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I think one of the biggest hurdles for people getting into this is that it's a 3D animated movie compared to a traditional 2D anime but that has never really bothered me so I finally decided to give it a try.

The story isn't overly unique, think The Matrix mixed with Elysium. Humanity stretched Earth to its very limit with overpopulation and global warming, so much so numerous different plans were made for the continuation of mankind. One of these was a giant orbital space station where humans would be scanned onto a huge computer system and live in a virtual world. This however created a ... cast system between these digital humans who see themselves as the next step in evolution, where they can experience anything they want in the virtual world whilst the humans on the surface are struggling to survive and get by.

When the digital world is hacked by a connection relay on Earth, the elite ruling class on the space station send numerous agents down to Earth to track down the hacker. The agents are all young, attractive women in skimpy costumes, which is a bit odd. I wasn't sure if the movie was trying to make a message since the three ruling members of the digital world are men who gave themselves avatars resembling gods and they made their security forces all hot young women, but the movie reveals itself to not really be that clever.

The main character Balzac is a likable enough character, a very cliched character who has never experienced "real life" and has to be shown what it is to be human by her actual human helper "Dingo" who is the best character in the movie. Balzac's story isn't overly complicated, to catch the hacker they have to go "off-grid" and disconnect from the space station entirely, leaving her with none of her advanced equipment or backup so she has to struggle to be human for a change. Her character is quite inconsistent though. When she's first introduced on the space station, she's calm, cool and seemingly quite reserved but when she goes on her mission she's very loud, easily flustered and whiny (which is weird since she says "I do my job, I have never complained"). I then wasn't sure if this was because she purposefully made her body 16 so maybe her mentality was changed too but once again, I think the movie isn't that clever and instead it is just for blatant TNA which is pretty off-putting. For her also being made out to be a great agent and very intelligent, she is then repeatedly confused and caught off guard by numerous things that should have been blatantly obvious, like if the hacker can monitor all of the digital world, why does she think it'd be a good idea to stay connected to it the entire time whilst hunting them?

The mission is over pretty quickly, finding the hacker and having to deal with the knowledge that the digital world isn't all good because it also has a cast system where if you aren't useful, you get less "memory" allocated to you, meaning you can't do much as a digital avatar and even have worse models. The movie doesn't explain what being useful is though in a digital world where everything is provided for you. Balzac works because she's a security agent, but what's the point of security agents if the rulers have total control over everyone and can kill them instantly with just a thought? What does everyone else do? They're hardly builders or farmers or anything along those lines. So how is your "worth" determined?

It might seem like I have a lot of complaints, but I did enjoy the movie as a character and action romp. If you actually think about the plot or the world, it doesn't make much sense at all.

The ending in particular just felt weak. It is one of those anime where I could easily imagine you thinking "Well, what was the point of this movie?". It suffers from being a movie where a series could have paced it out better, giving it time to expand on its lore but with its run time, everything just feels crammed in to get the story out the door.

I only know about Street Fighter in passing, fighting games really aren't my thing. I went into this thinking I would know at least a handful of the characters but I always remembered it being a grounded compared to other fighting games like Tekken with its random God-seed/Demon-seed thing it did. It got to the point where characters were constantly talking about dark chi and becoming Super Saiyans that I realised I was wrong.

If you aren't a fan of the game, I think you'll find this pretty impenetrable as a movie even ignoring everyone suddenly having magical powers. Characters are mentioned with such weight and ... become important figures in the story, but might only get a minute or two of screentime. If you know the character from the game, it will probably make sense but if you don't, you'll probably be confused why Chun-Li is so stunned about "Dr Sadler", especially at the end where his tiny amount of screentime is.

Ryuu as a character was just pretty bland, same for Chun-Li whose motivation is to find her dad which she mentions twice but when they get to their destination, she never even looks for him. Ken had a little more personality than the two of them but it wasn't anything major. Sakura had the most character and personality out of the cast but she plays such a tiny role in the movie because for some reason they decided we needed a young boy called Shun to show up to be the emotional core of the movie and kind of a character surrogate, but it was a strange choice when Sakura already seemed to be filling that role as a newbie fangirl in the world of street fighting. It doesn't help that Shun is just kind of an annoying character.

Other characters just pop up and disappear as just blatant cameos that have very little baring on the plot. Akuma is probably the most glaring one, appearing in a vision once or twice before Ryuu decides to visit him to have a talk about the dark powers but by this point we're already well aware of them so it seems pointless, especially since Akuma just kind of walks off after a minute on screen.

The fights are generally well animated though but some of them stretch on too long, the end fight being a pretty blatant example. I don't know how many times characters got their second wind against a basically immortal enemy. Character X will sacrifice themselves to Character Y can escape, but Character X will run back to save Y and tell them to run, who will then run back to save X and tell THEM to run. It's a bit much. The fights against the impossibly weak enemies are considerably more fun compared to the big, weighty fights the movie really throws its attention at.

The first 10 minutes move at a breakneck speed as they try to introduce all of the characters and their motivations. Then it really slows down as we get repeated discussions of the dark powers and Ryuu's fear of falling to them for a long stretch in the middle, then they rush to the final encounter, infiltrate the base within 2 minutes and then the final fight takes up the last 20 or so minutes of the movie.

The most glaringly strange thing was the "Rose" character. A magical lady who just kind of appears 2-3 times throughout the movie to give advice to Ryuu and then disappear again. There is no explanation of her whatsoever. She's introduced like a villainous character but apparently was a good guy. Her presence was so unimportant that I kept forgetting she existed but everytime she popped up I had to relive that moment again of "Oh, there's a weird looking magical woman talking to Ryuu in his dreams about the Tarot cards. Cool."

Overall, pretty disappointing but I'm sure if you're a fan of the franchise you'll get more out of it than me. If they'd removed the Shun character entirely and kept a more grounded story, I'd have enjoyed it a lot more but the repetitive "Will he fall to the dark power" storyline that dominated from about the 15 minute mark onwards really bored me to tears because you can guess the answer without even watching the movie.

If you are someone who highly values style in an anime, especially in regards to lighting of scenes and the general soundtrack, you'd likely get more from this movie than I did. I also want to make the disclosure that the DVD I found for this only had EN dub and no subtitles available, so certain issues might be addressed better in the JP original or EN sub.

The movie is set in a dystopian world where pollution savaged the Earth and to allow humans to survive, "ancestors" designed a living city but barred the majority of survivors from entering it, leading to many thousands of ... deaths except for those that were allowed to come in to work as slaves, named "builders". It's not an overly complicated story but unfortunately that's the extent of the story we get about the world. The city doesn't have much character or life about it, ironic for a "living" city. You might picture something similar to the great living city of Blame! but unfortunately its nothing similar and only serves as a generic set piece a few times with nothing really unique about it.

The builders outside of the city also struggle to have an identity, especially when the push was for them to be allowed into the city, but they aren't allowed in and instead have to live out in the wasteland, which was what they joined up to be builders to avoid. Since we learn so little about the world outside the 3 main characters, it never drew me in and I had to go check to see if there was source material this was cut down from but it seems to be a wholly original work.

Overall lore aside, the current issue is that the city seems to be dying and a rebel citizen is trying to cause it to detonate in an "energy release" which we are told will kill most of the citizens of the city. This is very briefly mentioned and then hand-waved away, which does make it quite hard to relate to the rebels who are rather suddenly revealed to be the heroes of the tale. The main character Jay is part of the security team for the city along with a potential love interest Kade who is the commander of security. They form a love triangle with Shua, the rebel who infiltrated the city.

Outside of being romantically interested in each other, the three main characters are pretty empty. Jay in particular is worst affected by this because she seems to have very little agency, instead just following Shua from place to place, changing allegiances seemingly on the drop of a hat because she met a boy she had a crush on over a decade before. Kade's main purpose is just to be the other side of the love triangle. He has little motivation outside of having feelings for Jay, so much so he's willing to backstab people in hopes of her loving him. Shua has the most character but is also the weakest, because the character is a fairly generic anime protagonist. He's very capable at everything he does, wins fights fairly easily, is brooding and talks about dying constantly but makes sure to show that he likes helping orphans.

Action sequences in the movie are surprisingly weak but that's mainly due to how one-sided the fights usually go, with the rebels quite easily gunning down the nameless soldiers. This includes an invasion of the city at the end of the film which goes so easily with only about 7 rebels, I have no idea how the city has kept control over the builders for so long when they claim to have a 100 to 1 advantage in numbers. The gore effects and the animation in the combat can be quite appealing to look at, especially the bar fight and the final confrontation but its rarely exciting or surprising. Probably the worst part is a long sequence of a character entering the city at the end through a glider they specifically built for the mission, seemingly being the only thing stopping them from launching earlier, but after finally making it in, he just bumps into the other rebels who drove their car in without issue. It made the entire glider storyline pointless outside of pretty heavy handed symbolism.

The soundtrack was great for the most part even if there was one part of the final fight where I felt that the soft, uplifting, nearly operatic music didn't work during a large gunfight.

The CGI animation does look dated but the overall production value and presentation of the movie is still great today. It's going to be a weird comparison, but a lot of the character design reminded me of the Dead Space animated movies, particularly the first one.

Despite the short comings, I'd recommend it for a watch. The story and characters are pretty weak and a few performances in the EN dub are pretty weak but the feeling of the world and the animation quality does make up for a lot of the shortcomings.

Exception is unwatchable, even at 1.5x speed as people recommend to try and get past the awkward, slow and stilted animation style that they're going for.

I only decided to watch this after how bad "Make My Day" was so I wanted a bit of background on the studio and it's somehow far worse than even that trainwreck of a show. At least Make My Day was sometimes funny bad and had a fairly decent pace to it even if it occasionally crashed into a wall, this show is so slow paced that if a competent studio had worked on it, they could've got it out ... as a 1 or 2 part OVA.

The story is simple enough, humanity has left earth and ahead of the main colony ships, they've sent a ship with a crew of 5 experts to get the planet ready for them. These people are "re-prints" though, basically clones that are grown after the ship has got close to the target area but during the printing, a solar flare causes one of the 5 to mutate into a half-human, half-something.

The 5 characters are some of the ugliest characters I've seen, not just because of the poor animation, but just their general character designs are hideous. They're also generally all interchangeable, less because they all have similar personality types, just the show routinely has characters change personality for whatever point of the storyline we're currently serving.

The main storyline for the first half of the show is "Should we kill the mutant?" and nearly every character takes their turn saying "Yes, we should" and shortly after "No, we shouldn't, it's murder!" It doesn't matter that the mutant has already killed (which doesn't matter because they just get instantly cloned again, which yes, does make the fear of death totally pointless). There are several conversations on the ethics of killing the mutant because "He's still TECHNICALLY a human" even as he growls and runs around smashing pieces of the ship and trying to kill them.

It's like a long and drawn out remake of Alien, but without the likable characters or interesting villain. Every single time they're about to kill him, something just happens to occur in time to change someone's mind about killing him or for him to escape. It gets so tedious as it keeps repeating on a loop.

When they've beaten that dead horse for awhile, they suddenly decide to reveal that there is a traitor among them, which then causes the mutant (who basically is just human again because he saw a necklace from his girlfriend) and the newly cloned version of himself to team up to try and find the traitor. Cut to more everyone arguing, changing their minds constantly and turning on eachother until the big reveal... that it was the most obvious character. The show has 5 characters. We have the main character, the mutant, the nice father guy, the angry obvious red herring and then the other woman who keeps messing with their plans. It was pretty obvious to guess.

It then falls into a trope I hate, once the woman is found to be the bad guy she starts acting crazier and more evil like someone flicked a light switch.

One of the biggest issues the show has is that these characters are just clones, which is one of the central themes but it also diffuses most of the tension. "Oh no, Mack died - Oh, he's back, nevermind." "Oh no, Nina di-, oh she's already back, nevermind." "Oh no Lewis is a monstrous mutant, should we kill him? Well, let's just create a new clone of him in the meantime." It's hard to have a dramatic death when the character is just a clone sent out on a mission where they will die terraforming a planet long before anyone arrives, and one of the people arriving will be their original. It also makes it more awkward that despite several characters being re-cloned throughout the show, everyone is so against killing people trying to actively murder them or destroy the mission even though when people die they're back within minutes of screentime.

The show then just kind of ends. The planet is terraformed and the last of the clones dies of old age long before the other humans arrive. I'd rather they have failed because that would have at least been a tiny bit interesting, but we couldn't even get that, they just succeed and the story ends in the most basic way possible.

Had to watch at 1.5x speed and ended up skipping through a lot of conversations of them just discussing how they can terraform the planet or the 18th discussion about the ethics of killing the mutant. If it was a 40 minute OVA or maybe a 2 parter, it'd maybe get a 3 or 4 but at 8 episodes with the last being a double episode, it was painful to sit through.

I don't think I've ever tried so hard to like a show and it's one of those anime I find myself walking away from and wondering if its high score is only because of the incredible animation quality and soundtrack, because it can't be because of the characters or writing.

This feels like the Michael Bay equivalent of an anime and weirdly fitting for the story of the Sound Hashira Tengen because it's all flashy and no substance at all.

The story follows immediately after Mugen Train finished, with Tanjiro attempting to speak with Rengoku's father and little brother to pass on his final message to ... them and also learn about "sun-breathing/fire-breathing". They then immediately have to go on a mission to the entertainment area of the city to locate a demon who has been slaughtering people. They believe it must be an incredibly high powered demon, possibly in the top 6 and despite losing a Hashira in the past few months to a top 6 member, they decide to send just one Hashira by himself and Tanjiro's crew bullies him into taking them because originally he wanted to take an untrained girl to do the work that the 3 incredibly powerful slayers have to do. The mission is also to infiltrate a brothel, kind of seems like it'd be a job fitting for the Love Hashira but no. The demon is discovered incredibly quickly and the story just goes balls to the wall with combat as the super powerful demon turns out to be a co-joined brother and sister pair.

It's kind of telling for the pace of this season when the first 26 episode series covered 53 chapters of the manga and these 11 episodes covered 30.

7 out of the 11 episodes are dedicated to one fight sequence and I can't help but feel it was way too much as the show kept finding ways to go "Yay! They won!..... BUT DID THEY?!!?!?" so much so I never expected a single finishing move to actually be a finishing move especially because even after they're both be-headed at the same time we get a "Oh no! It's not finished!"... but it was finished because the big final attack did literally nothing despite the ending of the episode showing it engulf Tanjiro and Tengen.

The show however commits a dozen sins in a row during the fight (mainly because it goes on way too long) and because of it, the show really doesn't have much dramatic weight for me anymore.

The most annoying is probably that death doesn't really mean anything. As Inosuke triumphantly takes down one of the demons and the team think they've nearly won, the other miraculously teleports behind his back too fast for anyone to even see and stabs him in the heart and he falls down dead. The demon brother even kills Tengen, cripples Zenitsu and leaves him lying in a pile of burning rubble... but nah, Zenitsu just escapes a few seconds later when the plot needs him to. And Inosuke isn't dead, he can actually move his heart around inside his body to dodge the hit. And Tengen had stopped his own heart to pretend to be dead. Why am I meant to be scared for any of these characters going forwards? The plot armour is insane. The demon even uses poisoned weapons and Inosuke is so unaffected by it he can keep fighting with a throw away line of "Eh, I grew up on a mountain so poison doesn't work on me!" which is somehow a worse line than Tengen who just says "Eh, I'm a ninja so poison doesn't work on me!"

It really tried to drag on that Inosuke was dead and had a dramatic return, but because 2 other characters had already suddenly come back I was just waiting for him to appear to.

The "power of will" for the fights is just frustrating as hell too. Tanjiro is fighting alone at the start, going toe to toe with one of the god-level powerful demons because of his fire-breathing which is already coming across as ridiculous since he's had zero training in it but is already incredible at it. Now he's combining both it and his water breathing (how do you breathe two different ways in the same breath?) and he's incredibly OP seemingly overnight. Well, it takes a huge toll on his body and right before he gets the final strike in, he collapses... but a minute later he's up fighting again, but then he collapses again.... but then he's up a few minutes later and fighting with all his force again. It happened about 3 times throughout the battle and it was just getting silly. Every character has their own versions of this too but Tanjiro's was so repetitive.

Tanjiro's sudden god-like power level just feels cheap because it's just one of those "eh, bloodline" throw away lines. Zenitsu even pulls out an even faster super-fast attack compared to his normal super fast attack but also with a throw away "eh, I can only do this twice" line. Inosuke is the only one I think is showing a more natural increase in power but because of that, he just was actually really boring during all of the fights because his move set is "I swing swords good".

Remember at the end of Mugen train, when Tanjiro was stabbed by basically a sowing needle and that was nearly him out of action entirely? You know the way Rengoku had to teach him how to seal his cut and told him to not move too much because it'll open up and he'll bleed to death? Yeah, well, forget all that. Tanjiro gets cut or stabbed far worse than that several times throughout this fight and never even slows down. It feels like this was written by an entirely different person because of how differently they treat injury levels.

While a lot of the main characters in Kimetsu no Yaiba are "eh" at best and annoying at worst, Nezuko really takes the cake for me. She's not a character, she's a plot tool. During Tanjiro's first collapse, Nezuko suddenly pops out of no where and easily beats the demon by herself (leading to the 3rd "did we win!?!?" moment out of 6). It's revealed that Nezuko has the power level to be in the top 6 of demons which the show specifically points out, you know, despite demons getting more powerful by consuming humans and Nezuko hasn't had anything to eat in 2 years since she changed. They even make a point that her demon powers are specifically designed to only kill demons as well. Of course she then has to be retired for the rest of the fight and forgotten about entirely because she has to sleep to recover from using all that power... until the end of the fight and for the second time in as many episodes they are pretending Inosuke and Tengen are dead because of the poison, when Nezuko just danders over and cures them instantly. Oh yeah, and she was also the reason the final special attack didn't kill Tanjiro which can be summed up as "just because". I'm already not fussed on Nezuko because she's the "cute loli" stereotype who ages up for her fights where she basically fights now as a big-titty sister wearing an open kimono but now she feels like the author just pulls out her of the box anytime he needs plot armour for characters before she immediately is stuck in again with no character building. I can't remember her being out of the box outside of those 2 moments in this entire season.

The writing is also just painful. Even when the show is genuinely trying to act like Inosuke is dying, we have Tanjiro riding around on tiny loli Nezuko's shoulders like a horse as she pulls "meme" faces. Tanjiro wakes up, thinking he's dead in a bombed out and burnt city, well why not have loli Nezuko greet him and start pulling meme faces? Tengen dying? Well of course have his 3 characterless wives screaming in cartoony styles and crying rivers of tears. Hell, why not just drop a few more comedy scenes in the middle of the 7 episode long battle also mixed in with imagry of the whole city burning and people cut to pieces? We seriously hardcut back and forth between Tanjiro crying tears of blood to the 3 T&A wives having comedy skits.

And can we stop using Tanjiro's dead family as a plot contrivance at this point? We saw his family alive for maybe 2 minutes at the start of the anime and now anytime he needs a pep talk or something bad is about to happen, one of his family members pop out to have a chat with him. It's weird to think that a dead family including 3 little children now feels like a deus ex machina who pop up to give speeches and advice anytime Tanjiro needs it because I think we're now on the double digits of it happening in the show already.

The female demon is kind of a fun villain if a bit one note but it got so much worse when they brought out her incel brother who she's connected to, complaining about Tengen being good looking and being upset that he has not just 1 but 3 girlfriends. And of course, we do the standard Demon Slayer thing of once the demons are finally beaten, they just vomit their life stories at the audience to explain why they turned out the way they did. It's always so funny that they do it in such a clearly manipulative way. They don't humanize the demons BEFORE they kill them, because they want the main characters to be holier than thou good guys who never do any wrong, but they can't let the demons die with no character because no one would care about them then. It's so clearly done in this order just to avoid there being a "grey" area with the demons which is really funny when the entire story is based on Tanjiro trying to cure his demon sister who is one of the good guys.

I was tempted to give it a 5 but because the fight scenes are so well animated and sometimes exciting, it would seem unfair to score it so low but now I'm typing this I wonder if the fights are even exciting? I wasn't surprised by any of it. It's not like Mugen train where they actually killed off Rengoku. Here nothing feels like it even changed. A character we saw briefly once has retired with his 3 fan-service wives and a demon we didn't know died. Was it a really powerful demon? Yeah. Did it really move the plot forwards? No.

I feel like you could cut this entire arc out and nothing would be different. You might have someone say "Wait... where did Tanjiro suddenly learn to master fire-breathing and water-breathing together?" but even watching this season it doesn't really teach you that, he just kind of does it suddenly because he's upset someone is about to die.

I'd only picked this up now because I was told the new "movie" is coming out but since a lot of the movie is just showing episodes 10 and 11 of this again, I probably will just skip and read the manga.

Thanks for coming to my Tedtalk on why a cartoon about a loli living in a box whilst big burly men beat up a demon geisha and incel is kinda dumb.

I've watched the first few episodes of every anime in Winter 2023 and without a doubt this is the worst anime released this season.

I know for a lot of people they're going to write this off immediately because of its pretty awful CGI but there are a lot more issues than just Foodfight level CGI characters and animation. I don't know if they had two teams working on it but some shots look passable while the next will look like a fan project a 12 year old made on Youtube.

The story is nothing special, humanity wants a super rare mineral, finally find a planet that's ... full of the stuff but they dig too deep and wake up a bunch of hibernating Tardigrades the size of elephants that run rampant over the entire planet.

The characters are worse than stock, they're bad. The main character will randomly flip a switch between being a super action hero to being a wimpering, crying loser begging for everyone to hug and sing campfires to make up. The prisoner main character is so one note that he's boring, even when they hilariously introduce his dark past that only matters for about 1 minute of screen time and then it's not brought up for 2 full episodes where they only bring it up to go "Oh, by the way, he had a reason so it's totally forgivable" and then it's never mentioned again. Throw in a few wacky mad scientist characters, a few planks of wood as the Doctor and the main love interest and then you also have the "villain" characters. I was tempted to spoiler tag it when I say that it's routine for a villain to turn on them, try and murder them and then they just forgive them in the next line of dialogue, but then I also realised that this describes 3 separate characters in the show so it's not even a spoiler.

The slow build of the first episode is just boring and I was really hoping that the introduction of the creatures would turn things around and it kind of did for about 2 minutes before it died again. Some of the deaths can be kind of brutal, especially when characters I didn't expect to die are killed off. The creatures however have a pretty massive flaw that removes them entirely as being a threat and really after the first 2 episodes, the creatures are just kind of a mild annoyance floating around. The main character of course makes them more dangerous though because despite him being a sudden genius who works out everything about them after his first encounter, apparently he never actually tells anyone the weak points he learnt or how they hunt.

The story grinds to a halt towards the end when they just sit around and talk, revealing no new information that wasn't already clearly demonstrated already, or something we could have guessed ourselves. My favourite bit is when in the middle of what seems to be the final climatic "battle" they dedicate a full half of the episode to a woman giving birth and the characters just kind of hanging around and chatting about it. It didn't even take away from the battle because despite this being a huge event shown numerous times in the trailer, basically all the fighting happens off screen and despite there being an army of untold millions of the creatures, we only really have to deal with one or two.

And that's one of the major issues of the show. It's an entire planet falling and being overrun. The show mentions 100,000 people on the planet, but it feels like there is never anything happening outside of our character's field of vision. They basically just travel from place to place, arriving, hanging out and then the creatures attack and they move on to the next place, rinse and repeat. In no way do I feel that thousands are dying by the minute. And of course the anime has them repeatedly bump into eachother over and over again. The world feels like it's made up entirely of 3 rooms and the cast of characters grows too large towards the end especially when most of them are generic and bland characters.

There's one character in particular they introduce right at the end who seems like they only introduced to go "Hey! Remember this character? Huh? Remember them!?!?!?" but their presence was just there to dump totally unnecessary exposition about the planet which made the lore of the anime more confusing then it needed to be.

Only not a 1 because its at least watchable and at times it can be funny-bad.