Black★Rock Shooter (OVA)

This show was so hyped up. For a year before its release, floods of fanart, teaser videos, even cosplay, were everywhere. Then it finally comes out and is probably the most disappointing thing I've seen in a long time. It's probably going to get high ratings just because it has forced popularity, but don't be fooled. Here's the what and the why. Spoilers, of course.

Story: 2
Awesome promo art, a catchy song, cool fight scenes, and what does the story end up as? A slow-building, slow-moving school drama. It's not even interesting. Basically, the main character Mato becomes friends with a Yomi girl. Mato then becomes ... friends with a Yuu girl. Mato gets jealous (since they were OBVIOUSLY such good friends after all of what, three days?), vanishes suddenly, and is never seen again. After the end credits, she's back. What happened? Who knows. It also impllies Yuu is now jealous of Mato and Yomi being friends, leaving room for a sequel (God knows it doesn't deserve one).

There are fighting scenes throughout, where characters that look like personas of these girls duking it out in a phantasmal checkerboard world, except for Yuu's persona, who just stands on a cliff for one scene and then is never seen again. The show keeps you guessing how it's related to the story you see unfolding at the school - could it be her imagination? A wild world contained in her dreams? No! It has no fucking connection at all! It's a metaphor for her trying to overcome her friend's jealousy. It's not deep. It's not inspirational. It's just stupid.

Art: 4
Yes, Black Rock Shooter is Yoko from Gurren Lagann combined with Hatsune Miku. Yes, there are girls with heavy weaponry, scythes, skulls, and skimpy clothing in this awesome cathedral world. But then when you actually watch it, you discover that during those fight scenes, the video gets so choppy you can barely tell it's animated at all! It's like you're watching a powerpoint presentation! The school life sequences were better animated, but were generally poor enough quality that it feels like you're watching K-On animated by underpaid laborers. Oh, wait...

Sound: 5
Remember that awesome Vocaloid Song the show was going to be based on? It doesn't appear in the show at all. Instead it's replaced by a punky-sounding end credits song, very sparse background music, and the voices, well... most of the lines are grunts and heavy breathing. For 50 minutes of video, there's not very much talking, and for what they do say, I have no comment. The music though, was a big let-down.

Character: 2
There are 6 characters in this show. Mato, Yomi, Yuu, and their personas. The personas look awesome but never talk until the very end, where one speaks. Deep? No. Lazy.
Their designs are decent enough, although Black Rock Shooter to me looked more like a zombie with her pale white skin and stomach scar. I don't really have much to say about the school-life versions. They're really boring. If you can find one defining thing about any of the three of them, please, PLEASE tell me. I won't even remember their names by tomorrow.

Enjoyment: 3
Because it was only an hour.

Overall: 3
Yeah, so people are going to say if you don't get the plot of this show, it's too deep for you. Well guess what? There is no plot. It's 40 minutes of highschool drama - /sorta/. 4 minutes of credits, and across the whole thing, 6 minutes of low-framerate fight scenes. The moral of the story? My friends and I came up with two.
A. You cannot have more than one friend.
B. Girls are bitches.

Before I say what I think of this OVA in general, I'm just going to briefly say why I rated each attribute what I did.

Story: 3 (Poor)

What story? It's a high school slice-of-life, *but*, an extremely underdeveloped one. I've seen a number of popular slice-of-life animes, and while the genre itself is "basic", it doesn't have to be uninteresting. Genshiken is a shining example of slice-of-life done right. As is Azumanga Daioh, which I've just recently started watching. In order to make up for a lack of deep plot twists and turns (though they can work in the genre, they're rarely done well when implemented), ... character development usually steps up to the plate as a heavy hitter to compensate. I'll get to characters more in a moment, but as it stands the story leaves much to be desired. There is practically none. The fact that this OVA exists means that some semblance of a story *exists*, but just by virtue of "existing". It's very poor.

Art: 7 (Good)

I rated the art "good" because it was original. It reminded me a little bit of D.Gray-Man, which while definitely not in the top-tier of shounen anime nor anime in general, you've gotta hand it to it; the art was original. Same for BRS. Unfortunately, the high school scenes and anything unrelated to the world in which BRS originates from was bland and mediocre, if that. I've seen better artwork in 90's anime. But hey, I'm not saying it was horrible... It was "good".

Sound: 6 (Fair)

I have to say, I expected more than BRS delivered. The music was slow, quiet, and mostly made me want to fall asleep. Now, this is subjective; some people like that sort of stuff, and during some of the fighting scenes, the pace did pick up, but in others, there was just *nothing*. Two people starting at each other for a few seconds, and *nothing*. I realize it was probably done on purpose to build up to something, but most of the time, the build up was ruined by a jump cut away from the BRS world back to the high school, where the girls are sitting at their desks talking about nothing particularly interesting. There's not too much to complain about in the sound area, but definitely nothing notable worthy of praise.

Character: 3 (Poor)

I realize it's a short OVA, but if you were to add a mere half hour more to it, it would be a feature-length movie. I didn't find myself having any emotional attachment to any of the characters on *any* level. BRS could have died, and I wouldn't have cared. Any character could have just dropped dead, and I wouldn't have cared. I didn't even hate any of the enemies, nor cared about them at all. Sure, developing a tie to a character is a completely subjective experience, but I felt *nothing*. That says enough to show that BRS really lacked in this department. It had more than enough time to work with, and made no use of it. Perhaps they should have spent less time on meaningless shots of people starting at each other and high school kids talking about everyday life *almost every single scene*. I mean, come on. Use the first 15-20 minutes if you need to for setting up the plot scenario, and sprinkle it with a little more character development and background. It's hard to enjoy any piece of work when you don't care about who's involved.

Enjoyment: 2 (Deadful)

I thought "poor" was giving this too much credit. "Enjoyment" is purely a subjective category, so regardless of the production values, my opinion is all that matters here. And I found sitting through this thing to be as uninteresting as watching paint dry. For the first 20 minutes or so, it had my attention, but only because I was waiting for all of the build up to explode into something more intriguing or awe-inspiring. But then that feeling just slowly started to fizzle out with all the jump cuts away from where the action was. As soon as it started to look promising, you were dished out a helping of boredom. How disappointing. One thing is for sure: I never want to sit through this OVA ever again. I will not be watching the sequel, if there ever is one (God help us).

Overall: 3 (Poor)

There was a lot of hype surrounding this OVA, but I think people are starting to realize how disappointing it turned out to be in the end. People have been (for some reason) comparing BRS to Miku Hatsune, because I suppose it's enough to say that any anime girl with twin tails who's VA sings must automatically be inspired by the character who is the poster girl for a voice synthesizer software product. If you just went "HUH?" at that last but, you're on the same page as me. This OVA was riding on the coat-tails of unfounded fan speculation of a character completely unrelated to it (for some reason I *still* can't understand), but it jumped off and decided to hitch a ride aboard the fail trail.

I know this review sounds harsh, but really. This was a big disappointment.

This is a crappier version of Heartcatch Precure, a magical girl show written for 12 year old girls. I'll be using Heartcatch as a comparison show. Go watch that instead, or do anything else with your time but this.

STORY:
THIS IS NOT THE ACTION FANTASY YOU WERE PROMISED BY THE TRAILERS.
Roughly half of the 5 to 10 minutes of actual Black Rock Shooter footage was already shown in the previews.

I've seen a couple reviews saying that the show is all about a great friendship story, which is the only thing they can claim when the first 44 minutes of this 48 minute show are spent without ... the title character getting more than a 30-second spot on screen.

However, the "great friendship story" is 10 to 15 minutes of content dragged out over 44 minutes. Girls become best friends, one girl gets all sad, evil lady captures sad girl, forces her to fight her best friend, best friend transforms and rescues sad girl. This is the entire plot to both BRS and the first episode of Heartcatch, and Heartcatch includes a better fighting scene and does it in half the time. Never has a show made me want to re-cut it for better pacing more than this show. I could have started halfway through the show and not missed anything.

ART:
The art was the best part of the show, which I guess makes sense when the entire show was based on a song and some character art. Some of the animation was a bit sketchy, but I could have forgiven it if the rest of the show wasn't such utter crap.

SOUND:
For a show based on a Vocaloid song, the music was almost non-existent. I think the piano version of the song showed up once, but it was really quiet. The battle noises drowned out any music during them.

For voices, they weren't too bad, except for Yomi's VA (Who I had come to expect better work from). The final scene, the big emotional payoff, was ruined by the "I'm hugging you/I don't want to be hugged/Too bad/I'm going to moan like I'm giving birth to a camel." Everyone in the room cringed.

CHARACTERS:
These characters could have been memorable, if they had given them more lines than idle chit-chat about unimportant crap. The Heartcatch Precure characters have more developed personalities than these girls.

ENJOYMENT:
What enjoyment?

OVERALL:
Just don't bother.

I kept hearing about BRS, so I got curious and checked it out.

My friend fell asleep halfway through, I barely stayed awake. There's very little that's worth watching on this mess of an OAV.

There's no cohesiveness to this. The main characters are awfully boring with an unoriginal plot. Yeah I'm sure friendship and bonds are the main themes but what other anime doesn't have that? You get pretty much no clues about why the characters jump back and forth between worlds, when you do figure it out, it still makes no sense. The episode primarily comprises of the "real" world, in ... which quite literally, nothing happens.

To top it all off, the animation is pretty terrible. The art is nothing to write home about but animation is very choppy and doesn't flow very well.

The characters are flat and dull. There's nothing spectacular about the main girls and you learn nothing about BRS and her enemies, the whole 10 minutes of screen time they have.

In short, this OAV is a complete disappointment. Not the worst I've seen but certainly nowhere near mediocre either. Plenty of better ways you can spend 50 minutes of your life.

Everyone was really excited about this OVA coming out.
Even I was excited myself, but when I watched this OVA, I kind of felt something was missing.
I mean the trailer was everything. I was expecting AMAZING things from this OVA.
But it seems like the trailer was everything.
I was expecting other characters to come out from the OVA such as Black Matagi, Black Gold Saw (well she did come out but only in the beginning), Black Devil Girl, and all the other characters that Huke has created. I kind of hope there is going to be a second one that is going to be much better. (I'm ... a person who doesn't judge anime or manga by first episode or the first chapter)
But seeing how the OVA ended, I'm pretty sure there's gonna be a second one to it.

The overall storyline, uhhhh... I kind of have nothing to say. I mean I'll admit that the characters were cute and all but like suddenly became friends suddenly disappearing.. and then Yomi suddenly becoming the Dead Master was a bit what the heck? I felt that the OVA was a bit too short and fast. Being honest, I would say that the opening was not that bad.

Lastly, there was this other character that had like white hair and red eyes.
I think it was quite obvious who she is. I mean I'm only guessing for now,
but.. it's kind of obvious, seeing how the ending turned out to be. Maybe I'm the only one who thinks this way but not sure.

I swear I couldn't understand what the fuck was happening even after seeing this crapwork of a movie twice.

The stupid story is about two parallel worlds of completely different nature, in which there are two sets of female characters doing completely different things and having different looks except for hairstyles.

In one world, it's a typical slice-of-life between two schoolgirls, which led to no conclusion. In the other one, the two girls were fighting to death, and at last one of them died! There are supposed to be connections between the two worlds, but there's effectively none...

This kind of bullshit crap... I can make a ton ... in my lifetime if I want to, but no, because only idiots do.

Ok, so if you don't know the story, I'll tell you:

The artist Huke drew a picture simply titled "Black Rock Shooter", and a Vocaloid song producer named Ryo though she looked like a black-haired Hatsune Miku, so he made a song and video, which were quite good, and after this entered the internet, it became a hit, so big, that they decided to make an anime.
I can only guess that at first they planned to have fights and a storyline, with BRS's post-apocalyptic world as a setting, but then some numbnuts decided that instead they should take advantage of the hype and make a ... slice-of-life anime about 2 girls...without BRS,of course.

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!! BEWARE....or not, this thing sucks anyway

Story:2
If you saw the OVA already, you shouldn't be surprised, two girls, Yomi and Mato, suddenly become best friends but then get separated, and Mato befriends this girl named Yuu, and Yomi becomes jealous, disappears, Mato gets sad and decides to go look for her, that's pretty much it. There are clips with Black Rock Shooter fighting (sometimes just walking, or standing...weeeee)with Dead Master, and a red girl with no name at the beginning of the OVA, who apparently kills BRS and is never seen again(BRS survived...wtf? -.-), there was also a white haired girl with HUGE umm, fist-glove-thingies, who appears for 30 seconds, jumps off a cliff and is never seen again...at this point I wasn't surprised.

Art:6
What can I say, it's K-ON with guns (well, 1 gun), it's not bad, but it certainly isn't good(if that makes any sense), there were low framerate fights btw, not much else to say, except BRS's world looked great.

Sound:4
Fist of all, the BRS song's not in there...ever, there are some parts that sound kinda like it, like the piano at the end, but, the music was decent, but not too good.

Character:3
Well, the "real world" characters were boring, except for yoi and Mato (Well, there's only 9 characters), the BRS world characters, well, I don't know what to say, they don't talk, but the red girl and the white haired one were boring, the white haired one was just standing there, and red girl killed BRS(I guess I can give her some credit for that), but BRS and Dead Master didn't do much either, they just fought and then sort of...stopped, anyway, the characters weren't very good.

Enjoyment:2
Yeah, what did you expect? Well, I sure expected a lot more from this OVA, but it just didn't live up to a hype, nothing lives up to hype actually( well, maybe Gurren Lagann), but this was WAY,WAAAY, below not living up to it, it was terrible, to people who either never heard of the song or just found it by surprise it might be alright, but to other people, it was just a huge disappointment.

Overall:4

I thought this was gonna be awesome chicks fighting each other but all we got was like 10 minutes of horribly animated chicks fighting and 40 minutes of slice of life yuri shit. I wouldn't have minded the slice of life stuff if the story wasn't just retarded. I heard there was a lot of hype behind this and it was supposed to be good but it was probably the most boring 52 minutes of my life. I also heard that this was supposed to have something to do with Vocaloids? I was expecting a bunch of good songs but there were literally only like ... 4 songs in the whole show.

Overall: Boring story, Ok art, bad fighting animation, ok music (for what music there was), and stupid characters.

I never thought I would be one of those people that would right a long Review >_> but w/e....THE FOLLOWING IS MY PERCEPTION OF THE 20-MINUTES I COULD BEAR TO WATCH

This movie was very very disappointing I normally like anything, and i mean anything that has to do with Amaterasu (Itachi's attack) so i thought, "hmm...a movie with a girl with a flaming blue eyes, this will be Legen....wait for it...dary." Turned out I was so wrong it wasn't Legendary it wasn't even "Leg.." A fourth of the way through this and I began ... to think, "wow maybe this just has a long introduction before the plot kicks in" but rather than seeing any hint of a future plot the movie got more and more confusing and finally after getting 20-minutes into it I deemed it to be unwatchable and had to save myself from any further torture. All I asked for was a Plot+Eyes+Flames and not necessarily even in that order.

2 - Story - Simply because it was literally dreadful and without achieving any conceivable plot within even the 20-minutes of it i watched.

9 - Art - I do admit that the art was very well made and brought a bit of ease to my eyes.

10 - Sound - There were no problems at all with the sound and I felt it was
actually quiet good.

3 - Characters - The characters are the most blandest, and static characters I have ever encountered. Its as if the creators got together and thought, "hmm whats the most boring way to bring about a character with no unique
ANYTHING."

2 - Enjoyment - hahahahahahaha.......Simply NO....

3 - Overall - Poor

The characters in the other world look cool but the show mostly is in the real world and nothing is really happening. The slow build leads to a conclusion, lacking a finale. I still don't understand exactly how the two worlds intertwine.

AKA nothing happens
but u can watch the few fight scenes on youtube or something maybe the shows better i donno



Character: Boring

Otherworld Characters: cool, if they had any screentime
...
Story: Boring

Conclusion: This show tries to be deep to be can't excuse the fact that it's boring and stupid


I have nothing more to say how long do i have to make this review