Glad this is finally over... Well, if you've been following my posts since the first episode discussion thread (which I doubt anyone cared enough to do, but whatever), I've already went through my opinions on every aspect of this show, so there isn't much else I can say here that won't be a repeat of what I already said. I guess I'll just go over a couple things as briefly as possible (aka not briefly at all):
Story: terrible and boring. A lot of people have said it was hard to follow, but the general outline was fairly simple and the writers for some reason added some weird details that unnecessarily complicated the show and were never brought up again, which is probably where the confusion stems from.
Art/Animation: god-awful. Why the actual fuck did they take a three month break if they weren't going to improve this and then end up using CGI models anyway? I literally laughed out loud during that "epic" scene where the OP played over still action shots of the characters instead of actually showing them in motion.
Characters: this was, in my opinion, the worst part of the show. Not a single character had any development, and none of their motivations made any sense whatsoever. To go into more detail on this aspect, I will analyze each major character since I have nothing better to do.
- Enterprise: aside from repeating "wAr nEveR cHanGeS" every episode and being OP, she added nothing to the show, which is a shame because I actually really like her and she was the first ship I married in the game. She had no development even though a huge plot point was literally Belfast and the other ships trying to figure out "How can we change Enterprise's mindset?" In the end they failed because Enty remained the same as she did when she started: a duty-driven 'perfect solider.' I think maybe what they were trying to do with this character was make her realize that she should be fighting not out of duty or fear, but out of love and out of the desire to protect her friends. This was never conveyed well, though. The stuff with Ash and the mirror sea or whatever was also poorly explained and played very little part in the plot aside from allowing Enterprise a deus ex machina.
- Belfast: had no purpose other than to try and get Enterprise to open up to the rest of the fleet. Our beloved maid did not achieve this, and unfortunately, she has no goals or characterization of her own outside of that.
- Laffey/Ayanami/Javelin: lumping them all together because they can barely even be considered characters individually. I already went into detail on why that plotline involving these three was stupid as fuck, so I won't repeat it here. All I'll say is that their obsession with each other was incredibly artificial and manufactured and they had no connection aside from "We are all starter ships in the game" which doesn't even have any application anime-wise.
- Akagi: somehow ended up an even shallower character than she is in the game. I guess her main goal was to revive Amagi at all costs, which was stupid because she got completely played by the Sirens. Everyone else in Azur Lane and even the Crimson Axis could see how stupid it was to trust the Sirens, but writers had to dumb Akagi down in order to advance the plot, so sadly she was the sole exception. At the end of the show, she miraculously decided to stop being bad and became friends with Enterprise and Azur Lane. There was no explanation for why any of this happened or how she suddenly had such a major change of heart.
- Kaga: the show absolutely butchered her character and turned her into a mindless groupie for Akagi. She has no other character traits outside of that, so that's it, I guess.
- Sirens: no explanation for anything here so not much to say. Though they were the main villains, their motivations, goals, and individual characterizations were never explained in-depth. The game doesn't say much about them either, though, so maybe the anime gets a slight pass on this one.
- Ironblood: yes, how sad is it that the Ironblood ships were so unimportant to the plot that I can just lump them all together into one group. This annoys me because they are my favorite faction and I feel like the writers missed a huge opportunity by not doing anything with these ships. Best girl Bismarck only got like ten seconds of screentime in the entire show.
All right, those should be all the major characters. And with that, I gladly wash my hands of this anime. If I didn't play the game or like naval history, I would have given this show like a 1/10 or a 2/10, but I have to admit that I did like seeing my shipfus animated, albeit poorly. Hopefully the next Azur Lane anime will be better. |