Although it seems like they blew almost their entire budget on episode one and episode three, preferring to can episode two to a fate of having less-fluid animation and leaning on still frames slightly being moved to give the illusion of action. An understandable compromise, but it's worth a mention nonetheless because it could symptomatic of technical inconsistency, especially if this was a longer series.
Set in a LAN tournament, the All-Star, the ONA has done a pretty competent job at evoking the atmosphere of a LAN. It has maintained a higher standard of storytelling, touching on the themes of the shifting of generations and the passing of the torch, as the new bloods challenge the old guards of the game. The old has to give way to the new, as they say; and yet the old guard also still have so much left to impart. A further exploration of this dynamic, this nebulous era of the old and the new coexisting before one moves on and the other takes over, would hopefully be the direction the series takes as it moves forward.
Fittingly for the theme, the main character has been sidelined to a mentor and spectator role in this story and he belongs there, in the mentor seat. As per my thesis way back in season one, if you’re going to make your main character a perfect/complete/faultless character instead of a still-flawed person trying to figure out what went wrong and how he can be a better player, then make him be the enabler of character growth in the people around him, his future teammates especially. Of course, the main goal would still be to setup his return to the competitive scene, but it’s certainly better that he’s never the primary focus even then. Rather, his return is and should be treated more as a celebration of the hearts he touched in all the years he played GLORY.
The main drawback of the ONA is its spectacle. Ostensibly, it is a setup of both his return to the competitive scene and the participating teams that will oppose him but the limited runtime means that it is going to be primarily a spectacle. And, for a spectacle, it fails to be truly spectacular because of the way it conducts its fight scenes. The “dynamic” still frames aside, it still refuses to use wide angle shots to properly convey the entirety of a fight. As I’ve said before, a fight is a synthesis: thesis and anti-thesis, action and reaction. Here, there’s still the tendency to have action occur in one frame, showing only one character, then the reaction in the next frame, showing the target. Refusing to show both action and reaction in one frame rids the viewer of a frame of reference to ground the action which ends up limiting the impact of a fight. We’re merely following pretty colors flying around, at times even the DBZ-style of two thick colored lines colliding, instead of truly appreciating the choreography and flow of the fight. It has to resort to the same old dust eruption and flashy lights that just obscures and makes the scene messier in order to illustrate the impact of the attacks which is a piss-poor substitute to actually seeing the entire sequence of one person starting his attack and then hitting his target and seeing the target react to that, all in one frame.
At least Episode 3 is doing better in that regard and there’s cause to hope for a much much better season 2.
Have a happy MDL Changsha.
TNC! TNC! TNC!
