Overview:
Weird guys with supernatural powers descend on a town intending to sacrifice it for some more power and Fujii Ren is apparently going to try to stop them. I’m not going to pretend like the story in this actually makes any sense or that it matters so that’ll do for an overview.
Review:
As you may have noticed from my overview, or if you followed my episodic reviews on this, that I found this show a little hard to swallow. Okay, scrap that. This show well and truly deserved the ‘they made this’ status that it wore in my weekly listings for most of Autumn. It is a complete mess from start to finish with very few redeeming characteristics.
And I’ll start with the couple of positives. Firstly, if you really just want to switch your brain off and watch over the top villains cause carnage than you may just find something appealing here. Just don’t ask how or why they are doing what they do because even when told why it isn’t satisfying and no logical or consistent explanation is ever given for their powers. They just do stuff and we’re supposed to be all impressed by how badass they are (apparently because I can’t think why else they would present the characters in this way).
Outside of fights with a supernatural edge, there’s pretty much nothing else to recommend the show. Episode 0 is… I don’t think anyone watching it really knew what that was but a few of us held out hope that once the actual show started it would begin to make sense. That was probably overly optimistic.
Fujii Ren is a terrible character but fortunately he doesn’t eat a lot of screen time despite probably being the protagonist of the story. The show is more concerned with showing us the villains and their antics. While you wouldn’t think it possible after his bland beginning, Ren actually becomes more boring as he becomes more powerful and to be honest I really never cared what happened to him. His partnership and relationship with Marie makes no sense and just seems to exist as do most of his relationships. His motives are never clearly understood and a lot of his actions seem stupid. Basically, I disliked Ren quite a bit.
That could possibly have been okay if the villains were worth their screen time. But basically they fall into two categories. They are either horrendously smug and self-assured and spend a lot of time talking down to people, or they are the shrieking and insane type villain. Neither is particularly interesting nor enlightening and the only real mercy here is that the shrieking villains tend to have a shorter life expectancy. Not because some hero is taking them out but more because clearly even the villains can’t stand each other.
All and all, the show is a visual mess with a narrative that makes enough sense that I can’t say it has no story but it isn’t particularly satisfying, and after the 11 episodes that makes up the TV series (there are apparently another six episodes to be released online but I am not going there) you are still more or less in the dark about everything and have no reason to care about anything.
While I won’t say this is the worst anime of 2017, it was a pretty good contender for it.
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Episode Reviews:
- Episode 0: What Just Happened?
- Episode 1: Somewhat Less Confusing
- Episode 2: Why Do They Always Enrol in the School?
- Episode 3: I’m Lost
- Episode 4: Um…
- Episode 5: Singing is Creepy
- Episode 6: Shiny Lights and Stuff Goes Boom
- Episode 7: We May As Well Just Go With It At This Point
- Episode 8: It’s All Just Stuff
- Episode 9: Disturbing
- Episode 10: Blah, Blah
- Episode 11: I’m Done
Thanks for reading.
Karandi James
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Haha, really no suprise there. Having read your episodic reviews for this series, this review pretty much sums it up very nicely. Oh well. For a change it’s actually quite nice that I don’t have to add an anime to my list 😀😀
The real question for me would be was this worse than watching Hand Shakers, and I would almost have to say yes. At least the visuals weren’t sickening but I’m pretty sure the story was worse.
Haha…wow, something worse than Hand Shakers. I remember how much you loved that one (lol…NOT). Well, with a comment such as this I am almost tempted to watch it 😂
One of my goals for 2018 is to not subject myself to anything that is that frustrating to watch. Probably why I’ve managed to keep from adding any shows into the ‘they made this’ category so far was because anything I suspected would land there I dropped straight up. As much as I think watching bad anime helps you define what you enjoy and why, there’s a limit to what I should force myself to finish sometimes.
That said, I have a show that is dropping to the ‘they made this’ category for next week after the episode this weekend so clearly I haven’t really learned my lesson yet.
Haha…yeah…I still haven’t gone back to our mutual friend Asta yet…I usually never drop series, but I’m thinking I’m going to handle that differently this year as well.
Lol…well..some lesson are hard to learn, and I clearly haven’t learned it either yet lol 😂😂
I gave up on this show after about 5 episodes because I just didn’t understand it. There is a fine line between confusion to add mystery and intrigue and confusion for no good reason! To this day I still don’t know what I watched in those episodes!
This show never seemed interested in being cohesive or in any way helpful to the audience in understanding what was going on.
Yeah that’s very true. Probably why I gave up in the end.
Now I’m even more curious to check the show out, sounds like a trainwreck! But a more important question is, are there any cute girls in the show?
Technically, there is…
Psychotic yes, cute, not so much.