Aah! This show so badly deserves better animation! Having Satelight as the animation production company is both a bliss and a curse: the graphics sure look imposing. The designs for this series are absolutely beautiful, but the animation is just incredibly messy and full of cut corners and very obviously rushed. What a bloody shame, because this series really deserves to look beautiful.
As for the rest of this episode: Guin Saga yet again showed that it excels at detailing and describing all sorts of different cultures and people. This episode gives a proper introduction to the giant people that Guin went after, and again a lot of imagination went into designing these people. Standalone, they’re a bit stereotypical, but when put in context with the rest of the series they fit so well. With such a huge cast, this series has already shown that it isn’t the best at characterization: for Guin Saga it’s really the bigger picture that makes it stand out.
This episode also shows Istvan’s part of Guin’s plan come to fruition as he successfully manages to kill off one of the major generals from the Mongols. It’s also interesting how he never seemed to take his mission personally, and actually came to like Marius before he killed him off. It’s good to run into a series that doesn’t have the “I can’t kill him! He’s my friend”-mentality.
Rating: * (Good)
Sub-par animation, but that’s not stopping this series from delivering a fantasy-epic.
I have to agree, the animation is really hurting this show. At the very least they could be indulging in some great animation for small bits here and there – though they have been almost doing this in some places, it’s not as good as it could be.
That being said, I give it the same opinion of Pandora Hearts – it’s going for a retro edge, so it doesn’t totally ruin the show. In Pandora Hearts, the small resolution and fuzzy video gives the washed out colour schemes and retro themes an almost complimentary style, like an old blurry nostalgic anime might be.
Guin Saga is similar in that whilst it’s fairly crisp in quality, it’s production values are more akin to the old Medieval warriors in the Desert-esque cartoons from years ago, which has a bit of charm to it. The so-bad-they’re-good designs and colour schemes especially.
So whilst it’s bad, it’s not disastrous and it maintains the atmosphere of the show at the very least. But for such an ambitious story you would expect a bit more high quality here and there, one-on-one brawls especially.
It’s kinda silly for Satelight, with such a small turnout, to be turning out two 26-episode series at the same time all equally demanding of a good budget – at the very least we can be thankful for Basquash’s quality, it certainly doesn’t go to waste there.