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Dec 6, 2022
Birdie Wing is a mediocre show that attempts to straddle the line between romance and action/comedy and fails to excel at either, petering out somewhere around the halfway point of the season.
The two main characters – Eve, an underworld golfer that makes money on shady bets, and Aoi, a high-society optimist who’s simply better than any of her peers – meet through coincidental circumstances through mutual love of the game and then proceed to fail to develop their characters any further in any way. They’re already at “full power,” as it is, having their perfect shots that easily win them every golf game they're in,
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and have no way to grow even when occasional opportunities present themselves. An intentional lack of knowledge about the courses they play, opponents they're up against, or even the golfing formats they’re playing is seen as reaffirmation of the characters’ positive traits – “that’s our Eve, so stubborn, that's how she plays golf” – instead of what I saw it as; a willful, boring, and frankly increasingly irritating lack of development that failed to create any tension or provide any new opportunities.
What’s really galling about all this is that the anime starts out reasonably strong. The golf is treated almost shonen, with named “attacks” to the swings, ridiculous special effects, and results that defy physics like breaking through a tree branch on a swing but the ball still going straight towards the hole. It’s stupid, but there’s a type of fun to that too. But just when you get used to how silly it all is, these elements faded away. Eve stops slamming the ball through the boxcars of a moving train and starts just, you know, hitting it kind of hard on a normal fairway. “Oooh wow that went 260 yards!” doesn’t have quite the same impact as her previous shenanigans. The same consequence happens with Eve’s underworld plotline, with her having to win impromptu bets that felt like they had real stakes. But those just end at some point and she fills out the rest of the show just doing well at official school tournaments. Birdie Wing tried to sell me with its shenanigans, and it succeeded to an extent, but then seemingly got bored of telling that kind of story, to its detriment.
With all these elements gone, all that was left was the yuribait relationship between Eve and Aoi to try to carry the second half of the show. Aoi clearly was serious about wanting to be around Eve, but it wasn’t ever all that clear to me if Eve felt the same way or is just hanging around her because Aoi is good at golf, and she wants to fight strong opponents. Either way, this wasn’t the focus of the story, which instead was about golf played straight. I hope you like watching doing the same drive over and over again in slightly different tournaments, episode after episode. “Blue bulletto!” loses its impact after the 7th or 8th time.
The show just unceremoniously ends 13 episodes in, in the middle of a tournament, in the middle of a hole even, after introducing some serious golfing opponents upcoming on the schedule. And that's it, show over. There’s no tension, cliffhanger, or resolution whatsoever. It’s like the show just went on commercial but never came back. Ridiculous. I have no idea why they thought such a non-ending was appropriate. Was there a problem with the budget, with the pacing? Or was this intentional? If they show’s creators believe they have created a strong enough scenario such that I am on the edge of my seat waiting for season two then they are sorely mistaken.
Also the opening song sucks. It's really, really bad. I had to mute it every single time. I've never disliked an OP this much. The rest of the sound design is fine but whew yeah points lost there.
Birdie Wing is kind of pretty and bright and it makes me think of a nice, sunny day. I don’t hate it. But it feels like the kind of show that I continued watching just to knock another one off my list. I could have dropped this easily halfway through and missed out on nothing of importance.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Sep 20, 2021
If you took one look at Vivy and assumed it was some sort of funny idol anime about cute girls doing singing and stuff, don’t worry too much: the first few minutes of Vivy’s first episode will show you where their marketing sort of failed and your expectations were misled. And thank God for that. Because the actual show was nothing like I thought it would be and was so much the better for it.
Don’t get me wrong; it has cute girls. In addition to Vivy herself there are five or six supporting women as well, and they’re all very cute. It has singing; the
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singing is a key thread in the entire plotline. And there are funny moments in the form of the occasional visual gag or snarky line. But Vivy straight up never tells a joke, for at its core it’s a very serious action drama, giving off vibes like a combination of Stein’s Gate and Asimov’s Foundation novels. Given how much I love both of those stories then its no surprise I was sept into Vivy immediately.
Vivy’s basic premise is that Vivy herself is a very primitive AI songstress robot that is tasked by another AI, the sass-talking and equally lovable Matsumoto, to stop an impending war between Ais and humanity using Matsumoto’s knowledge of the future. As events unfold over the decades, Vivy and Matsumoto try to intervene and lead history to a more favorable, less bloody outcome. All this is pretty hard on Vivy, who’s main and only purpose at design was to sing. It’s like if someone gave a Disney animatronic from the Pirates of the Caribbean intelligence and told it to save the world, while also telling it that giving a master-class recitation of “Yo Ho! A Pirate’s Life for Me!” was the most important thing it could ever do.
Ultimately, I’m not sure Vivy’s message had much meaning. Being a show about humans and AIs it covers expected ground – what it means to be human, what it means to be an AI, where those two lines intersect. It’s well-written but not particularly unique. Thankfully Vivy isn’t resting on that alone, with a lot of its charm coming from the likeability of its main characters, the spectacle of its story, and the slickness of its execution.
But the less I talk about the story, and the less you read before just diving in, the better. It’s a great ride that covers a lot of ground. Some of the developments were predictable but few in their entirety and there were plenty of shocking turns. And – and I do want to stress this – it’s a complete story. This feels like a rarity to me in a world flooded with seasonal shows where the man never really gets the girl and the adventurer never really defeats the demon king. Vivy is 13 episodes long, none of them wasted, and it builds to a gorgeous conclusion.
Graphically and audially Vivy is amazing. The set pieces are beautiful and the action scenes well-paced, well-choreographed, and just a joy to watch. And thankfully for a show with a songstress main character the songs and vocals are top notch as well, being used effectively as set pieces and plot points. Both add strongly to the enjoyment of the show.
Two things to watch out for. I don’t consider them downsides, but you’ll notice.
First, the nature of Vivy’s storyline means that things change on a very large scale. The scene changes, characters come and go, time moves on. Very few shows involve a large amount of time happening – nearly all of them seem condensed into a few months, maybe a school year at most – so it was a bit of a shock to wrap my head around years or decades going by so casually. This led to the storylines feeling almost episodic – two episodes with these events, three with those. These storylines are part of the greater narrative, but it does mean you need to move on from scenes and characters more or less as you were starting to really enjoy them.
But the second, far bigger disclaimer is that this show just has zero chill.
If you looked at Vivy’s description, thought it was a light idol show, and found yourself in the mood for exactly that, then I’m afraid you picked up the wrong show today, my friend. Vivy’s a very well-paced show but when it punches at you it does not pull those punches one bit. Some moments hit unexpectedly hard and out of nowhere. This, combined with the serious tone of the story – there’s little humor, and next to no fanservice – means that Vivy is not an all-purpose and all-audiences show. Not everyone is going to like it, and its not for everyone at all times. If you had a bad day and you’re looking for something to perk you up, look somewhere else for tonight.
But remember it when you’re feeling up for it, because its one hell of a ride that you don’t want to miss. I don’t give out 10’s very often, but at some point halfway through I realized that if I wasn’t giving this a 10 then I was doing disservice to both Vivy as well as my own tastes. I just flat out loved this from beginning to end. It’s not without flaws and there are absolutely things that could be executed better, buy by any reasonable metric I couldn’t ask for a whole lot more.
Truly the most bittersweet thing about Vivy is that it in fact does conclude. When it’s all over it ends with a feeling of completeness. I have no idea how they could write a Vivy 2, or if they even should, or if I found out they were if I would be happy about such a thing. Honestly I think I’m pretty happy with this one having the purity of a self-contained story, with it all over when it ends. But if for some reason we do hear word of a season 2, I will definitely keep an eye on it. I’m not sure if they could catch lightning in the bottle so well again, but they did it once so I'm willing to keep that hope alive.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Sep 20, 2021
If you watched the first Madoka show and then were thoroughly disappointed with Magireco's first season (and hey, I'm with you,) there are two things you should know:
1) the first episode of season 2 has basically nothing to do with Magireco. It is a beautifully animated scenario of Madoka, Sayaka, and Homura fighting a witch and all three get lots of love. Even if you are dead set on skipping Magireco, you should pick this one episode up; I guarantee you'll like it.
But 2) season 2 of Magireco is just far better than season 1.
Being better than season 1 is, of course, an extremely low
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bar, but I gotta give credit where its due: it seems the team took a lot of feedback about what wasn't liked about season 1 - namely, being a character-focused show where the characters just weren't all that good - and instead focused on the storyline season 1 started as well as the unique additions to Magireco in the form of Uwasas and Doppels. The characters are (sadly) still there, but the focus is far more on the antagonists' plans and what the heroes collectively are going to do about it. A lot of those additions and focuses are interesting. And, don't worry - in true Madoka fashion it gets very dark at times.
If anything the team almost seems to have taken complaints about the characters to the extreme, because season 2 introduces a new focus character: Kuroe. Kuroe appeared as a generic friend to Iroha in season 1's first episode 1 and then literally never again, so her getting the focus as a new main character was jarring to me, especially since Kuroe is a conspicuously weak fighter and has a subdued personality. It's not really clear to me why Kuroe's even in the show - the story could have been told without her, clearly, and nothing that happened to her made me endeared to her or rooting for her success. Frankly it almost seems like giving up on Iroha and Yachiyo somewhat. My dislike of those characters aside, a truly odd design choice.
By the season's middle, a single new character starts to not matter as much because there begins to be just so much going on. If you thought season 1 had too many characters just imagine how messy things get when Madoka'sc ast join the story along with seeing things from the antagonists' eyes. There's something like 20 characters in motion - Madoka's 5, Magireco's 5, 5 or 6 antagonists, and more or less all of season 1's support characters like Mitama, Momoko, and Rena. We bop back and forth between four or five concurrent storylines for a good number of episodes, checking in on how people are doing here and there. The visual design of the characters makes them easy to keep track of, but it's just a lot going on.
"A lot going on" describes a lot of the show, and also pinpoints season 2's two biggest weaknesses.
First, it's only 8 episodes, and the pacing is just brutally fast. With so many characters, fights, and revelations jammed into that space there is little time to understand what's going. Things that happen are rarely explained in detail and even the fight scenes feel like they're sped up to 2x speed. Some action scenes have multiple cuts a second, with some elements being on screen for a few frames. I found myself thinking "Wow, that was cool, too bad I couldn't see it" during many of the battles in the first half over my frustration of how fast they were...
... and more literally in the second half, as clearly the animation budget and development time just simply ran out. The first couple episodes are movie-quality gorgeous and a fair bit of the show is fine enough but in the second half the corner-cutting gets conspicuous. I'm not one to complain about the occasional funny derpface in the background, but when entire fight scenes are not shown and merely implied from who seems to have won or lost, or when the camera transitions to a still frame or a symbol during large parts of the dialogue, it becomes pretty obvious that something's gone horribly wrong at the studio.
I'm complaining about this type of thing in season 2 and not season 1 because unlike 1 I found 2 not a complete waste of time. Despite its flaws, following crazy scheme of the antagonists was compelling and entering the weird, surreal world of Madoka is always a treat when I can get a bit invested. It almost feels like the dev team listened to my complaints about over-reliance on boring characters and not leveraging what made Magireco unique and tried to give me a product that would satisfy me. I respect it.
But this brings me to the hardest part of the review: the recommendation.
Easy part out of the way first: if you watched season 1, watch season 2. You put in your time to be introduced to the characters and start the story, so season 2 is basically a reward for that punishment. But if you haven't seen season 1? That's the tough one. I honestly don't think I can recommend season 2 highly enough to justify having to watch season 1: 2's pretty good, but 1's pretty awful, and that's just a lot of hours for a middling payoff.
And season 2 completely does not stand alone. You can't simply get a summary of season 1 and be good to go. There's just too many characters and too many plotlines. Season 2 expects you to remember who is friends with who, who is mad at who, who was friends with who but had a falling out, who was friends with who but had a falling out but sort of regrets it and wishes they were friends again, and who the hell Kuroe even is. It's not just the middle part of a trilogy - it's the middle chapter of a book that hasn't ended yet. Despite the first episode sort of being an introduction to Madoka's lore, the events of season 2 are so heavily tied into season 1's that even as someone who actually watched season 1 I was pretty lost a lot of the time. I just can't expect a total newcomer to the IP to have any fun if they choose to start here.
So, you know, you can do what you want on this one. I got nothin'.
For some reason there's going to be a season 3 pretty soon, rumored to be a mere 4 episodes. lol. I don't know what to say anymore with the development and pacing of this show. I'll watch that too _ gotta see how it all ends, I guess. I already know I'm not in a master-class classic here, but let's all hope it will be an enjoyable end to the ride.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Nov 7, 2020
So people know where I'm coming from, this was my first exposure to this universe. I've since watched both Madoka Magica's first show, its movie, and even played a little of the game before it recently shut down. This wasn't great, because the show sure as hell expected me to have seen at least one of those and be aware of things like soul gems, witches, and the truth behind magical girls. I was able to watch episodes in a rudimentary way, following characters on screen through their actions, but, knowing little of what was really going on, its small moments entirely lost on me.
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this way, my review will be very different than many of the other ones on here because I didn't come into this having experienced the original show in all of its greatness and thus becoming horribly disappointed with this secondary offering. Instead, I just watched a sort of crummy show that didn't really stand alone.
Magia Record largely follows Iroha, the most blankest of blank slates, and Yachiyo, a veteran bitch, as they explore a city where rumors have begun to manifest into hostile monsters, fighting these surreal physical forms as magical girls. This is a pretty great idea. The rumors people spread and how those took form were fascinating. However, the show is character-focused, not story or action-focused, with the combat regulated into monster-of-the-every-other-week in favor of the rest of the time being attempts at the emotional heartstrings. And the two main leads just aren’t compelling enough characters to carry this at all. Iroha's main storyline is searching for a sister she can't remember - and we, as the audience, never met and don't know either - and seems hell bent on never expressing anything remotely close to an emotion, while Yachiyo just remains unlikeable and nasty for the entire show.
Things don't really improve as they add three more girls to the cast; none of the new girls really have much to add to the narrative, barely talk to eachother, and didn't compel me to care about their stories all that much. I briefly became interested when the last girl, the shy Sana, gave an account of parental neglect so over-the-top that I wondered it if she was either intentionally lying or otherwise deeply mislead, but after getting into an argument about it with people that played the game everyone came to the conclusion that I was just wrong. I also liked an energetic girl named Momoko that was briefly in a few episodes, but she dropped out of the story early on, regulated to a minor character at best.
The show's setting, art, sound, and general mythos is strong. It's a distressing place that I enjoyed learning about, and the rumors themselves made interesting puzzle-like investigations for the heroes to look into. It's just such a shame that I cared very little about the actual characters looking into them.
At some point my confusion over the show reached a boiling point about 2/3 of the way through and I had to watch the first show to get the answers that Magia Record wasn't going to give me, and I loved that. Which only makes this look worse, really. While I do want to try to review Magia Record as it stands alone, when compared with Madoka Magica it was lacking on all major fronts – characters and their interactions, depth of story, and overall escalation and hype.
The story, as it was, ended on a massive cliffhanger with our heroes in danger and the villains’ plot coming to fruition. I hear it's getting a season two sooner or later. I have a friend that's into this, so I'll watch it with him, but I'm not exactly chomping at the bit with anticipation. Well, can’t be a whole lot worse, I suppose.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Aug 23, 2020
It's not great.
I've played the Azur Lane mobile game since fall 2018 and watched this anime develop with wariness. It always felt like the type of game that wouldn't adapt well into a show. How do you tell a coherent story about a game with five hundred characters that spans 8 or 9 nations and a huge period of time? The answer isn't only that you don't; it's that you don't seriously try, apparently.
I think the biggest failing of the Azur Lane anime is that it tries to be everything at the same time, all smashed awkwardly into twelve episodes. It tries to be a
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character-driven show, focusing on Enterprise, Belfast, and Akagi - but constantly introduces a dozen "hey look its that girl from the gacha!" characters an episode. There's very serious discussions of the ramifications of war and its affect on combatants, but it's after a beach episode with a bunch of young girls running around in swimsuits and making sand castles. There's a reasonably good two-episode arc about infiltrating an enemy nation and a harrowing escape that's followed up by (I kid you not, this actually happens) a big-boobed character being insecure about her body type and finally coming to terms with the fact that breasts of all shapes and sizes are beautiful. I know they wanted to sell uncensored blu-ray copies, but come ON.
There's occasional moments of greatness. A highlight was a tense standoff between two massive navies in and around a flooded, destroyed city. If the show had been willing to tell a serious story it may have worked. But the constant juxtaposition between doom-and-gloom PTSD and borderline softcore porn ruined both sides. It was too slow to be a proper slice-of-life, and too goofball to work as either a serious or an action show. My best guess is that it wanted to tell a serious story but was worried that its audience would want more boobs and slapstick and so we ended up with this mess.
If anyone watched this, or otherwise had a run-in with it, I have two things to say to you:
First, my condolences. Like I said, it's not good.
But second, don't let this... thing... turn you off from the mobile game. It's better written and is ridiculously generous compared to every other gacha I've found, and gets a lot of new content. The idea of characters fighting these large-scale battles is an inherently interesting one, and the game acts it out far better than the show did.
The best thing I can say about this is that the devs know it wasn't good and are working on a totally different, apparently slice-of-life anime. Much like with the game itself they seem to be open to feedback and fan wants, so maybe - just possibly - we'll get a better Azur Lane show out of this mess on some distant day.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Aug 23, 2020
I'll start by saying I haven't read the webtoon, if that helps understand where I'm coming from.
I watched season 1 from beginning to end, one episode a week, and I never quite knew what to make of it. This is, best I can tell, the exact experience the storyline wanted me to have: confusion bordering on and occasionally spilling over to bored indifference.
The setting is a bad combination of over-structured and under-explained. Characters are climbing the Tower of God to attain one of those vague anime rewards at the top. Why is there a tower? Why does it have the ability to give rewards? Why
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are other characters maintaining this system? What's going on in the rest of the world outside the tower? The show is hoping that these questions are compelling enough to generate interest, but at the same time flatly ignored all of them and degenerated into the aforementioned over-structuring in the form of floor challenges. Every arc seems to be the same - there's some new floor of the tower, complete with complicated, malicious, and meaningless rules, and a few dozen characters complete to try to win. A few characters betray eachother, most play 4 or 5D chess in the typical unsatisfying anime way, and eventually everyone comes out of it more or less alive, killing time until the next little game.
A huge and relatively uninteresting cast offers something for everyone, but only a little. They all have their own little backstories but none of it matter. None of them are driving the story foreward - the tower itself is driving the characters, who in typical battle royale fashion squabble and complain and make little friendships and just get dragged along.
The most interesting dynamic is between the two main characters, Bam and Rachel, but only because it fairly accurately represented a deeply diseased one-sided relationship. Rachel is a girl that wants things her way; sometimes she's nice to Bam, sometimes she's cruel. Bam is too infatuated to hold Rachel's awful behavior against her. In this sense it's very realistic, very accurate to bad relationships seen in real life, and thus a little unique in anime. But I can't say I'm rooting for either of them in any way. I certainly don't want them to work out their problems. I can say at the least that it was extremely satisfying to hate Rachel because I've known people like this and been a victim of their awful behavior, and if she ever gets what's coming to her - preferably in the form of a gruesome death - that would be a highlight of the show.
And, really, that's the problem with this whole show - there's nobody I wanted to succeed, or even would have blinked twice if they died. Regardless of their backstories and personalities, they have no goal other than "climb the tower", ie stay on screen. If they got killed, they'd be replaced by another wacky walking cliche with a randomly generated backstory that wouldn't be relevant in the slightest, and the struggle to climb the tower would go on just as scheduled.
So. The characters don't drive the story, and the questions about the tower aren't explained and aren't showing any signs of being explained. I struggled to find a hook to latch onto for the entirety of the season - some reason to care, some question they were exploring. And nothin'. Just awkward fight scenes undermined by awkward conclusions, and dozens of squabbling kids that were entirely replaceable.
Maybe in season two it will get to the point of all of this. But, then again, maybe not. And it's hard to muster the enthusiasm to be interested either way.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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