Short Synopsis: 044 tries to get rid of 724 and his henchmen.
Highlights: Solid action that knows when to stop.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 8/10
Here’s one thing I don’t get: why the heck is this series getting so much hate?! I mean, I can understand how people can dislike this series: the art style, dark mood and Osamu Dezaki’s direction style aren’t for everyone. But when I look at sites as AniDB and MyAnimeList, with their abysmally low rating for this series and read some of the comments about this series, I just can’t seem to understand where all this hate is coming from.
This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged (and enjoyed) a series that was hated by a large amount of people, but at least there I could understand why people were hating it: the lead characters of Night Head Genesis did whine an awful lot. It’s obvious that they’re going to get on the nerves of many people. El Cazador was all about its characters, so if you don’t like them, then there’s nothing much left of it. Blade of the Immortal has been based on a rumoured excellent manga, so of course people will be disappointed if a studio like Bee-Train gets the rights to animate it. For Ultraviolet, I just can’t imagine any reason why someone would really label this as the worst show of the season.
Granted, the only really bad thing of the first episode of this series was the huge amounts of fanservice, but that doesn’t really explain the low ratings. First of all, series with fanservice are often popular in the online crowd (as demonstrated by series as To Love-Ru, Kanokon, Sekirei and Code Geass), so why should this be any different? Second of all, the fanservice was nowhere near as bad or blatant as in series as the ones mentioned above. And third of all, the fanservice disappears nearly entirely after the second episode anyway.
So someone, enlighten me. Why the heck is this series so bad? Why has this series the most amount of “suckage” when compared to all other series that aired this Spring and Summer?
In any case, this episode was more action-packed, as 044 gets rid of 724, who turns out to have been jealous of her all along, as number two in the organization. At the same time, Mathilda and Garcia (who probably are also in trouble, seeing as how they helped their friend 044 kill off many of Daxus II’s subordinates) seem to be joining her, and reveal a bit more about her past.
There were a lot of fight-scenes in this episode, they were obviously not the best animated (probably due to lack of budget), but they were interesting to watch nonetheless. I’m interested to see where this series is going now: 044 is free now, and Daxus II can’t track her down anymore. 044 will probably go after Luka, but what’s going to happen after that?
I could care less about majority opinions. What’s worse is, most anime you recommend are often subbed in slow-motion, so that you have wait several months or a whole year to watch the last episode, and the time between episode tends to increase. Sometimes they aren’t subbed at all.
The hyped shows are usually subbed by several groups, so you don’t really risk an eternal cliff-hanger. I would appreciate if sites which collect rankings wouldn’t accept any votes until at least half of a series had aired. Only morons would publically judge a series after they’ve seen less than 10% of it. I mean it’s fine to state one’s opinion even if it’s not based on any facts but that’s not the point of such rankings.
He questions the system! destroy him! snarfsnarfsnarfrawr.
oh sorry. I think this series was already judged to be excretion before the first episode. The film has a bad reputation so it was assumed this would be the same. Not the worst assumption in the world but not a fair one. Unfortunately while boobs (like a real girls!) and actionless action shows rule the domain people don’t have much time for the ‘interesting’
…
snarfsnarfsnarfrawr.
Lack of interest/motivation due to its association with the Ultraviolet movie, the fact that nobody seems to be subbing this and not too many people are inclined to watch raws. That would be the main reason.
If this is ever licensed or at least translated on a regular basis, I may at least check it out, thanks to your blog.
Until then, I can’t really say anything good or bad about it.
So it’s a pity that many people aren’t really willing to wait.I believe one should try to watch any show for a while, at least more than just a single episode if its a TV series, to provide a fair opinion, positive or negative, beyond initial impressions.
If people still don’t like it, that’s fine, but at least they should be able to provide better reasons.
People are fucking stupid, long story short.
This series looks to have potential but I wouldn’t know since I haven’t seen a single ep yet. Meanwhile, ridiculously popular shows like Code Geass R2 are getting subbed by 2-3+ groups. I admit to enjoying CGR2 myself, but it makes me scratch my head to see multiple subbing groups tackle mainstream yet quality-suspect shows (CGR2 has turned into a soap opera train wreck, and yet I can’t look away) while good series like Kaiba take forever to get subbed or not at all.
Reiter: Kaiba’s at least been hyped up quite a bit in several blogs or message boards, and the subs are slowly but surely coming out. There’s plenty of buzz in its favor. Ultraviolet Code 044? Not even close.
Re-stating the obvious, but a large part of a show’s popularity is, ultimately, buzz.
It’s not surprising that Code Geass R2, precisely because of its over the top and soap opera nature (which I also like, but I digress), would have more fans or at least watchers talking about it, including members of subbing groups.