18if Series Review: Great Individual Moments in an Ordinary Series

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Overview:

Haruto wakes up in a strange place and soon learns he is inside a dream where a sleeping girl has become a witch. Lily recruits Haruto to save the witches and help the girls wake up.

Review:

18if is one of those stories that you know at the beginning you can’t really judge until the end. There’s a lot of weird stuff going on, not just because it is inside of a dream, and as an audience member you are largely kept in the dark. What 18if did very well was to continuously give the audience enough prompts to keep thinking something was coming. What it did poorly was deliver an ending that was satisfying enough to make the overall journey feel like it was worth the effort.

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Despite that, I still kind of liked watching this show. I don’t think I’ll bother with a rewatch because the ending really isn’t particularly interesting or satisfying, but the individual stories of the witches were entertaining enough. Not to mention, the sleeping beauty syndrome that then turns into a rant about females, purity and god was kind of hard to swallow. While there is nothing wrong with the idea, the execution left a lot to be desired with little groundwork of that kind of overall theme being laid down in the earlier episodes that seemed to focus instead on subconscious desires, freedom and identity.

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Which leads me to the other issue with 18if. Each week we have a new witch as our focus and a new art style to accompany her. This makes the show fresh every week despite the basic story being boy meets witch in dream, witch throws a tantrum and then boy talks to her and ‘saves’ her before witch wakes up. And some of the episodes were absolutely gorgeous to look at. However, what it meant was that some weeks were misses both visually and from a story and character point of view. Some witches were really interesting and others were horrible. I found myself see-sawing between really loving this show one week and the next just kind of being indifferent to it, and at one particularly horrible episode I found myself actively disliking the show. It isn’t a very cohesive way to tell a story, though cohesion clearly wasn’t what they were going for as their main focus.

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Still, it isn’t like this is just a disconnected ramble. Haruto as the central character is pretty consistent in his actions and thoughts. Even though he is tasked with saving witches, his methods are at times interesting and he isn’t above being underhanded to get things done.  Yet he isn’t a villain or a jerk. He’s a mostly nice guy that doesn’t like being bothered and is a little bit confused because he realises he’s stuck in this dream and not waking up.

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While I mostly enjoyed the early episodes, formulaic though they were, I really do think the show needed a bit more depth in the characterisation of the witches. Some of their motives just made them seem really and incredibly childish. It is hard to get behind their sometimes murderous actions when they just seem to be so petty. And yes, I get they were all hurt by whatever in the real world, but lots of people get hurt in the real world and don’t build a dream escape where they torture people If this is what the story wanted to do, then it needed to give us more time with each witch and they needed to really flesh out that witches pain and make the audience connect with it. Make us feel she was possibly justified in her actions and make her eventual change of heart actually touching or meaningful. Really, the whole way through the show, that emotional depth and connection was missing from a show that seemed entirely about human emotions.

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The Professor is another character I struggled to connect with. You get that he is researching the witches and dreams because his sister is one of the girls trapped in the dream world, but it just seems so convenient that he walks in and out of the dream world seemingly at will. And then he has a phone that connects between people in dreams and people in the real world. They never explain any of this other than saying ‘research’, without specifying what kind or anything else that might actually make this in anyway logical. More importantly, for all that the Professor is sometimes acting as the voice of Haruto’s conscious, you have to wonder why the Professor didn’t do more to help Haruto out earlier. Mostly, he’s a bystander but occasionally he jumps in and does things. It makes him inconsistent and kind of annoying. Though he does have a cat avatar so maybe we can forgive him.

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Though, it is the ending where this show truly suffers. Once the witches are all woken up and Lily directs Haruto to kill Eve who is apparently waking up and that will destroy the world. I know they spend a lot of time in the final three episodes hitting us with exposition to try and make this make sense, and there’s some weird Eve worshipping cult in the real world, and some stuff about getting revenge on god by destroying the world, but really given the story we were watching and the final, they really feel like two entirely separate stories and neither really got enough focus to be satisfying.

All and all, I ended up disappointed with 18if, but I don’t regret watching it. For all its flaws, it was still a mostly entertaining watch for the season, and visually it was quite memorable.


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18if Episode 13: We Came, We Saw, We Drank Tea and Ate Cake

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Review – With Spoilers:

While I’ve enjoyed 18if all the way along, what this show really needed to lift it to something I would actually enjoy rewatching was a strong conclusion that really brought all those weird elements together. While they certainly brought back all the characters this episode, what we didn’t get was anything particularly satisfying about this conclusion.

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The revelation that Lily is Eve even though Lily wants Haruto to kill Eve (kill turning out later in the episode to mean sully her purity, as in kiss her, which doesn’t happen either mind you so seems like an incredibly pointless part of the narrative) was pretty obvious when you sat and thought about it and again, does it matter? They don’t do anything with this idea of Lily representing Eve before and Eve being who she was after so is it necessary at all?

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On the other hand, Eve has the incredibly clichéd motivation of being annoyed at god and clearly that means you should hate men and destroy the world. I really find this kind of motive for a bad guy dull. And even the writers must have realised how petty Eve was being given they appeased her by throwing a tea party. Not even joking. The witches all come back and eat cake and drink tea and that more or less stops Eve from destroying the world.

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And then we finally get to Haruto, the one character the audience have had a chance to actually connect with. We know he’s in hospital in a coma and then… Then he decides to go with Eve through some door to someplace humans can’t go but says he’ll come back. Cut to scene in hospital where essentially he flat lines. No more from Haruto.  I’m not entirely convinced that this is in anyway a satisfying way to wrap up this show. Basically, I’m still glad I watched it because it has been visually interesting each week and some of the dreams have been quite fun, but the overall narrative has falled pretty flat in the end.

I’ll do a full review soon.


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18if Episode 12: I’m Feeling This Was A Little Anti-Climatic

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Review:

This kind of seems like 18if has finally pulled everything together and is moving toward the final showdown between Haruto and Eve in the dream world, which means it really should be feeling exciting. We learn this episode where Haruto is in the real world (though no actual hints about how or why) and we also finally find and save the professor’s sister. That’s two big mysteries from the series solved and yet it all just felt kind of ho-hum.

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What made it worse was the show seemed to be trying to set up various characters in a sinister light in the real world but that has no weight given everything of interest that’s happened in this story has happened inside the dreams. More importantly, even the witch that died came back this episode which means even death lost its weight and importance in this particular story.

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While it is coming together, it is more working on paper than in reality. The feeling that you should have when watching this episode just isn’t there and the confrontation with Eve that will occur next week probably won’t fix the problem.


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18if Episode 11: Does This Count as Recap?

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Review:

This episode of 18if was both satisfying, in that we are finally see them trying to connect all of these incidents and give us some explanation about Haruto, and also incredibly frustrating. Frustrating because we spend a large part of the run time flashing back through all ten withes we’ve previously encountered.

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While Haruto’s mystery is one I’ve wanted dealt with, and I wouldn’t have minded one flashback through the encounters just to remind me because some of the earlier ones have become hazy, by the third time we cycled through the 10 girls that Haruto saved I was more or less over it and just wanted them to get on and make their point.

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That said, we do get a direction for this show to go with the introduction of Eve. Some cult the Professor is encountering in the real world want Eve to wake up full of love to save the world (yeah, that seems dodgy no matter how you look at it). Lily wants Haruto to kill Eve. The Professor is still in information gathering mode, but is probably going to run out of time given Haruto is working with Lily and heading for Eve by the end of this episode.

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Not that we have any idea what Haruto has decided given pretty much all we know is that he wants out of the dream world and he’s well aware at the moment that he can’t do that on his own. So the overall story is interesting, but this episode was a lot of recap and it felt like it dragged.


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18if Episode 10: Dream a Little Dream

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Review  (some spoilers below):

While overall this show has been a bit hit and miss, episodes like this remind me why I didn’t drop the show early on. Occasionally it hits the mark fairly perfectly. While the viewing of episode 10 is a disjointed at confusing experience, it has all the qualities one would expect of wandering through someone’s dream and it captures the personality of the dreamer this week pretty perfectly to the point where with minimal dialogue you feel you know her more than you should after only a single episode.

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But while the individual story of the witch of the week is quite superb (both in delivery of the story and the visuals), it is the ongoing narrative that gets just a few pushes this week and seem to be preparing the audience for some sort of reveal (which if it doesn’t occur will be horribly disappointing but this episode has given a real sense of anticipation). The mystery of Haruto and Lily which has been ongoing seems to be getting closer with the cat guy finally acknowledging he can see Lily (or maybe he finally started seeing her, I’m not really sure what happened there) and then the dreamer this week clearly asking how long Haruto had been asleep.

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This is something a lot of us want an answer to and the question coming head on toward the end of the episode seems to indicate that maybe the show will attempt to address this before the seasons end.

While 18if is not the be all and end all, it has provided a fairly interesting viewing experience this season. I’m not sure about rewatch value and I guess I’ll wait and see how it all ends before I make my final decision on that.


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18if Episode 8: Do Dreams Come With Subtitles?

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Review:

After asking last week whether Haruto was even the main character of this show, episode 8 seems to go out of its way to confirm that yes, this will be Haruto’s story… eventually. While last week Haruto seemed like a passenger in someone else’s story, this week, it seems the other character is sidelined as Haruto does some self-discovery.

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There’s an interesting and yet incredibly not subtle message about disabilities and how the world treats and responds to those with hearing impairments. It leads to some interesting sound choices throughout the episode as well as discussions about communication. But if you want to know what happened to the girl in the rubble don’t hold your breath. She’s just in the story to make Haruto realise something about himself.

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And what he realises is something a few of us have been wondering about from the beginning. Does Haruto ever wake up? We never see him in the real world. So who or what is he and why is he in the dream world? You know, other than to listen to the various girls who are on their way to becoming witches.

I don’t feel any closer to understanding what is actually going on with Haruto, but this episode makes me a little optimistic that the issue will be dealt with. Plus, this episode is gorgeous to look at. Really enjoyed the visuals this week.


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18if Episode 7: Is Haruto Actually The Main Character?

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Review:

Another dream, another art style and this one is super cute for the dark story you end up being a passenger in. What really bewilders is that Haruto doesn’t save the day, the witch, or really do anything. He is literally dragged along in the wake of the story standing in for the audience and then the story ends and he still hasn’t acted in anyway along the narratives course.

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This leaves you with a very confused feeling about what Haruto’s role in the narrative of 18if is (or even if there is anything resembling an ongoing story in this collection of tales about witches in the dream world). For awhile it seemed there might be a larger narrative but the further along we get the less it seems we’ll actually get that story and even if we do, does this anime still have time to develop it?

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Anyway, the story this week steals unapologetically from a myriad of stories but mostly makes use of The Wizard of Oz. It is a confusing and yet emotive journey, just don’t expect a happily ever after.


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18if Episode 6: Recapturing the Dream

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Review:

For all that this show has been set mainly in the dream world, other than zany colour schemes and character designs, little has given the impression that this is a dream and not just some off-beat fantasy. Episode 6 corrects that with an ending sequence that throws you straight into a dream like feeling and recaptures that sense of infinite possibilities that exist when you are on the edge of waking up from a dream.

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The story this week follows a girl who is bullied and so attempts suicide. We assume she then falls unconscious with Sleeping Beauty Syndrome but as we never see her real world body again she could have actually died and we wouldn’t know. Anyway, she is determined to curse those who allowed her to be bullied and much like the witch from episode 2, her curses are starting to have a real world influence.

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Initially Haruto is disinclined to involve himself assuming that the bullies are more or less getting what they deserve but for reasons never explained he goes along with cat guy to convince the girl. All of this is much the same as every other episode and then they convince her and the world gets all shiny and happy save for the attack from space.

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Yep. We go there. The aliens are attacking. Then we get a dialogue straight out of a dream as Haruto tells her it is fine because they’ll just fend it off in their giant robot. The matter of fact way he says it, the acceptance of the statement, the sudden transition into a cheesy mecha anime, it all just screams dream sequence and it is a lot of fun.

While this episode gets us no closer to any answers about anything, it showcases just what they can do with these episodes to make them enjoyable and interesting on their own. Episode 6 is definitely my favourite so far in this series.


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18if Episodes 4 + 5: No More Curry, Ever

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Review Episode 4:

As you may have picked up while I was watching March Comes in Like a Lion, I’m not a big fan of simple, catchy children’s songs mid-episode (let the shogi cat song disappear from my memory) and this episode of 18if hammers us with a song about curry. Over and over and over again. It was almost enough to make me stop watching the episode except that there is a definite question I have about Haruto that I want an answer to and I don’t want to miss it should they give it to us one random episode so skipping or passing on parts of episodes is definitely out.

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This episode follows same basic formula of previous episodes in that there’s a witch and Haruto ultimately helps her get over her drama so she stops being a witch. Only in this case she wasn’t in a coma. She was just a normal girl who got dumped by her boyfriend. She kept waking up and going to her job. And then at night…

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Well, everyone has some weird hobbies I guess and at least she’s asleep. But what about Haruto? Does he ever wake up in the real world? And why is he so special in dream land? Also, what’s Lily’s deal? I’m really wanting to know what his deal is and the show is persistent in not going there.

Review Episode 5:

Another episode, another witch. This one apparently escaping the burden of being a famous ice skater and somehow losing her love of skating because of all the other things that come with being famous. Too bad her dream leads her right back to the idea that she belongs on the ice.

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Haruto is once again caught up in the witch’s dream, though it is interesting that some witches just seem to be playing out their fantasy while others seem to be actively controlling their dream and effecting people outside of their dream.

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Still, it was Lily’s involvement in this episode that really starts you asking questions about where this is going. Lily keeps showing up and she calls Haruto brother but what is she actually up to? Why exactly did she infiltrate this witch’s dream and help send her back to reality (and why did no one mention to Haruto what reality was waiting for the witch)?

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So many ongoing questions and yet I can’t deny I’m finding each story interesting in their own right even if I don’t really get where this is going.


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