Category: The Fire Hunter

Welcome everyone, to another week of Fire Hunter! This was an interesting week, lots of lore drops, and a possible shake up of the status quo. Was it good? Will it save the series? I don’t yet know. But at least I have plenty to talk about. Now lets dive right into it!

Starting off, credit where it’s due, Fire Hunter has some incredible lore. We learned so much this episode. From the Flickering Flame being a satellite in space put there by the previous civilizations to the Treefolk being experiments created by the Divine Clans, with only the “successes” being sent out into the forests to act as benevolent helpers to the villages. Meanwhile the failures are left to rot inside the city, unloved and uncared for by their creators. There’s even some backstory regarding how humans came to be this way, along with the Flame Fiends! It’s all pretty interesting stuff. Which makes Fire Hunter’s ability to deliver it in the most dry, uninteresting way imaginable all the more egregious. Despite the lore being inherently interesting, all I could think of while watching the episode was if I could get away with skipping forward or not. And that sucks.

Continue reading “The Fire Hunter – 8 [Garden of the Gods]” →

Welcome everyone, to another week of Fire Hunter! I’ll admit, I wasn’t looking forward to much to writing this post, as Fire Hunter has done little of praise recently. And that hasn’t changed this week either! But I can’t just not write whenever the episode bad. If I do that this season will take forever. So lets dive right in shall we?

Before I get to negative, I will give Fire Hunter some praise. This week sees our leads finally meet up and get together, and it’s great. Not just because there is some payoff in watching these two storylines intersect, but also because it cuts down on the number of black-screen cutaways. I can’t understate how much I hate these cutaways. Not only do they completely break the flow of the episode and ruin transitions, they are just downright lazy. So seeing those start to peter out as Touko and Koushi intersect, cutting down on the number of different groups, was really nice to see. Hopefully as Fire Hunter progresses these groups continue to intersect, until they become one smooth narrative.

Continue reading “The Fire Hunter – 7 [Chance Encounter]” →

Hello everyone, and welcome to another week of Fire Hunter! I apologize for the delay, I was celebrating a friends birthday this weekend and so I wasn’t able to work on this until Monday. We have a lot to talk about this week, as a small glimmer of hope shines through Fire Hunter’s myriad of problems. So without further ado, lets dive into it!

Starting off, I’ve harped against Fire Hunter’s visuals for a while now. And while it continues to degrade and get worse and worse, this week I wanted to harp on something else: The pacing. More than the disappointing visuals and lackluster story presentation, I think the format of the episodes themselves are what’s holding Fire Hunter back. Simply put, Fire Hunter is killing itself with how it communicates to the viewer. Take the end of the episode as a prime example of this! A whale breaking the oceans surface behind the boat, this moment of monumental natural beauty in a dystopian world. But how do we lead into that? A stare down, ominous music, dogs growling, and a sudden, shitty cut. This should have been an easy slam dunk of a scene! Instead it falls on its face, like the rest of the episode.

Continue reading “The Fire Hunter – 5 [The Spider Child]” →

Welcome everyone, to another episode of Fire Hunter! This week was… It was a disappointment, to put it lightly. I’m really starting to lose faith. Why? Well lets talk about that.

Now I really hate to keep beating this horse every week, but Fire Hunter keeps finding new ways to disappoint. Yes, the animation was still trash. And yes, the direction was largely uninspired. But this week saw the melt also extend to the detail. Flat smoke with no linework or details, just a shape filled brown. The composite falling apart as Kanata and Touko look like they don’t even belong in the environment. Characters in the foreground, not the background mind you, with just no detail whatsoever. Legitimately incomplete drawings and fucking pop-in. Pop-in, from an animation. Now I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes with Fire Hunter, but clearly something is going down in their pipeline. Because Yasunori Miyazawa, from shows like Ping Pong and even better cuts from this very show, is far better than this. Easily some of his most disappointing work for me.

Continue reading “The Fire Hunter – 4 [Flickering Flame]” →

Welcome everyone, to another episode of Fire Hunter! This is a rough week for Fire Hunter, for a lot of reasons. It’s kind of sad really. I started with such high hopes for this and its falling, while I started with such low hopes for Kaina and the Great Snow Sea and it’s surpassing them. Just goes to show you can never know what will be good in a season. Now without further ado, lets jump into it!

As usual, first we have to start with the production. And as usual with Fire Hunter, it’s not good. Oh Fire Hunter looks fine in stills, sure. The colorful eyecatches are beautiful when they appear, no one can dispute that. But anytime it moves well… I’d almost prefer it not. Take the climax of this episode for instance, with the dragon-like Flame Fiend. The idea is there, I can feel the terror and majesty they were going for, and the eyecatch at the end does a lot to help with that. But the dragon itself is… rough, jittery even, with harsh jagged lines and few frames. It doesn’t feel like it belongs in the same show as everything surrounding it. That’s a damn shame, because Fire Hunter’s unique style should lend itself well to that sort of thing and yet it’s falling short.

Continue reading “The Fire Hunter – 3 [Fractions of the World]” →

Welcome everyone to the last show of the season, The Fire Hunter! This is definitely the one I have the least handle on, let me tell you what. It has the most potential, with the ability to soar higher then Kaina possibly could. But so far it isn’t anywhere as consistent as Kaina or Vinland Saga. What does that mean? Well lets dive in and talk about that.

First up, and my main point regarding consistency, Fire Hunter’s production. It’s rough. Picture in picture style direction has never been something I’ve enjoyed, and Fire Hunter uses it a lot. Freeze frames with oddly placed and panned windows of reaction faces. And while Fire Hunter isn’t a particularly movement heavy show, the movement we do get isn’t that great. You could argue that stuff like the Flame Fiend are supposed to be jarring and off-putting, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But it doesn’t make for a great visual experience. Furthermore, even the stuff that is good is used weirdly. Take the incredibly beautiful eye-catches Fire Hunter has for example. These brightly colored and detailed stills are stunning, and can make for some high-impact dramatic moments, like the finale! But they feel incredibly out of place during say… cleaning a toilet. As I said: Inconsistency is Fire Hunter’s greatest weakness.

Continue reading “The Fire Hunter – 2 [The Three Brides]” →