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Mar 29, 2023
While Technoroid: Overmind will likely stay overlooked by the majority of anime fans, those looking for either an under-the-radar music show or an intriguing Sci-Fi/Slice of Life anime should certainly check it out.
Another brainchild of Noriyasu Agematsu (a man perhaps best known for his other original creation Symphogear, and in general, no stranger to creative music shows) and featuring the stylings of his acclaimed group of composers Elements Garden, viewers can be assured of quality songs. The average Technoroid viewer will come for the music, and will likely not be disappointed. That being said, this anime has plenty of other hooks – in fact,
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the idol aspects of Technoroid are deceptively secondary to the character-driven slice of life segments and mysterious science fiction drama that make up the majority of the anime.
Most of Technoroid's runtime is spent developing upon the core androids making up the unit KNoCC (Kei, Neon, Chrom, and Cobalt), along with their relationships with a human boy, Esola Shibaura, and the greater world surrounding them. The anime takes place in a futuristic setting where robots and humans both play vital roles in society, and explores both the personal and societal consequences of such a world. Arguably Technoroid's greatest strength is the former – through a series of heartful episodic vignettes, the show demonstrates the main androids coming to understand their own human-like feelings, as well as other people around the androids coming to understand them. However, the latter also comes into play – spoilers aside, from the ending of episode 1, our mains are left entangled in the beginnings of a greater societal conflict that slowly shapes the journey of the main plot. Not all humans are fans of the increasing roles of androids in society, and their fears lead to greater problems that eventually boil to a climax. Technoroid may bite off a little more weight than it can chew here, but despite some simplistic, saccharine points, the journey through this conflict manages to be both entertaining and thought-provoking. Additionally, this major conflict keeps the show driven, both helping it to keep occasional background tensions to engage the viewer and slowly hooking them in as things intensify.
Ultimately, the idol part is still relevant, of course – the fusion of musical performance with the aforementioned aspects is what makes Technoroid a unique show. Our four android heroes find themselves in need of money to stay functioning, and this leads them to becoming Climbers at Babel – an entertainment tower akin to reality TV. The challenges KNoCC face in their daily lives help empower them to pass through Babel's various stages, resulting in a performance near the end of the average Technoroid episode after/during which the day-to-day problems are resolved. However, during the plot-heavy segments, this structure does get abandoned, leading to several straight episodes later on without any idol songs (not that there's anything wrong with that – there's enough going on in the show by then that viewers won't even notice). Additionally, a couple songs in the midsection do blur together – nevertheless, these performances are generally rather enjoyable and usually tie into the episodic conflicts rather well. The rival group Stand-Alone deserves special acclaim; while the times they actually perform are few and far between, they manage to deliver a couple real spotlight-stealing songs.
Really, there's not much else to be said without getting into the details of the show. Doga Kobo may be a surprising studio choice for an anime in this vein, but they deliver a competent product. While it is part of a multi-media franchise, Technoroid: Overmind manages to avoid most of the pitfalls these shows encounter, and genuinely feels like those behind it wanted to tell this story. And yes, I seriously have no idea why the MAL score is this low (at the time of writing, it's reached 6.38, and was somewhere in the 5.7 range while airing). If I had to guess, half the rather low count of watchers are people who try around every seasonal on MAL and have little interest in a show involving male idols to begin with. It'll go up.
All in all, if something in this show calls to you, I'd recommend giving it a try. Technoroid's blend of entertaining plot, endearing characters, and intriguing concepts leaves it one of the most pleasant surprises I've had with this medium in a while.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Dec 27, 2021
WARNING: THIS OVA NOT SAFE FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION!
Do you like copious amounts of random gore and sex? Literal essays of text to read explaining pointless lore and worldbuilding? Did I mention all the mindless gore and sex?
If this doesn't appeal to you, or if you don't like being bored beyond belief while watching media, Maryuu Senki is not for you.
The 1980s and 1990s are filled with OVAs no human being should ever watch -- content so mindless and boring it's hard to imagine there was ever a target audience for it. This is another one of those, and it's not particularly remarkable among them. The
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characters are all flat and boring -- new ones appear and disappear on screen, and most of them really don't seem to matter. The plot is chaotic and confusing and basically feels like a vessel to get random fights to occur. It's not bad enough to truly hate, and there's some minor entertainment to be gained from all the action, but it's hard to really say much nice about beyond 'it could be worse'. Honestly, it's hard to even write much about this OVA; I spent nearly two hours watching it and all of it vanished from my brain immediately after. A bunch of random freaky shit happened slowly over a long, boring period and made no sense. There's no baseline competency or rules in play to make the ridiculous things stand out. The third episode spends 15 minutes recapping the previous hour of content and it still feels just as much like nonsensical violence as it did the first time (complete with a side of rape-y overtones). People explode into red puddles, turn into tentacle blobs, and grow third eyes. Our main character (?) is some potter who has a demon inside of him, seemingly dies, and turns into Solomon Grundy before then turning into Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ninjas appear to fight our heroes at random moments, girls become naked for no reason, and at some point our heroes get saved by the appearance of a more attractive version of the Paradox brothers from Yu-Gi-Oh!. All the while, rejected Street Fighter music plays, random definitions of terms flash onscreen, and if I'm making this sound like it's actually fun, characters talk. A lot. About absolutely nothing. Things like how the 'Ingyou Jakan' is about to happen, or the 'Four Holy Beasts', or how they didn't notice that they actually died 18 years ago. Alternatively, about their goddamn occupation as a potter. It would be fascinating if it wasn't completely and utterly boring and inane, since there's no solid ground to even start from. Instead, it just feels like people mindlessly saying and doing things for almost two hours.
If you're looking for a good time, or even just something funny to watch with friends, don't bother with this. (...Unless you really want to see the secret inspiration for Muzan from Demon Slayer. But seriously, don't bother.)
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Dec 21, 2021
It's just not very interesting. It looks ugly (especially with the poor CG), there's nothing noteworthy about the characters, and the plot just speedruns a few tropes. Anything unique or different about this feels like it gets thrown in for about 5 seconds and then just moves on -- in fact, the entire plot just runs through itself so quickly it's impossible to invest in anything that happens. As I mentioned before, the characters don't really have any personality traits; I couldn't tell you what separates Mattsu from Yanma, nor could I tell you why I'm supposed to care about either.
It's far from the
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worst thing I've ever watched, but I don't really care about it at all and I'll probably forget about it by tomorrow. It just drags on for 10 minutes being mildly confusing, but not even confusing enough to remember or care.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Jul 10, 2021
If I had to pick one phrase to describe my experience here it would be 'a pleasant surprise'.
I wasn't expecting too much from a collection of edutainment commercial shorts, and only really started to watch them because of the interesting assortment of musical artists supplying the ending themes. Furthermore, I can't say I knew much about the Paralympics, or any of the assorted franchises crossing over here such as Yowamushi Pedal, Dear Boys: Act 4, or KochiKame: Tokyo Beat Cops.
However, watching these gave me a newfound appreciation for basically everything involved. I won't say they're masterfully crafted -- a lot of them even follow
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the same basic flowcharts and incredibly sports shounen trope-y styles -- but I found myself getting invested nonetheless. There's simply something uplifting about the spirit carried in these shorts. The edutainment aspect also works well; I got to learn a lot about a lot of random Paralympic sports I'd never even thought about before (Vision-impaired judo? Goalball? Para-badminton?), and walked away with a newfound respect for the athletes in these fields. Additionally, a lot of the collaborators were cool -- as I mentioned before I was fairly unfamiliar with all of them -- and I now feel interested in checking out some of those stories someday as well.
The production was also fairly nice overall. The animation felt a bit lacking at points, but the varied artstyles mostly made up for it and helped each episode continually feel fresh and different. The music was also a pleasant mixed bag of styles, featuring some bigger name artists such as LiSA, Okamoto's, and Daichi Miura. A personal surprise favourite was Kaela Kimura's 'Wish upon a star'.
In terms of episode quality, my favourite was probably Episode 10, which purely focused on the dynamic between its' main characters and made them feel the most lively of the entire bunch. I liked the entire stretch of like, 7-11 a lot in general -- episode 8 was another soft spot for me because I thought the character dynamic there was also pretty adorable.
Overall, these were a pretty likeable watch, and I feel that they did exactly what they wanted to do. Honestly, I kinda feel like watching some of the Paralympics now (and I'm not even really a sports guy), so I think they did an excellent job there.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Apr 28, 2021
Apparently this OVA has had yet to inspire anyone to care enough about it to write a review, so here's a quick heads up on it.
This appears to be promotional material for some game, it's connected to Idea Factory (yes that Idea Factory -- Skelter Heaven, Mars of Destruction, and many more beloved trash heap OVAs), and it's not particularly interesting. It's basically just a flimsy excuse to showcase the main character Self Insert Catgirl Demon (SICD for short) and her expansive reverse harem. It bounces around showing a bunch of different trope characters (a bunch of hot guys and most of them are catboys)
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with very brief explanations of SICD's connections to them. A bit of world lore and history is also provided, though the story doesn't really do anything with it
The way it was written makes me feel like it wasn't meant to be partaken as a standalone; it feels like it expects viewers to be familiar with the characters and their backstories (rather that satisfactorily introducing any of them). Instead, it just jumps straight into them and their interactions with SICD with flimsy-at-best depictions of how they know her.
There's no real meat to the relationships either -- most of them don't even have any reason shown to be interested in SICD, and if they do it's just some trope-y relationship like 'big stepsister' or 'saved my life once'. Nothing even really happens to progress them -- it just advertises all of her potential romance paths in the source (or at least I assume), and once it quickly does that it moves onto the next attractive slice of cardboard.
The character designs are alright, and the music is surprisingly good for how slapdash of a production this feels. Unfortunately, the animation itself is somewhat lousy; it's not anywhere near the worst I've seen but it's still noticeably lazy. The character concepts -- while nothing original -- could be explored more and become interesting. The world-building is also a little intriguing -- the politics surrounding these cat demon people and the warring factions they get caught up in do have potential.
If you're a fan of whatever this OVA's source material is maybe you'd get more enjoyment out of this, but as is I wouldn't recommend watching this to anyone else. It's far more superfluous than actually bad -- for the most part it just doesn't do anything beyond basic shoujo baiting -- but there's certainly many better ways to spend your viewing time. (For instance, if you're looking for something with similar character dynamics, setting, and reverse harem aspects I would instead suggest watching Yona of the Dawn.)
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Apr 28, 2021
Sometimes you deep dive into forgotten anime and stumble upon things no human being should ever watch.
I found this movie while looking over infamous director Iku Suzuki (the mastermind behind Dark Cat, a contender for worst anime ever) and his career. I was hoping to find something entertaining, but unfortunately this movie is mostly a bunch of boring nothing. The characters are flat as boards, the the art is bland and dull (as is the music), and the plot is vacant of any creativity for most of the movie.
The only reason I'm not giving this a 1 is that around 40 or so minutes in,
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the movie finally gets to its' point. It's still pretty generic heavy-handed sci-fi environmentalism, but I at least get the sense that someone wanted to tell this message -- it tried for something. It mildly caught my interest when I was completely checked out of this film, and it's also a pretty wild ending from what was a whole lot of nothing beforehand, so I'll give it credit for that.
I still would recommend nobody watches this movie. It's not interesting otherwise and not worth any payoffs in the slightest -- just a slow, plodding, creatively bankrupt experience created for the sake of making a movie.
If you're looking for something good, this isn't for you. Go watch Nausicaa, it's basically this movie's messaging but in an actually interesting package that people actually wanted to make.
If you're looking for something bad, this isn't for you either. It's certainly bad, but only in the way that it's tediously boring and absent of anything good. Go watch Skelter Heaven, Garzey's Wing, Dark Cat, Cipher, Gibiate, EX-ARM, Master of Martial Hearts or any of the many, many other mind-breaking failures of animation and storytelling found on this website.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Mar 18, 2021
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
The entire time spent watching Higurashi Gou, I found a pair of questions plaguing my mind: who is this for and why does it exist?
Unfortunately, two cours later I still lack any satisfactory answers. As much as I’d like to believe this exists for reasons beyond plugging a gacha game and lining the creators’ pockets, I’m struggling to say otherwise. I can only hope the upcoming sequel Sotsu will be able to build off of Gou’s foundation and take this story anywhere interesting or meaningful; as is, the only things I can credit Gou for are its extreme lack of respect for
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the viewer’s time and mental capacities, and its incessant desire to subvert the viewer’s expectations and stomp over everything the original series stood for.
Let me start by reiterating the question of ‘who is this for?’, because I think it’s a key point to criticizing Gou. As many viewers unfortunately found out the hard way, Higurashi Gou is not a remake -- despite being initially marketed as such. The only possible explanations I can come up with for this decision are a) getting more viewers by baiting people unfamiliar with the franchise to watch it and b) Ryukishi07 having a lot of fun messing with people. Given statements that Higurashi Gou would be welcoming for these new viewers, I’m inclined to believe there’s at least some truth to the latter.
Of course, Gou spoils the original series pretty significantly and I think everyone acquainted with it would agree that this isn’t a good starting point for newcomers. Therefore, Higurashi Gou must be targeted towards the existing fans of the series, right?
Well… sort of?
See, one of Gou’s biggest issues is that it spends its entire runtime hedging the interests of both groups. This fundamentally doesn’t work; it only succeeds in confusing newer viewers while ruining many twists of the original story. Meanwhile, this only makes the story drag on and on for experienced viewers, who have to sit through recap after recap that add virtually nothing to Gou’s new story.
The entire first cour falls heavily into this trap. (Spoilers ahead because I can’t really criticize Gou without discussing its one significant plot twist.) It’s essentially 13 episodes of accelerated rehashing, except the endings to the arcs have changed in an effort to capture experienced viewers’ interest. The arcs don’t work anywhere nearly as well because they’re built to have very different payoffs; in fact, they mainly serve to introduce newer viewers to the cast. That being said, I’m critiquing this as what it is: a sequel and not a reboot -- so I don’t really care about that.
What I do -- or rather /did/ -- care about was the new mysteries the first cour set up. It seemed to build up some grand web of mystique in the vein of the original. I was curious; what was up with the Sonozaki sisters -- was it Mion this time who’d gone L5? What was up with Satoko, or Ooishi, or Takano? Why was Rika merely sitting back and watching things go awry this time after the lessons of the original series?
The aforementioned subversions of expectations had already begun. A quick reveal that this was a sequel, a gradual reveal that someone new was likely pulling the strings, and twist endings for each rehashed arc of the original Higurashi -- all providing just enough interest through a lot of dry reused content to keep me wanting to push through. Little did I know anything interesting about this first cour was just another subversion, as the second cour makes it all pointless.
(Re)acquainting the viewer with the original cast? None of them have any plot relevance aside from Rika and Satoko. Setting up a grand sense of mystery with all the twists and moving parts? Too bad, the only purpose to any of it was the obvious things. Someone was deliberately making the arcs that should be going right go horribly wrong in new ways (and yes, that someone was Satoko, who everyone and their dog was suspicious of by the end of the cour. More on her later, of course.) Characters acting suspiciously out of character (such as Rika conveniently deciding to ignore her friends when confiding in them was what saved her in the first place)? Either a result of Gou changing arc endings for the sake of changing them or of Gou deciding to make them out of character (which certainly wasn’t about to stop).
Anyways, moving into the second cour we get our first arc, Nekodamashi-hen. The first two episodes of Nekodamashi-hen exist to convey one point: being Rika Furude is suffering. In particular, the second one begins to make it clear Gou just wants to spin its wheels and waste time -- a theme that only gets clearer across the second cour (just in case a cour of rehash to foreshadow one or two meaningful points didn’t get it across). It finally addresses Rika’s lack of seeking help by flash-forwarding through a bunch of outright comical gore scenes (more on that later as well) where everyone betrays her. Any sense of mystery created earlier on evaporates as the show bashes into your head ‘someone is clearly trying to mess with Rika’.
After this, the third episode decides there hadn’t been enough pointless gore/torture porn and spends ten minutes having Satoko drag out Rika’s intestines. It was at this exact moment that I gave up on expecting Gou to be clever or meaningful.
Let’s compare the Deen adaption for a moment -- something that (regardless of any of many fair criticisms levied at it) tried to be legitimately unsettling instead of purely relying upon cheap theatrics. Deen adaption? Realizes that describing Watanagashi is already enough to rattle a viewer. Gou? Spends half an episode dragging out showing it in excruciating detail. Deen adaption? Certainly goes extra with the gore/violence aspect at points, but is purposeful with them and usually wraps them in enough meaningful mystery or character/plot-related intensity to make it captivating. Scenes like that time Keiichi and Satoko stumble upon Rika’s mutilated corpse build an atmosphere of mystery and tension, scenes like Shion butchering Satoko and having a mental breakdown further the extremely messed up character development at play and have significant payoffs later in the series, etc etc. Gou? Mindless drawn out violence for the sake of mindless drawn out violence. Blood splatters the size of a small tsunami attached to a bright, lively art style that both combine to make it impossible to take anything seriously. Bonking people on the head with a baseball bat and having their eyes comically bulge out. At one point, a character throws themself in front of a bus just to comically blood splatter another character. It’s impossible to take any of it seriously.
Anyways, back to the episode. Ignoring the comically bad torture porn, this is also where Gou begins to completely break down in portraying the characters. Rika at this point is down worse than she was at the beginning of Kai. She curses her cruel fate, wants nothing more than to leave Hinamizawa and all of the horrible memories she has attached there, and has basically given up on trying to fight against it. (It’s already rather strange that Rika wants to leave behind Hinamizawa and most of her friends given the message of the original series. It’s even stranger given Higurashi Rei (which completely contradicts this motive), but wanting to leave behind a century of awful memories is rationalizable so I digress.)
Satoko (who Rika at least thinks has gone L5 and completely insane from Hinamizawa Syndrome) says some mumbo-jumbo to her about how Rika is cursed by Oyashiro, and Rika’s character motives built up through the last arc almost entirely evaporate. Never mind that Rika is even intimately familiar with ‘Oyashiro’ -- that’s all it takes. She goes from literally wanting to commit suicide to ‘Actually, I wouldn’t trade my time for Hinamizawa in the world’ because of a bit of gaslighting.
If you thought that character moment was nonsensical, the next arc then tops it with an outright butchering of Satoko’s character. We’re lead to feel sympathetic for Satoko because Rika “abandoned her” (emphasis on the quotation marks), which is supposed to make us feel bad for the character who’s time-looping to torture and gaslight her supposed friend into staying with her forever and in general massacring her friends and village over repetitive timeloops.
This abandonment consists of Rika wanting to leave Hinamizawa, going to a fancy boarding school, and making a bunch of new high society friends while Satoko struggles academically. She offers to help Satoko, Satoko refuses, and isn’t capable of keeping up with the school. This causes her to fall into a state where she wants to loop back and change everything, and is somehow granted that power by a new, suspiciously Umineko-like Hanyuu equivalent.
Reasonable enough progression so far, right?
Satoko then loops back, gets persuaded by Rika to go through essentially the same loop again because Rika says she’d never abandon her friend, refuses Rika’s help again, and ends up in the same situation. This causes Satoko to become so mad and distrustful of Rika she goes insane and turns into a cartoon villain obsessing over making the perfect timeline where Rika stays with her forever.
I can only believe there’s some sort of modified Hinamizawa Syndrome at work here, as Satoko from this point onward makes no sense with the original depiction of the character (or in general for that matter). However, given the show spends an entire arc establishing her motives -- along with multiple episodes that add nothing to the story beyond ‘In case you didn’t notice the last ten times we said it, yes Satoko is bad now’... it’s hard for me to say that with conviction.
(Seriously, in case I haven’t conveyed how ridiculous this becomes, here’s an example. There’s a point where Satoko’s given access to the timelines Rika suffered through over a century, and Satoko’s response is “I must watch them all to understand her”. The show then tells us she spends a century watching timelines of everything going wrong, comes out of it with zero change to her motivations (if anything she’s more gung-ho to manipulate Rika and feels less sympathy for her ‘friend’), and carries on as if this is a completely logical response to a friend growing more distant from you.)
The subversions of expectations only continue to grow in the final arc -- I can only imagine R07 is having a lot of fun messing with us. The plot stops moving entirely after Rika’s arc after leaving off at a cliffhanger and never comes back, even after a very in-depth flashback of Satoko’s motivations. With three episodes left, it slows to an absolute crawl with no meaningful progression. The first of these three episodes is another episode that adds literally nothing to the story -- it’s just Satoko and ‘Eua’ talking and plotting with more establishment that Satoko is acting completely out of character… just in case we couldn’t realize Satoko has become bad? She also finds out about Satoshi and doesn’t seem to particularly care, which outright makes no sense given her obsession and complexes towards him in the original, but whatever -- why start being in-character now.
The second decides to throw in a random Teppei redemption arc. While this episode does at least try to do something interesting, I unsurprisingly don’t feel particularly sympathetic for an abusive father who beats and abandons a young child just because he realizes he’s going to die alone. Perhaps the sequel will build off of this in useful ways, but it adds nothing to the story so far (not to mention it feels like an appalling narrative given the character’s previous depiction). Otherwise, the episode seemingly exists just to demonstrate characters can learn things over the course of loops (something we already knew about).
The next episode (and finale for the series) also exists for the same reason. It tries to explain some of the mysteries of the first cour (Takano’s motivations and how Satoko acquired the virus), but a) the concept has already been established many times over, b) the viewer can infer how Satoko’s looping powers could gain her access to the virus without an episode dedicated to it (if anything the idea that ‘Satoko has to codebreak to get the virus and does it by manually attempting and resetting every time she guess the wrong password’ is stupider than any way I would’ve imagined), and c) resolving the random mysteries of the first cour means nothing if they don’t matter whatsoever to the plot -- you’re just adding content for the sake of adding content. Half the episode is also spent as a flashback to Kai -- even during the season finale Gou still attempts to cater to new Higurashi viewers by exposition dumping the plot of the original series.
I’ve said it before, but Gou really feels like it has no respect for the viewer’s time. Having completed the series, I feel like I watched about 3 episodes of content stretched across 2 cours. The entire plot can be summed up as follows: Rika is returned to June 1983, and this time everything is being directly manipulated against her. It’s eventually revealed that this is being done by Satoko, who feels betrayed by Rika and wants to create a timeline where Rika and her are happily together.
That is the entire plot of two whole cours. Any attempted sense of misdirection feels like just that -- misdirection for misdirection’s sake to pad for time. Any revisiting of anything else feels like it’s just there to pad for time. Any usage of other existing characters feels like it’s just there to pad for time.
Even now, I’d still like to believe there’s more to this story -- I still hope in vain for Sotsu to redeem some of this drudgery. Unfortunately, all I can say for now is I came into Gou wanting to revisit both the deep web of mystery and beloved cast of the original Higurashi, and found a distinct lack of either. Instead, I found a sequel that only serves to trample on everything I loved about Higurashi. The messaging of the value of trust and friendship are gone, replaced with dreary cynicism and misery. Instead everyone has been quietly broken apart -- I can’t help but think of one background point where the show mentions Mion’s been ignoring her old friends for months now that she’s a college student. Shion completely disappears and Rena and even Keiichi -- the one who Rika once viewed as the key to changing fate -- have stopped mattering entirely. Any of the hidden depth of the characters feels forgotten in favour of dumbing them down to the repeated jokes, and any of the heart the series has disappears with it.
Any mysteries show in Gou feel like they’re just there to spin their wheels pointlessly, and any cleverness and subtlety in the show feels like it’s been thrown out the window in favour of repetitively shoving points down the viewer’s throat to convey their importance. Any genuine sense of tension or psychological unease has disappeared in favour of cheap theatrics befitting a c-list horror movie. Any meaning to these varied timelines has also disappeared; Satoko even literally says in the final episode that all her failed timelines don’t matter, and they only feel like some combination of dead space and misery for misery’s sake. The pacing drags on at a snail’s pace, and it doesn’t even matter because nothing matters anymore -- this new hellbound Satoko can simply snap her fingers and undo it with her new ridiculously broken powers.
Higurashi Gou has either intentionally or unintentionally deconstructed basically every strength of the series. While some fans seem to find that entertaining, I simply cannot understand why anyone would want that. I don’t even possibly know where it’s going anymore, and I’m not even sure I want to find out. I’m sure I’ll end up watching Sotsu regardless, hoping in vain to recapture some of the magic that made me love this series in the first place, and I suspect I’ll end up back here again venting my absolute disappointment. Maybe it’ll turn out better and redeem some of Gou’s failings for me, but I can’t see any world in which this wasn’t a huge letdown.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Jan 5, 2021
Character deaths done right are one of my favourite things in fiction. The absolute gut punch of losing a character I cared about, the ways the story's cast will play off of it and develop, and the impactful, irreparable tone shifts.
You've already read the score I'm giving this, so I'm sure you realize none of that applies to Mahou Shoujo Ikusei Keikaku.
It isn't hard to look at Ikusei Keikaku and see exactly what will go wrong with it. It's a one-cour show trying to tell the story of sixteen different magical girls -- and if that wasn't already a difficult enough task, it's a battle
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royale where this expansive cast get butchered.
In other words, the show rides or dies on one specific thing: making me care about these characters and the tragedy that befalls them. It has far less than an episode to do that per character (even before I consider the focus on major characters, the world-building, the set-up, etc.).
The end result is a bunch of meaningless edge and gore as the show introduces characters, develops them for /maybe/ three minutes, and throws them into a blender. Any punch the initial chaos or 'twist' has gets sucked out after episode beyond episode of the exact same formula repeated ad nauseum. It quickly loses any feeling of genuineness when it only exposition dumps a character's backstory right before they're killed in the most underwhelming, blink-and-you-might-miss-it ways. Any impact most of these deaths would have is quickly erased as the show moves onto the next one, and any lingering callback or development it tries to make feels half-baked and hackneyed. Even the fights are often pretty lackluster and can feel rushed through, which is rather problematic when they're one of the core attractions of the show.
That all being said, the most frustrating thing about Ikusei Keikaku is that I care /just/ enough to get frustrated by it. Most of the character concepts and designs are compelling, and there's a fair bit of creativity put into the designs, personalities, and backstories behind them. A trans magical girl, a pair of lesbian lovers, even a buddy cop dynamic -- any one of these could be taken and fleshed out so much more. There's all sorts of differing motivations behind them, and in hindsight I've only grown to appreciate them.
Unfortunately, the show also decides to kill most of the interesting characters quickly and focus primarily on the least likeable and unique of the bunch. This only serves to aggravate the aforementioned issues.
Mild spoilers ahead (though I'll try to avoid the specifics). Our protagonist Snow White is yet another Madoka clone. She's a goody-two-shoes who just wants to help everyone and be friends with everyone and... dear god does this character not have a place in this story. I get what they were trying to go for -- a contrast between the incredibly dark storyline and the cliche heroine. However, what we end up with is a character who doesn't want to participate in the death game because she's too much of a good person... and she indeed doesn't. She continues to survive purely off other characters protecting her/dying for her, or just the blind luck of not being targeted. All the while she wallows in misery about her friends dying and how terrible the world is and just... exists. She's never really directly plot relevant so much as just observing, but even then, the show spends more time away from her than not. Whenever her struggles show up, they're simply not very interesting and a distraction from any meat in the show.
The other main character Ripple is among the least memorable characters in the show. I don't really have anything against her, but her only real personality and charm revolves around her relationship with Top Speed -- beyond that she's a cliche sullen teenager that the show doesn't really do anything special with.
Finally, the third significant character is a major antagonist, Swim Swim. Her power is interesting, but beyond that she's 7 years old and acts like it almost the entire time. Unsurprisingly, an antagonist with the mental capacities of a toddler isn't compelling in the slightest. There's not really much more to say about her, either.
There's a few other things I could pick at (Fav is an embarrassingly blatant attempt at ripping off Kyubey, the initial tone of the show doesn't shift gracefully into the dark 'twist' [which isn't even a twist because it's the entire point of the show], and the ending's character arc resolution feels strange and unimpactful [albeit the source material continues from that point, so it may play off it in more interesting ways]), but there's not much to say about them. The production quality of the show is fine but unremarkable, and the opening and ending songs are both solid but nothing too special.
For closing thoughts, I will at least say that I can't bring myself to really hate this show because I was almost interested in it. I can't say I'd ever recommend watching it, but if you really want to see some mediocre kill-em-all action, you'll find it here.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Oct 23, 2020
"Girls are this soft?! Human hands are this warm... and feel this good? This is marriage?! It's fantastic!"
-Nasa Yuzaki
Ladies and gentlemen, the year is 2020, and 'pandering to incels' is still a viable business strategy. I'm not gonna make any friends for this one but... Tonikawa is real bad.
This show popped on my radar while reading through the list of Fall 2020 seasonals. I thought to myself "I could go for a cute romance show -- I love those", and quickly threw it on my list. It would be fun to develop on two essential strangers living together and having to build a relationship from
...
zero, right? Surely I'd be drowning in cute fluff?
Yeah, I should know better than to trust the anime industry. Instead what I got was a pervert who'd never been within ten feet of a woman before and his empty, wish fulfillment girlfriend. The bulk of the show beyond the introduction is our main character Nasa, who spends his time thinking things like "What if I hold her like a body pillow when we sleep" or "how can I sneak off and see my wife naked in the public bath?" or the aforementioned quote at the beginning of the review. Of course, he can't say 5 words to her without blushing because she's a pretty girl and he doesn't know how to actually act towards his weird impulses. His wife Tsukasa is... a girl. She's pure and innocent -- she blushes whenever he says something nice or lewd about her. She's beautiful, she uses a bunch of beauty products, and of course, she cooks for him. She’s just feisty enough to be cute when a scene calls for it, but this trait basically is just an illusion and takes a backseat to her being shy and submissive around Nasa for the majority of the show. Unsurprisingly, she doesn't actually have much of a personality because she just exists to check the boxes on wish fulfillment fantasies. She's meat on a platter, and giving her significant individuality would serve to break the illusion of every man's fantasy.
Essentially, the entire content of the first three episodes has been cringing at our main character being a degenerate, watching the newlyweds get embarrassed over and over, and fan-servicing the under-aged waifu (because of course she is). It's not like this is some critique of this behaviour or anything -- it just knows enough people out there have similar feelings of loneliness, longing and desire without any idea of what a relationship will even look like. (Look, someone like them went out there and shot his shot and he got the girl!)
I do think Tonikawa is very self-aware of what it's doing, but that's not really a good thing when 'what it's doing' is just reinforcing a bunch of uncomfortable and arguably harmful tropes that already plague the anime and manga industry. I still wouldn't mind this so much if the show didn't brutally reinforce the whole 'perv and his paper doll' thing every chance it gets, but 4 episodes in and there's few signs of that stopping. There's just... next to no other substance here, and any vaguely cute moments get completely overshadowed by the show bashing my brain in that Nasa wants some anime titty.
The fourth episode finally made some attempt at developing Tsukasa, but it felt both too little and too late to win me over. Even during the moments where it’s not being uncomfortable, it feels like it’s trying to convince me this is some perfect, destined pairing. All the while, it’s overlooked the glaring lack of development between the two characters in favour of throwing in a checklist of relationship goals (e.g, a first kiss, a proposal, a wedding). It feels like there’s very little heart or thought put into this core aspect of the show -- which I suppose is exactly what I should expect from a shallow relationship fantasy.
In terms of anything else to this anime, a side character thinks Tsukasa's got 'beautiful skin like an iPhone X' and another side character spent a couple minutes of screentime making jokes about how small Nasa's dick is -- just in case there wasn't enough lewd humour. Finally, a third side character is Tsukasa’s obsessively protective imouto who also wants to marry her. Unsurprisingly, none of these characters are particularly interesting or compelling. There’s also an element of mystery about Tsukasa’s past that it seems to slowly want to develop, but this doesn’t feel like a very important part of the show so far.
I will at least grant the production quality's fine (if mostly unremarkable), and the opening is fairly catchy, so at least there's that? Beyond that, the cheap comedy omnipresent is nothing remarkable, but can still get the occasional laugh. I also still want to feel something towards the romance, but Tonikawa can’t even create a deep conversation towards it so far.
Maybe it'll catch me off guard and develop some maturity or depth later in the season, but as is I'm not really looking forward to the rest of this anime.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Oct 23, 2020
So far, Assault Lily: Bouquet isn't an awful show per se, but it's sorely lacking in originality.
For starters, the concept is straight out of RWBY -- teenage girls with gunblades fighting against evil monsters that threaten humanity. We have a similar high school setting to early RWBY -- hell we're introduced to our naive protagonist on her first day at the academy, and she immediately meets a rich heiress who eventually becomes a close friend. Like, it doesn't even try to hide this part -- episode 3 starts off by revealing everyone has a semblance... er sorry, "Rare Skill".
However, that's still a fun enough
...
setting to play with, so maybe the characters will make up for it?
Sorry, I can't even say that with a straight face. It took the first roll of the OP for me to figure out exactly who our main character Riri Hitotsuyanagi was going to be, even before the show introduced her.
See, about a decade ago Shaft made this show you might've heard of -- Madoka Magica. It was a big success -- and ever since then everyone and their dog has been trying to ride on its coattails. In other words, the magical girl genre has been consumed with innocent, pink-haired protagonists and cold dark-haired deuteragonists. I'm not even saying Madoka invented this character dynamic, but it's hard to pin this on anyone else when it's been ingrained down to the designs. Yuki Yuna is a Hero, Granbelm, Magical Girl Raising Project -- even shows outside of the genre like Revue Starlight (well, mostly just the Homura part in that case). Not to say it's been completely cookie cutter -- some of them do a solid job of putting their own spin on it -- but it's been starting to get really stale. Half the time, you can take one glance at these characters and know exactly what's coming from them.
Despite it being their own progeny, Shaft's been far from immune to this -- if anything they've shown they have no problem playing even stronger into it than everyone else. Magia Record's main pair of characters were one of the clearest examples of this trend -- but even that was forgivable considering it was a Madoka spin-off.
Assault Lily's just as blatant with no excuses to be found.
If this was the first time I'd seen it, I wouldn't care that much, but it's been a decade y'all, come up with something else. I also don't actually think this character dynamic is that great -- especially the protagonist part -- and I love Madoka Magica. It plays well off Madoka's plot (which heavily drives Madoka's entire cast) and adds strong contrast, but put into most other shows it's really not that interesting. An innocent, pure, goody-two-shoes really isn't a very interesting POV for most stories, and this one hasn't really felt any different.
The rest of the cast is a bunch of cliches that haven't really been fleshed out at all yet. I'm expecting this show to just go the Magia Record route and have a bunch of mostly disconnected stories fleshing out the like, 15 named characters who mostly have significant effort put into their designs. Four episodes in, I can’t keep track of all of them, and I can barely even tell which ones are important to the show. I'm also expecting to never care about most of the cast because there won’t be enough time to develop them meaningfully -- as is, the show has speedrun through Yuyu's character arc. Episode 4 also awkwardly shuffled into a new character’s arc just to speedrun through it even harder, so this is a concerning trend.
Okay, but what about the production quality? Even Magia Record had that as a pretty strong saving grace, and Shaft has produced some of the prettiest and most stylistically memorable shows of the past ~decade (eg 3-gatsu no Lion, Madoka Magica, and the Monogatari series).
It's... not bad? I certainly haven't had any issues with it. The opening's solid, the character designs are nice, the animation's felt fairly fluid... but I don't know, it's not really standing out to me. I feel bad complaining about it, but given we're talking Shaft, I can't help but want something more than this bland packaging.
As for anything else about the writing, I've been struggling to put my finger on why exactly, but the tone and direction of the show feel a little all over the place. For instance, I was expecting a darker shift in tone from the backstory of Yuyu, but the show didn't really build up towards that shift at all. It's been really light and comedic -- befitting of the high school-esque setting, but really strange when the show switches to a life-threatening fight against a 'Huge'. For specific instances, the first episode has both Riri and Kaede almost get killed, or the third episode casually points out the Huge they're fighting has killed dozens of Lillies... and yet there's not really any tension or grit to the actual fights, and these details feel quickly forgotten. In general, the world-building has felt rather slap-dash and poorly thought-out/defined so far; that being said, it's only been a few episodes, so I can't really say that much yet.
I really do hope this anime is able to pick up the slack and find its own voice in future episodes, but as of now I'm starting to feel a little indifferent towards it. Shaft can certainly do a lot better than this. It's /okay/ for now, but I worry it's going to get more and more tired and insubstantial as time goes on -- especially with such a large cast awkwardly looming. There’s at least a certain cutesiness to the character interactions and their ‘yuri’ namesakes, but so far the show doesn’t really feel committed to this angle (or any angle, for that matter).
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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