Back to sRoy's Profile sRoy's Profile

An anime which is the epitome of the writers thinking shock value, nonsensical tragedies are better than happy endings or in fact, a decent well thought out payoff in line with the narrative of the whole series. Sitting through a 26 episode drag for a simple shock value ending is just plain ridiculous. One of the hallmarks of a good story and indeed a good anime is the simple idea that there is a payoff - characters go on a journey because there is something that happens at the end that justifies the character and vicariously speaking, the audience going on said journey.

But the writers ... of this piece of trash had a better idea - of subverting the expectations of everyone watching the show in such a preposterous fashion that Occam's Razor suggests that in writing this anime, they created decent characters without having a clue how to have a pay-off. The finale is so horrendous and lackluster that they might as well have not written the anime to begin with. Sad endings are one thing, if they are in line with a well-built narrative. Not because it just comes out of the blue and the writers just thought it would be cool.

Trust me. The mini-rant that I just went on is justified. This anime is a decent 6/10-star anime with a -5 star ending. Spare yourself and just watch something else.

Toaru Majutsu no Index has so much wasted potential, it's literally criminal. It does such a tremendous job world-building and creating atleast partially interesting characters - and for what? Just to whittle it all away with jokes that seldom land and bland stories. There are things that really do work:

1) Misaka's tsundere chemistry with Touma
2) The fact that they don't blather endlessly about a character, and running the well dry in a single episode
3) The world building and most of the characters
4) Few of the stories

And there is a LOT that doesn't work:

1) The bland and generic stories
2) A lack of any comprehensive motivation ... for anything Touma, or anyone else for that matter, does
3) Touma's preaching - one of the most annoying things in this anime
4) The silliness even when the story literally calls for seriousness
5) The fan service - the anime is written for some 15 year old kid and that's all it is at times
6) There being no point to Index being in the anime beyond the first few episodes

I so badly wanted to like this anime and even though I'm told it gets better in later parts or seasons, I have no idea how to get through them. For all it's bluster, it does very little to make you want to watch anything beyond this. But I do understand that I am not it's target demo - 15 year olds are.

I tried to watch this thing, I really did. But once you go through half the series with the characters being as shallow as a small puddle, you don't really have much to go through the series on. A decent example would be imagine someone tried to remake Trigun with mediocrity dripping in every single department. There isn't a single thing that makes you like the characters. At best you could call them one dimensional, at best. The story is barely able to hold itself together - I mean imagine this one episode, a group of people in the desert who skin people alive. You ... get visuals with skinned human bodies hanging like slaughtered cattle and the team behind this gem make it as interesting as grass growing.

It's not like I didn't want to like this anime, I did. It's hard to get English subbed anime on Netflix in my region. But my god, who exactly did the team think their target demographic was when they were making this? How low can your standards be if you chose to like this one.

Give it a miss. And to anyone looking to repeat this, if you're gonna copy Trigun with no imagination whatsoever, please don't. Spare us fans.

*Spoilers*

I contemplated on how best to summarize this review for what seems like an exceedingly long time. It falls somewhere between the "Fate of anticlimactic ends", "Deus ex machina all day everyday" and the "Fate with the writer who dropped out of a literature degree after learning one literary mechanism - the anti-climax". It's Fate/Stay Night's less popular mass market cousin (twice removed).

I mean rarely have I seen an anime with untapped potential with so many characters, so gratuitously running them all off a cliff. Fate/Apocrypha should NOT be a fan's introduction to the Fate series. Fate/Stay Night was not the best anime ... ever created neither then nor now, but it made you care for the small crop of core characters, filled you with a sense of dread when they faced danger and when it dropped the big plot bombs it made you scream with glee and a certain sense of "dear god, they didn't just suggest that did they..." And when the characters died, it was without a shadow of a doubt, important and it made us care. Not Fate/Apocrypha. No.

Fate/Apocrypha is a mess of (and I repeat) questionable plot points (I cannot truly call them holes, since I myself could have misunderstood them), anti-climatic endings to characters - backgrounds for which sometime show flashes of brilliance but never explore anything beyond some rushed development or a few initial scenes, needless fan-service and ofcourse the deus ex machina,

Let's quickly go over my favorite ones:

*Spoiler Warning!*

1) The Ruler character is the only one richly developed along the lines of Saber or Shirou from Fate/Stay Night. However, she also falls victim to the anti-climax of just fighting and eventually dying. I mean everyone just seems to have a fight (and if the writer felt like it on that day, reflect a little bit) and just die. No real importance to any death, it just... happens. Case in point, Vlad Tepes, uses his Noble Phantasm (which has a pretty great motivation about why he wouldn't willingly use it, and just, dies after 10 mins of him being untouchable and is discarded like an after thought). It's nearly the same with everyone else.

2) Poorly developed backgrounds for the heroes galore. Siegfried, few lines about him and he dies. Mordred (he's FSN Saber's (woman's) daughter with another woman - I mean I understand poetic authority but really, come one) and wants...something. To be king or to ease his/her father/mother's burden - why the change of heart? What brought this on? Karna, what is his motivation? What does he want? Shakespeare. What exactly is his power with his writing. Why is he writing if he cannot make events come true? Why is Shirou afraid of him writing a tragedy? If he could've materialized his writing he could have influenced nearly everything in the story? So why the writing? WHY does Sieg have command spells?

3) And let's come to the anti-climaxes. Frakenstein's monster dies trying to kill Mordred a few scenes after she's humanized a bit. Mordred goes into a big fight and simply dies at the end. Siegfried, the original one, all of a sudden, simply dies trying to save Sieg. Vlad Tepes just dies a few scenes after he became a near unstoppable monster. Aviceborn is simply shot - although he does state that he simply wanted to create the golem and nothing more, but still the all important golem dies a few scenes later. It's just filled with gems like this.

4) The people who don't die and Deus-Ex machina. Sieg is special. But WHY? He has command spells, Great. He saves Astolfo who is self admittedly a weak character. He fights and kills Karna (seemingly a very powerful character) on the second attempt after being wiped on the first attempt. What did he simply try harder the second time? He loses Siegfried's power and immediately gains Frankenstein's Monster's power because he was hit by her Noble Phantasm - Great but why does this happen? And apparently someone who killed Vlad Tepes in his Phantasm form as well as fought Frankenstein's Monster originally now is killed by Sieg wielding the same power? Great. Okay so Blasted Tree killed her when she used it but Sieg survives when he uses it. Why? Ugh.. I just couldn't keep suspending my disbelief after a point.

5) The catering to otakus. Jack the Rippers backstory is refreshingly sensible however why is her character a loli? It kills the whole seriousness of the character and is unnecessary. Why is Astolfo suddenly a pink haired shota? Who is sexually abused by a dominatrix/tsundere master who seems to have been miscast from a Hentai?

I'm sure there are other issues that I'm forgetting but overall Fate/Apocrypha seems to be a mass market anime masquerading as something greater than it is - a lot of potential which unfortunately never goes anywhere. It seems like an example of a studio rushing an anime out and try to be mass market by appealing to a larger fanbase by going all Charles Dickens with the number and variety of characters and the breadth of the story - thing is Charles Dickens wrote better and wove a better story. Hell maybe they could've outsourced the story to Shakespeare - I mean he WAS in the anime and did keep writing all the time - which was again, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing - just like the anime.

Okay I don't usually review but when I came across this thing and read a few chapters I thought I HAD to say something.

Spoilers:

It sucks, Elite Salaryman gets a sucked by a girl on a train and become this stud. That's the first chapter. And then spends the rest of the manga having kinky sex with women spouting philosophy in the middle. It's that and just that.