If someone told me, “Hey do you like your Guilty Crown and other anime we totally aren’t ripping off, than how about this one. It’s a story about a male protagonist who has to fight stuff and you just fell asleep.” Being generic isn’t so much a bad thing if the writers boldly know how to both create an effective story and interesting characters behind such a ploy. But let’s go over it.
The story goes like this: Humanity is going to war with a terrible threat meaning humanity is also on the brink of extinction mind you, a hitherto enemy known as Gastrea. Two Wars with the Gastrea already happened off camera so where. Also the story takes place in Neo-Tokyo where the residents have walled themselves off with a material called Varanium and constructed Monoliths that ward off the Gastrea.
Main character is Satomi Rentaro who is generic teen male fighter and righteous hero of the PEOPLE! To be honest, most of the characters aren’t really interesting for the most part. They all take some token presence and bait for the audience to both feel secure and idyllic. The only character I can ever approve of is Hiruko the foil to Rentaro, who seems to be the only one who’s not brooding serious, or intense serious, or dumb-righteous seriousness (Rentaro what the f**k). Hiruko could have been the main character of the story because he’s cool without the tone of desperation to be such and such for shallow approval. And to enlighten on that desperation, I’m going to call it “Simplistic Obligatory Writing”. It’s when characters for no discernible reasoning become total cocks because they have to. Now in some cases this makes but in most it just doesn’t. Sure there’s build up but what to? What has the character learned from it and why is it in the story? It’s for the delusion of “Character growth” but in the end it makes no sense and makes the characters unlikable.
Now the story is offset at the end when you realize that the show doesn’t know what it’s suppose to be or it’s inconsistent tone. This is marred by multiple tones ranging from Slice of Life relaxation, to whimsical silliness, to brooding seriousness etc. etc.
The anime isn’t so bad that writing this review has taken a few bricks from my load, but that’s like saying the "Internship" wasn’t so bad that I got eat some popcorn with it. You can almost feel the general conflict of the anime, trying to be both fun and dark-seriousness, which is like having it's cake and eating it too, leading to being baked in mother's 'boiling' love oven.
In the end I’m very tired and feel very awful from this experience, but if you’re the kind that enjoys some nice action, Black Bullet has some of that as well. Especially me as I painfully cut its every smug, contemptuous limb with a hack saw.
