This was... a weird watch. One of the few shows that made me almost break my promise to myself to give every show at least the full first episode to grab me. There was something weird and off about how it was animated, which is why I find it odd everyone here praising the 2d animation.
It first set in right off the bat with the main characters coming one one-by-one, barely looking at eachother and saying their lines deadpan to the camera. Bad blocking? Bad direction? Wait, direction? But it's animated. The 3D then was obviously a turn off but no need to bring that up, we all seem to agree on that at least. Another example of this is the red head in the onsen: at one point, she's talking and ends the cut with a specific expression on her face, the cut then goes to a different angle on her, but with no time jumps. Error - her expression is entirely different. I suspect there is more things like this going on, digging into my subconscious and giving me that weird feeling.
The weird movement/ lack thereof continued into the next scenes, along with deadpan deliveries of info-dumping lines. Like another commenter mentioned. I almost fell asleep when the scene changed to the girls from the actual race in front of a TV chatting about nothing interesting and delivering a long-winded purpose speech in a manner you'd expect in a final episode after we're supposed to have had a chance to get connected to the characters.
Then there's the subtitle errors - English grammatical mistakes that make some sentences ununderstandable. They are few but consistently there. Maybe someone without my neuro weirdness could interpret, but stuff like that absolutely destroys my ability to understand sentences. Like the thing with the falling water and telling her to move away from it for some reason.
So here I am, taking a break at the 11 minute mark to try to finish the episode after, so here I go.
Somewhat later in I'm starting to wonder if the voice actors were given the lines with no context and a director who didn't give a crap how they were delivered. The characters sound.. emotional but not exactly as they should for the emotions of some scenes. Or maybe that's not it. Maybe it has to do with the animation weirdness I was mentioning before, like the voice actors emotions and tones not matching the characters faces. It's hard to put my finger on.
It's not helping that the info dumps are extremely boring but due to them being... well... info dumps, I can't really speed it up much to get through faster.
There is that saying - show don't tell and that's the problem here. All these characters who were introduced as text dumps of their names on screen are just deadpan delivering a dump each of why they wanna cycle.
I haven't seen further direct grammar errors but there are some sentences that seem oddly translated, like in bland sentences that wouldn't be common for English. Oh, there was one more during the onsen scene where they mixed up the plural and singular in one sentence. Oh, one at the end. Yo, translators: you can't put a "PS" in the middle of a letter. That's not what a PS is /facepalm.
Yo wtf, all her friends decide to train for cycling and go hard and she's all like "nah" for half a year of montage? "I can't decide wahhh." Yo bruh I think you already decided "no" by ditching your friends for 6 months. That's a character complaint, though. Everyone is different and often we run into people we can't understand individually in media.
Oh the classic "don't bother translating a Japanese word" at the end there. ug. For anyone wondering, "dagashi" is cheap, individually wrapped sweets. Bing image search is good for Japanese words. Can't see the reasoning for not translating that.
Addendum: Apparently this show shares a streaming service with Blue Archive, which also had major complaints about translation/ English grammar so well, there we go. |