Train wreck of an ending, yet much better than the anime overall in a lot of ways. It was a lot more straight forward about details such as the astral line and what horns role were for demons. Pandaemonium was more straight forward and so was details about the demons society even if not by too much. I consider the anime to be meaningless pretentious jargon overlapped with a plot that never tells you anything but a stylish world with some genuinely decent characters and a cool team of villains. In a few words style over substance. I would 100% still stay the same about the final volume of the manga. That being said it avoided that for the majority until the very end.
From the moment of the teleport to Eden to this conclusion I was frustrated. The overall story is unfocused while feeding you breadcrumbs of hints and then we're here and it ends in a heart beat. I liked the ideas a lot. I liked the world a lot. I liked the characters and the character art a lot. But alike the anime, in actual substance this fell short. The pay off for all the hints about the plot was a poorly constructed and rushed ending that jumped you with exposition and plot twists and the likes without proper foreshadowing and made little sense. It almost felt as if everything before it didn't even matter. On top of all this the action was drawn as some of the worst I've ever seen. Pages were cluttered and it made it tedious to read, although that was a constant. I don't know if I've seen so many good ideas go to absolute garbage apart from the likes of Yuyu Hakusho's final arc, but to compare the two would be an insult to Hakusho.
It's still not clear how Chrno stopped Pandaemonium from demonizing the world. Nor did it explain why the apostles turned into little creepy android type kids. Nor did it go into enough detail about the demon society or Ririsu. Rosette was supposed to live around a year at most, but as cheesy as it is it's cute that she denied death to learn to wait for Chrno. Stella was like cryogenically frozen or something and Fiore and Shader are still their pretty young doll & demon selves but refuse to speak to her probably because Fiore blames herself and can somewhat care about her now .... Maybe Shader altered her doll brain. Even that feels contradictory to what was said before. Although if she doesn't a duty for Aion anymore it probably makes some semblance of sense. Unless I'm just lacking all understanding for all of these points, this is what I mean by style over substance.
Everything was good until near the end. I loved learning about Pandaemonium and Magdalene and seeing the fantastic villains that are the sinners and dark tragic unforgiving nature of this manga(until the storybook cheesy ending that was the conclusion). But even then, that's not that much. The characters were good but nothing complex or even memorable apart from the sinners. In fact I thought Azmaria was a better character in the anime, Satella was certainly more memorable at least. Steiner even had more of a presence... The sinners however were a great team of villains although I wish it portrayed why they followed Aion more and I wish we got more of Aion's reasoning for doing what he was attempting to do... The good qualities of Chrno Crusade aren't that substantial whereas the fewer problems of it are illuminated by the poor conclusion which everything was building to. If only the main characters were the sinners, that would have been a much better story.
5/10. I'll have to think about it later and see if I'm being too harsh.
edit: i also want to specify that i'm tired out of my mind right now. |
gfsdfgsdgsdfgsMar 16, 2018 4:03 PM