Mar 4, 2018
B: The Beginning combines two separate stories within each other, one of supernatural mystery and one with a detective searching for a murderer. The fundamental problem with the show is that both stories suck ass and don’t really connect together at all. You could rather easily cut out one of these plot lines from the entire narrative and not lose that much in terms of story quality in the other. Hell, the show may be better for it. So, don’t even read the rest of this review, just write the show off based on the word of one internet stranger alone. Trust me, I’m
...
the only internet stranger that matters.
I hate when reviews talk about the meaty stuff first and then mention the audiovisuals at the end in much shorter detail, so we’re going to escalate in our meaty bonanza. The production values for this show are great. B: The Beginning does not have any dips in quality, it is consistently good looking and sometimes better than that for its entire run. While not specifically my aesthetic, the visuals are certainly strong, and the animation is quite good the entire show. Kazuto Nakazawa has many important seats visual wise, as the chief animation director, character designer, director in general, and original creator of the show. Other shows he’s had influence on visual wise that you may have heard of are Zankyou no Terror and Samurai Champloo, so if you loved the visuals in those shows, this may be worth a shot for you.
Sound wise, this show is pretty underwhelming. The soundtrack isn’t of poor quality but binging through the entire show it was easy to notice they were just playing the same couple of tracks over and over again per episode, which got grating. This show does have a cool ending theme song as well, though the visuals for it aren’t noteworthy.
I’ll be frank; the supernatural plot of B: The Beginning is a pile of cockshit, getting bad quickly and never recovering. The premise, is that we have “Killer B” who is a non human creature with insane powers. He has wings, his arm can turn into a sword, he has an edgy anime left eye, his skin turns black when he starts fighting people, and has regenerative powers. This part of the show is about him, and the mythos of his species. This isn’t a bad premise on its own although it isn’t especially unique, but fun things could be done with it! Sadly, B: The Beginning does not do anything fun with this. Instead it goes into the most basic direction imaginable in every shape and form. I felt like I had vietnam flashbacks to every anime I’ve ever watched while finding out about this character’s backstory. I don’t mind if a show isn’t unique as long as it is executed in an appealing way, and this show very much does not execute this aspect in an appealing way. In order to do that, I’d need to care about the characters, because every single character in the supernatural plot did not matter to me, including the most important character, Killer B a.k.a Koku. Koku’s entire character basically revolves around the “tragedy” of what happened to him when he was a child and his girlfriend Yuna. When bad things happen to Yuna, he gets mad and yells like the shounen boy he is. He has nothing else going on so his character gets incredibly annoying being on screen so much when he is so uninteresting. Speaking of Yuna, she is a prime example of how this show can not write female characters very well. She is just Koku’s girlfriend and the damsel in distress. She doesn’t have her own character, her own motivations, nor does she do anything of importance in the story. She is just a macguffin, that is her entire character. The other chucklefucks, are all completely inconquestial to everything that it is kinda laughable. Pretty much every single one of the supernatural characters in this show is a stereotypical edgy anime crazy person, and all of them get taken out with little fanfare. Even an antagonist that remained in the shadows and slowly had intrigue building up for his encounter with the main character, ended up not mattering at all. Only one of these characters is an actual threatening adversary to the main character, but he isn’t given enough time or personality to leave an impact on the viewer.
Now, the other half of B: The Beginning is a story about Keith Flick hunting down the criminal that murdered someone close to him, and the bonds he has with the people in his life. While this side of B: The Beginning is better than everything related to Koku, it isn’t good by any stretch. The police force have some fun personalities in them, most notably Hoshino Lily, but they don’t leave much of an impact at all. Keith himself is just an eccentric genius character and this is shown to the audience in a terrible way, because the show doesn’t actually know how to represent this so it just throws bullshit at you. Keith solves the answer to a certain problem in episode 1 after writing a bunch of mathematical gibberish on a board, which is not the only the time that the show attempts to make him look smart despite the staff having little idea on how to present a character that actually is as smart as Keith. I found him quite dull. The main villain of this story line isn’t very good either. The show takes too long to start delving into his mindset and motivations that by the time it even attempted to do any fleshing out of the character my patience had already been worn out. Kaela, a side character, is similar to Keith in that they are supposed to be crazy good at something, but the show doesn’t know how to show it. She is the classic hacker dude of the group. She has a bunch of monitors, four fucking keyboards, that's right, four keyboards, weird foot pedals for some reason, you get the gist. Again, it is all just bullshit. Lily is the single most engaging character in the show due to her spunky personality, but the show doesn’t use her as much as they should have. In the finale she is just a tool for the last section of this storyline instead of getting to do something on her own. Like I said earlier in the review, this show does not write its female characters very well. While I don’t think the male characters are any good either, the writing and presentation of the female characters is fairly sexist. It isn’t to an extreme amount, but it is still a detriment to the show.
B: The Beginning… is pretty bad. haHAA get it, cause of the letter B bayBEEEE. I honestly regret ever watching a single episode of anime in my life.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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