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.