And so it has finally ended…
To be honest, I think 25 episodes was just the right amount. On one hand, one cour would not have been enough to really capture the story. Arc 3 was instrumental in showcasing that the novel does have world building and the story is much more grand than the first two arcs might have one believe. If we had finished on arc 2, it would have looked like the story was entirely focused only on Subaru, his suffering and that the rest of the world doesn’t really exist.
It got to a point where I was theorizing that the entire world of the show was just a product of Subaru’s mind. That nothing was real and it was all in his head. If there was no arc 3, I would have really believed this to be the case, but now it’s clear that the world of Re:Zero is, without a doubt, alive and full of storylines.
On the other hand, if we had more episodes, I feel like the show would start to get stale. The thing with Re:Zero is that, whilst the writing is REALLY good, it’s still fairly simplistic. It gives me very strong Kawahara vibes (author of SAO) in that he is an extremely skilled writer, but is creating a product for the general public to consume, not avid readers. It’s like a gourmet pizza. It’s gourmet alright, but it’s still just a pizza.
So if we had another cour or two, I feel like the hype of the show would start to go down towards the end. People would start to get slightly bored.
And so 25 episodes is just the right amount to perfectly get across what Re:Zero is and to hook people to go and read the light novels. Luckily, with all this hype around, a lot of people have taken up to translate so I expect many volumes to be done in a very short amount of time.
The people who REALLY got invested in the idea of Re:Zero, will now have an excellent LN to pick up, while anime fans will be able to end this show with a good impression.
It reminds me of Spice&Wolf, actually. Funnily enough, done by the same studio, that show also ended on a very good note to hook the viewer to try the LN without getting even slightly stale.
So with that said, on to some reviewing!
The best way I could describe this show, is a very, VERY long movie. Each arc felt VERY much like a separate movie with way more content than a movie would normally have.
The thing with most LNs and anime shows in general is that they’re made to have a slow plot progression. After every big plot checkmark, there will be a fairly long period of “settling down” on the new “level” within the story. There will always be a lot of time spent on increasing the depth of the characters or on building the world. These moments where any events that happen don’t really “mean” anything. They’re just there to help us develop our understanding and view of the characters.
I think Re:Zero is exactly about this concept and approaching it in an entirely different way.
It’s a show where character and world building happen while having huge plot developments and then using “Return by death” to reset said plot development, but keep our new understanding of the characters valid.
It’s pretty ingenious and VERY different from everything else that dealt with similar mechanics.
It’s how I always envisioned time travel stories to play out. Using different timelines as a means to learn something to then use in the original timeline.
This parallel of an MC that is constantly changing due to the events that surround him and the cast that change only based on the events of the one timeline they’re in. The fact that towards the end of the show, White Fox managed to really make these characters feel “alive” is proof of their extreme competence as a studio and the brilliance of the author.
Another point that must not be missed is how this show managed to go so mainstream, while taking so many story risks. By this I mean that the story itself was not filled with fanservice and over-positive outcomes towards the main cast like in most other light novels. One of the greatest issues with a lot of current light novels that deal with world-transportation is that the MC ends up being invincible from the very start. There is always huge risk involved, but the MC always ends up winning and never suffers even a little bit.
Re:Zero throws this entire concept out of the window and tries to tell a realistic and gritty tale. A tale of what being stuck in another world could really mean. The constant helplessness, powerlessness and the feel of isolation. All these emotions are VERY difficult to stomach for a viewer and are generally avoided by these young new LN authors and anime studios. They try to tell a story which the viewer could self-insert into and feel better about themselves fantasizing about it.
Self-inserting in this context is really a plague of extremely boring and WORTHLESS story-telling where the viewer doesn’t learn anything. It’s just like watching fireworks. They look cool, sure, but do they have any value apart from looking cool? Almost none.
Good storytelling is managing to play with the viewers emotions, making him care for the characters within the story and to learn something along the way.
Re:Zero does this job perfectly. It’s taking the concept of “stuck in another world” and creating a story WORTH TELLING. A story that exists not just to make money, but to actually have artistic value in itself.
The word is really artistic value. Can anyone really say that the majority of these recent trope stories have any artistic value? That they make a person really think about things and feel more emotions than what a drug would give?
Re:Zero is a slap to the face of this type of worthless storytelling. A wake up call for authors that it IS possible in this day and age to attract an audience towards a story that is not glorious, but actually gritty, brutal and can make the viewer feel sick to the bone.
I genuinely dropped the show for a while when Arc3 started because the pitifulness of Subaru felt like too much. I couldn’t handle watching him completely lose his sense of reality in front of everyone. It was a horrible experience.
However, I never, not even for a moment, think that I’m dropping this show because it’s bad. I did it because it was so good at showcasing something so horrid. I just wanted to wait till enough episodes came out to actually reach a conclusion and not be stuck on such a pitiful state. I basically binged the remaining 10 episodes in 2 sessions of 5 episodes each. 5 weeks apart.
Now, here’s the big question : is Re:Zero really that good?
No, It’s really not a masterpiece. As brave as this show was, it still let itself be restrained by the genre. It simply wasn’t a multi-layered show. It had the core ideas presented from the start of the show, but didn’t attempt to explore any concepts TOO brave, nor did the show feature very strong multi-layered personalities. They still felt like characters from a fantasy work and not people that one could write essay after essay about.
Re:Zero just wasn’t attempting to express ideas that people could talk about for years in the future.
The parallel to draw here would be shows like NGE, which manages to talk about real world problems at length and make people really THINK about the problems surrounding our society.
Re:Zero does not attempt to make use pose such questions. It simply has a tale it wants to tell. This means that, whilst within it’s own boundry, the show is absolutely amazing. The boundry itself is too small to really reach the epitome of what an anime or a story in general can be capable of.
I will rate the show a 9 out of 10, with the distribution being:
Adaptation quality : 10/10. White Fox keeps proving itself as one of, if not the greatest studio when it comes to really capturing a source material.
Story : 10/10. A brilliant tale that felt like a movie from start to finish. At no point in time did it feel boring or slow. Everything had a meaning.
Characters : 9/10. Subaru will go down in history as one of the most realistic MCs we’ve had in anime in a long time. The rest of the cast have also shown a high level of complexity. However, the show didn’t have anyone of the level of truly masterful characters (ex Holo, Shinji).
Realization of it’s purpose: 10/10. The author had very clear ideas that he wanted to get across with this story and he did it flawlessly.
At the end of the day, the purpose itself of the show just wasn’t grand enough to warrant a masterpiece status so a 9 is as high as I would go.
Re:Zero should go down in history as a new addition to the “must watch” lists to NEW anime fans and viewers who want to really see the “stuck in another world” genre expressed in a truly artistic way with actual value.
It’s not a deconstruction of a genre, but it’s definitely a very valuable work that shows where the genre can be taken.
Now if a writer were to take this entire genre and the groundwork that Re:Zero has laid and then attempted to break the 4th wall of the genre (actually connecting the fantasy world with the real world). Making the story not about an MC who is basically an immigrant from reality, but a story about taking shelter in the fantasy world to escape the real world or to use it as a means to better himself, then we could find ourselves a masterpiece.
If we could just have a writer as competent as Tappei Nagatsuki(Re:Zero) write a story based on the ideas of Reki Kawahara(SAO) with the writing prowess of someone like Nisio Isin(Monogatari) then we could really see this genre taken to the absolute limit.
