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Oct 2, 2017
Made in Abyss: A Lesson in World Building
Made in Abyss is the type of show that rarely comes around in these days when so many shows are just carbon copies of the same recycled light novel plots (I'm looking at you Isekai shows), and that alone was enough to garner my attention from the beginning of the season, but that isn't what made it magical. Made in Abyss has some of the best world building that I have seen in any show, in any medium: period. The level of world building compares to shows like Avatar: the Last Airbender, Game of Thrones, and within anime
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really the only things I can think of that compare are shows that take significantly more time to achieve the same results like LOTGH, One Piece, FMA, etc.
Why is the world building in Made in Abyss so amazing? I think there's a lot of answers to that but it inherently comes down to one idea: it provides enough info to keep the audience in wonder, and never too much to take it away. And when it gives you information, it does it in digestible chunks that are seemlessly integrated into the adventure. There are very few hard exposition scenes in the entire show, unless they are more or less necessary. This is how exposition was meant to be done, and it kept me captivated through the thirteen episode run and after. Each episode felt like peeling another layer off an onion, with the strength and pungency of the smell getting stronger each time, and I mean that in a good way. Made in Abyss changes form dramatically over the course of the series and it's a delight to experience it.
Due to the boost in source material sales, I can only hope another season happens as soon as possible, and that Akihito Tsukishi can get as much material written for a new season as fast as possible.
10/10, and a show I will definitely recommend to my friends who aren't even that into anime.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Jun 14, 2017
TLDR at this time is to wait until this show is finished before starting it or rating it. It's really balancing on a knife's edge right now and has the capacity to either finish strong or completely fuck everything that made it great with the most recent episode.
So I'm going to separate 2 different iconic aspects of the show which is something I don't usually do. The animation, and the story/premise. So the first thing I'm going to talk about that is of note is the animation. The animation is all CGI for the most part that uses cell shading to give the appearance of
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2D characters. This is honestly the best integration of CGI in a an anime that I've ever seen. The anime industry has been making great strides in doing this starting from Aku no Hana and Kingdom in 2013, and Kado really nailed it. The integration isn't perfectly seamless naturally. You can still tell that all the characters have 3D shapes but it certainly isn't jarring like what we've seen in the past and ends up working really well.
The second big aspect is the story. The premise is actually fantastic. Kado deals with many philosophical concepts associated with meeting a new more advanced form of alien life which seeks to fast forward humanity's growth. Firstly this is great, because for once we actually have a show that explores interaction with a benevolent alien species, not a blindly evil one, but the real thing that makes it great is the philosophical questions these interactions pose. How fast should civilization advance? Are our current political constructs more detrimental than they are helpful to the progress of mankind? For example, if humanity is given the opportunity to have unimaginable power, would it actually help us, or would it just make us destroy ourselves like nuclear weapons did. These are the questions Kado explores, and it does it very well for the most part. Kado is 100% the most thought provoking show of the season IMO, and I'm really excited to see where it goes.
So why did I give it a 7? Honestly it was going on an 8-9 for me until a recent turn in the series made me question if it was going to be able to keep true to what made it great. And honestly I don't think it will be able to with the direction it's going and will devolve into something much more base than it could be. I'm hoping to be proven wrong but these last few episodes will decide whether Kado will be a show to remember, or a show that will fade into obscurity after the season is done.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Jun 12, 2017
Re:Creators is being criminally underrated this season because it had a cliche sounding premise and very meh first episodes. But if Re:Zero and Madoka have taught us anything it's that cliche sounding premises may not be so cliche after all, and that sometimes shows need time to get the ball rolling especially for a two cour. This show is ballooning with potential, I'm just hoping that balloon doesn't pop
Re:Creators is truly a gift that keeps on giving, as it really does have 9s across the board so far for me and is set to keep up that pace. The first thing I have to praise
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is actually the supposedly cliche premise. The idea of bring other characters into our world from different universes isn't exactly the newest thing ever, but it has never been executed in this way. These characters from fiction are actually aware of the oddity of their existence in the modern world, and the other characters are too. We see magical girls surprised by how much destruction and pain their attacks can cause, single minded driven characters that appear foolish when placed in circumstances with real consequence, and very typical anime stereotypes explored as if they were real people. And the best part is, they grow out of those stereotypes as they learn the realities of the world of their creators.
The interactions between the creators and created are also great. To some creations their creators are like gods, but to others they're more like parents. I'm pleasantly surprised to see interactions that aren't entirely unrealistic from pretty much every character in the show. The real live humans behave rationally for the most part, and the anime characters behave like anime characters. As the show goes on, even the more boring characters(like the MC) are fleshed out much more until they become legitimately interesting.
The great thing about original anime is that their stories are usually better since they don't have to hack something together to try to give the illusion of finishing a story when the source material is unfinished or sometimes not possible to adapt fully. Re:Creators seems to have a grander plot occurring in the background and I couldn't be more excited to see where it goes. At this point I could see this becoming a classic as iconic as the first two I mentioned in my review.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Jun 12, 2017
It's really sad knowing that with the anime industry in its current state we will never have a story as grand or fulfilling as the one presented in LOTGH for a long long time. LOTGH is something that most anime strive to be, but never can due to episode limits and simple lack of personnel working on them.
This show had an incredibly diverse cast of characters which it fleshed out beautifully. Honestly if I could give this show a 12 for character i would because 11 wouldn't even do it justice. When watching shows with similar amounts of characters like Game of Thrones it's
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easy to forget semi important characters simply because they weren't fleshed out enough. Often you enter episodes wondering "who was this guy again?: One of the most incredible parts of this show is that it avoids that pitfall for the most part, completely exploring several side characters so that you're never wondering what happened to them or what kinds of people they were. Every loose end is tied up other than the ones that are better left untied.
To quote the show "In every time, in every place, the deeds of men remain the same". In the end it is a story of people and history. What people want, what drives them, why good people can do terrible things, how bad people can come to rule over perfectly intelligent good ones, and why sometimes lives have to be sacrificed for something greater despite acknowledging how fucked up it is. It's a very rare thing to feel true blue respect for a fictional character but this show managed to get me to feel it for several of them.
If you are willing to make the time investment I guarantee you will get more out of it for this show than any other I have ever seen.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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