Welcome to this week’s Dungeon! We have thickening…plots! Also, Hestia shows up late, Bell gets beat up (and likes it), and Lili wins a high stakes drinking game!
For starters, let the record (and the previous blog post) show that I correctly predicted this episode would see the mechanics behind changing families. But boy was I wrong in how we would see it in action. I figured it would be with prize money from the Apollo family to buy out Lili. The multiple transactions and how they came about caught me off guard.
This week’s episode of Fire Force has obvious implications beyond anime – the KyoAni fire. I’ll be addressing this episode as it was without wading into any of the horrific tragedy or any censoring/changes that may have occurred.
Episode 3 starts off with long winded exposition and world discussion. Surprisingly, we meet the bad guys, the state of Earth, and the major players behind the scenes in the span of 15 seconds. Not my favorite way to introduce setting – I would rather be shown than told. From there we are thrust into the newbie online diner games, which I actually liked. Instead of typical shonen overblown tournaments for the local nose picking competition, these rookie games were something that felt like an inter departmental team building exercise – a nice realistic touch. For an added layer of excitement, give parlay a try and see where the thrill takes you.
Continue reading “Fire Force – 3 [The Rookie Fire Soldier Games]”
Even with all the worries from manga-readers regarding whether or not Kanata no Astra can wrap things up in 12 episodes, for me from an anime-only perspective the pacing so far is just about right. This week our group arrives at the second planet in their journey, and I enjoy the fact that this planet is vastly different from the first, and increasingly more sinister as well. Each place they visit the ecosystem varies significantly, and that provides a good opportunity for new experience (hello riding strange animals) and how well these kids adapt to the new environment. Of course, Kanata no Astra also knows its medium so it’s never shy on playing up the character tropes, which personally I can live without. I was crying inside when Quitterie’s first reaction when Zack butts into the bathroom was “I understand how you feel. But now is not the time for this” (seriously, who says that in that situation in real life?) and Kanata’s logic of taking off his helmet to find the medicine shiny mushroom still bugs me. But other aspects of this episode are strong enough to compensate for these missteps.
For those of you who haven’t quite caught up yet, Cop Craft claimed our own “Season Sleeper” prize for its first episode. While at first glance, Cop Craft is a kind of mix between the buddy cop formula of Double Decker and the “multiple races live in the same city” world building of Blood Blockade Battlefront, for me it’s another case of Grimoire of Zero which air few years ago: both have an incredible leads’ chemistry and a mildly-interesting settings. For Cop Craft, the show is not shy on touching dark themes of corruption and racism so you can’t say that it doesn’t have any ambition. The problem with Cop Craft so far is the production values. Mind you, it didn’t even look polished in the premiere, but it still saddens me to see how the production falling apart just 3 episodes in.
Continue reading “Cop Craft – 02/03 [Dragnet Mirage/ Midnight Train]”
This is the kind of show that got me into Nasuverse in first place where it methodically goes through its mystery before punctuated by an epic showdown. The entire show gives off such a Kara no Kyoukai vibe with Lord El-Melloi II doing the detective work while his apprentices do all the stabbing and disposal of rogue magus. The mechanics of the magic system in Fate franchise are often so convoluted that info dumps are necessary to understand exactly how all the pieces come together. Lord El-Melloi II avoids such mundane narrative devices like explaining while walking around in a circle by organically incorporating the different aspects of magic into its weekly cases. First up is the astrology driven magus that ends up being consumed by a faulty ritual and sets the pace for how mysteries are to be solved. In the world of magic, once the motive has been discovered then everything else should fall into place as opposed to the standard CSI approach of picking through the howdunit. The second case is alot less interesting with the rat man ruining Waver’s favorite place for tea but that because a whole slew of characters were introduced.
Continue reading “Lord El-Melloi II Sei no Jikenbo: Rail Zeppelin Grace Note – 02-03”
Welcome to DanMachi Episode 2 a.k.a. “Extreme Apollo Obstacle Course.” One of the things that I enjoy most about DanMachi is that they put it all out there, unashamed. Some shows spend 30+ episodes and have only the subtlest hints of relationship advancement or expression of how the participants feel – DanMachi is interested in no such thing. Confession during a run-and-gun fight? You got it! Getting friendzoned causes you to march right up the enemy and demand a duel. Okay!
This week in Kanata no Astra happens almost entirely inside the spaceship, and with that we come to learn more about some characters, the “conspiracy theory” and how once again they need to work together to save their asses. Put frankly, I found the way the discussion turns into a suspect game just based on Funicia’s mistranslation a bit of a stretch, but it does provide a nice mix of tension for the cast. It’s normal for someone like Quitterie to lose her composure for a moment there, after all, it’s never easy to hear that “the culprit is amongst us”. All the guessing game heads towards Yun-hua and Ulgar at the moment, but for me they are simply red-herrings. The thing that makes them suspicious is that we don’t know their motivation/ perspective in the first place so that we (and our cast) can’t entirely trust them. In this case it’s normally the person who appears the most normal is the one behind it, but I don’t want to point any finger at this early stage because it can ruin the mystery fun.
We finally get to the end of the Mars Brightest contest and the beginning of the new arc (with shining new OP and ED to boost), but narratively it’s not much of a big gap between these three episodes. While we can see how it wraps up from miles away, episode 12 wraps up the best way it can with the conclusion of the final showdown between Carole & Tuesday versus Angela. Turns out, there isn’t really a “showdown” to begin with, as our titular characters are disqualified for the final. Here, the show brings a fair share of pluses and minuses in its package. On one hand, I approve its focus on Carole & Tuesday relationship rather than the Mars Brightest contest. It’s nice to see them reflect on how important they are for each other and how they wanted to team up in the first place. With that, despite the fact that they didn’t win the contest, they still gain something more valuable: their partnership. On the other hand, the plot is simply too thin that it stretches out too much that you can see a lot of holes and inconsistencies. Take Tuesday’s Mom Valerie for example. We see her “abducting” her daughter because she’s in the middle of the campaign, but later on after Tuesday escapes we hear next to nothing about her in regards to Tuesday. So… she just gives up on Tuesday? Is she too busy to even consider Tuesday a threat for her campaign? Likewise, we have a random old passerby who appears just in time to give Carole & Tuesday a lift to the contest, then seemingly vanish without a trace. That’s what I called a clumsy plot device.
Welcome to the first week of Kanata no Astra, aka Astra Lost in Space in English localization. The double-length premiere remains a flawed but decent introduction for me, and this sophomore further underlines the strengths, as well as the potential weaknesses of this show going forward. For instance, many of the anime’s changes baffled me. The ratio aspect makes little sense and visually it looks like it has been cropped out from the original frame, as a result we see lots of shots where part of characters’ head being cut off. It’s a good gimmick once we get into the space where the screen “opens up”, but consider how the majority of time we follow them exploring new planets, the feeling of inside-the-box defeats the purpose greatly. Second, in the premiere, in one dramatic event, the anime decided to alter the source and makes it even more dramatic (the human chain) that it sadly disregards the common sense (THE ROPE). I consider that a manipulating tactic where Kanata no Astra purposely creates unnecessary conflicts in order to make us FEEL rewarding once everyone joins hands to save Kanata and Aries. Well, it just didn’t work for me.
This second episode does excel on another strength, however, and that is the background art. As the group encounters the first planet of their journey, Vilavure, they find the planet full of natural resources. The art alone brings to life the richness of that place, and kudos to the animal/ plant designs that bring so much quirks into this planet: the trampoline trees, the parachute flowers and the turkey-dragons AKA tur-gons. I suspect that each planet they’d go will have some specific traits (like in ACCA’s 13 territories), and it’s understandable that the first planet they step in is more about the thrill of exploring a new place completely different than their own rather than any life-threatening events (although there is one).
This episode also establishes the cast whom is skillful in many areas beyond their age (if you can’t tell if I being sarcastic or not by that sentence, I am). Last week, we learn a kid who already experienced life/death situation and a bloke whose IQ is about 200, this week add to that mix is another boy who has a master-level knowledge of biology and a girl with a photographic memory. Shameless over-the-top-ness aside, it further proves the theory that this string of misfortune event is set-up by someone or some organisation. There’s also a reveal of someone in the cast intentionally sabotage the communication system. This is an interesting development for sure to figure out who the traitor is and what is their reason behind all this.
While I am excited for the upcoming plot of exploring new planets as an A plot and finding out the traitor as an overarching plot, I remain mixed on the characters chemistry and character development so far. The jokes, in particular, are pretty bad with typical anime-humor and exaggeration, which for me simply doesn’t belong to this series. By saying that I don’t expect the show to go full dark like Lord of the Fireflies and the likes, but take the sequence in this week, where Kanata and Quitterie bickering about “leader”, something that has already been sold last week, it’s just a total misfire for me. Yes, characters this age can act childish but why the need to amp it up to 11? For character development, this week we deal with Quitterie and her inability to communicate with other people. While I appreciate the amount of backstory Kanata no Astra focus on her character (and I’m sure the rest of the cast will have their shares), it’s a tad bit obvious that the show reminds us again and again about her issues, by her childhood friend Genius, by her bickering, by her backstory with her little sister, by Quiterrie herself when she admits it later on. Show don’t tell, Kanata no Astra, the less said the greater impact you eventually deliver.