A Tale of the Secret Saint
Short Synopsis: A girl who wants to be a knight finds out that she was a saint in her previous life, and makes a pact with a dragon in the process.
Mario: This is a perfectly solid episode, if you are willing to forgive the main character’s clumsiness. That clumsiness is not in the way she stumbles over her words or doesn’t know how to fight properly, but more about how she tends to say out loud what she thinks or feels, mostly in service of the plot. It’s her dragon that she makes a pact with that is a more compelling character to me. The way the dragon shakes her head when she hears about our main character’s terrible white lies is neat comedic timing there. The main plot is intriguing so far, with her finding out about her past life as a Saint – but at the same time it looks as if she wasn’t traumatized after being betrayed by her brothers at all. I will come back for more of this.
Potential:: 30%
Suikoden: The Anime
Short Synopsis: Two militant young men are framed, pursued, imprisoned, sentenced to death, and rescued, all by a huge cast of characters.
Wooper: I haven’t played any of the JRPGs in the Suikoden series, least of all Suikoden II, the franchise’s most acclaimed entry and the one selected as the basis of this adaptation. That lack of context wasn’t a barrier to understanding this first episode, though. If you want to follow along here, just pause every time a new character’s name is given, either through dialogue or on-screen text, then point at the screen and say, “That’s [character name].” After doing this around 25 times, it will become clear that you’re not actually expected to remember who anyone is. At that point, you can enjoy watching the two characters that actually matter (Riliu and Jowy) get captured and freed repeatedly until the double length premiere is over. Suikoden was inspired by Water Margin, a centuries-old Chinese novel with hundreds of characters, so it’s no surprise that the game nor this anime would unrelentingly throw new faces at the viewer, nor that so many of them would be walking cliches. As long as they accept that characterization is near the bottom of Suikoden’s to-do list, this adaptation may actually please fans of the game; the production suffers only a few dips in nearly an hour, and the protagonists are so consistently persecuted that it’s easy to wish for their freedom. I’ll leave it to them to judge the remainder of this show, as 50 minutes was more than enough for me.
Potential: 10.8%
Tank Chair
Short Synopsis: A braindead former assassin who can temporarily transform into a superhuman kills off bad guys.
Mario: My lord, does this episode look terrible. It’s from Polygon Pictures, the studio behind CG 3D anime like Ajin (hit and miss visually), Drifting Dragons, and Kaina of the Great Snow Sea. I don’t mind the look of those last two, but Tank Chair is utterly uninspired. Even the pink blood can’t give it any personality. The half-human characters aren’t convincing either; they feel like Planet of the Apes clones added for no clear reason. The one thing that intrigues me in this hot mess is how Nagi’s brain damage is handled, and how it pushes his sister Shizuka to take on these jobs in the first place. But that isn’t enough to make me think twice about the show.
Potential: 0%
