In case it doesn’t become immediately obvious, this review has zero objetivity and is mostly just a rant. Please feel free to ignore and check out one of my other actual reviews.
Overview:
I could be really snarky here but let’s just go with it’s the story of co-dependent people who have a mental disorder and hear the voice of god before hallucinating fight sequences while on LSD. Or at least, that would be a better story than the one we get.
Um… Pairs of people called Hand Shakers are fighting supposedly to try to meet god who may or may not exist in the context of the show?
Wait… I’ve got it. Koyori wants to learn how to cook because she’s been in a coma forever and she’s hungry.
Okay, I went with snarky. Sorry.
If you would like to see my descent from naively hopeful that maybe this could pull something half-decent from the mess into mostly just incredulous that somehow this show didn’t get axed mid-season, my episodic thoughts are here.
Review:
In case I wasn’t clear in my overview, I really hated this. I don’t say that too often about an anime, particularly one I watched all the way through, but in this case it is fairly well deserved. Even if the visuals weren’t hideous distractions, the characters tepid, and the plot a mish mash of poorly delivered expositions, there was still a chance that the interesting concept hinted at early on might have become something. Anything. Give us some reason to care about anything that has happened, please.
But no. This show is content to ramble at you when it should offer something resembling an explanation. It focusses on cute girls, idol wannabes, and creepy sisters rather than plot. Mostly it meanders all over the place and then in the final episodes conjures a villain seemingly from nowhere, for no purpose, and has a fight, where even the established rules for fighting seem to just be over-written at will, before we pull a deus ex-machina style ending to save the villains. We get some non-explanatory style dialogue and then we all just go back to being Hand Shakers but we’re no closer to knowing what that actually means of why they exist.
I do try to be fair when I review a show so I’m going to search really hard for a positive… and I’m not going to find one outside of a potentially interesting premise that it does absolutely nothing with. Music, setting, characters, writing, themes, plot, and anything else you can name about this anime is just wrong. The fight sequences are semi-interesting (if visually off putting) in the first episodes and progressively just become blurred lines and explosions with no coherence to them.
However, bad as it may be, my pet hate for this show is reserved for the protagonist’s catch phrase.
You know, I actually used to like the word mesh. Things meshing makes such a satisfying sound. Now, I actively find myself rewriting a sentence if I start going anywhere near the word.
I’m sure there is an audience somewhere for this show but I know that audience definitely shouldn’t have been me. I really and truly hate this anime and would not recommend it to anyone (except the person who insists they’ve seen everything anime has to offer). This review is short but there just doesn’t seem any point in going on and on about how much I disliked this or ranting further.
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Karandi James.
A review sounds like it’s too good for this show. A rant fits it better and it still seems like you’ve restrained yourself admirably.
I actually like reading people rant about things. They’re usually filled with so much genuine emotion. (Though I tend to steer clear of people hatin’ on things I love because I am not a complete masochist).
So yeah, it was fun reading this, especially the opening. Such wonderful vitriol!
The thing is, even though I genuinely hated this, I know there are people out there who were quite enjoying watching it so I really didn’t want to just hit it with insults and tear it apart. I don’t mind negative reviews but just angry noise is a different story. This post kind of went too far toward more angry noise I feel but at the same time, I’d already softened it as far as I could so in the end just posted a rant warning and let it go.
Haha, that opening was priceless. This review has Zero objectivity and is mostly a rant. I’m glad you mentioned that, because otherwise I would not have noticed lol. So I’m guessing I had best avoid this anime huh? 😂😂
You never know, it might be just the thing if you ever get to the bottom of your watch list – which if its anything like mine, it will never happen.
Haha….when I say that I am not even calling it a list anymore but an encyclopedia, does that answer your question? 😂😂
Something tells me you didn’t like this show. I’m not sure what.
I know, I was so subtle in how I expressed my opinion on this one.
“You know, I actually used to like the word mesh. Things meshing makes such a satisfying sound. Now, I actively find myself rewriting a sentence if I start going anywhere near the word.”
This part speaks to me. I can relate on every level
That’s probably the worst thing about the Hand Shakers viewing experience. It destroyed my enjoyment of a word.
Over on ANN, Hand Shakers set a new record… consistently at the bottom of their weekly ranking poll for the entire season.
Despite the first episode being dreadful, I kind of thought there was an interesting enough idea behind this anime to give it a go. By the time I realised they weren’t going anywhere with that I’d passed my usual point for dropping and there was this nagging feeling that just maybe they would explain something. Turns out, no, they weren’t going to do anything with their story so I pretty much endured the entire season for absolutely nothing.
Ah, we all do that from time to time… 🙂
You should do rants every now and then! This was great! XD
I really did try to write a review but no matter what it came out like a rant. There just wasn’t anything that I ended up even kind of not disliking about this anime.