Where do I even begin?
This series has been the bane of my existence for the past week as I slogged through every episode praying for the day it would be over. I've spent way too much time thinking about this stupid show even while not watching it, and I quickly grew to hate it so much that I decided I needed to make this review as thorough and as damning a critique as possible. To facilitate this, for the first time ever I actually decided to take notes while watching a series for the express purpose of writing a review of it. I usually just write my general feelings about a show when I'm done watching it, but I wanted to chronicle how I felt at the end of each episode so I could get real specific and personal about just how much I hate this trash.
Something to get out of the way off the bat: First and foremost this show exists as an advertisement for some shitty SquareEnix mobile game. It was never meant to be consumed in isolation. So if you're like me and you couldn't give a shit about money grubbing gatcha games you will already be behind the curb on understanding what the fuck is going on at any given time. My guess is you're expected to already be familiar with the setting. I wouldn't know because I refuse to do more research on this shit than I've already had to. This franchise isn't worth that much of my time.
Here's how the first episode decides to set up the setting for our story. There's some brand new sickness going around that's killing people at an alarming rate and it's real bad. It's coming from a place called the Asylum, we're going to spend the rest of our time there and not out where people are getting sick so I don't know why it was even brought up. If I had to guess it was probably a vain attempt to parallel events happening in our real world in the last couple years so it can be #relatable. #killme. So in this Asylum place is some military operation where "Sleepers" are sent down into monster invested regions to do... fuck if I know. I don't think the show even knows what their goal is supposed to be, maybe cure that disease they were talking about? Except it's pretty much never brought up again because now they're just fighting monsters down in the Asylum for seemingly no reason other than fighting monsters. Maybe they explained it, but if they did it was not clear.
Our group of heroes are all very "special" in their own way if you know what I mean. I don't know if they were supposed to be written like a group of actually mentally-handicapped individuals, but that's sure what it comes off as. We get our protagonist who spergs out in his interview to become a sleeper, saying that he wants to do it because an anime told him to. That's not a joke or exaggeration, that is his actual in-universe character motivation that is supposed to drive the plot along. It would be hilarious if the setting wasn't trying to be so damn serious about it.
After our protagonist we get an episode each explaining the backstories and motivations of the rest of the crew he's on. We have a failed idol who now works in a military organization and for some reason is allowed to give orders, a manchild who actually has brain damage that makes him incapable of rational thought which he mislabels as a lack of fear, an aspiring mangaka probably fujoshi girl and the vice captain who- oh boy we'll get to him.
We're meant to believe that these characters are coming to be closer to each other when there is 0 chemistry between them. After each of their focus episodes they fade comfortably into the background and go back to having the personality of a sack of potatoes. The protagonist is the most generic, self-insert hero archetype I've ever seen. I've been watching re-watching parts and thinking about this show basically nonstop for the past week trying to write this review and I honestly couldn't tell you any of their names. Except one.
Leslie is I think technically the first character we get introduced to, even before the supposed protagonist, and the show sure likes to spend way too much time and focus on him. Yes him. Not they, not them, themselves or any other plural pronouns. You see English as a language has this problem. It has no gender-neutral third person singular pronoun to refer to indefinite pronouns. "They" and "them" are plural, despite Webster trying to redefine them as otherwise simply because of repeated incorrect use. I could rant about how stupid I think gender identity politics are until I'm blue in the face but this isn't the place for that, suffice to say that whenever I hear they/them being used to refer to a single individual I die a little inside at the bastardization of our language.
There's something that you have to confront when watching anime: English and Japanese are two radically different languages. The best choice for any viewer to get an authentic experience would be to learn Japanese and just watch the original. For those of us without the time or patience to put into learning a language ranked as being one of the most difficult for English speakers to learn, subtitles become a necessary evil. With no knowledge of Japanese, the person or group creating those subtitles becomes your only lifeline when it comes to understanding what is being said. It would therefore be that person or that group's responsibility, if being paid for a premium service, to provide the best possible subtitles for the experience. Why then, is it, that official subs from the likes of Funimation are always the worst thing ever and make me want to die.
It's not just the They/Them situation. That was just a constant reminder that I was reading official subs from a company that wanted to appear progressive. Never mind that Japanese has no pronouns for the most part and the subject of a sentence is usually implied by context or a given title. Never mind the fact that your gender identity bullshit would be mocked openly in Japan and localizing it to western sensibilities in disingenuous and frankly xenophobic. Even ignoring all that the rest of the subtitles are just riddled with errors and unprofessionalism. And these are the official ones from Funimation! A supposedly premium streaming service! I found one place where they used less when they meant fewer. That's like 5th grade English, and it wasn't being used intentionally to accentuate a characters speech patterns or anything it was just straight up improper grammar. And that was just the example I chose to write down! But back on the subject of Leslie's name they constantly refer to him as XO. I was so confused at what that could possibly mean, at first I assumed it was another bizarre gender term. Listening closer I realized the word they were translating into XO was fukutaicho. I'm not going to pretend I understand all the intricacies of military terminology but at least in Japanese I can tell you that fukutaicho or 副隊長 just means lieutenant, vice captain, second in command, or something similar. For some ungodly reason they've decided to localize that to hell and back by changing it to Executive Officer. I don't know if that's supposed to be an equivalent American military rank, but it sure as hell doesn't sound like a second in command. And why not abbreviate it as EO? Why the hell did they decide to constantly refer to him as multiple people and as XO? It was such a clusterfuck of bad dialogue I was genuinely confused about who the characters were referring to most of the time, which is counter to the whole purpose of assigning pronouns in the first place! I wish they had just referred to Leslie exclusively as Leslie in the subtitles if they were going to be insistent that Leslie couldn't just go by fucking HE! FUCK!
I know I'm getting so heating over basically nothing, but as mentioned subtitles are the main connection most western viewers are going to be able to have with a show originally in Japanese, so it's really important to do them right. When you have these little hiccups along the way it starts to detract from the viewing experience and if they persist it starts to build and build until it becomes unbearable and you wonder why you didn't just pirate the one with fansubs. How is that the hobbyists doing something for free somehow manage to do a better job than multi-million dollar licensing companies that should have plenty of resources to pay teams of translators? Oh wait they don't pay their translators shit. $80 an episode regardless of word count. Fuck Funimation.
What is there to even like about this show? Well I took a couple of quotes that out of context are kind of funny. "that's because you're smart and smart people don't go into politics" was one, "I just watched anime and pretended I was some kind of expert at it, when I wasn't" was another. That second one describes me pretty well. There was also actually a pretty funny line right at the beginning of the show. They show a bunch of storefronts with signs saying nobody with [disease name] was allowed to enter and everyone is going around town wearing face masks and looking paranoid, and one guy has his face uncovered looking unconcerned and says "Aaah, there's no saving a city when it gets this far. people who are gonna get [disease name] are gonna get it, and there's nothing you can do to stop that."
Like I said that's all taken out of context and doesn't mean there is anything of value in this train wreck. I would rather eat the rotten asshole of a road-kill skunk and down it with beer than be forced to sit through another second of this fucking disaster. I didn't even get to how bad the plot is or how there's some time travel bullshit shoe-horned in at the last minute out of nowhere. 4/10 and if you know me you know how bad that is. I gave 8/10 to fucking Sword Art. Let that sink in. I'm done, please never make me think about this series again.
