Here’s a basic overview of the anime. Re:Creators is a classic “save the world from destruction” kind of show in that it has a completely overpowered antagonist who wants to annihilate society. Our villain, The Military Uniform Princess (What a mouthful. Let’s just call her Altair, her actual name), carries out her plan by bringing fictional beings from stories into reality to upset the order of the universe, causing it to collapse. At least that’s what heroine Meteora concludes after analyzing the situation. Some join Altair’s side with the desire to force their creators, the ones who wrote their stories, to change them for the better. Others realize that this is just a farce and decide to oppose Altair. Both sides conjure up plans to defeat the other and have many battles, culminating in a final epic confrontation involving all of the creations watched by an audience of thousands.
While this seems interesting enough, I was relatively indifferent towards the first half of the anime. Now don’t get me wrong, I believe that many aspects of the show were executed adequately. The plot is unique and incredibly layered; the producers made sure to explain every last detail of the story to viewers. The characters are quite diverse and each bring a little something to the table, though many are admittedly overshadowed by the core cast. However the predominant issue that I found with Re:Creators is its presentation.
Let me elaborate. A commonality amongst practically all forms of media is something called an information dump. Used in order to enlighten viewers on details surrounding the plot, these info dumps are commonly executed by having one or more of the cast explain story details to other characters. As you can imagine, its somewhat difficult to pull this off without creating a sense of boredom in the viewer since these scenes generally have boring visuals and just seem to drag on. However, Re:Creators fails miserably in that it has one of these in EVERY EPISODE up until the episode 13 recap. I’ve never seen a show have so many info dumps, and what’s more is that they were executed in the most mind-numbing way imaginable. I can’t stress enough how painful it was to watch one character bloviate about the plot as the listening characters just stood there doing NOTHING. They didn’t contribute to the conversation and hardly even moved. I respect the fact that Re:Creators has a lot of depth to its story and needed to be properly explained to the audience, but the way in which this was accomplished was absolutely horrible.
The recap was more interesting than the previous episodes because of Meteora’s humorous dialogue. It was literally a retelling of all of the information learned previously through the painstakingly boring info dump episodes, yet it was presented in a way that was actually able to grasp my attention, unlike every prior episode of the anime. I guess the producers were so desperate to get their viewers invested in the show that they created a sexy version of Meteora that was solely made for fanservice. How shallow.
…It totally worked.
*Ahem* Anyway, I was pleased with the presentation of the second portion of the anime. Conversations became more impactful and were no longer one-sided. That’s right, they actually had two people discussing their ideals and conflicting beliefs instead of having a single character monologuing for half an episode. It was very refreshing.
There are a lot of characters in Re:Creators, though it won’t seem like it due to the lack of screen time that many of them receive. Prime examples include the magical girl Mamika, the mecha pilot Rui, and the former bounty hunter Blitz Talker. They each received a modicum of screen time and probably could have made for great supporting characters. They really stood out during their few moments in the spotlight, but it wasn’t enough to really flesh out their characters, which is unfortunate. The fiery swordswoman Selesia seemed like the main heroine after episode one, but her importance sort of faded as the anime shifted its attention to other characters. She was cool, but nothing special. The bad boy Yuuya looks and acts pretty awesome, but is barely developed. The antagonist, Altair, is definitely the best designed character. Her powers are inventive and her motivation for being the villain is appropriate.
Souta Mizushino is supposedly the main character of the story. I’m hesitant to classify him as the protagonist due to his lack of importance. Like Selesia, he faded into the background after episode one. In fact, if you completely removed his presence from half of the episodes, everything would proceed in exactly the same manner. He finally becomes important after revealing his connection to Altair to the rest of the cast. Souta starts off weak, but exhibits many human qualities, which is a point in his favor since he’s just an insecure kid who isn’t at the level of the super powered characters, so his weaknesses are to be expected. He also gains some development and confidence in the latter portion of the anime which somewhat redeemed him in my eyes.
Meteora receives far more screen time and accomplishes a lot more then Souta, which leads me to classify her as the true protagonist. She’s the one who develops the strategies used to oppose Altair and displays the most common sense and knowledge out of all of the characters. I also found her to be the funniest character (though that’s not saying much) even though she falls under the emotionless girl trope. While her sesquipedalian monologues were incredibly boring, she made up for it in other ways, and overall made for a pretty good lead.
Magane steadily rose to become my personal favorite character of the show. I simply found her to be the most interesting and entertaining member of the cast, and not just because she’s a chaotic maniac. Magane is also a surprisingly thought provoking character, mainly due to her unique power, which I won’t discuss because of spoilers. I loved the way that she manipulated others characters into saying what she wanted them to. Her intelligence and uncanny knack for twisting the truth made me really start to like her character. Simultaneously, I also held some malicious feelings towards her due to her villainous actions. I find that a character is well written when I can both love and hate them, so I tip my hat to the creators for making Magane the way she is.
The soundtrack is composed by Hiroyuki Sawano, who never fails to deliver high quality music. Both of the opening themes, Gravity Wall and Sh0ut, are fantastic compositions that instantly became my favorite anime openings of 2017. The soundtrack is filled with powerful pieces that command the attention of listeners, and the music easily became one of my favorite part of the anime. Many great seiyuu appear as well, including Maaya Sakamoto (Oshino Shinobu, Ciel Phantomhive) as Magane, Aki Toyosaki (Yui Hirasawa, Momo Deviluke) as The Military Uniform Princess, and Inori Minase (Rem) who voiced Meteora. Re:Creators definitely boast a strong selection of voice actors.
A few of the background visuals tended to be animated with fine precision. Specifically the outdoor scenery, which in some cases would really stand out to me with great color schemes and high detail. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the majority of the character designs. They were rather poor in quality when the characters were both stagnant and in motion. It also didn’t help that many of the scenes took place in dull locations (like office rooms and living rooms) that were filled with completely motionless characters doing nothing but opening and closing their mouths. This is a perfect example of lazy animating, and the lack of effort really shows.
Re:Creators brought a lot to the table, but wasn’t always able to deliver. While we were presented with an assiduously conceived story, the producers just couldn’t figure out how to effectively provide viewers with plot details. This left the anime feeling hollow and uninteresting, an issue that plagued Re:Creators for a dozen episodes. Many of the show’s characters had the capability to become great, however they weren’t given nearly enough screen time or depth, so they often ended up being simply mediocre. Overall, I sort of liked Re:Creators, but its shortcomings prevented me from truly enjoying the anime. I would recommend watching this if you enjoy the fantasy and reality colliding setting and are able to put up with unnecessarily long information dumps.
