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Apr 19, 2024
Lowspeed Toilet
Somehow the makers of this show managed to make an ultra-high speed racing series unbelievably boring. There are multiple things that cause this, from the commentators sounding bored out of their mind, to us not knowing anything about the characters since we get tossed into the races right away without any buildup, to there being no music for a lot of the driving, which means that most of the racing shown is cars going down a straight with no BGM with only the low hum of the engines and a commentator droning on about something while sounding like a robot.
I really cannot stress enough
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how bad the commentator VAs in this show are. The male one at least tries to sound somewhat enthusiastic, but the female one sounds like she’s reading sales figures at a weekly business meeting. As you can imagine, this is extremely detrimental to building any sense of excitement and really doesn’t do the series any favors.
Our MC Rin is ditzy to an unbelievable degree. She is supposed to come from (sim?) racing games, but when she’s finally in the car she’s as clueless about everything as a person who doesn’t even know what a car race is. She also doesn’t know who one of the top two racers in the series is. This joke is the basis for the whole of episode 3, btw.
I have a hard time identifying if this show is trying to be a comedy or not. You have factors pointing towards it (basically everything to do with our MC), but then you have the rest of the show where it’s not really present.
The other characters just ... exist. Since the first two episodes were nearly all race scenes, there really is nothing to say about them so far.
There have been some blatant animation errors, like a large object popping in too late and someone’s hair changing colour. The cars in this series go way too slow around the track for the supposed speeds they are traveling at. Using Ep2 they are supposed to be going at an average speed of 640 kmph (400 mph) over a lap, yet when we see them drive they seem to be going f1 pace at best, which is 250 kmph at the high end.
I also have some personal nitpicks as a racing fan, like everyone being obsessed with a regular ass overtake she performed (while using a boost), direction arrows pointing the wrong way, showing footage of a certain turn while highlighting another turn on the circuit, but these are really minor compared to the overall boringness problem.
If the makers want this to succeed in any way, they NEED to make the next few episodes focus on the characters, since then there will at least be something to care about. If they don’t do this and the next episodes will keep the racing focus, I don’t recommend watching this. Watching Verstappen win by 30 seconds in F1 every race would be more entertaining.
The one positive thing I can say about this show is that it’s not as blatant of an advertisement as the Gran Turismo movie that came out last year, which has loosely the same premise.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Feb 2, 2024
Both of these Gaiden series are basically just the author wanking himself off by having his ultra smart MCs repeatedly go up against and humiliate braindead troglodytes who are also evil and beat their wives and all want to kill him. It would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic.
The only one that’s somewhat interesting is the Yang one and the “Retriever” story because there are parts of it that don’t follow this formula. All of the other ones are basically the exact same story told in different ways.
This series also exemplifies that explaining everything in a story is not always a good idea. While
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watching the regular series, one could imagine for himself what Yangs evacuation of El Facil looked like. Instead, this series explains how it happens and it makes Yang seem extremely irresponsible and unfit to be a commander by his escape plan relying on the enemy being total idiots and putting all the civilians in danger.
These series somewhat soured my opinion on the original OVA by repeating and thus highlighting the issues which were sometimes noticeable in it many, many times and for that reason alone I don’t recommend watching them.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Dec 2, 2023
This show has a huge identity crisis and it suffers greatly because of it.
Overtake marketed itself as a racing series about Japanese F4. However, it’s not really about that at all (which is probably the reason that no one in any f1/feeder series/racing forum I frequent has mentioned this show since the first episode dropped). It tries to be 2 (sometimes even 3) different shows at once, awkwardly juggling some decently ok drama plot with a plot about a young racer trying to succeed with an underfunded team and a few segments with the two MCs just doing stuff together, none of them really getting
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the chance to shine. Especially the racing part feeling half-baked.
In fact, (I can’t believe I’m saying this as someone who has been a racing/F1 fan for most of his life) I feel like this series would be way better if the whole racing segment was just removed. The drama in this show is actually pretty unique and it would have a larger impact if it didn’t have to share screentime with the (quite boring and sometimes unrealistic) racing segments. There is nearly no importance placed on the racing part of this show and it feels like the studio didn’t even want to include it but were contractually obligated to. It even had a negative effect on the characters. Madoka irritated me from the start since he reminds me of annoying DtS fans. If this wasn’t the case, I’d probably have enjoyed the drama surrounding him more. Most of the other characters are nothing to write home about.
I see little reason to watch Overtake since it is overtaken by other shows in what it tries to do. It’s quite sad, because I feel like it could’ve been quite compelling if it just focused on one thing for the whole show. If you want to watch it for either the racing or the drama, you'll be bored with the other half.
If you want to watch a show about a young boy rising through the ranks trying to reach F1, watch Capeta
If you want to watch a cool racing anime, watch Initial D or MF Ghost (which is also airing this season)
If you want to watch a racing show with CGDCT, watch Two Car
If you want to watch a good drama, just look around on this site, there are dozens of them.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Sep 8, 2023
The second half of Tokyo Ghoul:re is a complete trainwreck. I feel that this can be summarized into 4 main reasons:
Reason 1: What the Hell is even happening?
For a large part of the series, and especially the first 4 episodes, It is (nearly) impossible to understand what is even going on. Pretty much none of the events in this series logically connect to eachother. Nearly nothing is explained; most events happen without any of the context you’d expect such an event to have. This turns the plot into basically just a string of random fights in which random events happen and the viewer is left to
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guess what the hell the writer was even trying to do. It's impossible to understand the motivation of the characters and therefore the insane actions and choices they make just leave you scratching your head. This leads to the second reason:
Reason 2: Pointless battles
This season ramps up the action dramatically and has battles nearly constantly. The problem is that nearly every single one of these battles is either a. Between random characters which we have never seen before or b. Between characters which don’t have well-explained reasons to fight eachother. This means that it’s very hard to even care about these fights and it all just devolves into meaningless violence.
Reason 3: The Power of Friendship
In the second half of TG:re S2, after brutally slaughtering eachother for 3,5 seasons and probably decades of in-universe time, the ghouls and humans choose to work together after one of the ghouls caused a catastrophic event to occur. Nobody on either side seems to have any problem with this after the first minute that this plan was proposed. The ghouls just walk into the CCG HQ, half-intimidate them into working together and everything is just sunshine and rainbows. In case you didn’t realize, this undermines the whole fucking story of TG up to this point and means that everything that happened up to this point was just pointless violence that could’ve stopped at any time if either side just proposed to work together.
Reason 4: Borderline serial killer / mass murderer apologism
TG has always had a weird habit of not addressing that 99%+ of all ghouls are insane psychopaths/sociopaths/lunatics/perverts/you name it and that choosing which side is better isn’t really a hard choice. This season takes it even farther by presenting a situation where Arima was kidnapped by Touka. Touka then leads her around until they come to some child ghouls and Hinami. The children hug her (one a side note, one of them sniffs her and says hes hungry. This should be a sign to fucking book it out of there lmao). Finally Hinami hugs her, indirectly forgiving her for killing her parents and Arima cries and says she doesn't know who to hate anymore. Other than the fact that whole scene is dumb since it turns Arima Into an overly emotional dumbass who loses all ability to think critically after one of her captors tries to emotionally manipulate her, it also feels like the show is trying to persuade the audience into feeling the same thing. I'm saying this because the inclusion of the ghoul children in the scene and the lack of any real confrontation by Arima is clearly meant to emotionally manipulate the audience into also feeling sad. After the confusion of processing that this actually happened I felt pretty disgusted, to a level which I’ve never felt after watching any media before.
Some other thoughts:
This show has 1 random comedic moment in each episode. They're all really weird and out of place.
The only upside of this season were Urie and Saiko. They're the only people who have a clear and understandable reasoning for what they do, however simple it may be. They share some good moments together and are the one thing that prevents this series from being a 1.
I don't remember ever watching a series that feels like the author cut out each panel in an actually good story, burned half of them and then shuffled the remaining ones in a random order. I'm not a manga reader but i've read that this adapts the manga at a breakneck pace, which explains a lot of the problems.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Aug 20, 2023
Tokyo Ghoul:re part 1 positively surprised me. I never even planned to watch it since I didn’t really care about S1 and disliked S2, but I’m very glad I did.
The biggest reason for this is that the characters in this show are likable, unlike the (borderline) psychopaths from the previous seasons. This meant that I actually cared about them and their interactions were very pleasant to watch. Even Urie, who had very harsh opinions about the actions of others, was likeable because you could actually understand his reasoning and why he felt that way. Haise is Kaneki minus the trademark ghoul psychopathy. Shirazu has to
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learn how to be a team leader and struggles with PTSD throughout the season. Saiko is my spirit animal. She’s adorable and automatically gets +100 likeability points for gaming on a PSP. We get a lot of wholesome SoL moments with the crew, which endears them to the viewer.
Some returning characters like Juuzou and especially Tsukiyama get more characterization this season, which enhances their characters and makes interactions involving them more interesting.
The story has big changes; In this season we follow the perspective of the CCG, which were until now the antagonists. This is a welcome change for me, since I rooted against the ghouls from early on in S1. S2 felt like one long constant fight scene, but thankfully that is toned down in this season and we get a better mix of fighting and story driven episodes. There are also some funny jokes, which are appropriately placed (i. e. not in the middle of a dramatic moment)
I enjoyed the change in animation style for this season. It looks very crisp. This seasons OP and ED were also the best in the series. The music/SFX in the next episode preview also made me want to watch the next episode.
Overall this was an unexpectedly great sequel to a series which had trudged in mediocrity up to this point.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Jun 27, 2023
I’ll be the first to admit that this show isn’t a masterpiece or anything close to it. But it makes up for that by generally just being fun and wholesome. This show doesn’t take itself very seriously. Which is a good thing, since, at its core, it’s just a generic isekai. This means that instead of some grand battle, you’ll just have Touya use Slip to defeat (and humiliate) his opponents and get back to more important matters, such as growing his harem. Speaking of his harem, their interactions throughout the show generate quite a few comedic situations. I rarely laugh when watching any sort
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of media, but this show got a few laughs out of me. The main plotline is advanced slightly, but it’s still of secondary importance. Did I forget to mention that this show also has mechs?
If you want to watch a lighthearted, funny and wholesome show, I’d recommend this. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a S3 announcement.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Jul 4, 2022
This series baffles me. It baffles me how an author is able to make a work this incoherent without it being a parody. I'll try to avoid spoiling anything in depth in this review, but I might touch on more general story beats.
By far the biggest problem in this series are the characters. Pretty much all of them are one-dimensional. Most of the supporting cast are fucked in the head (psychopath, deranged, rapist, pedophile or a combination of these traits). The rest of the characters is seemingly okay with the behaviour of these people.
All of the characters *constantly* make idiotic decisions. If I were
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to elaborate on this, I’d basically be recanting the script of the series. For an example, you can look at my forum post for episode 11. To sum it up, these choices include:
- Trusting a group of deranged psychopaths
- Trusting a person who tried to murder them a few hours earlier
- Sacrificing yourself for deranged psychopaths
- Not being able to recognize imminent danger / not having an ounce of self-preservation instinct.
- Generally doing dumb or bizarre things, given the circumstances at hand.
As you can guess, horrible things happen to them. Yet they don’t seem to learn a single thing from the whole ordeal. This makes it pretty hard to care about anything that happens to them, since they don’t really seem to care either.
The only one I didn’t dislike by the end is the first main character. Her personality is that she’s a socially awkward preteen/teen. This means that she doesn’t make many decisions and she doesn’t do anything outrageously stupid (that I can remember at least)
I also didn’t really mind the main guy, although a throwaway line seemed to imply that he doesn’t see anything wrong with strangling kittens. I couldn’t help but laugh at this within the context of this series.
The plot isn’t much better. Most of the story is extremely contrived (My favorite of these is characters randomly stumbling upon each other even though they’re strewn all over Japan) or relies on everyone being absolute idiots. There is also extreme plot armor. This isn’t even talking about the worldbuilding, which is also generally stupid.
The animation quality degrades over the season, but is serviceable. The one good thing about this series is the intro song.
I will say that it was pretty funny to watch due to some of the absurdity. (At one point telepathy is randomly introduced, for seemingly no reason other than steering a group of characters). The characters are so badly written, I often wondered if the author is an misanthropist, or if they just don’t interact with other people.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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Aug 31, 2021
*THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS*
Sorry for any grammar or spelling errors, English isn’t my first language.
This series is the pinnacle of ‘themes over substance’. It goes deep on the Nazi comparisons and the ‘racism = bad :(’ theme, but completely falls over itself in the execution phase.
STORY / WORLDBUILDING (2/10)
The story takes place in a country called San Magnolia which is at was with the Giad Empire. San Magnolia is inhabited by a race of people with blue eyes and hair, which are called Alba. They built a wall around their heartland to defend themselves from the ‘Legion’, the invading army.
In the war, both sides
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claim they use robots to fight. But in actuality, San Magnolians are comically racist and use people with different hair and eye colors, who built the wall and were forced to live outside of it, to fight inside of the robots. These people are called the 86. They are seen as livestock by the Alba. We follow a squad of these 86 led by their Captain Shin ‘Undertaker’ on the battlefield and Major Vladilena ‘Lena’ Milize inside the walls. When the main character Lena tries to inform the other Alba about this, she gets branded as a crazy person.
This already brings up a lot of questions. Why does nobody believe her? According to future episodes, the wall was built less than 10 years before the story takes place. Did everyone just forget there used to be other people in the country?
How many 86 are there? One of the characters mentions there are only children left. But the Alba know the war will last at least two more years. What are they planning to do when they all die? Why do the other countries not just offer to accept the 86 into their ranks? It’s explained that the 86 originally come from those countries. They would bring valuable information and equipment. Why do the 86 not rebel or just not fight? There are no guards at their camp and they have mechs. And no, the explanation in episode 7 doesn’t count. It just makes all of them seem extremely retarded.
There is also a weird side thread in this episode where they won’t receive reinforcements because they are an ‘execution squadron’ and are all meant to die. This doesn’t make sense, since the next episode they get sent out on an impossible mission where everyone will die anyway (atleast that’s what the military’s plan is). So giving them reinforcements would’ve sped up the killing of 86.
In episode 3 (I think) one of the side characters goes on a huge rant about how Lena doesn’t actually care about them, even though she tries to help them. Imagine if the Jews got mad at Schindler for helping them escape Nazi occupation.
There is also a really weird point about them not being allowed to use maps, which just seems counterintuitive for trying to win a war. I guess the Alba forgot that the 86 are defending them and they will all die if the 86 are killed.
There is basically no plot in the first 7 episodes. Those episodes mostly consist of random fights, random people dying and conversations about how awful the Alba are. By the 6th and 7th episode we learn that Shin can somehow telepathically communicate/listen to the Legion. Because apparently the robots have a human consciousness and they ingest the brains of dead people to repair/enhance themselves. Yeah, I don’t really understand it either.
In episode 9 Lena blatantly disobeys the military’s orders, yet faces no consequences for it. Very weird, given that it is basically an authoritarian state. The Legion also suddenly gains the ability to liquidize and bend metal.
The final two episodes are different from the rest, but are still filled with nonsense.
There were a ton of other problems I had while watching this show, but I can’t be bothered typing more of them out. The world and story is broken and made it impossible for me to enjoy this series. Something nonsensical happens pretty much every episode.
CHARACTERS (3/10)
Lena, her friend and Shin are the only actual characters in this show, with Lena being the only one who goes through a character arc. She starts off as being somewhat akin to a virtue signaler, but slowly learns that she can’t really help the 86 and is mostly powerless in the situation.
Shin’s only trait is that he wants to save his brother from having his consciousness uploaded into the Legion hivemind.
Her friend seems generally disinterested at first, but in episode 8 she teaches Lena about how she isn’t what she believes herself to be and that it’s impossible for them to change the situation and help the 86 by themselves. I really liked this scene at first. But then she gets mad that that Lena delayed the deaths of the 86 (not caused, but delayed!!!), says she hates her and doesn’t want to speak to her again, which was just weird to watch. Later on she gets a slight course correction, but the damage had already been done.
Her uncle and any other Alba who get to speak are all Josef Mengele-levels of cartoonishly evil. They are also extremely stupid. This is demonstrated in episode 8, where her uncle explains how the deaths of the 86 will be covered up after the war ends, to prevent San Magnolia from being deemed an oppressor. Their solution? Don’t bury them. Yeah, I’m sure other countries won’t notice that all of your non-ethnic population vanished into thin air without an explanation.
The rest of the squadron are all ‘literal nobodies’. I can’t even remember the names of most of them. None of them have even a sliver of personality and I didn’t even realize that most of them died until they depart with five people (three of whom I didn’t even know the name of) at the end of episode 8. One of them gets a sliver of character development in episode 10, but it’s too little too late. Their freight transport robot has more personality than they have.
No one aside from Lena has a clear goal.
ART / ANIMATION (7/10)
The animation is good, with the mechs and battle droids standing out the most in terms of animation quality. The mech design looks a bit stupid at times though.
SOUND (5/10)
The opening song was unique and somewhat enjoyable to listen to. I can’t remember any of the other music that played during the show. I’m not sure where else to put this, but the subtitles seem weirdly race-baity at times. Might just be Crunchyroll’s fault.
ENJOYMENT (3/10)
Most of the scenes were so boring that I defaulted back to thinking about how broken the world is more often than I can count. I really wanted to like this series, since it’s a war/military story (which I REALLY like and was my highest rated genre before watching this). Unfortunately, this series focuses WAY too much on its themes and emotional moments while neglecting all the other aspects of a successful story. Due to this, I didn’t feel anything during any of the ‘emotional’ moments. By the end of the last episode it was still unclear what direction the show wanted to go in.
I see themes like spices. If you prepare even a decent meal and add them, they greatly enhance the experience. But if you serve me a piece of shit with spices on it, it will still be a piece of shit.
FINAL VERDICT: 3/10
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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