10.09
Dies Irae
Gesundheit.
Let it be known that in an era marked by social strife and the rise of fascism I am watching an anime about bishounen nazis.
BISHOUNEN NAAAAAZEEEEEEEEES.
Not only that but a show about Bishounen nazis funded entirely with kickstarter money. Somebody gave up their hard earned cash to see a show about bishounen Nazis. This is flat out appauling but not surprising considering Japan gave us Tanya The Evil earlier this year. And wasn’t Tanya the Evil just greeeeeaaaat?
Now I know what you’re going to say: “But Dalek! Hetalia!” Well Hetalia was a stupid comedy about buffoonish country people. This is played deathly straight. Dies Irae wants me to root for Bishounen Nazis unironically. That is unacceptable
On top of that its also Fate/Stay Night with Nazis and the whole episode is just background filler. Three strikes, we’re done. – Lord Dalek
Schindler’s Opinion
“Why don’t you read visual novels, Marquis? They’ve got some great prose!”
This was a kickstarter-funded anime, right? Implying the guys who made this show didn’t want to do this out of money but out of sheer ambition, like they were absolutely determined to make Dies Irae into a show? So why does this look as well-animated as a 2003 anime? This was apparently a big deal for the visual novel’s fans, enough that the funding exceeded expectations, so why doesn’t this show have the care put into it that Ufotable adds into their Type/Moon installments? Those have some beautiful animation, while this has off-model Germans performing acrobatics at each other. I couldn’t even tell who I was supposed to root for or even sympathize with. We get scattered scenes of this albino guy fighting an albino crossdresser, and then Reinhard’s forces show up to fight them. And the premiere focuses on Reinhard enough that you’re led to believe he must be the main character, but then he promotes his weird beliefs while nonchalantly smacking his female lieutenants. Then there are hints it might be a yaoi, and something about a golden fortress that gets its power from dead souls the Nazis kill. I had no clue what was going on.
I know it’s episode 0 and we’ll probably get the real protagonist next week, but then what is this supposed to be? An appetizer to show how badass the villains are? Maybe I was expected to read the entire 50-hour visual novel to appreciate this, but is the rest of the audience meant to do that too? Was there a large enough fanbase that they could adapt an out-of-sequence chapter and expect everybody to get it? Outside of seeing guys argue about power levels, I hadn’t seen anybody else mention Dies Irae until this month. I’m only expecting another Grisaia fiasco, where some guys rage over how they ruined the source material while I sit and watch the show in complete shock as to what’s occurring. This is already “Nazis with Bankais” stupid, so I can only imagine how it can increase the scale. – BloodyMarquis
Infini-T Force
No its Shibuya. Superhero Time is up the road in Yokohama.
Once in a blue moon there comes a show that defies description. A show so inept and so baffling dumb that you can’t help but say… well that was a thing. Because we’ve all watched bad anime. We all know what its like. Its badly written, its disgusting, it leaves you emotionally bereft and angry and wondering what kind of lousy people do those trolls at certain websites who praise this hot crap have to be in real life to like it.
And then…you get a show like Inifi-T Force, and it all makes sense.
Admittedly the concept, a Crisis On Infinite Earths-style crossover between a slew of old Tatusnoko super heroes from their Ippei Kuri heyday (Eagle Ken, Polymar, Tekkaman, and Casshern), sounds brilliant on paper. However those geniuses at Tatsunoko never knew a reboot they couldn’t fuck up and so somebody decided “Hey! Lets do it entirely in CGI, and make the protagonist a girl who wears an Italian restaurant tablecloth to school and owns a magic pencil! What a horrible idea! That’ll teach ’em for throwing up over Gatchaman Crowds!”
And yet…some how… they made it work, probably by accident.
Let it be known that Inifini-T force is this season’s Springtime for Hitler. A show so amazingly bad you can’t help but love it. It commits every sin in the book: looking like Final Fantasy, having a script full of philosophy so cringeworthy it would make Nasu blush, getting performances out of its cast so wooden you could build a house out of em, etc. But that’s the charm of Infini-T Force. When you do so much wrong it becomes so laughable that you get into and enjoy it. Its probably the same reason all those creepers love that weird animal loli show from last Winter. It did nothing right, except existing.
And that my friends, is a triumph, it still sucks but its a triumph none the less. – Lord Dalek
Just Because
*applause* *rolls credits by Miller-Boyett Productions*
Oh joy, another romance show where a boy falls in love with a girl and he’s unable to confess. After making a surprisingly okay show with Gamers, Studio Pine Jam is stepping into PA Works’ territory and proving to us that newcomers like them can be as good as any other studio, by producing the same shit as any other studio. Now we can see their take on the “boring guy falls in love with boring girl over more interesting girls while annoying friend of boring guy makes stupid jokes” genre. As we’ve seen again and again and again. Not like audiences will actually remember these shows after they ended, so we have to keep pumping out new ones to briefly capture their attention. It’s as if anime studios have invented their own Mari Okada script generators. I mean, she’s going into directing now, so something has to take her place.
Too bad it’s harder to replicate the animation of her shows than the writing, as the art quality and movement of this show leave much to desire. Characters regularly have one eye larger than the other eye, or pencil scribbles for knees. Take Senpai Club, but remove all the jokes. That’s what the overall design resembled. The landscape and backgrounds are so lifeless and gray that I initially assumed this was a post-apocalyptic anime. During one elongated scene of baseball, I could have sworn the main characters were playing in the middle of a dust bowl.
I don’t know. Maybe I need more time to ponder the romantic lives of Recoome and that one blue-haired guy from Chaika. Could this show possibly be a reflection of our high school lives, how grey and lifeless they were that even a simple game of baseball was the highlight of our day? Or is this show so dull that my mind wanders into Brendan Fraser memes instead of focusing? All I know is that one girl with the camera who took pictures of everybody is a fucking creep and doesn’t deserve anybody, not even Recoome. – BloodyMarquis
Junni Taisen: Zodiac War
Rabbit is a victim of racial profiling.
Before anything, I have to say that I don’t care much for the palindrome that is Nisio Isin. At the very least, I don’t care for the adaptations of his light novels, though the feeling I get watching the “Monogatari Series” alerts me that his work would probably too verbose for my liking. Akiyuki Shinbou’s directing of that anime delivers the equivalent of watching random experimental animation being showcased while listening to an unrelated audiobook. I don’t doubt that there is a clever narrative connection between the visuals and dialogue that’s just going over my head, but the story doesn’t entice me enough to dig for and dissect it, causing the entire work to fall apart in my eyes. But maybe something aiming to be less cerebral might do it for me. An ultraviolent action series utilizing the deadly survival game trope, following twelve characters that each represent parts of the Chinese Zodiac, perhaps? With a more grounded animation style in lieu of grandiose experimentation? Hmm. Maybe that could turn me around on Nisio Isin…unfortunately, it didn’t do too much in that regard.
Watching “Junni Taisen” reminded me about that time back in high school where I was trying to write a black comedy/urban fantasy about a teenage serial killer: silly bordering on the absurd, riddled with clichés, and trying a bit too hard to hit every desired beat. From the ridiculous flashback scenes that detail how the Boar manipulated her little sister into committing suicide, to the unexplained and glossed over existence of magic, to the barebones premise, “Junni Taisen” strikes me as a bit juvenile at its worst. At best, it comes across as a small project that was written to relax and cool down between the crafting of larger and more important stories, rather than an earnest attempt to bring a unique take on a popular genre. Which is a bit of a shame, since Isin obviously enjoys playing with harem tropes with the “Monogatari” books. Seeing not even a little hint of that in the first episode of “Junni Taisen” disappoints me. Eh, in any case, I hope the Monkey wins. – RacattackForce
King’s Game
Asu…ka…
King’s Game begins with our protagonist finding himself on what appears to be the set of The End of Evangelion. Considering he bares a resemblance to Shinji if Shinji was older and a lot taller, I’d expect him to proceed to find the nearest red-haired tsundere with one eye and start strangling her. But alas… this is actually not Evangelion but just another rehash of Danganronpa, making our hero less Shinji Ikari and more Makoto Naegi.
…wait a minute…Shinji and Naegi had the same VA in Japan…Oh crap! Danganronpa was Evangelion the whole time! GODDAMMIT!
Well anyway back to King’s Game, the saga of death, murder, and various humiliating tasks. Our “hero” has already been subjected to and been the sole survivor of the King’s Game once before, to the point of actually having to rape his old girlfriend shortly before her limbs exploded….because clearly Danganronpa and SAO weren’t horrible enough. Things get even more real when one of sad-sack loser kid’s classmates dies horribly in front of him and the rest of the class when his bodily fluids literally erupt out of his own skin. Clearly King’s Game knows no bottom it won’t scrape and oh boy has it scrapped a lot already.
In a way King’s Game is the ultimate distilation of everything wrong with the anime of 2017. Its badly written, the characters are either 2D cut outs or just completely unlikable, and its gross for the sake of being gross. And the sad part is I can’t even call it the worst show of the fall when we had Neo Yokio two weeks ago! …how the fuck does that work???
On the other hand, we may have found a show this year worse than Hand Shakers. And that is a feat unto itself. – Lord Dalek
A Sister’s All You Need
“They taste almost as good as her cloaca.”
I’m actually quite sad the first minute, where a young man chews on his little sister’s freshly worn panties from another dimension, wasn’t the real show. By all standards, it was awful and would’ve been a complete and utter scorn on Japanese culture as a whole, but I wanted to see how it could get worse. A naked girl laid eggs and fried them for her big brother, for God’s sake. And because it’s incestuous, those eggs were probably fertilized with his own seed, and he was ready to eat his own unborn fetus children. Yet it was all portrayed like a romantic fantasy, and it’s sad that level of black comedy faded away in favor of Eromanga-sensei but without an actual imouto.
Coming from the author of…sigh… Haganai, we get more of our favorite harem cliches. Reverse-reverse-double-quadruple-agent traps who are not related by blood but still a sibling to a character. Albino teenage girls who thirst for dick and aren’t afraid to admit it in every sentence they utter. MC who desperately wants to fuck little girls, yet is too beta to bone the girl in front of him, and will probably take the rest of the season until he actually holds hands or kisses somebody. If I were writing one of these, I’d have the main character fuck somebody by the first episode and call that the official couple. Sure, it’ll alienate and scare people who want their waifus to be pure, but fuck ‘em. Fuck ’em where their imaginary little sisters never would.
Besides all else that happened was some Phoenix Wright bullshit where the characters debate about potential LN plots. And a sobstory about a lonely teenage girl who was so inspired by a young writer’s work that she became an inexplicably young author herself to chase the man of her dreams. Wah-wah-wah. It’s another LN adaptation that indulges in dumb smut, but uses the excuse of metafiction to justify its skeeviness. It’s not an anime where a guy wants to fuck his sister. It’s an anime that “satirizes” the concept of guys wanting to fuck their sisters. Because it worked so well for Oreimo.
This show does have some good reaction pictures though. Can’t deny that. – BloodyMarquis
Yuki Yuna is a Hero – Washio Sumi Chapter
Yuki Yuna.png
Ohhhhh YuYuYu… the show that went from being on the top of everyone’s 10 best lists to the bottom of everyone’s 10 worst lists within a matter of weeks. I had actually forgotten what this show was supposed to be about again until I noticed the entire run was on Netflix. Remembering that it was getting a long delayed 2nd season this month, I decided to refresh my memory…and it all came flooding back. The shameless Madoka thievery, the bs ableist pandering, the shoehorned out-of-left-field Post Apocalypse angle, the Sword Art Online-reject character designs, etc. etc. This show was just as awful as I remembered it. And now, here we are again. More depressing lamb to the slaughter magical girl bullshit courtesy of the Sage Quiche, Akame ga Kill creator Takahiro and famed light novel illustrator abe-I MEAN BUN-BUN! I… just… can’t… wait…. –_–
Anyway this arc of Yuki Yuna is actually a chopped up version of a series of movies released earlier this year and is a prequel. The real sequel isn’t airing for another 7 weeks. That should give the production team ample enough time to produce a horribly rushed epilogue that will be just as bad as the first season. But until then, we have the saga of Sumi Washio, a well bred girl from an elite private school who will eventually lose the ability to use her legs and her memory to become Mimori Togo, the lame Homura clone from season 1; Sonoko Nogi, who ends up bid ridden, with half her face and most of her body horribly burned, praying for a death that will never come; and the previously unseen Gin Minowa whose absence suggests she either didn’t make it or something far worse (translation: stupid). And if you’re going to complain about me spoiling all that… well that show aired back in 2014. We’re well past the sell-by date for spoilers here especially for a tragedy where we already know the outcome. Its like watching the Star Wars prequels and complaining about Darth Vader being a spoiler.
So ultimately I’m not exactly sure what was the point of doing the show this way. We know these girls are all going to end up badly so there’s no dramatic impetus for the story to proceed. We’re just killing time before the inevitable lame ass finale. On the other hand, if there’s anything worthwhile to come out of this, its once again the soundtrack done by Keiichi Okabe and his collaborators at MONACA. And if Season 1’s ost sounded like leftovers from Drakengard 3, these must be leftovers from NieR Automata. That’s not a bad thing at all. But you know what is a bad thing? Watching another boring ass episode of YuCubed and wondering what the point was. Thanks a lot, Sage Quiche. – Lord Dalek