Good grief, this show messed up so bad that it made me ended up despising the six main "good guy" characters, and empathizing and rooting for the antagonists "bad guys". That's rare, but holy hell do I have utter contempt for Oliver and kept wishing to see him fail or beat badly, which never happens. Even in the end when he should have gotten his ass beat all over the place by Ophelia, they instead had Milligan take it all while the "good guy" main character did pretty much nothing. Yes, it's set up, explained, and expected that the main characters are way out of their league against upperclassmen and the third level of the labyrinth, but that never stop the main characters from being overwhelmingly OP against people before (which contributed to why I wanted to see them beat so badly). I mean, Oliver and Nanao took on and beat Milligan badly, the same Milligan holding her own against Ophelia, why aren't Oliver and Nanao doing anything now? Can't even be a freaking meat shield for Milligan?!? It would have been extremely practical (and satisfying) if Oliver, Nanao, Chella, and Pete were getting their asses beat to a pulp as a distraction for Milligan (the supposedly strongest of them now) to take on Ophelia by surprise or unhindered. But for some reason this stupid show would not show the main characters getting beat nor fail badly, it's ridiculous and one of the big reasons I despise the main character so.
So I ended up liking pretty much all the antagonists. It's so ridiculous because the antagonists like the Chella's sister/"cousin" with the werewolf servant had backstory flashbacks lasting something like 10 seconds, but they were super effective at getting me to empathize with them. Not that any of the backstory flashbacks were exceptional great, but when compared to the lackluster and almost non-existent character development of the "good guy" main characters, they were. The big problem with the main characters is they often told the audience their backstory, they didn't show it, and when they showed it for Oliver or Nanao it wasn't really that effective nor impactful. Like that guy who played chess with his servant who finally beat him, then she being killed off with her family just for that, and the guy getting tortured for just losing...I felt more for that than Oliver's mysterious backstory of her mom getting betrayed, and this is even with me LMAO when shown the guy was getting tortured for losing. It wasn't even a single case of me siding with an antagonist, like pretty much all of them I found myself siding with. That bully in the earlier episodes who worked through his cowardice and becomes a slightly better person, I wanted the sister/cousin with the werewolf to win so badly, and Milligan should have owned Oliver and Nanao during her first fight against them but they pulled some Spellblade non-sense out of their butts which they didn't even try to use in the Ophelia fight.
And what was going on with this last arc which dragged on, and ended in the Ophelia fight? It was all pointless in terms of the main characters involvement. If they never even tried to go save Pete, it would have all ended exactly the same, the student body president and vice president would have showed up and ended it the same way, and Pete would have been released just like the werewolf kid and others were. Nothing was accomplished for the main characters other than them learning from Milligan, who's probably the best character since they showed a complete range for her character where she was the antagonist who got defeated, reformed, went on to train the main characters, and then fought and struggled against Ophelia only to be defeated again. By the way, the show done her dirty in the end, she didn't die but they didn't even give her a scene in the end to show she was still alive nor to show her off as the anime concluded. They showed her for seconds in the montage after the fight, what an utter disgrace and disrespect to her character. A lot of people thought she was dead, it's not hard to see why when they only dedicated two frames to show she's alright:
And speaking of utter disgraces, Pete's Reversi amounted to nothing. Other commenters early on saying his Reversi adds nothing to his character and the plot were proven right. His Reversi didn't change anything meaningfully with his capture, escape, and rescue. So Pete was able to stay awake because of his Reversi, wake up the other guy to get the smoke signal, breakout and signal the main characters to come; everybody would have found their way there anyways, so it was pointless, just like the main character's fight with Ophelia since the president and vice president would have finished it the same way anyways. They said Pete's Reversi was hindering what Ophelia was trying to do without her knowing, that's pretty pointless also. If that was the case, lets say Pete's Reversi was delaying Ophelia long enough until Godfrey and Carlos could get there in time, from a story/writing standpoint, wouldn't it have been way less convoluted to just write it as they just happened to arrive on time without the BS of Pete's Reversi? Pete's Reversi was so convoluted and utterly pointless, even more so than Chella's half-elf linage reveal.
I think that sums up this whole show perfectly, it was needlessly convoluted, and utterly pointless. I'm kind of struggling on my rating, I'm thinking 5/10, but am I being too harsh?, the production values of the animation was pretty good, but 6/10 seems too good for this mess of an anime. This is probably the first time I ever felt sorry and embarrassed for the animators of an anime. I look at the drawings and think to myself somebody put in so much effort and probably passion in drawing these characters, only for the show to turn out like this. And even if it's the opposite where the animators are just "drawing for a pay check" and it's not about putting their hearts into it, I still find myself feeling sorry they put their skills into this. It's like having NASA engineers build and install a toilet in some run down crappy house so the house flippers can boast about it to try to make the house seem more valuable.
It feels like I'm exaggerating, I've seen worse animes, but something pisses me off about this one with the story and it's characters. It almost looked like they were going somewhere interesting with the revenge plot, but they veered away from it so hard that it looked like a bait and switch scam. Other commenters complaining about this are totally right to be pissed. I don't believe the commenters who try to pin the blame on the anime being a bad adaptation, the way events play out and how the characters are is way more the problem than how they're portrayed by the anime, the anime can only do so much to make it better or worse if there are faults to the source material. This was very evident in "Made in the Abyss" where the 1st season was great, but the 2nd season was a disappointingly underwhelming and different in comparison; the suspected reason being the adaptation of the 1st season was so good because they hid all the fault, but they could only hid the problems for so long until the source material got so bad.
Anyways, I wash my hands of this anime now. Sorry for venting, but I had to get that out of my system before moving on. I enjoyed the antagonists once I turned on the main characters, Ophelia's story was touching, sad she wasn't saved, it was so wasteful. Compared to other animes it wasn't anything that noteworthy, but compared to the main characters it was; I don't give a crap at all about Oliver's story nor Nanao or any of the others "good guys". That's a failing of the source material. It's kind of hard to blame the anime adaption when it was able to make me feel something for the antagonists instead with such short and cheap flashbacks scenes for them.
|