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Feb 11, 2023

Blue Lock (Anime) add

Mixed Feelings

Preliminary (18/24 eps)

Having followed the manga from way before there was even an anime announced for Blue Lock, I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone decided to take it on. And lo and behold, the one to step up to the challenge is none other than 8bit, a studio mostly known for the That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime and Grisaia series. When I first got the news about this adaptation I did get some worries about how they would deal with a sports anime but thought it couldn’t be too bad since they did a good job with Stars Align. In fact, while ... being completely different in tone, both Stars Align and Blue Lock are similar in the sense that both are more than just sports series, one being more of a drama than a sports anime for most of it and the other taking more of a battle shounen-like approach to sports. All that said here’s my thoughts about this adaptation.

+ The openings really slap and the first ending is also really good. The rest of the OST is fine but nothing mind blowing.
+ They hit the jackpot on some of their VA choices, especially for characters like Bachira and Nagi.
+ They’ve kept a good pacing for these series. There might be some scenes that were left out (I don’t really remember, I’ve read those chapters long ago) but they kept the essential parts in and there really hasn’t been a boring moment in any episode so far.
+ The post credits segments are a good addition, allowing the viewer to get to know the characters’ personalities, particularly the lesser important secondary characters.
- Now let’s stop beating around the bush, the animation SUCKS. I knew that whoever tried to adapt this series would have a big task in front of them. Of all the genres of anime, sports anime are the ones that require the most attention to their animation since you know… athletes move…like a lot… during sports. On top of that, they chose a series drawn by Yuusuke Nomura. While he doesn’t have many reputable works under his name, Yuusuke is definitely a talented artist. His inventive paneling, dynamic poses and thick lines make the characters pop out of the pages and really gives you the sensation of movement. And here lied the issue for 8bit. While they can definitely push out 1 or 2 episodes with some great animation in a 1 cour season and give you that sweet sweet sakuga, their animation is mediocre for most it. They have some outliers like the 1st season of Tensura or the Stars Align, but majority of their adaptations are really substandard (or maybe standard in an era where studios care more about pushing out as many series as possible than actually making good shows). Long gone are the days where CGI wasn’t really a thing in anime and now studios have become too reliant on it. 8bit is guilty of this. Don’t get me wrong, CGI can be used to great effect and can definitely help with animating stuff like crowds in the background. But when you pan over 3 or 4 CGI character models whose faces show any emotion running towards a ball with the stiffest running animation, it’s hard for me to take them seriously as a studio. And worst of all, their 2D animation isn’t particularly that good either. Some of the characters haven’t transitioned that well from the manga to the anime (like Barou, I know his hair is corny but it looks so much corny in the anime). This is especially noticeable in their running scenes, where they distort the characters, making them look stubby for some reason. But I’ll give them some props for their effects, like the auras and the eyes, they did decent.

Since I’m reading the manga I think I should touch on the story segment separately. 8bit has kept true to the source material and so the story’s strengths and flaws are on the writer and not the studio. I guess I could write this part in a manga review but I really don’t feel like making another one.
The story is really fun. Like I mentioned before the story takes a lot of elements from battle shounen and applies it to football. The matches are literal fights between players both opposition and teammates to see who’s the best striker. It gives you a bunch of different players with different approaches to how they play, kinda how you’d get fighters with different fighting styles in a battle shounen. And while much of it isn’t very realistic to actual football, it conveys the feeling of football really well. In general, it's pure hype.
The plot is fine, it presents you with an interesting setting but has some inconsistencies, though nothing that completely shatters the world. My biggest issue is how the author stops caring about the main driving point for the series, finding the best striker (heavy spoilers ahead). Season 1 should cover at least most if not the whole of the 2nd selection arc, which is the last arc where players are actually being eliminated from Blue Lock (at least up to where the manga is atm of writing this). During the 1st and 2nd selections we see lots of strikers with actual potential being eliminated yet players who have no real potential shown so far or have switched positions get to stay. There are some people among the BL fandom who been saying that Ego never meant to just find the best striker but the best players for every position. But if that’s the case than it completely breaks the plot and takes all the fun out of it. He literally preaches about how players should rather “score a hat trick and lose 3-4 than assist and win 1-0”. So Blue Lock should be about guys who want to score goals, actual strikers.
Another grievance I have with the series is how they make it seem as if the stakes are much higher than they actually are. If you get eliminated you can't play for the national team ever yet players act as if they can no longer go pro.
For last, I’d like to address the meat heads of the Blue Lock fandom (which believe me. there are a lot of them in this fandom). Blue Lock isn’t that much more original than other sports anime just because “it isn’t about friendship” or “it’s about ego”. First of all, stop calling yourself an egoist online, it's cringe. Second, there’s a lot of "friendship" in this anime as well and the teams only work because the characters are friends or at least tolerate each other. I really didn't want to make comparisons here, but how different is that from how the academy players and trialists tolerate each other in Ao Ashi? (y'all know damn well why I made this comparison). Third, it still has all the other clichés from other football anime. It has the important game where the score ends up like 5-4 with a goal in the last second of the game, it has the team that completely obliterates the MCs team, it has the benchwarmers that are there just to give commentary on the game (not yet but in future arcs), it even has its own Ryo Ishizaki. My point is that the series has a good gimmick but it doesn't really take it above most other sports anime in what comes to it's story.

Summarized: Blue Lock (anime) is an underwhelming adaptation made by 8bit for one of the hottest animanga properties at the moment. While it has some positives points it completely falls flat due to a lack of effort/investment put up by the studio. I would recommend anyone who reads this review to skip this anime and just read the manga.

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Aug 29, 2021

Pokemon (2019) (Anime) add

Not Recommended

Preliminary (78/136 eps)

I hate Journeys so much. There's not much they can even do at this point to salvage this burning trash bin. It makes a mockery of you viewers and Pokemon lovers.

1. The animation is bad most of the time: They threw away everything that made Sun & Moon's animation good and kept only the worst parts. What's the point of doing a more "simplistic" art style if you take away all the expressiveness and fluidity of the animation? The world even looks less colorful than it looked in SM. And the character designs look so uninspiring. Gou's design is recognizable and sure Koharu and ... her family all have to look similar but new characters like Renji, Kikuna or Houji look so generic and some older characters that didn't make the transitions to this simpler art style back in SM were completely butchered. It all shows a complete lack of effort by OLM.

2. They did Galar and the entire gen 8 so dirty: Not only is the anime not focused on a specific region like all other seasons before but they basically disregarded its existence. They took the plot of the games and watered it down into a rushed badly written couple of episodes. This isn't to say that the Sword and Shield had an amazing plot but it was among the best in the whole main game series (which says a lot about the Pokemon series as a whole). And the games had some really great characters that weren't explored nearly enough if anything. Twilight Wings in its 42 minutes had more character and world building in Galar than this series had in 10 or so episodes in Galar. And it's actually quite sad that they chose to abandon the usual regional Pokemon league since SwSh were the first games to approach the of pokemon battles as a sport and to have an elimination tournament much like the anime used to have.

3. This series is written as if it was a fanfic and a bad one at that: To put it short, it relies a lot on fanservice. First, there's a substantial number of Pokemon caught or evolutions that feel very undeserved and just happen to appeal to fans who been whishing to see the main characters having those Pokemon. While Gou is quite literally playing Pokemon Go, chucking pokeballs at anything that moves, Satoshi himself got some very popular Pokemon without putting in any of the hardwork and/or having the emotional climax as in previous series. For those who actually seen the anime you might know exactly the multiple Pokemon I'm referring to but for those who haven't, and without spoiling it, Satoshi's team at the time of this review is composed mostly of certain Pokemon species that might have had a noticeable role in his previous adventures. And this wouldn't be so bad if these previous interactions with these Pokemon didn't feel like better times to get them. Unfortunately, this show's writing is so bad that it almost seem like they're just handing them to Satoshi. And don't even get me started on Gou.
Secondly, it relies a lot on older characters. The whole concept of the show itself is like a mechanism to show as many older characters as possible, be it in battles for the World Championship or simply by travelling to the various regions in single episode escapades.

4. What does this mean to gen 9?: If we are to get a generation 9 (which we will definitely get in the future), how are they gonna do the anime? Pokemon (2019) is already showing a lack of imagination, so much that it has to rely on fanservice and nostalgia. Are they gonna return to have it focus on one region? What does this mean to the whole continuity? Am I supposed to believe that no trainer from X future regions participated or showed up in the World Championship? Since Gou plans to catch every pokemon in on his way to find Mew, is he gonna be in the next seasons as well? So many questions to be asked and no answer. I'm genuinely worried for the future of this series and if you like Pokemon you should be as well.

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Feb 14, 2021

Digimon Adventure: (Anime) add

Not Recommended

Preliminary (35/67 eps)

Let me go ahead and preface that I'll use the original Digimon Adventure series as my main comparison. Despite me really liking the Digimon franchise, I don't feel any attachment to Adventure 1 or 2 since I was too young at the time to even understand it and my Digimon introduction was basically left to Tamers and Frontier. Having finally watched the original series only about 2 years ago, I don't think nostalgia should really play a role in my opinion of Digimon Adventure:. Also, I'll not judge this anime as I would most other anime since I think it would be unfair to compare ... an anime intended for younger kids as I would one intended for older kids and adults. So with that out of the way let's get right into it.

The Good:
1. Adventurous - Okay, yes Digimon Adventure: is Adventurous *ba dum tss* in the sense that they weren't afraid to explore concepts that weren't explored that much in the original Digimon Adventure series like digimon eating other digimon in order to digivolve or them breaking the mold and creating new ways to digivolve.
2. More digimon - To be fair, the original Digimon Adventure series only had so many digimon it could use and they created some specifically for the anime. But I'll have this as a positive because it had diversity which is something that lacked in series like Digimon Adventure Tri. I always thought it was weird how, in a world that is supposedly inhabited by digimon there were forests, jungles and deserts without any digimon and when there were it was always the same ones. That's not how an ecosystem works.

The Bad:
3. Character Development or, may I say it , the lack of it - The character development is basically non existent, that is, for everyone except Tai. I'll talk more about it in the next point but Tai is the only character in this series that seems to get some attention. Not that I was expecting them to give the same amount of attention to every character but it seems crazy to me that even Yamato has been relegated from rival/counterpart to sidekick. Not even the digidestined digimon seem to be getting that much attention. It's like it expects you to have an entry level knowledge of the characters, it gives little to no backstory and their personalities has been boiled down to MC, Cool "Rival", Brains, Main Girl, Brat Girl and Scaredy-Cat.
4. Writing - "Our expectations for you were low but holyfuck". I know this is a kids show and knowing how low the bar for kids shows has been lowered in the past years I wasn't expecting anything great, but goddamit this was worst than hot garbage. This anime makes the original series feel like One Piece, that's the level of depth were dealing with this shit. Don't know what to do with a character? Just say they're occupied with idk being in a hot spring or collecting gems and now you can just ignore them until you need their digimons to evolve into the next form to catch up to Tai and Agumon so that Agumon can finally digivolve again to Omnimon to defeat this enemy that only Omnimon can defeat.
5. Art - Again, I understand this is a kids show and that they were trying to recreat the original artstyle but that doesn't mean you can just regurgitate the same animation 21 years later. First of all, it doesn't work because you're using different techniques. The original kinda worked because it was still mostly hand drawn, but computer animations simply can't achieve the same effect. The way the skies and the background used to be colored gave a otherworldly feeling that made sense in an isekai like Digimon Adventure (yes Digimon Adventure was an isekai, let's go mai boissss). Now, you look at the background of Digimon Adventure: and what you get is blue sky with no feature, just blue and boring. Second, the animation is trash. Apart from the first 3 or so episodes and some "boss fights" episodes, the animations is just still images with lip flops and movement shots with very few FPS going on for half a minute each. How is your animtion still the same as it was back when the original series came out. If you're using computer animation then get a proper animation right. A good example of how you can achieve the same feeling as an older kids show without putting the animation in jeopardy is Dragon Quest (2020). Does every episode have top tier animation? No. But is it consistently good? Yes. Did it sacrifice the artstyle? Nope. A media franchise as big a Digimon shouldn't be struggling to make a decent anime, let alone one at the level of Dragon Quest (no offence meant to DQ).

The Stupid:
6. Koushiro is a hacker - If I remember well, Koushiro is supposed to be 10 yo right? Then please explain to me how the hell is he hacking missiles and satellites. It makes no fucking sense. As ridiculous as the original series was, it never made Koushiro out to be some super genius that can hack into any computer system. Also this combined with the lack of character development has made him just some kid behind the computer while Tai, Yamato and Sora solve the problems.
7. WHY DO THEY RIDE THE DIGIMON WHILE FIGHTING? - I swear every episode I get this much close of just quitting for how stupid this is. I can get behind Yamato riding Garurumon while fighting bu why does Tai need to ride Greymon every damn episode while fighting. It only puts him in danger while making Greymon having to worry about him while battling. What's even more ridiculous is that the digimon do backflips at high speed with their digidestined on top of them without them falling. It makes no sense. It's stupid and I hate it. This didn't happen in the original and I don't remember it happening in any of the series.

In summary, Digimon Adventure: is a reboot that makes promises to achieve a lot while delivering nothing. Please don't waste your time watching this husk of a show and just go watch the original.

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