- Last Online6 hours ago
- GenderFemale
- BirthdayAug 30
- LocationHawaii
- JoinedJul 31, 2015
Ode to MALentine Secret Santa Exchange MALoween Mansion (Candy Hoarder) Fantasy Anime League MAL Bunkasai Attendee A Summer Out of This World School Club Showcase Easter Egg Hunt (Easy)
Also Available at
RSS Feeds
|
Jan 10, 2023
It's been 11 years since the original run of Tiger & Bunny in 2011, and it shows. It definitely shows. The first season way back then ended on a spooky cliffhanger implying that the nefarious secretive terrorist organization Ouroboros was real and not something Maverick made up to manipulate Barnaby. And I think they forgot what they were trying to do with that plot point. The chief issue with this very latest season is the focus it puts on Ouroboros that ultimately goes nowhere. The primary antagonist here is explicitly a member of Ouroboros, but it's revealed in one of the last moments that she
...
was acting completely independently in her schemes. The higher-ups at Ouroboros, who are shown only in silhouette profiles, end up convincing her lackey to take her out for them before disposing of him themselves. The heroes are constantly on the back foot and end up barely mattering in how the conflict resolves. The whole thing feels like filler to wait out a future season that may well never exist.
Even ignoring the failings of the overarching narrative, this season is a mess. Little Aurora, who is seen constantly in the background in billboards and such in the first half of season 2, is jawdroppingly useless. She's gifted with the power of supernatural intellect whenever she closes her eyes, but all she does is show up to be targeted by the villains and a damsel in distress, never once actually trying to think her way out of the situation. The incredibly dumb racism plot, the motivation behind our primary antagonist, feels like something the writers pulled out of thin air, pretending anti-superpower sentiment was always a thing despite no signs of it in season 1, in a society were superpowers have largely been extremely beneficial. It's funny that it ends up causing the mayor, who brings to mind the Jaws meme about why it's important to vote in your local elections, to order all the supernaturally gifted into literal internment camps, at the behest of public outcry, but no time is spent on the aftermath. I guess everyone forgot about it once the day was saved.
The main saving grace of the season is the character moments, though they don't get nearly as many chances to indulge in them compared to the first half of season 2. Kotetsu's and Barnaby's concern and care for each other as partners is always nice to see, though it does feel a bit rehashy of material we already saw in previous seasons. The other buddy hero duos do get cute enough bonding moments, if a little superficial. The most unique element of this season is Yuri, and it's nice to see him finally work through his lingering dad-related trauma, even if the execution is pretty clumsy. I'd probably watch a season 3 for more of these characters, but at this point, my expectations are rock-bottom for a satisfying plot.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
What did you think of this review?
Nice
0
Love it
0
Funny
0
Confusing
0
Well-written
0
Creative
0Show all
Oct 23, 2022
Shine Post has a fair bit of wasted potential, but the character interactions are enjoyable enough to help tug it to the finish line despite never really deviating from the structure of its generic narrative.
The early episodes are definitely where the show is at its weakest, working through very dime a dozen teenage insecurity character arcs to the point that they double up on the "no, I don't deserve to be center" plot back to back for two of the main characters. Then the show gets incredibly dumb, revealing that the group TINGS's main struggles boil down to how our protagonist Haru is just
...
too naturally talented and has it hide it so the other members can keep up. The whole fallout with two of the girls leaving TINGS before the start of the show is revealed as a plot by the president to try to trick Haru into trying harder, which surprise, surprise doesn't work, but hey, it's all good. We got the gang back together! Just ignore the fact that we deliberately broke it apart ourselves to begin with.
The manager is easily the weakest character in the show. The most generous take is that he's a very reserved type of guy, but he basically does nothing but be Mr. Perfect whenever the girls need someone to help get their character development moving and is otherwise not really seen or heard. The show's main gimmick is that the manager can tell by supernatural means whenever someone is lying, but this is the most underutilized aspect of the show. The show at least respects its audience's intelligence enough to not explicitly state that is what's happening, but 99% its only function is to tell the audience things they already know. The one time it's somewhat useful is when it's used to reveal that one of the girls' fans was being insincere in her support, but any competent drama should be able to convey that kind of information without paranormal intervention. In the end, it's nothing but a lazy crutch for the writers.
The show does pick up in the last few episodes when the rival group HY:RAIN gets some focus. The main rival girl, Ren, showing up out of nowhere to repeatedly declare "It's time!" to Haru in front of her group and refusing to elaborate is very endearing and helps round out the fun cast of idiots. The other four HY:RAIN girls comparatively get very little characterization, but their role in playing the four-person straight man to Ren's antics is serviceable enough. And serviceable is basically what the show is. At its core, this is a story about newbie idols who are given a challenge with a clear victory condition, and though it's hard work, they manage get to it in the end. It's the boilerplate hero's journey, and while the execution certainly stumbles at times, when it comes to idol stories, you could certainly do worse.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
What did you think of this review?
Nice
0
Love it
0
Funny
0
Confusing
0
Well-written
0
Creative
0Show all
Oct 17, 2022
The choice of story structure in A3! is bizarre. The time spent on the seasonal troupes is evenly divided, so you get six episodes with each of them. The show starts off with recruiting mostly theater newbies and watching them learn how to act. Then, six episodes later, the show throws them to the side to focus on finding five new guys, who you watch learn how to act, get tossed aside, and repeat. And repeat is the keyword. The whole show is just watching some bumbling idiots learn how to act four times in row. Most of the characters don't get enough screentime to
...
differentiate themselves from the cast of 20 boys, so instead they have to fall back on one-trick pony gimmicks to have any memorability. There's occasionally some decent drama, though nothing unique, and most episodes end up quite boring.
The second cour is at least marginally better than the first. You have a solid character dynamic between two boys in the Autumn troupe who start out hating each other but end up forming some grudging respect for each other. The Winter troupe is where the show decides to introduce some supernatural elements for the first time 19 episodes in, including getting the boys stuck in a literal time loop. It's too little too late to really recommend, but hey, if you've made it this far, you might as well finish it out.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
What did you think of this review?
Nice
0
Love it
0
Funny
0
Confusing
0
Well-written
0
Creative
0Show all
Oct 12, 2022
Shoot! Goal to the Future is sequel to the 1993 series Aoki Densetsu Shoot! which was a fairly standard sports narrative that became defined by its major character death midway through the series. It was an interesting exploration of how a death of a renowned player affects not only his team but also his rivals on other teams denied their chances of ever getting a rematch. The story often took a turn deep into melodrama, but the emotional charge is what sets the series apart from all the dozens of no-names to champions sports narratives out there.
Shoot! the sequel takes that melodrama and throws out
...
everything else. Characters will suddenly turn incredibly jaded and selfish after some miscommunication. Situations will bring up crazy ultimatums and resolve with lots of loud sobbing. My favorite setup happens midway through the show, where one of the main characters becomes insanely jealous of his best friend (though it's pretty obvious he wants to be more than that) becoming close to the soccer team's new member, to the point where he's openly spreading rumors about the new kid on the team and trying to sabotage his reputation on the school newspaper in order to get him to quit the team. It should be noted that he had no problem playing with him for several episodes before this.
This kind of writing is fantastic if you love soap operas, but it's hard to recommend it to anyone else. There's little else Shoot! really has to offer. The animation looks awful to the point where it can be difficult to find stills that look halfway decent. The nods to the original 1993 series are cute if you know where to look for them, but they can't carry a full 13 episodes. You'll know immediately from episode 1 if this is the kind of show you'll enjoy, and if you do, I promise it's a great ride.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
What did you think of this review?
Nice
0
Love it
0
Funny
0
Confusing
0
Well-written
0
Creative
0Show all
Apr 27, 2022
Nothing really stands out about Ahiru no Sora. At the immediate surface level, the animation never really goes beyond perfunctory in the basketball games, with many scenes being obvious manga panel stills embellished with some sliding motions in the foreground. As is rather infamous, the animation team tries to ape Kuroko's Basketball in conveying how fast the characters are moving, but without the polish of Kuroko's production it just looks comical. Game flow massively suffers as a result, so it's hard to get invested in games when it's often unclear what plays are happening.
Storywise though, I have to give the show props for not being
...
a cookie cutter underdog narrative. We start with the basketball team as a complete sham and front for a delinquents' hangout brought about by the school's mandatory club rules. So when the team does get dragged into trying to play a game, they suck. A lot. They never win any of their practice games. They lose their first match in the tournament prelims. In fact, in the show's 50-episode run, the team plays five games and wins exactly zero of them.
The basketball games aren't really what's important in the show though. They're simply the medium for carrying the real meat of the show: the character arcs. You've got the usual spiel with the kids about finding a passion and working hard to achieve something even if you fail, but I find the advisor to be the most compelling character as the representation of the primary conflict of the series. Because of their reputation, the basketball team commands not an iota of respect from the school, neither from the faculty or the other students. The advisor comes in only because he is told to by the principal, and he immediately lays it out that he is not invested in the future of the team and would really have it be disbanded as soon as possible. He is convinced that people don't fundamentally change, but the team's earnest efforts to get better and make up for their mistakes slowly wins him over. They might cause trouble and get into fights, but they're ultimately just kids, and kids need to be nurtured and encouraged, not abandoned.
It's a sweet sentiment, but it's a bit undermined by how much of this show is its very lame treatment of its female characters. We get a scene early on with one of the main characters trying to peep on the girls' locker room and then steal their underwear, and that pretty much sets the tone for the entire show. The most egregious instance is when they play a practice game against the girls' basketball team. When the coach brings it up, the boys scoff at the idea that any game with such a lopsided physical advantage could possibly be worth going through, and one of them cheekily suggests that maybe they'll be motivated if the girls all strip naked if they lose. This turns into the captain of the girls' team getting stuck as the sole victim of the losing condition, and absolutely none of the boys even try protesting this despite the show presenting some of them elsewhere as good-natured and nice people. I've never been a high school boy, so perhaps having uncontrollably horny urges is simply accurate to real life, but I'd rather not see it in my media.
Ahiru no Sora is basically a melodrama in disguise, complete with a obviously dying mom for the protagonist, and to that effect it's pretty good. Worth a look if you can ignore the lackluster animation, somewhat slow pacing, and questionable characterization, but there's no doubt in my mind that the manga is the better format for the series.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
What did you think of this review?
Nice
0
Love it
0
Funny
0
Confusing
0
Well-written
0
Creative
0Show all
Mar 29, 2022
Sasaki and Miyano is a shallow romance series, where our two leads consist of one guy working up to a 10-year-old's understanding of love and another guy who never learned about boundaries or self-reflection. But worst of all, nothing frigging happens over the whole show.
Let's start with that. The pacing is reminiscent of an adaptation of a never-ending light novel series. It's obvious the kids fall for each other pretty much immediately, yet they'll still waffle over what it all means for the majority of the show's total runtime. The grand feelings realization scenes that should be pivotal for any romance series have zero impact
...
because they get recycled so frequently by the show, sometimes even in back-to-back episodes. On top of that, we get multiple instances of Sasaki telling Miyano he likes him, to which Miyano emphatically does nothing. At best, he'll hem and haw about not being able to give an answer right now, and Sasaki will accept it by saying he'll wait forever because he's a pathetic fool. The wheel spinning is made worse by the concept of time itself being completely weightless. When the characters see each other again, how much time has passed since we last saw them? A day? A week? Three months? It's impossible to tell until the characters explicitly inform the audience that yes, three months have indeed passed since our last banal conversation. The frequent time skips for seemingly no reason makes it hard to care about the cast it outright denies the chance of seeing them develop over the normal course of a school year. Or well, the chance would have been denied if they had developed at all, that is.
Which brings me to my second point: the extended cast is an empty shell. None of them matter except to exist in the periphery of Sasaki and Miyano. Thus, the setting comes off as artificial. This feeling is best encapsulated in the women in the show, because they effectively do not exist. We get about four minutes of screentime with Miyano's middle school crush in one episode, then we never mention it again, and that's basically it as far as named characters go. Multiple boys in the cast have girlfriends they frequently talk about, but they never get any names and we don't ever get to see their faces. Every opportunity for one of our leads to potentially meet one of them is conveniently brushed aside. ("Wanna visit my girlfriend in the hospital with me? No? Okay."; "Hey, I was gonna come to the cultural festival with my girlfriend, but she said she couldn't make it.") Halfway through the show, I was entertaining the idea that at least one of the girlfriends was completely made up, which would be some character trait to explore rather than the nothing burger the show keeps taunting us with.
All this could be tolerable if the central relationship was engaging, but it's the least appetizing element of the show somehow. The romance is vapid and fueled purely by physical attraction, despite what Sasaki might claim. But of course, what else could it be? The leads basically have no personality traits to speak of. They both like BL (boy, does the show want you to know they like BL), but other than that Miyano is insecure and Sasaki is prone to intense bouts of jealousy. Real keepers, the both of them. Supposed delinquent Sasaki never even gets shown breaking any school rules, aside from I guess briefly beating up some kids who were beating up another kid in episode 1. The most characterization we get is when the show dips into dated BL manga tropes that I remember being sick of in the early 2000s. For example, at one point Sasaki meets up with Miyano in an empty classroom, and he secretly locks the door behind him, and no one even comments on him doing this afterwards. I'm sure the show is going for the "Aw, he's so in love with him that he can't help himself from behaving badly" angle, but the sexual assault connotations really don't help its case.
What I'll give the show is that it's decent enough production-wise, though the overuse of geometry-adorned bloom effects gets tiring very quickly. It looks okay, which puts the show heads and shoulders over most BL anime. If you want something with substance however, I recommend looking anywhere else.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
What did you think of this review?
Nice
0
Love it
0
Funny
0
Confusing
0
Well-written
0
Creative
0Show all
Oct 17, 2021
Love Live! Superstar is a solid show production-wise, but its position as the fourth separate continuity in the franchise only highlights the increasingly formulaic nature of Love Live's writing.
The show starts out promising enough. Kanon is our now apparently archetypal spunky orange-headed protagonist. Unlike Honoka or Chika though, she gets to have real character flaws. She's grumpy, she sulks, she talks back to her family. She loves to sing, but she has struggled for years freezing up in front of an audience. When we meet her, she's convinced she'll never make it as a performer. There's potential for a focused, if rather well-worn, character
...
arc here that Love Live has never really done before.
Unfortunately, this lasts about two episodes in total. Within days of meeting Kanon, Keke sweeps her up into doing the school idol thing with her, with only token resistance from Kanon. One pre-concert jitters scene later, Kanon's stage fright is cured forever (or at least until we pretend it's still an ongoing issue nine episodes later to try to have some kind of conclusion for the end of the season), and we never see her acting moody again. Apparently, solving a lifetime's worth of anxiety issues is sometimes just that easy. A few episodes later, Kanon's childhood friend Chisato mentions that she specifically went into dance so that she could help Kanon out by doing the things Kanon can't do, but the implications of this put the opening arc of the show in a weird spot. I guess despite the two being close friends for nearly ten years or so, Chisato just never tried hard enough to help Kanon conquer her stage fright.
Aside from all that, Kanon herself is very popular at school, even though it is barely mentioned outright. Kanon handily wins a class vote for their idol group's center where most people voting would have no reason to care, and she's implied to have had a very good chance at the student council president seat if she hadn't refused to run. She's struggled with stage fright in front of her classmates for years, but the only bullying that ever happens is over Chisato drawing some stick figures in the dirt at a public park when she was a little girl. It's like a committee took someone's script and proceeded to shave off anything with the remotest chance of offending someone, all for the purpose of circling back to the safest route possible.
As we build up the school idol club, we're informed that—surprise, surprise—the student council girl, Ren, is against it. Why? Well, her mom was a school idol too, but she never kept any records of her club activities, and she apparently only mentioned her feelings about it once to Ren. But Ren forgot—yes, really—what her mom said to her, and thus concluded that her mom must have regretted being a school idol, it's the only explanation. She is thus very vocal on her anti-school idol position as she runs for student council president. Ren manages to get the votes of the general curriculum students by promising that everyone will get to participate in the upcoming school festival.
Once she's elected however, she insists that only the music course students will be performing, because she believes it's the only way to get more students to enroll in the school. Yes, apparently, the school is in danger of shutting down. Yes, again. Not only is the plot point derivative to the point of self-parody, but logistically, it makes little sense. Yuigaoka is literally in the very first year of its operation since it was formally refounded. How could it fall into such dire financial straits in the span of a few months? Are we to assume there's some embezzlement happening behind the scenes?
Ren's abrupt about-face in policy naturally upset the general curriculum students who start a petition in protest, and we see heated arguments break out between the general and music course students. Oh, but don't worry. All of this is resolved within the episode when Kanon and the gang showed Ren that no, her mom really did love being a school idol. So Ren relents and immediately reverses her position, allowing the general curriculum students to participate in the school festival. In response, the students all clap. Literally, everyone claps. Apparently, there's sometimes no one more understanding than a room full of irate teenagers. The school shutting down doesn't even get brought up again until it's suddenly solved off-screen in the final episode, so I guess it wasn't that important either?
Before Superstar aired, I had hoped that the smaller than usual main cast was a sign that we would see more nuanced, fleshed out characterization, but the characters are just as shallow here as when we had nine main characters in previous Love Live anime entries. Nothing the characters do have any real consequences, and every conflict is resolved almost immediately. There's never any stakes because the characters are never allowed to meaningfully fail. Early on, the fledgling school idol club is given an ultimatum: they have to win first place in an upcoming idol festival or they'll have to disband. They end up losing to the contest favorite school idol duo Sunny Passion, but the school just shrugs and lets them have their club anyway with no pushback.
Sunny Passion functions as our main rivals, but they might as well not exist for how severely underutilized they are. Their whole characters can be summed up in three traits: they're nice, they never sing on-screen, and they look like they got picked off the cutting room floor of Aikatsu character designs. They get a full episode where they invite the girls out to perform at their island resort, and even then they have barely any presence. I'd be surprised if anyone remembers their names because they matter so little.
Meanwhile, our main cast of girls get to have cute antics with good production values, but that's all there is to it. The only character flaws they have that aren't tossed aside are ones that can be spun as cute, as if they're disguised strengths in the weaknesses category of a job interview. The one exception to this is when the focus shifts to Sumire, whose hangups get treated some actual weight. She's insecure and afraid of failure, and that doesn't magically all go away after receiving one kind gesture from her friends. Two episodes cannot carry a series however, and the show otherwise never tries to be anything more, quickly quashing any hints to the contrary.
Love Live is a mega popular franchise with more than enough dedicated super fans to weather a few unexceptional anime entries, but a franchise that keeps playing safe is one that will eventually hit a wall in market saturation. As of now, Love Live is juggling three different active groups to run the live concert circuit: Sunshine's Aqours, Nijigasaki, and Superstar's Liella! Each one has the same basic premise of starting a brand new idol club in the face of student council disapproval. Sunshine, at least in its first season, distinguishes itself by having a consistent through line reinforcing its central theme. Nijigasaki flips the focus in favor of individual character episodes instead of any overall plot, and at least its school isn't in danger of dying for no good reason. In contrast, Superstar has little giving it its own identity.
On its own, Superstar is serviceable if light on substance, and it has enough great scenes to demonstrate that someone on the staff really cared about the show, but they're always fighting against the show's refusal to take a step outside the boundaries of past successes. Taken in the context of the franchise, it has little innovation to offer. Newcomers to Love Live will have no issues enjoying the series, and super fans don't need a second opinion. For everyone else though, it's more or less skippable.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
What did you think of this review?
Nice
0
Love it
0
Funny
0
Confusing
0
Well-written
0
Creative
0Show all
Aug 10, 2021
This is the stupidest show I've seen in years.
Moriarty the Patriot is at its core a simple revenge fantasy. The villains of the week are all cartoonishly evil beyond parody, characterized only by things like yelling about how much they hate the poor. The purported central theme of Moriarty is that the ills of society lay solely at the hands of the rich elites, yet we take out one bad police commissioner and then treat police corruption as a solved issue. Power structures? No, it's all the work of a few bad apples.
Season 1 at least has the merits of short contained episodes where Moriarty
...
has some funny murders under his belt, like tricking a guy into eating his fruit allergy or baiting another guy into stabbing someone onstage in a fully occupied concert hall. I guess in season 2 though he got tired of coming up with ways to kill people, where all he does is stab a few people in the last few episodes. Instead, the story concerns itself with setting up longer arcs, and the pacing suffers massively as a result. Plans set into motion are immediately accompanied by a flashback explaining every step of the plan, and then followed up by subsequent flashbacks of everyone explaining their own parts in the plan to themselves. It's pretty obvious the animation staff needed to fill time (the final episode had five separate recaps, including a flashback to what happened earlier that same episode), but it comes off as the show having absolutely no faith in its audience. If the show wants the audience to know something, it gets explicitly spelled out to the letter every time.
Season 2 also has a pretty bad character bloat problem, which is only exacerbated by how the show undermines every possible competent antagonist as soon as they appear, so it keeps needing to invent new ones. The British government is on to us? Oh never mind, Mycroft says he'll look the other way. The police is after us? Oh never mind, we got rid that one bad commissioner, so now we're friends. The media mogul is trying to blackmail us? Oh never mind, we gave him two episodes to pretend to be a threat and hyped up the confrontation as the epic battle between pure evil and necessary evil, and then we killed him off in the next episode where William Moriarty himself is mostly plotting off-screen.
A lot of season 2's runtime is spent on discussing political maneuvers and William's master plan, which is not only dull but also meaningless, as in the final arc William reveals his actual secret master plan which is completely different from what had been discussed for the past 22 episodes. The real master plan gets rid of any remaining redeeming quality of the show. You wanted a revenge fantasy? Sorry, William just revealed he feels very bad about all those unrepentantly evil men he's killed (begging the question of why we even made a conventional villain the hero of the story), and the only way he can atone is by dying himself. He doesn't die of course. If there's anything the show won't abide, it's letting anything of consequence happen to its main characters.
The only thing the show has going for it is how stupid it is, like when it reveals that no, the French Revolution and Reign of Terror was all a secret British plot, instigated by secret government agent Maximilien Robespierre. None of this actually factors into the plot at all beyond being government secrets Britain doesn't want to get out, although by absolving the French monarchy of any wrongdoing it's just more proof we don't believe in power structures. If you want to see how dumb this show can get, by all means watch season 2. For everyone else, just look up the scene where a machine gun is defeated by kicking a coin into the line of fire so another bullet we shoot gets deflected into the gun chamber on sakugabooru and move on with your life.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
What did you think of this review?
Nice
0
Love it
0
Funny
0
Confusing
0
Well-written
0
Creative
0Show all
Mar 28, 2021
In a word, disappointing. Idoly Pride had a fantastic opening episode that soon degenerated into a very by-the-numbers, predictable storyline. The principal issue with the show is that the characters are never meaningfully challenged and overcome every test without any difficulty. Our protagonists are going to be up against the biggest veteran idols in the industry? I can't wait to see how they'll work to prepare for this! Oh, they just did more of their usual barely coached training routines and won in their first face-off, okay. There is no reason to be invested in their struggles, because, aside from paying some minor lip service
...
to a potential scandal or family conflict, the characters don't seem to have any they aren't able to immediately shrug off. No one has to grow because they're already perfect at what they do.
The majority of the cast is also severely underutilized. If you're not the ghost or directly related to the ghost, good luck getting more than a few lines each episode. For purportedly "main" characters, it's next to impossible to remember their names from week to week. The rival groups don't fare much better. They get very little screen time until it's their day to perform, at which point they get five or so minutes of a flashback for the audience to maybe feel sorry for them when they're summarily beaten. But it's okay; somehow, losing still won them the approval of their dad/producer or whatever, so we can count their character arcs as complete and realized.
The performances themselves are incredibly bland. The CG animation noticeably stutters when trying to render more than two people at a time on stage, and the 2D animation is few and far between, compensated heavily by stills. Every group that performs does little more than sing and dance, which might be fine for a small-time gig, but the competition at the center of Idoly Pride is advertised in-universe as one of the biggest events of the year. And yet, the performances at the finals are no different from the performances in the early rounds. I realize asking for a few explosions or fancy fireworks might be outside the realm of feasibility for the animation studio, but at least attempt some more inspired lighting effects. Is the audience happy to pay presumably over 10k yen a ticket and travel across the country just to see the occasional little puff of fire at the end of a song?
Though Idoly Pride might have enough cute girls to distract the less attentive viewer from its excessively formulaic storytelling, its problems will be readily apparent to anyone who has already seen their fair share of media. If you're interested in this show, by all means start watching it. I still enjoy the first episode as a stand-alone tale of a girl with big dreams that ended up getting cut short. But if you find yourself losing interest afterwards, go ahead and drop it. It won't get better from there.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
What did you think of this review?
Nice
0
Love it
0
Funny
0
Confusing
0
Well-written
0
Creative
0Show all
Dec 29, 2019
Is it possible to write about Actors without spoiling its core conceit? I don't think so, but I'll do my best.
There's a certain type of anime I love watching for the thrill of never being able to guess what happens next. Usually, these are soap opera-esque melodramas, but I'd put Actors in this category too. And Actors is very different.
Disregard any summaries you may find about this show; they're all wrong. By all appearances, Actors is a slice-of-life about boys who like to sing, but even early on, there are signs that something weird is going on. The town is encompassed by a towering white
...
wall that no one questions. People occasionally spot mysterious white ghosts hanging around. There are an increasingly number of suspicious stray cats. Sometimes, a guy opens a door in an underground secret lab and finds himself immediately back on the beach.
Skip this next paragraph if you don't want me to spoil episode 5:
A couple of kids find out about an MMO that takes place in an exact replica of their school, and every student is included as an NPC. Paying members have a customizable cat avatar to navigate the MMO in, while free players only get a formless white shadow that is unable to interact with the world and can only communicate with other players. But as you might have guessed, this MMO and the school are in fact one and the same. Actors is about an MMO, but entirely from the perspective of the NPCs. Over time, a few of these NPCs learn their world is not all that it appears to be. (Some of them are just dumb though.)
Actors is overall pretty uneven. Its animation often looks cheap and uninspired. The acting is not especially noteworthy. The episodes that focus on the boys just hanging out can run dull easily. But its core premise is perhaps one of the most unique I've seen in anime recently, and there's enough runtime spent on it to keep me engaged and engrossed all the way to the end.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
What did you think of this review?
Nice
0
Love it
0
Funny
0
Confusing
0
Well-written
0
Creative
0Show all
|