mess of a concept, which is a shame, because I feel like in the right hands, it could have been the kick-in-the-pants its source series desperately needed. It faltered not because the team behind it didn’t care, but for desperately lacking a level of consideration and hindsight to tell the story it wanted to tell in the best way possible while being exciting for existing fans or a good jumping in point for newcomers.

As someone who has seen all eight current seasons of the original RWBY series, my general opinion is that ... despite some goofy character charm, distinctive character designs with appropriately distinct powers, rocking musical inserts, a 3D animation aesthetic that grows more professional as the years go on, and a share of incredibly kinetic action scenes (primarily in the first two seasons when its creator Monty Oum was still alive, RIP), it’s easy to look behind the curtain and see the inexperience of its writers stacking the fragile house of cards that is the series’ worldbuilding and character writing. The majority of the show’s seasons tend to focus on an excess of character factions, dead end subplots, badly conveyed worldbuilding and an incredibly questionable racism allegory with pacing that doesn’t tend to give its better ideas (such as the lead character’s grief about her lost mother) enough time to properly coalesce. It’s to the point where the RWBY Chibi spinoff series entirely about zany gags uses its cast better than the show it’s based off of. But it does have a lot of ideas, and a lot of fans that attach to some of those ideas, despite the series gaining a similar reputation to Sword Art Online among dissenters and outsiders for how amateurish writing underlies much of its production and conceptual strengths.

My hope with RWBY Ice Queendom was that this series, with the benefit of hindsight and eight seasons worth of character material to pull from, could tell a tighter, incredibly cohesive story about its four title characters, with talented 2D animators mirroring Monty Oum’s gift for dynamic, kinetic and characterful action scenes to scatter throughout. This series could epitomize the genuine appeal of RWBY’s action and character concepts separated from all of the excess junk the main show had been piling up. Remind longtime fans why they should keep caring about the series while hooking new fans. Sadly, I don’t think it accomplished either goal.

Regarding Recap

First of all, if you are a newcomer to RWBY scared off by the MMD level of animation quality, Ice Queendom starts with a three episode recap of the first season of the web series in the show’s new 2D style. It’s a conceptually basic story at the start, starring four girls (Ruby Rose, Weiss Schnee, Blake Belladona and Yang Xiao Long) who are accepted into an academy to train their fighting abilities to become peacekeepers of a world overrun by ravenous monsters known as Grimm. The recap is to get everyone up to speed on where the characters were at that point in time.

I can understand this was done specifically in relation to Weiss Schnee, the series’ Snow White analog, to bring her negative character traits to the forefront. She’s haughty, selfish, domineering, has a need to appease her demanding father, feels constantly judged by her siblings, and is flagarently racist against the Faunus, a species of animal human hybrids meant to represent the oppressed races of the world (yes, really). They needed to make all of this clear in order to have substantial psychological ammo to dissect for the series’s main arc, and I think they succeeded, but there are obvious concessions made in having to cover so much content unrelated to Weiss that was happening at the same time.

To Ice Queendom’s credit, a lot of the more egregious/extra parts from the original first season are cut, such as Yang arbitrarily leaving with shadow people extras to excuse Ruby meeting other characters on her own or having to go to three separate scenes to show Blake’s and Weiss’s introductions randomly stumbling onto Ruby in an empty fountain plaza, the main four bickering in a dorm at night, to then hearing an announcement from the school’s headmaster Ozpin the next day. Scenes such as these are all consolidated in a way that makes a lot of sense, and character dialogue is generally a bit more natural throughout the recapped material. The widely hated story arc for the character of Jaune is cut almost entirely aside from introducing a new original Nightmare Grimm that comes into play later. That said, this is a case of less bad, but also less good, since this comes at the expense of the humor. There’s some jokier parts in later sections of Ice Queendom that bring in some charm, but for the first three episodes, much of what gave V1 RWBY its spirit in spite of the questionable plotting and wonky non-battle animation, is fairly excised. Despite 2D being inherently more limiting than 3D in terms of camera space, this section has a handful of strong animated moments (mostly from Hiroto Nagata) that match what Monty Oum was capable of nearly a decade ago on a program that could barely get character walk cycles right.

All of this though mostly only applies to the first two episodes. Episode 3 has to cover far too much of the original series in only a short 22 minute runtime while also planting seeds for the anime’s original story. This makes the already messy plotting the original series had of needing to spontaneously introduce two entirely new characters for the season’s final action climax even more rushed. To make up for Weiss’s lack of presence in Volume 1’s climax, they removed the entire fight. I know it sounds really really really really really really really really dumb, but trust me that this is the most likely scenario. It then leads to the episode’s closer feeling like it happened too early.

There is one other issue this manner of recap brings, which is that if you’re not already a fan of RWBY or invested in the journey that its characters have gone on for nearly a decade at this point, I have to think it would be harder to care once the original material starts and Ice Queendom has a lot of intense, high-strung emotional scenes between characters who, to you, have hardly had the time to know each other.

This can be seen right away in Episode 3 when the implied incredibly close bond between Jaune, Nora, Pyrrha and Ren is told, not shown, as an attempt to parallel Ruby and Weiss’s shown struggle to get along, but there being almost no time to show Team JNPR’s kinship prior to that moment. And this continues when the Ice Queendom plot takes center stage and you see Ruby and Weiss having these grand emotional moments regarding their relationship while Blake and Yang have their own sort of rapport hardly seen prior but given a fair amount of time in later seasons of the original show. And yes, I do think this is an issue to take with Ice Queendom because the series is presented like an alternate timeline, not a sequel like Metal Gear Solid 4 or Kingdom Hearts III which are in series with one timeline and naturally suggest by name you need a lot of knowledge going into it. As someone who’s followed the original series, I do appreciate more of what’s going on there, but to newcomers I can see them being out of the loop.

To Ice Queendom’s credit, these scenes are presented very earnestly, with Saori Hayami and the other Japanese VAs genuinely putting their best foot forward to carry whatever drama is there. FAR better than their English VAs being pulled to voice the cast with little training or direction at the start. It’s just that the foundation to care about these characters is built on long term engagement to material outside of this anime. That being said, it also doesn’t help that a lot of these payoffs are mulled by the series’s production issues.

Woefully Underpar Animation

Now, despite what I say about the original series gaining somewhat of a punching bag reputation overtime, one element that was hard to deny from the start was the appeal of Monty Oum’s action scenes. He had the ability to show these power-imbued characters as acrobats, using the 3D camera to create long uninterrupted sequences of action scenes that feel like performances, taking similar influence to what made action scenes in The Matrix trilogy so fun to watch, assisted by the metal butt rock score. After Monty’s unfortunate passing, the latter seasons of RWBY made the fights more cohesive with the story, but with a couple exceptions, they gradually lost that rhythm. Music could still hit, but many action scenes felt stiffer, more weightless, more inconsistently boarded and with more unwelcome dialogue to separate the action segments. So I hoped that this new creative team could mirror a similar spark that Oum’s action had for the original series, but unfortunately, much like with the anime adaptation of Devil May Cry, a series known for its action scenes gets an anime that barely has any worth praising.

Aside from an even stronger finish, the rest of the giant bird fight represented in Episode 2 feels far stiffer and less conveying of character than the original web series. I had hoped that the anime-exclusive action scenes would go hard considering Episode 3 cutting the first season’s entire original climax, but sadly no. COVID definitely played a huge part in preventing SHAFT from getting a vast swath of talent in person, but even still, what’s present is unfortunately lacking. Much of the anime episodes are exposition, not action scenes, and a lot of the action is limited to Ruby, Yang and Blake running away from an overpowered Weiss to little if any memorable scuffles given all of the cuts made that prevent the action from flowing well. Episodes 6 and 10 in particular are absolutely egregious examples of needing to shortcut for action scenes, doing very little to hide the replacement of the 2D characters into CGI models for certain shots, which is the same criticism I levied at SHAFT’s Assault Lily Bouquet two years ago. These models look ugly and awkward with their differing frame rates compared to the 2D characters. Inserting these between 2D shots only makes the action even less cohesive. I understand that some of the rendering issues can be fixed in a Blu-Ray release, but the scenes themselves are still stuck with the same borked action pace. This rushed schedule even affects the static dialogue scenes, with one conversation between Blake and Yang in Episode 10 cutting off Yang’s legs during a pan.

It’s not all bad. I do think some of the characters, such as Ruby, Weiss, Yang and Penny still look cute in the new art style despite other characters like Ozpin not transferring over particularly well. I like the added highlights to certain characters’ hair that were unshaded in the original series, and some of the backdrops of Weiss’s dream realm like the violet-tinged sky with her emblem pattern scattered about, the consolidated town and the mysterious interiors of Weiss’s family manor do also let the visuals shine. Lastly, Episode 11 does have the few actual free-flowing and kinetic action cuts that are original to the series synced with exciting music and in those brief moments, it gave me a sense of what the series could have been, had its structure and production woes not undermined its efforts and made the majority of scene payoffs (aside from the final one) feel hollow.

Baffling Pacing, Editing and Story Structure

In addition to the clunky battle animation, the editing of the series is often annoyingly standout when it really has no reason to be. Many episodes feature a frequent amount of hard cuts to character stills circling around a small scene, which gives the production the feeling that a lot of the shots were rushed out the door and had to be cobbled together at the last minute to fit the weekly TV episode deadline. One scene in particular of Blake sneaking her way inside a bedroom to meet up with Ruby and Yang was so badly cut together I struggled to tell what was happening. In an attempt to add some signature SHAFT flair into the mix, they use this Hulk (2003) multiple panel style where they can pan on multiple shots happening at the same time, and sadly, I can’t say its usage ever added substantially relative to its frequency, aside from the ending of Episode 5. Perhaps this is also the time to say that nearly every episode of the “Ice Queendom arc” feels the need to tag itself with a cliffhanger that often doesn’t match the exciting payoffs.

Most of the anime makes up the “Ice Queendom arc”, where Ruby, Blake and Yang travel inside of Weiss’s nightmare realm to recover her soul from a nightmare eating away at her, fighting a version of Weiss that seems to embody her worst traits in the process. Initially it seems promising that the arc slows the pace way down from the insanely rushed Episode 3, but the further in you get the more you question if it needed to be THAT slow. So much time is spent expositing about how the dream realm works, directly explaining all of the correlations Weiss is making in her head in case viewers don’t pick up on them and repeating a lot of the same motions. There’s a back and forth between characters trying to enter the town, confronting the alternate Weiss, and getting arbitrarily pushed back after badly edited action scenes with middling at best material in between. One of the exits is initially promising, with the series using side characters to genuinely set the leads on the right track to better understand their friend and become a stronger team for it. And then Jaune gets prominence. . . .

The moment I knew this series was ABSOLUTELY heading on the wrong track with this story was when the show decided to include Jaune Arc into a prominent role alongside the four girls. The writers try to justify this by saying he exists as a cloak to the Nightmare energy, but this purpose goes away after a single scene and all he actually does is open a door, drag along a sword he can barely carry and defeat a miniboss he has no connection to. He’s not exactly a loved character among fans of the original, with many thinking he’s either a bland tepid tagalong that steals screentime from other main characters, or a borderline author insert for one of the show’s writers, and Ice Queendom making him more prominent than he should be doesn’t help his case. It’s unfortunate because there was an obviously better method of handling an extra party member tagalong.

One of the few animation highlights outside of Episode 11 is a moment when a dream version of Pyrrha, a character the original series gives some parallels to Weiss, sings Mirror Mirror, Weiss’s original theme song. Her character is gorgeously animated in the scene, and Megumi Toyoguchi does a wonderful job covering the song in English. I was hoping that this meant that Pyrrha would have more of a role in the series, perhaps directly getting through to Weiss with her own feelings of being lonely despite being seen like a celebrity. But, no, despite Jaune having a widely hated mini-arc in the original show’s first season, and having plenty of time after that to interact with the main characters, Jaune gets to be a character here who does nothing and contributes nothing besides opening one door, while Pyrrha after her song is presented as a mute piece of cardboard Jaune carries around from scene to scene in a subplot that accomplishes nothing. Another character could have opened the door, and Pyrrha’s character would have benefited substantially more from interacting with the four lead girls away from Jaune to parallel Weiss’s dilemma, like they seemed to imply by giving her Weiss’s theme song. It’s choices like this obviously padded subplot that has me asking:

You needed 12 episodes for this?!

It’s unfortunate, honestly. When I first started watching Ice Queendom upon the premiere of the first three episodes, one of my earliest thoughts was that they could’ve used an additional episode of Volume 1 recap so that the events of Episode 3 could be less hastily sped through and maybe they could have actually shown a rendition of the dock battle at the Volume’s end, a major highlight of the original series’s first season. Then later, when the show actually gets to the Ice Queendom part of the story, you see just how little every episode contributes to the overall story, how many parts of the story could have been cut entirety (particularly everything involving Jaune) and how several of the repeated plot events (RBY reaching Nightmare Weiss and then getting pushed back three times over, Ruby needing to enter the dream three times, the gang entering the city over and over again by train) could have accomplished their same intended goal without needing to waste almost three hours through as simple as a choice as only having two dives into the dream world instead of three.

For the sake of Ice Queendom’s production, which, with exception to most of Episode 11, falls apart at the seams the longer you go on, the Ice Queendom portion should have been, at most, a 2 hour movie, and not a 3 hour slog where over a third of that time is either repeated content, irrelevant content or exclamation that could’ve been better left unsaid.

Perhaps giving the series fewer total episodes could have better consolidated the handful of talented animators SHAFT did manage to get so the show could consistently look better when it counted, instead of wasting talent on a song sequence that failed to connect to anything and making the majority of fights jittery messes where they don’t even try to hide their CGI model replacement. But I can only think about what could have been for so long when analyzing the product that SHAFT and Rooster Teeth put out to commemorate their long running series for me to say it just isn’t good enough.

Despite all my complaining, as someone who’s been hard on the sunk cost fallacy of RWBY’s existence, there were moments of Ice Queendom I did greatly appreciate, such as giving us more insight into Weiss’s psychological hangups at a time when she was suffering from them the most. I liked getting to see how a small Weiss looks up to her grandfather, and how Ruby feels about Weiss being pushed to an emotional breaking point. I like Sun and Penny’s use here and despite them missing the latter’s iconic catchphrase, her seiyuu does a lot to convey her character. The new OST was generally solid enough and while Jeff and Casey Lee Williams’s music from the original series is sorely missed, the vocal inserts present here capture the show’s style appropriately. It’s a conceptually solid idea, and it says something that there’s a heartwarming conclusion at the end of this messy, hastily put together brand extension that makes me genuinely feel something for these characters despite the poorly paced narratives they find themselves stuck in time and time again.

I just wish Ice Queendom could’ve been something different, instead of a hacked-out production that serves as a standard bearer for why a series constructed out of many scattered concepts to feel “anime” enough struggles to look beyond that lens and hit the same incredible highs of what it chooses to imitate.

Writing the review after finishing episode 6 of 12. I find this a good point to accurately judge the show
As someone who has never seen the original RWBY, I thought that the first 3 episodes were great. I got enough information to understand the characters and I was introduced to the power systems and the world. The animation was solid and the story did not feel rushed or too slow.

However, episodes 4, 5 and 6 quickly went downhill. The animation became choppy and unfinished, along with obvious CGI used in action sequences, which was not present in earlier episodes. And while these episodes are ... not quite filler, they move incredibly slowly. It seems as if the first season will be dedicated to one problem, which shouldn't have taken more than 3-4 episode to resolve.

I will be finishing the season, but I don't look forward to it. The first 3 episodes showed that the show had potential, but fell short.

After considerably being disappointed from the first 3 episodes, the show manages to get progressively worse. Its quite stunning how bad the show gets.

The show stated off alright, the first 3 episodes went over the first volume very quickly with watered down personalities and fights but I was sort of maybe interested in what the story could lead with its anime original story line and its just completely terrible even if you were not a fan of the original RWBY or never watched it you could tell how horrible the show is. The rest of the show focuses on a pointless dream sequence filler that ... is neither interesting, well written, nor any of RWBY's strong points such as comedy, fight choreography, etc.

If you had no RWBY experience and only saw this you would think the series was terrible, i'm not gonna act like the story for the original was great but it at least had personality, stand out characters, and good fights the story here just feels like nothing and no one would gush over a show like this where it promises to be based off an existing series but its nothing but a dream, not to mention somehow although rare the cgi somehow looks worse than its predecessor which is kind of hilarious but just sad because it is nothing like RWBY and its trying to make its own identity but not in any note worthy or good ways.

I don't think anyone would recommend this series as the show is not a good way to get into RWBY nor is it good on its own, I doubt they would but hopefully they do not green light a season 2 because theres really not much worth redeeming if at all

Ice Queendom is an awful representation of Rooster Teeth and Monty Om's RWBY. If it wasn't for a manga spinoff it wouldn't exist in the first place.
When RWBY was initially being worked on, (by Rooster Teeth and Monty Om) there was a serious disconnect between the two. Monty was slated to animate the fight scenes but was never told the context behind the scenes themselves, giving Rooster Teeth full rule over plot, ultimately leading to an entire lack of story. The series relied heavily on Monty's involvement, so much so that when he died from a allergic reaction the series plummeted in quality and ... the ugly head of the non-existent plot reared itself. I'd imagine Monty rolling in his grave knowing that his life's work has come to fruition: he finally got a legit anime deal but he has no rule over the context or where it goes, just like with Rooster Teeth. It's cynically hilarious that RWBY would yet again be bastardized by a third-party. Ice Queendom, like the original RWBY, has no idea where it's going, has no idea how it got to where it currently is and relies heavily on a manga spinoff instead of new fresh ideas. Reworking RWBY from the ground-up would've been so much better. Intermingling Rooster Teeth's ideas and plot lines with the spinoff material makes it feel fake, forced and overdone. There is literally nothing here. I'd argue even less so than the original. Absolute farce.

RWBY: Ice Queendom is bad. However, was the original RWBY good to begin with? Also no.

If we’re talking pure production value, I don’t think that there’s any chance in hell that RoosterTeeth’s production is better. The CGI is just terrible to look at. Sure, while Ice Queendom uses some CGI to an extent, most of it is animated fairly well, with fight scenes to boot. Side by side comparisons of fight scenes, even with the advantage of CGI being way easier to animate, Shaft still has RoosterTeeth beat. I don’t think that this is a strong performance by Shaft, but it also is not it’s ... worst. It’s an average Shaft production, which makes the overall animation, editing, backgrounds, and editing more than above average compared to most anime, and of course, RoosterTeeth’s RWBY.

That said, Ice Queendom is just boring. It’s flat. The pacing is horrendous. On one hand, you have a rushed four episode beginning, where the story goes through the motions until you arrive at what Shaft deems to be “important” enough to cover the next eight episodes. The beginning was actually good for what it was, but it skips a bunch of characterization that’s required for you to care about the next arc. The rushed beginning arcs were really apparent because it tried to introduce the dynamics of Team RWBY, introduce conflict and eventual resolution between Blake and Weiss, and also tried to include the introduction of Penny in an episode or less. There’s so much lack of dialogue and slower paced life of life scenes that’s just skipped over from the original RWBY, and instead you just have fast paced fights, events, and it all kind of just blurs together, with barely any memorable character moments.

That’s not to say that the original RWBY’s slice of life moments that built the characters up were good or anything though. I skimmed through the first couple of seasons of the original RWBY since it’s been so long since I dropped the series, and the dialogue is just super cringe and not something that should be suffered through. However, it did try to develop character relationships in a natural way that Shaft’s production just did not attempt to with its fast pacing towards the big arc of the show.

The second arc of the show, which is what the majority of the show is focused on, deals with again, more of the character dynamics of team RWBY and the exploration into their characters. I’m not going to spoil anything, but it’s hard for me to really care about conflicts, drama, or trust between each character when I’m not invested in them at all. I think that it would have been a good, impactful arc if the show had illustrated more of the characters’ personalities before this arc. How could you really care about these characters? They barely have a personality themselves, let alone you caring about the relationship between the characters.

This second arc is actually painfully slow compared to the rushed beginning. Things that don’t need to be shown, explained, or repeated are shown, and it’s overall a pretty drawn out process for such a simple theme and idea. It’s really messy, and there’s just not a lot of thought put into these episodes. I didn’t really check when watching the show, but I had a feeling this was complete filler content, and when I checked afterwards, I was right. I don’t really get why the show rushed through and paced things so poorly, as the second arc could have been easily condensed to 3-4 episodes max, and have another 4 episodes for meaningful and important character development, alongside developing the camaraderie of team RWBY.

The last episode shows more slice of life and character building, which the show desperately needed more of, despite how inorganic some of the dialogue came off to be. Focusing on Weiss in the majority of the anime basically stalls everyone else’s development. While sure, you learn some about Ruby and Blake along the way, the best way to engage the viewers with the characters is just some pure slice of life content that’s much more prevalent in the original RWBY.
I don’t mind at all with Shaft taking creative liberties with a show that wasn’t all that amazing to begin with. In fact, it elevated the Monogatari series with that strategy. With poor source material to work with, Shaft transformed the Monogatari series into something that surpassed the original. However, half or more of Shaft’s projects tends to be busts. And this is one of them.

As the others say, Ep 1 - 3 is a recap of volumes 1 and 2. I recommend watching the original instead of this anime.

The animation has really no effort, the quality is just... not good

The only new content in these, they introduced to us a new Grimm called Nightmares and there's a new character named Shion... what? I forget her name.

The Sfx was... low quality, and also what's wrong with eps 10 dude, why does the magic circle just appear like that?

And... Ruby didn't eat the cookies! Why?!

... The Opening... it's just... didn't feel the same way for me.

The anime isn't good dude... I recommend all of you to watch the original instead of this anime...

This is my first review, please forgive any mistakes.
(sorry for my bad eng language)

I could not understand how can so good looking anime score only 6 points, but now after watching it, it became completely clear to me.
You could make story that makes less sense with worse development and less likeable characters that never make any sense only if you hired ex-twitter workers and asked them to write their biography. To invest 11 from 12 episodes in to the worst character this series has (girl of cold powers that never makes anything likeable but people unreasonably risk life for her and everyone says nice things about her for no reason) For example she will say" You ... suck and i hope you die" and then character will say "What she meant is that she loves you and wants to marry you" bullcrap! And she never even talks to people that reinterpret her shit as the nicest thing ever. It is total stranger for them but universally everyone likes her, even catgirl that is hated by her for being catgirl(literally racism) does say nice things about her and risks her life for her...

I give it 4 points for nice art and fine music. But for story and characters it would get 1/10

Man, I was really rooting for RWBY: Ice Queendom to do well because I'm quite a fan of the expansive world that the original online show produced, but for viewers new to the whole RWBY world, this series really doesn't reflect how deep and fast past the original is. We're probably not suppose to compare non-anime to anime, but let's call it what it is - RWBY: Ice Queendom is a pretty big disappointment. I'll try and keep my comparisons to a minimum for any new viewers.

Story: RWBY: Ice Queendom takes place in the world of Remnent, where prospective huntsmen and huntresses go ... to Beacon Academy to learn the ins and outs of combat. They use these skills in order to fight the Grimm - dark creatures that pollute the world of Remnent. Ruby Rose and her newly formed four-man squad, including herself, her sister Yang Xiao Long, half-human Blake-Belladonna and the privileged Weiss Schnee, must learn together to fight the Grimm. They essentially go to this academy in order to learn to fight, similar to the setting the series Naruto takes place in.

The beginning gives a very Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood-like feel, where you get an accelerated first three episodes so that returning fans don't have to see the same thing over a long period of time. This starts the series on the right foot, because, while the introductions are basically the same, they use a pretty quick pacing because it's well established that this series will attract fans of the original web series. We get to learn about, not just our main team, but also other characters that are in this series, including Jaune and his team, and newcomer to the series Shion Zaiden. She plays a pretty integral part to keeping ourselves informed about the events of the series, and I thought her parts were played out as well as they could have, given the circumstances.

The middle six episodes is when things go horribly downhill. There is a type of Grimm that our cast become aware of that takes our new band of huntresses on RWBY's team to another type of world. Throughout much of the rest of the series, they go back and forth, all while bringing what information they learned back to the original world to discuss everything that was witnessed, to our older characters. This completely demolishes any potential this series has at keeping an upbeat pace. Simply put, the same thing happens over and over again, and it doesn't feel like it serves any real purpose. There are new scenes, surely, but there's no real point of any of it. It just gives our heroes another reason to go back and forth. While the initial idea of this new world is a fine idea in itself, the way it's used was slow and boring.

Once you get to the final three episodes, it's a much more enjoyable viewing. They really start to show what certain characters are capable of, and watching this play out was likely the best part. There are some interesting concepts introduced, though I'd argue that it does border on one of our characters taking a leap of faith, and it kind of just working out in the end. That character really doesn't have a ton of motivation to pull off this sort of thing, but I'm somewhat forgiving considering how much of the mess the rest of the series was. They certainly leave room to take the story to a more macro level if it's decided that this series should continue, but there needs to be a faster moving story, and more good things that separate this from the original, for audiences to flock to this once again. (4/10)

Characters: Ruby displays a high level of strength early on in the series, and this is somewhat how she gets into Beacon at her early age. Her personal ability, otherwise known as her Semblance, isn't anything too out of this world, but it's interesting to see it at work with a weapon that's about the same size as her. She shows her age a bit in this series and doesn't really develop much as a character. She often feels like a kid who just wants to be with her friends, and that can rub certain audiences the wrong way. Yang is her sister, one they didn't really do a good job at showing who she really is. There's not a ton of background on her shown in this series, and that leaves her in an awkward state where you question her role in the team. Still, she's easily the physically strongest of the group, and every group needs that bit of muscle. Blake is half-human, otherwise known as Faunus, and she has some really clear goals by enrolling in Beacon. They really stressed her character in this role quite a bit, and I appreciate that it was brought up in small spurts because it makes you care about what happens to her. Weiss very clearly has attitude problems that stem from her having an overinflated ego from the start, and, as a person, she clearly has a ways to go. The academy seems like the perfect place for her to develop, and even though she goes through some pretty tough ordeals in the show, I really wished they showed more of her fighting her inner demons, rather than just showing the beginning and end.

Jaune's team is shown in shown portions throughout the series, but we don't have much on them in this series. The obvious focus was on Ruby's team, but even though Jaune, himself, gets more involved in the plot in the series, he doesn't really do anything remarkable. Ozpin, the academy's headmaster, as well as Shion, keep us informed about what they know about the Grimm, and it mostly feels natural. This series is basically tailored to Shion's Semblance, and even though it's really tied to her, do we really care about her character? Not really. In general, this series doesn't really show much in the way of character developments, even if it did have some better moments with Blake. (6/10)

Art: I'm really, really not a fan of the animation used here. It looks so static during the action sequences and many of the characters have random moments where things don't look really polished. You don't really sense this was a high budget project, but this is definitely one of the uglier series that I've seen in a while. This coming from the same studio, Shaft, that did the Madoka series. Then again, it's also the same series that did Fate/Extra, so maybe I just answered my own question. (5/10)

Sound: It's very clear that Nobuko Toda, in charge of music here, had a very firm idea of how she wanted this series to sound. Based on the OST and OP, I'd say she succeeded. Beyond Shelves, by Void_Chords feat. L very much gives you the same feeling that Jeff Williams did with his music in the original web series, and the OST was actually pretty solid as well. I'm really not sold on the VO work here though. I'm not sure if it's because the original cast isn't used to trying to lip syncing with a series after the fact, because web series are created with the English audio in mind. I feel like it has to do less with the ADR directors, Kdin Jenzen (who also voices Shion) and Kerry Shawcross, as they are Rooster Teeth employees, but you never know. There were simply too many instances where characters spoke lines as if they were read, rather than acted, and it got a little too dry. Credit does need to be given to Jen Brown (Pyra) for that outstanding performance in singing one of the insert songs in the middle of the series. It's not often the VO for characters will sing a song, but to not only do that, and sound amazing doing it - that deserves full props. (6/10)

Overall: To say that RWBY: Ice Queendom was a bit of a disappointment would be a bit of an understatement. It took a decent concept and expanded it across far too many episodes. There's so much more they could have done with RWBY's story and characters, and it was mostly not utilized at all. For returning fans, this is a series well worth skipping for the original. New fans really shouldn't be rushing to watch this, as there are much better series out there that show characters slaying monsters. There's just not enough here. (5/10)

So here’s what I think happened with this anime: they wanted to rebrand the original cg series as anime and make big bucks on Netflix. They wisely entrusted legendary Studio Shaft with this task since it has a name for quality animation and storytelling. Thing is, it didn’t work out.
It’s obvious that there were many problems down the production line (time? money?) and it’s sad to see how hard the studio that brought to life masterpieces such as Monogatari and MadoMagi is struggling with this new project.
It started nicely with some decent fight sequences and lovely character design, but the last few episodes the animation ... fell apart and there was some really bothersome CGI/missed sequences/recycled frames.
However, this was not the reason why I dropped it. I’m not in the position to judge the whole franchise because I only (partially) watched this adaptation, but even as a newcomer it was not enjoyable. Some fans lamented the cut of many scenes and exposition, but what I find unappealing is that very video-gamey feel each episode has (and i’m not even talking about that dream-world system of using coins to activate new skills).
It’s like everything is divided in clear cut ‘chapters’ and the plot just comes over without foreshadowing. The photography is also similar to a visual novel, with very static and mid range cuts that you could easily fill with a dialogue box at the bottom. Drama and possible character development is just interpreted as a new ‘mission’ to clear, and the recent Weiss arc was the expression of all the flaws I mentioned: too sudden, too long, too repetitive.
Sorry but no amount of Shaft copyrighted neck-tilting can help with this.
I kind of liked the concept but I do feel like it would work much better as an actual videogame.

RWBY is an American animated series created by Monty Oum of Rooster Teeth. Although there are many ignorant skeptics that are very vocal about how watching things in English is weird(?) or that the CG animation is bad(?), RWBY is an excellent show with one of the best narratives I've ever had the pleasure of diving into. This anime here, Ice Queendom, IS NOT an adaptation of RWBY, IS NOT representative of RWBY as a whole, and SHOULD NOT be used as a substitute for watching RWBY. I will definitively say here and now that Ice Queendom is an inferior spinoff that should be treated ... as a non-canon OVA at best, and the rest of this review will serve to explain why that is the case, and why everyone should just watch the original work done by Rooster Teeth if they are interested in RWBY. I hope you will stick around, so let's begin.

Here I will just summarize Ice Queendom's narrative relative to RWBY's narrative to give people an idea of why it isn't representative of RWBY as a whole and cannot be used as a substitute. Episodes 1-3 of Ice Queendom summarize the bare minimum of Season 1 of RWBY. For reference, there are 8 Seasons of RWBY, with the 9th coming in early 2023. Episodes 4-11 of Ice Queendom cover the anime-original plot about nightmares and dreams. This part of the show is largely inconsequential to the narrative as a whole, so I would assume the purpose of this would be such that Ice Queendom can canonically fit into RWBY's timeline without conflict. Episode 12 of Ice Queendom returns to the RWBY narrative, covering events that occur during the final episode of Season 1 and the first episodes of Season 2. If it wasn't already obvious from this comparison, Ice Queendom is more of an OVA or spinoff and absolutely cannot be used to represent RWBY as a whole. Even though Ice Queendom is supposed to be a reimagining of RWBY for new viewers, it leaves out essential plot points and character development that consumers would miss without watching the original.

Here I will address Ice Queendom's animation, and compare it to RWBY's CG animation done by Rooster Teeth. Since studio Shaft is doing Ice Queendom's animation, this shouldn't even be a debate about which is better, right? Well... not necessarily. Studio Shaft is infamous for their top notch animation sequences, having done work on Madoka Magica, the Monogatari series, Magia Record, Assault Lily, and more. However, Studio Shaft is also just as infamous if not more so for their inconsistency. While Shaft can produce some amazing animation sequences for action scenes, they can also produce some very awkward and disproportional scenes just as easily. Ice Queendom definitely suffered from this "Shaft Syndrome" where there were some amazing scenes, and then there were some very visually unappealing scenes as well. In fact, you can count the amount of actually impressive animation sequences throughout all of Ice Queendom with two hands (Ruby vs. Torchwick henchman, Weiss vs. Knight Golem, Ruby vs. Nevermore, Weiss vs. Grimm in classroom, Yang vs. giant statue, final Nightmare battle, and food fight). Meanwhile, the amount of times I was put off by the animation quality numbered at least twice of that. Now, while comparing it to the original RWBY's CG animation might be a matter of how each individual viewer tolerates watching CG animations, we cannot ignore the fact that Ice Queendom also uses CG. Yang's bike is almost always CG, and I can say with certainty it looks worse than the Rooster Teeth's CG. There are also several fight scenes where CG is used, and no one can tell me those T-posing abominations are more visually appealing than Rooster Teeth's properly rendered CG. The final point I'll talk about with the animation is the OP. I won't touch on the audio portion of the OP as of yet, but visually speaking the OP is terribly lazy. There is absolutely nothing original about the OP, with every single frame being a clip from the first 3 episodes. Ice Queendom's OP looks like something a mediocre AMV youtuber from 2006 would've compiled, not something from the renowned Studio Shaft. Comparing that paltry creativity with the creative RWBY OPs done by Rooster Teeth is like comparing night and day.

This final segment will go over the remaining aspects of the show that I haven't touched on thus far. The soundtrack of Ice Queendom was definitely impressive and was the one part of the anime that did actually live up to the hype. The OP done by Void_Chords is really darn good, and having Hayami Saori sing the ED was a treat as well. That being said, the OST still didn't hit the same as the soundtrack with vocals done by Jeff and Casey Williams. I think it was a missed opportunity not to incorporate more songs from RWBY, but I understand that they probably wanted to create a more original take on the series. I feel that the previous statement can be extended to Ice Queendom as a whole, where the production seemed to want to appropriate the characters and setting to tell their own story or their own perspective of how RWBY is that doesn't really mesh with the direction that Rooster Teeth has been taking RWBY, so there is a lot of dissonance present as a result. I might just feel this way because of how I am an avid RWBY fan that does really enjoy the series, but if anything I guess that speaks for how Ice Queendom really is not authentic RWBY. Throughout the entirety of Ice Queendom there really was only one moment where I truly felt glad I was watching the show, and that was when I realized that we would be able to see the authentic RWBY food fight scene animated by studio Shaft.

I think a lot of my gripes with Ice Queendom are a result of the culture clash between western and eastern media. As much as I am a fan of Hayami Saori (I love her roles as Meltryllis from FGO and Ayaka from Genshin among many others), RWBY just didn't feel the same without the English banter that couldn't get translated in the Japanese medium. And while Ice Queendom is getting an official dub by the cast of RWBY, the problem isn’t just the language barrier. Lots of the themes and portrayals of the characters that the Japanese audiences prefer don’t quite transfer over to western audiences. For example, I know for a fact that Japanese viewers are OBSESSED with the Weiss vs. Golem Knight scene that is the adaptation of Rooster Teeth’s ‘White’ trailer for RWBY. Meanwhile, we didn’t even get an adaptation for Yang’s bar fight scene in the ‘Yellow’ trailer which was FAR superior to Weiss’s fight. Based on how the characterization in Ice Queendom went, the Japanese consumers love the whole one-dimensional tsundere ice queen archetype Weiss has going on; meanwhile, I feel that this is Weiss at her most immature state, and we only get to see the more appealing aspects of her character when she matures in Seasons 5 and 6 and uses her vulnerabilities to ease the tension between her team. This kind of culture clash on top of Shaft’s inconsistent animation quality throughout production was why I couldn’t enjoy myself while watching Ice Queendom. Everything felt so hollow and cliché compared to authentic RWBY. The best example I can give is how Ruby used her silver eyes to defeat Weiss’s nightmare which completely undermines the moment where she is first supposed to use them during the end of Season 3. Victory may lie in a simple soul, but when you make it too simple can you really say that it still has soul?

Rest in peace, Monty Oum. Even though I didn't necessarily enjoy Ice Queendom, a weird RWBY spinoff is better than no RWBY at all. It is amazing how his ambition crossed overseas all the way to Japan and inspired producers there to do a reimagining of his work. We have Monty to thank for bringing people together like this.

RWBY? Now, that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time.

I haven’t seen RWBY since season six in late 2018, and nothing, in particular, has turned me off the series. My interest just kind of petered out after I began to make, and listen to criticisms of the show. But, when I saw a new anime called “RWBY: Ice Queendom” the long cold fire that was my interest in RWBY began to smolder anew. However, the smoldering waned a bit after I watched the first few episodes, and by the last episode, the fire was as cold as it always ... was. Not that RWBY: Ice Queendom was bad. It just captured very little about what I liked in the original show. The animation, music, and character development that the original show had (to varying degrees I might add) just weren’t there in the end. Don’t watch this if you are a RWBY mega fan because you will just get mad. Also, if you are not a fan, don’t watch it because this won't get you into, or back into, RWBY. So who is this show for? I don’t know, children? 4/10.

*Spoilers beyond this point*

I immediately knew I was going to be in for something when the first three episodes are pretty much all recaps of the show, but they condense two hours of the show into one hour for the anime. This caused a lot of pacing issues in those first three episodes. Like when the students are tasked with finding a chess piece in order to make teams. The entire thing was here and gone in a few minutes. And this was one example of things being cut out and left worse for wear. There are many more I can assure you. And because of the amount cut out, the dialog has to pick up the slack, and oh boy does it hold your hand. It holds your hand so hard in fact that your bones will powderize after the first episode. One of my favorite examples is when Weiss says, “Hello Father and older sister this is my final test right?” Now the dialog in the original show wasn’t very hands-off, but it was leagues better than this!

Two of my favorite moments from the first season were the open fight at the dust store, and Blake's reveal as a Faunus. But of course, both of these moments are way worse in the anime than in the show. For example, in the show, Ruby turns the music off on her headphones after going outside. That was a small detail, but it sold the scene. Also, there was no cut to Yang in the middle of the chase going “Ruby? What are you doing little sister?” Who thought that would be a good decision? Also, who thought rushing through Blake's revel as a Faunus was a good idea? So in the show, Blake’s revel had (mostly) proper buildup and payoff, but in the anime, it is like, “See Blake? Wow, she is a Faunus. Anyways, moving on…” Very little setup and even less payoff. You would have guessed?

After the first three episodes, comes the meat of the season. That of course being that Ruby, Blake, and Yang have to save Weiss from the Grimm that is keeping her in her dreams. Does that sound confusing and misplaced? Well, reader, I can assure you that it is even worse in the show. It comes out of nowhere and makes very little sense. The Grimm has always been a real, and physical, threat, but this one is not and not. Why? Couldn’t tell ya. Actually, I can. It is the same reason why they did not send as many people as possible into Weiss’s dream to begin with, the reason why there were so many relics, and the reason why Ruby didn’t just use her semblance to get inside and help Weiss right away. We needed a 12-episode show, and without these poor story decisions, and others, we wouldn’t have that.

The story isn’t all bad though. For example, I like how the characters have relationships prior to the show starting. It shows planning and an idea of where the show will go in the future. Also, I like the airplane scene because it takes all the nonsense from the first season of the show, and condolences it down to a (mostly) logical scenario. It was a nice step up from the original. Also, Wiess’s dream had good symbolism. Weiss’s father's hologram has bright blue eyes as if that's the part of him that she remembers the clearest. There were also some funny jokes. Like when Ruby thinks that Weiss remembered her weapon, but then it shoots from the end of the handle instead of the tang. Lastly, The visuals when Blake’s and Weiss’s dreams collided looked nice. Even though it made no sense narratively. I will finish off this paragraph with a recommendation. Because it doesn’t make sense for Pyrrha to be sinning Mirror Mirror, so what should happen is to have a hologram of Weiss pushed into an alleyway singing it. You get the song and the symbolism. Bam.

Also, I suggest people stop ragging on the animation. Listen man it’s not good, but I have seen so much worse. When you delve into the rabbit hole as often as I do, you know it can get really bad. Honestly, the worst parts about the art are the chins that can cut diamonds, and the character redesigns. All of the characters look bad except for a couple like Adam and Penny which are just okay. Additionally, the redesigns remind me of the “drawing characters from _____ in my art style” thing that occasionally occurs on the internet. Also, on the character designs, hate Blake’s dream clothing. I know that that is how Weiss really sees her, but could it be any more on the nose? The final criticism of the art is that I hate it when an anime is edited like a manga. Like when the screen is cut in half and Weiss’s eyes are staring straight ahead at the viewer, and Ruby’s are on the bottom staring at the viewer too. Like you are making an anime. You can have more creative and dynamic shots than that.

There are a few things that I do like. For example, I like Ruby’s, Weiss’s, and Yang’s dream clothes. They fit the characters very well, while still feeling like they fit the environment. Also, I liked Shion Zaiden’s design, but she is so different than the others that she really stands out.
Another example is that there are a handful of scenes that look good. Like when Weiss crushes the golden chess piece with the vines growing out of her hand. This scene made me sit up in my chair and go “Oh wow.” But then I slumped back down again after I remembered that there were probably many other relics just kicking around.

I have so little to say about the characters. They were already ill-defined at this point in the show, and the anime doesn’t do much to combat that. The only thing that the anime does is take out moments that I liked, and were needed for proper character development. I have almost nothing to say about the sound too. I prefer the original music and go back to listen to it sometimes, but the music in the anime isn’t that good. While some of the music in the anime is good and fits well and others don’t and don’t. Some sound effects are good, and others are not. The VAs did a passable job. That’s it. Moving on.

So, did I enjoy RWBY: Ice Queendom? No, because clearly this anime was made for the current fans of the show, but I can’t see any RWBY fans liking this show because of all the things it does wrong. It looks, on average, worse than the show, it has worse music than the show, it has a worse story than any season of the show, and it has worse characters than the show. So what does it have for a current fan? Past fan? Non-fan? Of course, the answer to all the above is that I don’t know at best and nothing at worst. Unfortunately, all of these problems leave me unable to recommend. In the end, the sound gets a 5 while the story, animation, characters, and enjoyment get a 4. For a final score of a 4/10.

TLDR: Don't waste your time on this anime. The animation is terrible and the story is boring.

I came into this anime expecting stellar fight scenes as Shaft attempts to recreate the awesomeness of the original RWBY. Story I didn't really care that much about, but it had to be at least somewhat serviceable and not be boring. What I got was the complete opposite of what I wanted. There was one really good fight scene for each of the first three episodes, and everything else looks like utter dogshit. Walk cycles were fucked, fights became slideshows, sometimes the animation quality drops so hard it's comical. ... Ok, so the animation is garbage, but what about the plot? While there is a plot, it's boring as fuck. Team RWBY has to save Weiss from a dream demon by going into her dream and beating her evil possessed self. This plot is very simple, and could make for a serviceable anime if the animation did it's job. However, the story is somehow boring as fuck. I honestly can't even remember what happened other than the start and ending, so you'll have to trust me on that. Everything considered, this anime is hot garbage. The only reason it got a 3/10 rather than a 1/10 is because the first three episodes had some REALLY good fight scenes. Watch those on youtube, skip the rest.

3/10 solely for how "decently" the first three episodes are adapted. It'd be a 1 otherwise.

RWBY is a series that conceptually has a really interesting world and characters, but unfortunately the "writers" have no idea what to do with any of it. Even more unfortunate is the fact that these same writers are the ones who wrote this story and handed it off to a high end studio hoping they could make a miracle out of garbage.

While the first three episodes to have a pacing problem and mostly require that you've watched the first couple Volumes of the original series to fully grasp what's happening, ... for the most part the adaptation of it is excellently done. Scenes that looked pretty bad in the original volume and were only saved by the amazing choreography of Monty Oum look stunning in those episodes. Again the pacing is a bit fast to cram as much information as possible, but it's forgivable for the most part.

Where everything falls apart is the atrocious original story created for this adaptation. What happened in nine episodes honestly could've been done in the span of three and without the needless plot convenience of an OC that is Shion. Animation quality takes a sharp decline until the second to last episode as well, and even then it tries to take the Demon Slayer approach of big explosions and lots of colors and effects but fails at it. Dialogue genuinely feels like it was written by someone who has never spoken with another human before and only has an idea of how they talk from watching other cheesy anime. Some scenes are completely out of place, characters are awful, the plot goes nowhere the entire time...basically just the problems that modern day RWBY has. Somehow above all else, an anime that was marketed as primarily being about Weiss, spends almost no time exploring her character in a meaningful way that hasn't already been done to death in the original series. Even then, they barely explore her character at all other than being a petty, cold, rich girl tsundere who is actually just really lonely. It's an absolute joke.

I had hopes for the project, but much like everything RoosterTeeth handles in this day and age, it just fell flat on it's face. Unless you're the most hardcore of RWBY fans this is an easy skip imo. It's a shame that something better couldn't be created with the legacy that Monty Oum left behind.