04.22
It's Mari Okada-O'clock again.
If you were considering making the Clusterfuck as your go to overview for this season’s “fine”, but mostly awful, anime offerings, you probably noticed we didn’t cover every single show this spring. For the most part this was out of general indifference (who gives a crap about Kindaichi Case Files Returns?), overall disgust (Foggle picked Date-A-Live 2 over Fairy Tail, make your own conclusions), and too many similar titles (Dragon Collection? What’s that?). That brings us to this show, M3 – That Black Metal, which we omitted for a rather more bizarre reason: it hadn’t aired yet*. But now it has! And its on Daisuki too as part of a newly signed pact with Satelight!
…its also a Mari Okada show… Oh this is going to be fun he lied.
Hope it's not CHRIS's blood!
All right the plot is typical f0r a Mari Okada pilot… in that it doesn’t make much sense…at all. However I will try my darndest to explain it. At some point in the future, a black dome has been lowered onto Kawadahara City in the Japanese coast. This is called the Avidya Zone and it has the power to render anything it comes in contact into a dried out grotesque husk, allowing it to generate large black blobs of living metal known as Admonitions. Or as the show charmingly puts it…
Yes those are actual subs. Anyway, a private millitary corporation called IX (which despite being a roman numeral is literally pronounced “Icks”) has been building rather squatty pilotable robots to fight the Admonitions when they come out at night. Pilots are being trained at a place called Kukonoichi Academy and we are introduced to four of them: Kirito-clone Akashi, hyperactive ditz Emiru, bro-sidekick guy Iwato, and Tomoko-clone (really? I thought Watamote bombed in Japan) Maamu. They’ve been handpicked along with a tough slightly more experienced pilot named Raika and three others who do not appear in this episode to be the first team to enter the Zone and see if it can be destroyed. Exactly why is not clear at the moment but I assume it has something to do with a flashback to earlier events seen in the episode that suggests they may have been the sole survivors of the area currently occupied by the zone.
What Kirito wanted to say to Sugu in Fairy Dance
The bulk of the episode is just training as our crew of mismatched students spend their time in cram sessions and having baseballs shot at them. Eventually a training sorte in the mecha suits goes horribly wrong as an Admonition Raika failed to kill earlier in the episode attacks Akashi and Emiru. Happily some random kid who’s just standing around is able to help them out, and with the additional use of a plot device in the form of a mysterious locket, Akashi is able to kill the thing. Big whoop.
Home run!
While watching this, I tried to remind myself how the last three Okada premieres I saw felt to me. FTR those being Anohana, Nagi-Asu, and Selector Infected Wixoss which aired two weeks ago. They were all like you were walking into the plot of another show, had a bunch of characters you didn’t know, didn’t like, and didn’t care about; and ultimately left you more bewildered than enthusiastic for future installments. Sadly these trends are also present in M3. Its one thing to set up a conflict its another thing to go out of your way to drain any emotional interest in it. While its not a bad episode per say, the vague writing pretty much dooms it in my opinion but only just. Now… maybe this will got the way of Anohana and quickly rebound producing a fairly heartfelt and emotional finale, I don’t know. As it stands the only reaction I can give is… M3h (see what I did there?)
4/10
*NicoNico doesn’t count.