Let me put up a disclaimer: When I first started to review this series, I didn’t foresee the obvious outcome that this show would end up so mediocre. I debated whether or not I should write reviews in groups of 2-3 episodes versus reviews that would drone on about the same issues every single episode, and I ultimately decided on the former. Parasyte is yet another anomaly- because while the pacing and story are solid as hell, various weaknesses in character development and a total failure to create an effective setting ultimately bring the show down.
First, I think we can all agree that Migi is by far the best character in this show. But besides him, who else do I genuinely care about? Shinichi’s “dehumanization” continues to occur far too rapidly for us to care about it very much, yet the writers seem to keep beating us over the head with evidence that he’s changing- when Mr. A is approaching Shinichi in episode four, Shinichi feels strong remorse about having to kill A, even though he ultimately kills him out of self-defense. So I was initially under the impression that Shinichi doesn’t want to kill any organism regardless of their threat level, because his actions had demonstrated that very same idea up to that point. However, when a pregnant Miss Ryoko is literally causing zero harm to anyone, all of a sudden, Shinichi wants to kill her- what a textbook definition of beating us over the head with character development.
This also directly correlates with the failure to create tension whenever Shinichi goes outdoors. With a premise as this reminiscent of vampires, there was so much potential here. Although this is obviously a minor issue in comparison to something like character development, creating an unnerving tension whenever Shinichi goes outside to interact with other humans would take the story this show seeks to tell and drastically further push the narrative. How awesome would it have been, had the writers shown Shinichi suspecting every person he saw in the city simply because one of them might be a parasyte? Because so far, the only things that remind us that there are other parasytes out there are the “boss fights” we get every episode.
Overall, although I’ve only listed the negative aspects of the show fron episodes 3-5, the parts this show does right remains the same as what I wrote for my episode 2 review. Regardless, the soundtrack is definitely now a problem- the big emotional reveal in the fifth episode was ruined for me because of the badly composed dubstep (a genre of music that I normally enjoy.) Ultimately, the positives and negatives of this show make this series a fairly average one so far.
Yeah, I agree, while it isn’t technically outright awful which bad adaptations usually are. The execution of this adaptation is weak. Most events are telegraphed very boldly, the music has been a case of really interfering with the mood of what’s happening. Finally it has the same problem as Gyo, in which the manga let us sink in the graphic-violent-imagery and in the animation it occurs to fast, the CGI isn’t as convincing, or simply the color alters the weight of the imagery.
Besides the OST, the only major impediment to my enjoyment so far has been episode 5, which was far too coincidence driven for my liking.
Well, Ryoko wasn’t causing 0 harm to anyone. She was still killing and eating people, which was why Shinichi wanted to kill her. He confronted the guy in episode 2 for the same reason. I do think it was inconsistent that he showed remorse for killing A, but I think that was a natural human response. People are often irrational, and Shinichi doesn’t seem like a particularly intelligent person. This anime is a bit disappointing to me too for the other reasons though.
“creating an unnerving tension whenever Shinichi goes outside to interact with other humans would take the story this show seeks to tell and drastically further push the narrative. How awesome would it have been, had the writers shown Shinichi suspecting every person he saw in the city simply because one of them might be a parasyte?”
Funny you should say that, as just this week, no spoilers on the content of the episode, but let’s just say that happened word for word.