For the first few episodes, Kabaneri was just your atypical action show. After a quick introduction to the setting – essentially the same as Attack on Titan but with a trains and zombie’s motif - two of the possibly greatest human inventions combined! Yet unlike Kabaneri’s emo as fuck brother who thinks killing characters every 10 seconds is the equivalent of a good writer masturbating, Kabaneri fortunately hails that so-called ‘modern masterpiece of narcissistic entropy’ to slit its god damn throat and breaks that shit down to its bare-bones basics. By basics: a switch your brain off action show. Just ignore the magic of how a single person can kill a million zombies out of god knows where.
My first impressions gave me some fate that the damn thing is going to be good up until the very end… on the other hand, this is modern; you think this shit will stay consistent, but it eventually succumbs into evaporating diarrhea. I suppose Wit wasn’t satisfied enough after Seraph not becoming as big as a hit as it would have meant to be (which was a decent show, wink!). Thus, they wanted Kabaneri to be so akin as possible with AoT. They tried to put sympathetic and emotional weight to the character’s actions, and even abandoning the over powered main character – as a means to what? Make me sob? Or that people get salty because they are only given a bit of rice for lunch during an apocalyptic setting? Don’t even get me started at the amount of shouting the protagonist does; I swear he spends more energy bitching about how dangerous a situation is and expressing basic status of depression, rather than just killing the damn zombies. Which was all what I wanted to see!
Amusingly there were no character deaths throughout the whole thing. Yeah there were the zero-dimensional civilians but they are almost - literally cannon fodder for the pseudo CGI backgrounds and an excuse to make the zombie apocalyptic setting. If you exclude that hundreds of thousands of people death toll, you realise that no one fucking dies! Not even the support characters, who are just there to make conversations for the protagonist and support development even die. It’s like the opposite of AoT: where a few minutes of screen time is given to certain side characters, and they die without even getting my overly sensitive ex to give a shit. And the characters are one dimensional as hell, so who even cares?
Did I mention that the protagonist, Ikoma, is a more badass version of Eren? At least Ikoma gets shit done, and doesn’t whine nearly as often as that emo kid. They’re pretty similar, so expect archetypal plot armor moments. But I do question: if Ikoma can enhance his bodily performance to a demi-Kabane, would it more convenient to have a few more people with the same augmentations? All what you had to do is cure yourself of a Kabane disease, and simples. How do these zombies even came to be? How does the blood circulation pseudo-science even work? Now I wouldn’t mind vague world building, but science in this show need some validity if it’s going to be more than mindless schlock.
Apart from the antagonist’s legendary pink hair, Biba was just another edgy kid who looks like he has grey morality for his actions, but really he is just a very quiet generic asshole. I don’t know why he reminds me of Shadow the Hedgehog.
In conclusion, Kabane Iron Fortress was first a mindless action show which I would praise it like a gem from all the cancer that is modern anime. But it had to suck on Attack on Titan like a feeder eventually. Because you know… “Financial reasons…” – Studio Wit.
CRTICAL FINALE: 4/10 ENJOYMENT: 4/10
