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Jan 22, 2025
As someone who has watched more Isekai anime, willingly or otherwise, than I'd care to admit, this particular Crunchyroll-funded piece of garbage is truly the bottom of the bottom of the barrel.
Great Isekai anime use their settings and premise to elevate their storytelling and challenge their audience while using the other world to say something meaningful about our world.
Good Isekai anime feature a world and characters worth getting invested in.
Passable Isekai anime stay away from questionable plot points and lean into the ridiculousness of their settings, premise, and characters.
Normal bad Isekai anime have animation that doesn't look unfinished.
Master of Ragnarok fails on all counts.
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I acknowledge as a certified trashman that garbage anime, guilty pleasures and the like, do indeed have their place. I implore you to please find garbage that respects you and your time more than this agonizingly slow, incest-obsessed, unfinished piece of work with one of the most agonizingly irritating main characters in the entire genre.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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Jan 22, 2025
I love this series, but as a source material reader, admittedly I'm fairly biased. This story just has the sauce, its characters, despite their number, are all widely distinct and interesting, the MC is one of the best MCs in all of romcom history, and it takes on a wacky over-the-top approach to storytelling that perfectly fits the story's tone and characters' personalities.
Commendable even more so, is that the anime adaptation loses none of that sauce in the transition. The story is just as, if not more over-the-top and crazy than its source material while maintaining and occasionally expanding upon the genuine moments of connection
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between our MC and the girls who appear in this season.
I give this show a 10 not because it's for everyone, and not because the anime is particularly ascendant compared to its peers, but because it took a 10/10 manga and gave it the adaptation every manga deserves.
Well done.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Jan 22, 2025
I doubt I need to explain to anyone why this movie is so good, but I'm putting this here to make sure I can reference my own thoughts later.
The truly striking thing about Deep Blue is how well it models the main character's mental breakdown over the course of the story. We've all had to, at one point or another, reckon with making big decisions that affect our lives in major ways that you simply cannot forsee prior to making them. Showing the main character's conflict as an alternate, spiteful, bitter depiction of who she could've been makes the conflict well conveyed and personal to
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the audience.
The creative direction in so many scenes here are just fantastic. The deafening silence as our main character has to act out a scene of sexual abuse, the raw emotion of the actors cuts out and is replaced with the silent murmurs and shuffling of the production crew. It gives the audience no choice but to stew in their own thoughts about how miserable it must make our main character.
The deterioration of the main character's psyche is also brilliantly done. By the climax, you simply cannot assume that any of what you're seeing is real, even if a scene just consists of an otherwise innocuous conversation.
This film is brilliant. Maybe I'll move it down to a 9 later, but as of right now this is the best piece of anime media I've seen.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Feb 13, 2024
I am hugely invested in telling people that this movie is actually good, so I'm going to tell a story about how I discovered this movie.
As part of an (ill-advised) attempt to make a comprehensive isekai tier list, I decided to sit down with some friends to watch every piece of SAO media available to me in as close to one sitting as I could get. This was the last piece of media I watched after finishing Ordinal Scale (I didn't realize it was before Alicization. Whoops) and was so checked out of the end of that movie that the bar of expectations was on
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the floor for this one.
Cue my surprise when half an hour in, I realize I want to go get something to drink but don't feel like I can because I'm too invested in what's happening onscreen.
SAO did that? Really?
I have no nostalgia for this series, I got into anime early in college. So when I sat down to watch this, I took in all the ugly plot-hole ridden mess that was SAO Seasons 1 and (to a lesser extent) 2. By this point I expected little out of the series, but this movie gripped me in a way nothing that day had even come close to doing.
First, the elephant in the room. The SAO Progressive Aria movie is very loosely adapted from the light novel of the same name, and this movie take many liberties in adapting that material. Though a handful of scenes and themes remain from that novel, the first entire half of this movie was fabricated for the sake of this movie. This is objectively a bad adaptation of its source material, and if you go into this looking for that, you will be disappointed.
I was not, however, and having since read the novel, I've come to the conclusion that the movie tells a better overall story.
What SAO always lacked, in my opinion, was the proper worldbuilding and time to flesh out its death game setting. How people act when put in a game environment under extremely high stress, and how people cope with that. This movie has that in SPADES, all through the eyes of our POV character, Asuna Yuuki.
This movie is told through the eyes of Asuna as it tells an alternate point of view of getting through episodes one and two of the Aincrad arc of SAO S1. To that end, Asuna is far from the confident, melancholic badass swordswoman we see in episode two, quite the opposite really. This movie tells the story of both how she learned the necessary skills to survive in SAO's world, how she ends up in the melancholic, doom-and-gloom state she is in episode two, and how she overcomes those things to find renewed purpose. It's more character work than we've ever gotten for the main cast outside of the Mother's Rosaria arc of SAO II, and by a very very long shot.
To that end, many of the characters we know and love(?) from SAO are recontextualized to make them fit better in a story about Asuna's growth, and to give them personal stakes in the story of their own. It recontextualizes beta testers, the role they played in SAO, and makes their misunderstood hero status more complicated by the end of the movie. There is a surprising amount of subtlety here if you look for it.
The greatest thing this movie does, though, is make Aincrad truly scary again. Trash mobs are legitimate threats. Early in the movie we see a group of players brutally hacked to death because they opened a rigged chest. Our main characters are constantly in danger of being overrun by strong monsters, or hordes of trash mobs that matter so much more because there is no respawning. This game makes you feel the dread of looking at another player, watching them crystalize and knowing they're gone. It's absolutely the thing SAO needed most and we got SO LITTLE of it in the original series.
This movie is everything I personally wanted SAO to be. It's not carrying deep messages about the human spirit, no. But it's so much more emotionally engaging than anything the main series has put out. I highly recommend this movie to anyone who was disappointed in the original SAO, if you're like me than this movie was exactly what you're looking for.
9/10
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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