- Last OnlineNov 15, 2024 7:35 PM
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- BirthdayFeb 17, 1983
- LocationWiltshire, England
- JoinedJan 4, 2012
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Apr 20, 2022
Ok i'm gonna say upfront: I hate Harem anime! So you can disregard my opinion if you like them.
Now harem has become so entwined with fantasy anime that you've just gotta roll with it somewhat but 3 episodes in this has gone from a fantasy anime with harem elements to a full on harem anime, with all the clichés and stupidity one would expect from such a thing, and so i'm dropping this.
Not that i'm gonna be missing out much i expect for as fantasy animes go this one isn't really doing anything terribly unique. We've had the whole powerful person reincarnates into less powerful
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world a number of times now and the overall production, from the writing to the animation, is so middle of the road that if you've seen one you've seen this.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Feb 26, 2022
This anime started out with so much promise, was actually doing something different, but now? Now it's just another stupid harem isekai and i'm done.
Maybe i'm being harsh, but such is the contrast between what the show is trying do (looking at the real world issues of running a nation albeit in a fantasy setting) and the absolutely moronic implementation of the harem trope into the show.
Early on they establish the idea that in this world marriages are polygamic with the wives and husbands sharing equal standing and are each free to marry as many partners as they so choose. Now you don't need to
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be some sort of economic genius to see how this just would not be allowed for tax reasons alone but take this to it's logical conclusion and you could have entire nations where everyone is married to everyone else and the union holds utterly no meaning at all, legally or otherwise. And before someone tries to suggest that this is being inclusive or progressive in someway please note that we NEVER see any marriages of this nature other than with the protagonist himself!
In the first part tho this was just a stupid idea (with no thought put behind it AT ALL), a way to force the harem trope into an anime that DOES NOT NEED IT cause that's what you do with isekai fantasy anime, ain't it? It's in this part, this season, that the idea takes off into true lunacy as they actually start implementing it for the protagonist who is a HEAD OF STATE!
At this point Souma is now engaged to: the daughter of the former king, the daughter of a tribal chief and his personal bodyguard, the daughter of a prominent noble and the daughter of the king of a annexed nation. Now you don't need to be some sort of political studies student to know that this would not be in any way politically viable AT ALL, and would in fact render the usual benefits (and responsibilities) of political marriages utterly null and void (for once again you take this to it's logical conclusion Souma could go onto marry EVERY single daughter of EVERY nation in this world!).
So yeah, i tried my best to overlook this stupidity but after episode 4 they just kept piling on and on and on, practically 4 episodes in a row has been largely dedicated to this utterly absurd idea in a show with the world "realist" in the title! And it really is a shame as when this show was looking at the inner workings and issues of running a nation it truly was interesting and unique.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Feb 24, 2022
So i had to drop this after only 7 episodes and the reason is simple: It's so freakin' LAME!!!
Overall this is just a mediocre anime, a dime a dozen fantasy that stands out in no way what-so-ever, so really it shouldn't have been difficult to sit back turn off my brain and just pass the time with it. Unfortunately tho i couldn't.
Everything this anime does is lame! Every twist to the story, every big reveal, every time they tried to make the main character look cool or badass, it was just lame lame lame! At first it started out funny, how lame it was, but
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after a few episodes it became embarrassing and finally just frustrating.
So yeah, i've dropped it. I don't like dropping anime but i could not take the lameness anymore!
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Sep 15, 2021
Ok, i'll start off by saying that this is probably going to be more of a rant than an actual review and to get into the depths of the things that really pissed me off about this abysmal anime i'm probably going to have to go into spoiler territory so with that in mind and that this may go on for a bit the tl;dr: Watch episodes 1 & 2 of this anime and then throw the rest in the bin, DO NOT WATCH THE REST! (unless, that is, you crave disappointment.)
Muv-Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse, imo, is a failure of an anime! This is not
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necessarily due to bad sound, art, voice acting, soundtrack, characters, plot or any of the other parts that you would normally attribute to such a failure. In fact, in many cases thruout many of these qualities could even be thought of as good. It's just they've all been thrown together in an almighty mess that not only doesn't work at all together but the anime as a whole suffers from a complete identity crisis. Ultimately tho there's an even greater crime this anime commits and that is to completely fail to live up to what it shows you it could have been.
***SPOILERS START HERE***
Episodes 1 & 2 open this anime with exceptional promise. A dark world where earth is being invaded by a vast horde of huge flesh-eating aliens, the BETA, humanity is on the verge of extinction as little can slow down their relentless swarm and around about two 3rds of the world is already lost by the opening of the series. We're introduced to a group of girls undergoing heavy training to become Tactical Surface Fighter Eishi (pilots), you think you're in for your bog standard schoolgirls and Mecha anime but instead the training is largely passed over in a sort of montage. The main character thruout this is Takamura Yui, we follow her as she shows off her skill, befriends a rival, helps her friends with their training and discuss their views on current events. One of the key things learned during this part of the story is of the "8 minutes of death", which is that in battle with the BETA the average life expectancy of an Eishi is only 8 minutes. Once the training is done (again this is over very quickly largely covered as it is by a series of montages) we see her say her goodbyes to her family and sent off to duty.
From that point it is not long before Yui and her friends are thrown right into the action as defensive lines a broken by the BETA. This proves to be action packed but also grim as you see friend after friend of Yui killed by various means, often quite gruesome. It gets to the point where the girls are so overwhelmed they must retreat and they begin a fast pace and high tension run as they fly incredibly fast and low in an effort to avoid being shot down by the BETA. Unfortunately more of the girls are shot down until it is just Yui and 2 others left eventually even the three of them are knocked down as well. After Yui crashes we see her emerge from her TSF and descend down some stairs, into what i assume is an underground system of some sort, armed with only a pistol. Here we see our first look at the Solider Type BETA (the smallest of the BETA but still roughly twice the size of a human) and they are devouring one of Yui's friends (we see this in quite graphic detail), Yui descends further to find the last of her friends still trapped in her TSF. The Soldiers come and start ripping apart the TSF to get to her and Yui's friend begs her to shoot her but Yui can't do it and so she is torn apart in front of Yui, the last we see of her is her head catapulted out and it rolls across the floor towards Yui. The Soldiers turn towards Yui and she is saved just in the nick of time by a TSF. In one of the final scenes we see Yui recovering in a medical tent with some pretty serious injuries and struck silent by the horror of what she has witnessed and the remorse of being the only survivor out of all of her friends.
Now you may be wondering why i went into so much detail about what happened during those two episodes, well i wanted to make it quite clear that there was a serious tone thruout, i also wanted to point out how horrific some of the imagery was.
Having watched those two episodes my expectations where high, i was vastly impressed by the way that had handled this dark story and how they had maintained the serious tone without giving in to moeness, comic relief or fan service (there's one scene in those two episodes that could be considered true fan service but it's over so quick that you could blink and miss the fan service... and i think i did), i was happy to lay all the concerns i had had about the series to rest and settle down to a action packed and seriously dark sci-fi anime (lord knows it often seems that there's too few of them out there these days) following Yui as she devotes herself to fighting the BETA to find both redemption and salvation for herself and the world... little did i know that what i was in fact going to get was the complete mess that suffers from an complete identity crisis and pretty much dumps all over what it could have been.
Let's tackle the problems one at a time.
First off Yui: She's not the main character. You might be mistaken thinking that she's the main character seeing how we had spent two whole episodes setting up her backstory but she's not. She barely even qualifies as a secondary character as little she has to do with the plot most of the time.
Instead we get Yuuya Bridges, whom i might have been more inclined to have liked if i hadn't gone thru the jarring experience of having the main character switched on me after only 2 episodes! Also his backstory is more of a kind of whiny "i'll do whatever i want cause i was bullied as a child" which kinda pales in comparison to Yui's "I failed to protect all of my friends and watched as they were torn apart and eaten before my eyes and stared death in the face myself" in trying to garner our sympathy, he's never even fought against the BETA in combat so knows nothing of the horrors of the war, or it would if Yui wasn't a completely broken character.
Yui displays none of the psychological issues one would expect from someone who had gone thru such a trauma as she had. During the first few episodes she's rather harsh on Yuuya and the team, so you think that she's keeping every body at a distance so she doesn't have to go thru seeing another friend die, but no, it disappears incredibly quickly (almost as if the writer forgot about it) and Yui pretty much becomes the lamest example of a Tsundere i've ever come across (this is also due to the result of her falling in Love with Yuuya in a ridiculously short amount of time). We only see 2 examples of her struggling with the memories of what had happened to her and her friends but as soon as they're over there's no sign that she's even upset or shaken by these memories she just gets on with what she's doing. Yui's completely broken personality, a personality which would be appropriate in your bog standard slice of life harem anime but doesn't fit this character and her backstory at all, is a constant issue which prevented me from enjoying any of the scenes she appears in.
The tone: It takes a dive! Not straight away admittedly, for the first few episodes it still maintains some seriousness tho things are much much lighter than the first two episodes none-the-less, however when you get to episode 6 (an episode that should live in infamy for anyone who's watched this series) it takes a dive right off the deep end, so much so in fact that you will have a hard time taking anything the anime does seriously from that point onwards!
It's your bog standard fan service beach episode which is presented to us on the most flimsy and ludicrous of basis, not just in real life (i seriously doubt any military anywhere would set up such a situation let alone the events that happen during it could happen) but also in their world where humanity (as i remind you) IS FACING EXTINCTION!!! And it is largely after this point that you just get the sense that the whole anime is taking a much more light hearted approach to the theme that the first two episodes lead you to believe it would. So much so that even when it's being serious you kinda feel that there's a levity to it that feels wholly inappropriate from everything that you've learnt about this world. Now this may not actually be the case but this is how badly it colours your perceptions but dumping in comedic sketches and fan service episodes in something that started off on as similarly a dark and gory scale as bloody Elfen Lied!
The Story/Plot: Now essentially it's good, the basis at least is interesting and it provides a lot of action and conflict, the problem is with the implementation. This is an anime where i honestly believe the writers/producers/whoever didn't know what they wanted to do, they just knew they wanted it to be popular and so they went and took a look around at what else was popular at the time and just tossed as many of their elements as possible into the mix.
I'll lay a few down for you: There's, tsunderes, fan service, mecha, harem, a Big F*ckin' Lazer Canon, cloned psychics, government conspiracies, competition between squads, a tournament, a hot springs episode (even more fan service), more conspiracies, terrorists, and a big bad villain whom either wants to rule the world at the expense of it's defence (so an idiot) or wants to destroy the world by compromising it's defence (still quite a idiot). All of those were just the things i can remember months later, there's more and worse i remember thinking the same thought quite often thruout the series "Yet another new element that feels like it's from a different anime!".
And while we're on this topic i want to point two things out that are pertinent to the overall story:
1. The tournament - THIS WOULD NEVER HAPPEN!!! "This world is facing extinction so lets all throw on a TSF vs TSF competition to inspire unity and improve moral as well as test these weapons!" WHAT?!! Two 3rds of the world is gone to the BETA, you can barely hold your front lines and you want to throw a sports day?! Also it obviously fails to inspire unity as every squad is competing with each other to win! (to the point where several of them start actively sabotaging one another) No unity inspired there!
2. The conspiracies - Now i'm not so optimistic to think that when humanity's on the edge there won't be people out for themselves or government agencies putting their own interests above everyone else, but what i can't accept is that ANY human (aside from the completely insane) would ACTIVELY sabotage one of humanity's defensive lines just to get their grubby hands on a piece of tech a rival "ally" is developing! They try to justify it by saying over and over that once the BETA are dealt with whomever has the technical advantage will rule the world, but seriously! The BETA are a serious threat now! I can't over state this: TWO THIRDS OF THE WORLD GONE! I think the priorities would be a little more kill the BETA than try to fuck over the competition, at least until you've started to push them back a bit.
And that's it basically... well it is right now cause i've gone on for so long i've kinda forgotten if i had any other points... . -.-
Anyway, the facts are that this series shows you, it SHOWS you, in the first two episodes everything it could be and then from episode 3 onwards it not only consistently fails to live up to that but it also constantly tries to add in new and unnecessary components that don't quite fit, don't really make sense and just mess with the anime further turning it all into a huge mess that doesn't know quite what it wants to be.
It's at it's best during the 20% when it's focus is on fighting the BETA, which is where it's focus should have always been from start to end (tho even then it never recaptures the dark thrill of the first two episodes), and it's at it's worst the other 80% of the time when it's doing anything but... oh and Yui, whenever she's on screen after episode 2 that's when it's truly at it's worst.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Sep 14, 2021
So i came into this series as a big fan and i'm leaving as someone who is completely done with Tensura, i'll never read the novels, never rewatch any of the anime and while i managed to finish episode 11 to watch even one more episode is just too much to ask.
And here the problem: This series is a absolute pisstake!
Now the main issue, as others have mentioned, is the first 6 episodes are just filled with nothing but talking (the majority of which is all done in just one location and by just one group of people). But what others have failed to mention
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(at least the reviews i've read) is that the talking done within the first 4 episodes is exclusively about things we already know! 4 episodes, FOUR, are basically used as the catch up for what happened in the previous half of this season!
Episodes 5 and 6 at least go into new territory with their talking (discussing what's going to happen rather than what has happened) but by that point all the good will and excitement that i had from the previous half of this season had been completely destroyed and i simply could not bring myself to care!
This was all compounded by the fact that the show continues to insist on using every opportunity it can to unleash it's tired and cliched "jokes" upon us. I've never found Tensura's comedy funny, cause i've seen it all so many times before, but i never minded until now when it feels so much like they're just doing it to waste our time.
On top of all of this is the continuing problem that none of the characters (outside of Rimuru himself) receive any kind of development or even possess any actual depth to them. The cast continues to be the very same one note characters they were when we were first introduced to them. Now this issue is exasperated by the fact that the cast is huge so most of them get little time on screen and are largely left uninvolved in things. But this issue is particularly galling when the show decides to waste at least 4 episodes telling you what you already know when they could've instead explored some of these characters or given them something to actually do other than make lame cliched jokes!
Finally Rimuru himself has suffered from a sort of character assassination this season. The tension of events is supposed to be high and very serious (his city was attacked, many of his friends killed, they're all going to war, he himself is going to face off against his opponent as well as numerous powerful individuals who may decide to kill him) and yet he doesn't seem to care. He's just arsing around makin' terrible jokes, laughing off important developments, ignoring warnings, behaving inappropriately in front of foreign delegates, and basically treating the entire thing (and world) like he's a kid and it's some sort of game. Gone is the character which, tho unsure of himself at times, you could believe to be an inspiring and competent ruler. Heck during the main confrontation he even goes so far as to interrupt and ignore Raphael, his greatest and most critical tool, 3 times despite the severity of the consequences should he fail!
And it's that that's made me quit Tensura entirely. No longer is the main character someone i'm interested in who i want to see succeed. Rather he has become the instrument that tells me that none of this matters, that the events unfolding are meaningless, that the characters around him aren't worth caring about, and that the world itself is just a worthless waste of time. Cause if he doesn't care enough to take it seriously when it should matter why should i?
Well it was that and the first 4 episodes... what the heck were they thinking a FOUR EPISODE RECAP?!!!
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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May 27, 2012
I don't have a lot to say about this Anime but what i do have to say is critical for anyone whom plans to watch it: Blood-C has absolutely nothing to do with Blood: The Last Vampire or Blood+! So get any notion of a connection right out of your head before you settle down to watch it or you shall (as i was) be bothered thruout by the comparisons you'll make between the three of them.
I have no idea whether this is a good Anime or not because i spent the first half of it in constant bafflement as to how none of the
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story, characters (including the main source of confusion herself: Saya) or the monsters lined up at all with either B:TLV or B+, and i spent the whole of the second half of the series forced to be awfully aware that, even tho it has nothing to do with the other two, it is mediocre in comparison (but saying that doesn't mean it's bad or even just average, it just seems so in comparison to two Animes that are, imo, brilliant!).
So yeah, go in with a clean mind and don't compare it to Blood: The Last Vampire or Blood+ and you may enjoy this Anime (tho i can't give you a guarantee), and if you do let me know how it was... cause i still haven't got a clue.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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May 15, 2012
Now before i begin i've got to say that Animes of this type really sink or swim based entirely on the protagonist. If you don't get on with the main character then you're not going to get on with the Anime as a whole. It is for that reason and that reason a lone that after watching 21 episodes of Shuffle! i decided i had had enough and to drop this Anime entirely, probably never to finish it ever (much to my shame and annoyance)!
It started out promisingly enough, similar in many ways to other Animes of the genre, and the main character held
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the illusion of being a likeable character for much of the early episodes, tho i must say that he doesn't really stand out too much. Once i got to the mid point of the series i was finding myself getting more and more getting annoyed with him every time he opened his mouth but as i was watching the dub version i put this down to the voice actor, whom on the English dub is pretty awful (when you're shouting out at the TV "Have emotion damnit!" it's not a very good sign your getting quality acting). Having changed to the English sub on episode 15 i continued on hoping that i'll be able to reconnect with the main character and get back into the story, and it worked for a whole 3 episodes, but as the Anime got closer and closer to the final episodes his actions became more and more moronic and his emotional abuse of one of the girls got worse and worse (obviously intentional but i couldn't get on board with the way they were playing it out at all, that it was supposed to be for her own good kind of thing) and once it hit the point where you've got two of the girls just saying how much they wish this moronic arse happiness and how being with him makes one of them so very happy i was like "That's it i'm done! This scene is supposed to mean something but i've got literary no connection to it cause i just can't bring myself to root for that dick!"
So yeah, that's it for me for this Anime, which i feel is a shame as so many of the rest of the cast is so likeable and the various side stories (involving OTHER characters) were both interesting and enjoyable, tho overall this is probably just an average Anime at best. As for you if you want to give it ago i suggest watching the first few episodes yourself and make an assessment about whether you like the protagonist or not, if you do keep going and hopefully you won't be put off by his actions later on as badly as i was, if not then get out of it fast!
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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