I can’t recall any other time where the series I was watching is actively aware of what’s wrong with itself to a degree that they say not to do the terrible ideas they themselves are doing at the same time, as if this somehow justifies them. (it’s meta commentary on storytelling guys, it’s deep!)
This Modern Classic example of how not to write an original anime is brought to you by a staff who really should have been able to pull off an interesting, engaging series, yet it utterly fails on so many basic levels it feels like they either didn’t care at all or passed off most of the work to some underpaid interns.
I don’t know what it is about original animation projects, they have all the freedom to be whatever they want and they almost always come out as cliched, stupid messes of a show that aren’t worth watching. That is, if the show came out in the 2010s. Sure there are good original shows sometimes, but most of them end up being like this, or Comet Lucifer. What’s that, you don’t remember Comet Lucifer? Good. I certainly hope this show will go the way of that trainwreck, but a passionate fanbase has already decided to declare this a modern classic anime, one of their favorites.
And why wouldn’t it be your favorite anime? It broke new ground! By digging itself deeper and deeper into the ground with every episode’s downward spiral from mediocre beginning to mind numbingly idiotic finale! We start with a decent idea for a show, fictional characters come to life and have to deal with the reality of being characters from a story, interacting with their writers along the way.
And then they all have a bunch of dumb fight scenes for no reason cause that idea above requires actual writing to pull off. It’s far, far easier to write a dumb fight scene then it is to write a decent dialog scene. Not that Re:Classic didn’t try to write dialog, in fact, there’s so much you might forget it was an action show!
“Did I just contradict myself there?”, you might ask, but no, I wouldn’t write blatantly conflicting pieces of information so close together, I’m not the writer of Re:Creators. The dialog in Re:Creators tries very hard to be smart, but at the end all it amounts to is glue between more stupid, badly animated fight scenes. Characters will switch sides of the conflict on the drop of a hat, generally with a dialog that looks like this: “The information you had was wrong, you’re the villain here!” “Whoa you’re right, I guess I’m a good guy again it’s not like I just shot somebody in cold blood two minutes ago, forget that!”
The characters of this show are all so stupid, if any of them actually stopped and questioned their own actions the plot would end in like two episodes. The plot that is a ton of fight scenes that lead up to a LITERAL deus ex machina ending, people like those right? Oh wait, those have been an overused cliché since ancient greece!
I clapped when I saw the zero foreshadowing devinatart OC show up and wins the fight for the heroes cause the writer’s wrote themselves into a corner! It broke new ground!
Why is this show even remotely popular?
In what universe does a character go from NOW I’VE LOST IT, I KNOW I CAN KILL to “We’re best friends forever now” because of a single conversation, they didn’t even go through a redemption arc, they’re just heroes now.
One of the biggest complaints about Sword Art Online is that it’s filled with Cafe Scenes, where characters explain the plot to each other in boring dry dialog. Well, innovator it is, Re:Creators deftly deconstructs this tired trope by having not only cafe scenes, but family restaurant scenes, sushi bar scenes, fast food restaurant scenes, you name it and they’ve probably eaten it while explaining the paper thin plot to Sota, the audience self insert character who adds nothing but gets to hang around the cool kids anyways.
Sota is a dumb nerd who watches anime and reads light novels and wears glasses, just like YOU, the viewer, can’t you relate to his struggles?? As he stands in the background and occasionally asks questions.
Is this even a review, is there any structure to what’s happening here? And this is where I blow your minds when I reveal that this lack of structure is actually a clever deconstruction of poorly constructed reviews! Marvel at how I stick it to genre conventions by doing exactly what you’d expect but then saying I did it, how original!
I can understand the appeal of Recreators on a basic level, the premise is interesting and could have lead to a great show. However, the strength of the concept is meaningless without the execution, something recreators itself seems aware of despite delivering an incredibly trite, poorly made series that coasts due to it’s premise and character designs, which are just similar enough to real characters that people can project their like of that character onto them so you don’t have to write or design a real character, it’s brilliant!
Oh yeah, the show has bad production values outside of writing too. The animation is cheap at best and atrocious at worst. The music is Sawano’s weakest so far. Now Sawano gets a lot of hate, but I’m not one of them really, I’ve liked several osts of his, including some in series I don’t particularly like or enjoy, like Aldnoah Zero. But this show literally has three songs in it’s ost, it’s so weak and it really undermines the scenes when the only vocal insert track plays Every. Single. Episode.
I have nothing more to say about this, I rambled on enough, the end.
Don’t watch it.
