Yue, Hajime, and Some Terrible CGI
Arifureta Episode 4
Look, it is the final boss of the dungeon. That should be exciting, right? A real sense of tension, a spectacular fight, and top class animation? It should, shouldn’t it?
Well, Arifureta at least hasn’t set its own bar too high so I guess I wasn’t expecting much. I did have to flinch at just how badly done the CGI dragon was and as the fight continued, and oh boy does it continue for almost the entire episode, it actually managed to look even worse. My favourite part was where they essentially reused the same image of the three heads lunging forward. Maybe this was actually an entirely unique sequence and I certainly didn’t go back to compare, but it looked pretty much identical to me.
So the monster doesn’t look good. At all. Not even vaguely like any thing that should appear in a modern anime. But what about the characters?
Apparently Yue is Hajime’s beloved. Yeah, the anime really didn’t build up to that one. It just kind of happened. He kissed her and woke her up from some mind control, when he was on the edge of dying he saw her in danger and essentially got a power up meanwhile thinking about his ‘beloved’ who was going to be killed.
Once again Arifureta, this isn’t how you do characterisation. See you can’t just give us a minute of meeting a guy and then transform his whole character and expect us to care and you can’t have one episode of two characters expositioning their way through a dungeon and then pull out the ‘beloved’ card. It doesn’t feel genuine or earned. Actually it feels pretty trite.
Naturally they beat the monster but we still don’t know what is at the end of the Labyrinth because we cut to seeing the teacher and then the other students doing some stuff. Nothing that we get to see for any length of time and as we essentially skipped any kind of intro to these characters they are having to do introductions on the fly which sounds totally natural (not) and honestly I just can’t bring myself to care.
Watch if you are in the mood for repetitive monster attacks, a predictable outcome, and zero sense when it comes to character development. Why aren’t I dropping this? Mostly because I just want to see whether it can maintain this level of ridiculous from start to finish at this point.
Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
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Karandi James
If you are game, check out more reviews of Arifureta.
Images from: Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest. Dir. K Yoshimoto. White Fox. 2019.
Watching this series makes me want to apologize to every single anime that I ever complained about having bad CGI. Clearly I didn’t know how good I had it. In fact, it’s so bad that you almost don’t notice how subpar the writing is. Almost.
At this point I expect nothing from this anime and I’m merely watching to see if it does manage to get even a little bit better given this opening has been pretty much a write off.
Yes, it’s extremely disappointing, the first light novel is great and they are just massacring it. The boss fight with the chromatic dragon is great in the books and here it was just incredibly slow and that dragon has markmanship that makes Imperial stormtroopers look like crack shots
I know when it was spraying the pink stuff around I just had to wonder what it was even aiming at half the time.