Reviews & Features Discussion

[LumRanmaYasha]

Late to the party, but great write-ups, Spark! Since I only had read the first volume of FOR a couple years ago, I decided that I'd read the manga and watch the anime in pace with your reviews. I just got done with reading through chapter 13 and episode 3 today, and yeah, I pretty much agree with all your points about how the anime's changes are detrimental to the story and characterization. I also don't care for how the anime takes out the humor and attempts to make the series feel more serious by making the fights more violent and dramatic. It completely misses the spirit of the source material but at the same doesn't commit to it's darker direction in a consistent or compelling way, making the stakes and events in the series really fall flat.

Honestly, I think the anime is even worse than you've been giving it credit for. The character designs feel stiff and lack the personality they had in the manga and go off model constantly, the BGM drones on and doesn't properly reflect the mood of the scene it's used in most cases, and the color palette is bland and washed-out. While I generally like Noriyuki Abe's use of heavy shadows and dark lighting, it just makes scenes look drab and ugly in this show, and while there are nice bits of animation here and there, most of the time the fight choreography is monotonous and movement is choppy and jittery. The depiction of Recca's flame is also a complete joke; while in the manga it actually looks like fire and is presented with a sense of grandeur (like at the end of chapter 7), in the anime it's just some small and pathetic-looking translucent red light. You can't tell me that the studio that animated the spectacle that was the Dragon of the Darkness Flame just a few years prior couldn't have done better. Not to say anything about the show's pacing. As a consequence to gutting the humor and downtime between the characters, there's no emotional highs and lows to each episode; everything stays at one mood constantly, making nothing stand out, and the show incredibly boring to sit through even with all the action going on.

I thought the first episode in particular was really bad. Beyond all the alterations you mentioned, it breaks basic rules of good storytelling. It's common sense to stick to the perspective of your main character at the beginning of the story and stay with it until the audience knows the supporting cast enough to start to mix it up. The manga did this from the first page, but the anime keeps switching the perspective between Kagehoshi and Recca throughout the episode, and includes a completely random scene of who I'm assuming are the series' main villains that has no direct bearing on anything that happens in the episode and just feels jarring and confusing as a result. Not to mention that the way the series establishes the characters often feels very incongruous. In the scenes where Kagehoshi is watching Recca save Yanagi from the beam in the anime, her reaction implies that she's concerned about what happens to him when he gets hit by the beam. Later on, though, the anime has her sadistically cut up Recca, which is inconsistent with her previous characterization, and makes her motivations and relationship to him confusing. And her spilling all the details about her past and relationship with Recca instantly makes her a less interesting and more one-note antagonist, whereas in the manga the mystery and ambiguity behind her actions makes her arguably the most interesting character and probably my favorite in the series so far.

And you discussed well how Yanagi is also far less interesting character in the anime, because she really doesn't have any character at all. Compared with the manga, where's she's naive and has various quirks, and her relationship with Recca feels genuine, her anime counterpart has nothing to her beyond just being a nice girl and the two have almost no chemistry, and honestly very few scenes together past the first episode. There's almost nothing to make me care about her as a character or Recca's devotion to her because the anime barely establishes and develops their relationship. I don't even feel particularly strongly about what I've read of the manga so far, but damn, just based on what I've seen and can compare I find the anime vastly inferior in almost every regard presentation wise. It's not simply just a bad adaption - this really is a badly made show in several regards. I can't believe the same director who made YYH and GTO could make something this poorly constructed. Even Bleach, as much as I don't care for it, was at least competently made and directed and didn't detract from what worked about the source material.

Well, that's my rant. I was definitely surprised about how much the anime pissed me off while I was watching it, when I'm not even into the manga very much yet. Anyways, looking forward to reading more of your comparisons and following the series (well, the manga mostly) as you go along! 

[Spark Of Spirit]

Thanks for the comments!

Everything you said about the FoR anime is fairly dead on. I was a little less harsh on the first two episodes than I should have been, but after rewatching episode three and seeing how they made a fan favorite character (who they change the hair and eye color of... for some reason) into a complete dimwitted psychopath pushed my buttons pretty hard. Mikagami isn't even my favorite character, but they just wrecked him there.

I do hope you keep up with FoR. The manga is a lot of fun, one of my favorite action manga just because of how sharp and well thought out it is. Anzai's characterizations and composition makes the story fun to follow and the plot has just the right amount of stakes. While I haven't enjoyed his latter series all that much, I think he nailed it here. That's why it's such a shame that its adaption suffers like it does.

The anime, in contrast, rips out the fun, the humor, and Anzai's plot points like Pierrot believes it can tell its own story instead. But, IIRC, the first real arc coming up is fun like Rescue Yukina in YYH, it's what made me a fan, but in the anime they absolutely wreck the tone to make it like a worse version of Maze Castle. Now that takes talent to mess up like that. The antagonists, especially one when we get to him, gets jobbed so badly it takes all mystique out of him when we are later supposed to take him seriously. Man, just thinking about the anime changes gets me irate. It just doesn't make sense, FoR didn't need tweaking!

If there is a show that deserves a new anime to make up for a previous one, this is a prime candidate. I'm still standing by the OP and ED being the best thing about this adaption.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

What attracted me to the series at first was Recca being a fun protagonist, and the character dynamic with the different personalities clashing. When we finally did get to the more serious stuff, it felt more weighted because we came to care about the characters all the more, and wanted them to be able to return to their normal selves. It also served as a good frame of reference for how they developed throughout the series. Removing those humorous elements, to me, is equivalent to removing essential parts of the story and fundamentally changing who the characters are at their core.

[LumRanmaYasha]

Thanks for the comments!

Everything you said about the FoR anime is fairly dead on. I was a little less harsh on the first two episodes than I should have been, but after rewatching episode three and seeing how they made a fan favorite character (who they change the hair and eye color of... for some reason) into a complete dimwitted psychopath pushed my buttons pretty hard. Mikagami isn't even my favorite character, but they just wrecked him there.

Yeah, I don't even know much about Mikagami so far, but he seems like a level-headed and reasonable guy in the manga, whereas the anime version's introduction seems like a psycho creep. It's baffling how they could screw up such an archetypal character that badly.

I do hope you keep up with FoR. The manga is a lot of fun, one of my favorite action manga just because of how sharp and well thought out it is. Anzai's characterizations and composition makes the story fun to follow and the plot has just the right amount of stakes. While I haven't enjoyed his latter series all that much, I think he nailed it here. That's why it's such a shame that its adaption suffers like it does.

The anime, in contrast, rips out the fun, the humor, and Anzai's plot points like Pierrot believes it can tell its own story instead. But, IIRC, the first real arc coming up is fun like Rescue Yukina in YYH, it's what made me a fan, but in the anime they absolutely wreck the tone to make it like a worse version of Maze Castle. Now that takes talent to mess up like that. The antagonists, especially one when we get to him, gets jobbed so badly it takes all mystique out of him when we are later supposed to take him seriously. Man, just thinking about the anime changes gets me irate. It just doesn't make sense, FoR didn't need tweaking!

If there is a show that deserves a new anime to make up for a previous one, this is a prime candidate. I'm still standing by the OP and ED being the best thing about this adaption.

It seems that I have some good things to look forward to in the manga then! Really is too bad the anime is such a stinker. Hopefully the success of Ushio & Tora leads to more classic shonen manga getting new anime adaptions, and FOR gets another shot at some point.

I do like the opening and ending themes for the series quite a bit, though there are parts that could be better, like the middle sequence of the ED where the shot lingers on a panning road for a little bit too long for my liking. Songs themselves are quite nice to listen to, though. The OST is honestly pretty good too based on what I've listened to, but so far the anime doesn't seem to be using the tracks effectively, which is unfortunate.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Episode 4 is up!

For future reference, Yanagi's powers work this way. She can heal surface wounds. She cannot heal herself. She can only heal internal injuries by using her blood to enter into her target's body that way. She is not the equivalent of a Phoenix Down in Final Fantasy, her powers have limits. I write this because I'm not sure the anime will keep any of this straight in the future.

[LumRanmaYasha]

Great writeup! Hopefully the next arc is treated better, considering the anime feels like it's been impatient to get to it.

I think the thing that bothered me the most about this episode is how they take all the fun and humor of the material. Recca feeling unworthy of being Yanagi's ninja was more endearing in the manga because the series wasn't afraid to poke fun at him and didn't present the circumstances as melancholy. It helped that the chapter that the anime skipped did well in establishing a sense of closeness between Recca and Yanagi, so you can empathize with Recca's guilt and Yanagi's sadness that he's avoiding her. I think the scene that shows the biggest difference in the mood of the two versions is the way Recca enters his fight with Mikagami in the Hall of Mirrors. The manga's version is over the top and comical, and he's determined with an infectiously shonen excitability. In the anime, on the other hand, he just runs straight to Mikagami with little fanfare and his attitude is very tense and pensive. The manga's version is just far more interesting and unpredictable way to start a fight than the anime's, and moments like this helps gives the fight and the series more flavor to it.

The anime keeps trying to make the series more serious by gutting the stuff that seems silly, but all it's doing is removing the series of any personality. It's like it's desperately trying to hide it's shonen roots by making things seems more dramatic by superficially upping the stakes by making the fights more violent and have shadowy figures scheme in the background, but it doesn't work because it's still committed to following what is a very shonen storyline. The result is that the anime version feels generic, and sometimes downright unpleasant, and because it's so lacking in compelling characterization and spills out all the mysteries early on, there's not as much to keep it engaging. It honestly feels like the anime doesn't respect or understand the appeal of it's source material, and is trying to pander to it's audience by emphasizing popular characters and fights rather than making a genuinely enjoyable show.

[Spark Of Spirit]

What it's really impatient to get to is the second arc which basically takes up more than half of the anime. That said, I watched the next episode to prepare for the next write-up and it kind of aggravated me with how much was changed, sometimes for no reason at all. The more I watch this the more I become convinced that Pierrot had no confidence at all in the material, and it shows with how much they change.

There's a reason nobody remembers the FoR anime. It's really, really dull.

[Dr. Insomniac]

Coming out with no reason or rhyme, it's Clusterfuck time!

[Spark Of Spirit]

Nice write ups. While there was some crap this season (well covered here) there does some to be a lot less of it than usual. I'm still pretty surprised at how strong the season has been as a whole when the majority of shows aren't unwatchable crap.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Finally got around to catching up with your write-ups.

Jesus Christ! I always knew that FOR was supposed to be a bad adaptation of the manga, but I never realized it was THIS bad. In less than five episodes they've managed the characterization of at least two members of the main cast, the humor is almost entirely removed, and the plot feels incredibly disjointed with so much actual essential stuff cut out. While it makes sense to rush through the early material for some manga when it comes to adapting into anime (such as Yu Yu Hakusho's first two volumes, as much as I do enjoy them), FOR was already pretty plot-focused right from the beginning.

[Spark Of Spirit]

It's a misfire. That's really the nicest way to say it. It's overly serious, its fight scenes are weak, the characters are stripped of character, and the story is changed around in a way that causes inconsistencies and plotholes that weren't in the original.

The next episode should prove it when I put it up. Those chapters were what really engaged me in the story back when I first read it. So watching what they did to it was a treat all its own.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Episode 5!

If it isn't clear what they were trying to change this manga into by now, it'll probably never be clear.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Episode 6 is now up!

The Viz translation of this series is pretty good aside from one random volume that throws swear words all over the place, but the fan translation was done during the years of Literal Translation when otaku were quite insufferable about "accuracy" to the text and wasting their time re-translating already adapted works instead of ones that hadn't been touched. I had to go through several different pages to make sure I found ones that actually made sense and weren't stiff as a board.

That aside, hope you're enjoying the feature!

[Foggle]

The Viz translation of this series is pretty good aside from one random volume that throws swear words all over the place, but the fan translation was done during the years of Literal Translation when otaku were quite insufferable about "accuracy" to the text

Ugh, sounds like Excel Saga. The Viz version is excellent despite not being extraordinarily faithful to the original text, but the fan translations are literally unreadable.

[Spark Of Spirit]

The Viz translation of this series is pretty good aside from one random volume that throws swear words all over the place, but the fan translation was done during the years of Literal Translation when otaku were quite insufferable about "accuracy" to the text

Ugh, sounds like Excel Saga. The Viz version is excellent despite not being extraordinarily faithful to the original text, but the fan translations are literally unreadable.

Yes, it was a big thing with manga and old SNES/Genesis games at the time to re-translate them to be as "pure" as the original text. There was even a time when the name Ted Woolsey was a bad word. Even games as minor as Mega Man X received pointless new translations. The fans were going to "fix" Viz's "bad" translations and put the "real" translations out there for the fans.

Years later and apparently most of them woke up and realized that Literal Translations were awful to read, dry, and contained no character whatsoever. Unfortunately, because of all their wasted time there is a lot of good stuff from before the mid-'00s left completely untranslated. There's a lot of good stuff nobody over here will ever get to read because of their quest for purity.

On the other hand, now I get to parse through two translations and an anime for this feature, so I get exposed to multiple translations of the same story. So it's not all bad.