- Last OnlineAug 30, 6:08 AM
- GenderNon-Binary
- BirthdayJun 25, 1991
- LocationUK
- JoinedJul 16, 2011
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Mar 10, 2023
This story has great promise and stumbles on every great building block.
Plot:
Super Scifi [Watch]!
The scifi is mostly untouched besides making the MC overpowered without much more than 'super science watch!' as an explanation. She learn about natural events, the location of people or objects are, or certain knowledge/interests characters have.
The MC's soldier past life has no bearing on her strength, personality or adaptiveness, which is most disappointing. As a chronically ill person, I was pleased to see a once-healthy soldier trapped in the body of a weak kid, and I wanted to see how their identity and skills might be maintained or grow with her
...
new condition. Clearly, my mild interest held more thought than the author's development somehow... The worst part is that the author tried to work on these two subjects but did so in a lazy, unconvincing way. The story indicates that she's able to adapt and survive (and adapt), which presumably is meant to be linked to her soldier history, but instead, all evidence of her adaption is her 'super science watch!'.
[Negative] Adaption Stats.
Her adaptive skills are so bad they're actually backwards. Imagine being an in-debt soldier used to scraping by, then becoming super wealthy to the point one piece of clothing could buy a house. Imagine getting so used to being wealthy that you think nothing of spending money worth multiple houses and then being upset you're poor and confused about how you could ever survive without money.
If she was content with being poor because she was used to it, I could forgive her overspending (some people don't learn how to handle money if they've never had it) but I don't think a captain would have such little future planning for one.
[Bribelical] Respect
This leads to my second point; she acts super spoilt like she is used to being rich and manipulating people. I don't count that as an adaption to the richness, and I think most people around her would find it obvious, brazen, and embarrassing to just throw her money at people to gain lackeys. Especially if she does so to the point she keeps running out of money. But we're supposed to believe everyone is just so in love with her money they have no concerns about her leadership skills, forward planning, priorities, respect for them etc. All that makes me think of is a child who was so used to having money they never learnt how to handle people besides handing out money. It doesn't make me think of a competent adult captain who is now adapting to a new world with limited resources besides financial...
Characters:
Romance
The attempt at a slow-burn romance between the two characters is lacklustre. I think it tried to go with the 'opposites attract, but also they have some unexpected similarities', but they're basically the same personality at different volumes. It's actually interesting to me how similar they are but are coded so differently due to physique (gender, stature, eye shape lol). They're both unsociable (despite having loyal friends), selfish, blunt and competent. They'd be more similar (and probably have better chemistry) if the story didn't forget that the woman is a soldier, much like the guy is. It'd make more sense for an adaptive, scifi soldier to calculate his strength into their plans and work to make him a strong ally. Instead, she gets scared every time she's reminded of his strength and doesn't know what to do with the information.
[Bad] Bad Guys. (Really, Really Bad)
No nuance to the bad guys so you don't have to work hard to know who to route for. No one seems to represent complex ideologies. Want to kill someone because they're cramping your style? Checks out; you're platinum blonde... I mean, evil. :)
Overall:
I feel like this falls into the reincarnation genre I've been avoiding and I don't really get the point. The story would work fine with a fantasy woman having memory loss this double death, and unilateral body swap nonsense (like how is she alive in a corpse?). Her poorly established original personality has no bearing on the current time besides the excuse to have her shun traditional femininity and misogyny and be a comparatively unrivalled badass for wearing trousers. These things could have been accomplished without the trope, and part of the expectations are dropped (like this physically unwell ex-soldier not bothering to engage in fights).
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Dec 3, 2021
(Sorry for the wall of text, I can't format this reviews :'( ) When watching this I had the strong question of 'what is the purpose of this new series?'. It's not a remake, and there's no real need to retell the story, when the nature of Higurashi is revisiting the same story over and over until you have all angles of it. I figured maybe we'd finally get a link between the Higurashi universe and the Umineko one, but... no, we didn't really get that. What we instead got, was them bringing to the forefront questions we left the original series with, tempting us
...
that we might get an answer, then just... not answering it, or worse providing such a poorly thought out vague idea of an answer that it brings up more questions and seems to be inconsistent with the world. One of the biggest changes is in Rika and Satoko's personalities. They still talk the same, and act mostly the same, but their intentions and priorities are shifted a lot, and the explanations given are pretty bad. I found it hard to empathise with either of them, not only because they're acting horribly in most of this, but also their justifications were pathetic. The whole 'I'm laughing like an evil person, so now my justifications behind my actions are suddenly extremely 2D and vaguely sensual' is just so old and dry. There's a lot to work with in this story that could make the projection work, but the explanation the story gives for going from point A to B is incredibly unsatisfactory. The original series was great because, especially with the game and books, you could effectively keep notes and realise innocuous scenes from earlier are actually crucial hints. In this new series, it feels like they're trying to hint at things we already have confirmed in the original, while skipping over the burning questions. I slogged through this series hoping I'd get SOMETHING, and it just never paid off. If you cut out all of the scenes that have happened in previous series and only showed the new information or content, I feel like you'd only get 1 sentence per episode, maybe a drawn out exposition scene later on that doesn't actually tell you anything new, but reviews the information in a new setting... But that's not worth an entire new series. I'm now on my quest to watch the 2021 series and my question remains; what is the purpose of this? My answer right now is 'money'. They're just making bank off of a cult following and hoping if they tease us enough, and don't answer questions we'll leave confused, think the confusion is a sign it's so smart, and feel satisfied with such little sustenance.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Apr 15, 2020
Why does this even exist?
Characters:
The art style is ok, mostly like the old series, which is fine I guess but I felt like I couldn't connect to the characters as I could barely tell them apart. I kept going 'oh I know who this is based on from the old series' as they all felt like replacements for the original cast, sometimes both down to personality and hair style/colour. It felt lazy or like the author/artists really struggled to come up with something unique.
They were also really boring and 2D feeling and I never connected with any of them or care if they made friends
...
again or figured out a rumour or whatever.
Art:
A highlight of the art being the same, is the psychedelic, textured, multimedia, beautiful scenery you get in the witches scenes were present. Which honestly is the highlight of this spin off. They were similar enough but each one was unique and you could tell a lot of work went into it. It was a pleasure to see.
Sadly it wasn't enough to make me finish the series.
Music:
Was alright I guess, don't remember it much and it didn't stand out as much as the original soundtrack to me. I also found the opening and ending physically painful (I have noise sensitivity to high pitches). Not that they were objectively bad, they just didn't agree with me and didn't really feel like they added anything but fluff to the show. I remember nothing else about the music.
I just didn't get why this existed. Did the author want this? I thought the author was already done before the last film, so it feels uncomfortable to continue with a finished story.
And I don't know what this story has to say but the hook is resting on the success of the previous one, that's how it felt anyway.
Just WHY?
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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