Overlord K posted:

I still think Dimension W is pretty good and am still really enjoying it.

Droyer posted:

I hope the revelation regarding Mira's body is gonna lead to Kyoma eventually treating her as a daughter.

VostokProgram posted:

It would be nice if this helps him become more accepting of robots in general.

VostokProgram posted:

It would be nice if this helps him become more accepting of robots in general.

Droyer posted:

She's the only sentient robot though?

Darth Walrus posted:

built by another guy in memory of his own dead wife

VostokProgram posted:

Yeah, forgot she was special. But what I'm getting at is that he's a bit misanthropic right now and if this causes him to open up to others and become a better person it would be a good direction for the show.

Droyer posted:

This is incorrect. Mira's earliest memory is Dr. Yurizaki and her daughter being killed. In other words, she was created before that happened.

Darth Walrus posted:

OK, so in the current arc, we're following three guys with young female assistants. Two of them have dead wives. Two of them regularly kick around the girls following them. They're facing off against a heavily gay-coded villain who is implied to be somehow responsible for killing the two wives. The female lead is one of these guys' assistants. He regularly kicks her around. She is a partial reincarnation of his dead wife built by another guy in memory of his own dead wife (who may also have been killed by the creepy gay guy, though that's not seriously evidenced yet).

In another show, like, say, Victory Gundam or Evangelion, I might think that this was a result of a creator in a bad psychological place pouring his massive psychosexual hangups into his work. Dimension W seems too bland, derivative, and thematically incoherent for that, though - it feels more like the creator was pulling bits and pieces from famous works in neighbouring genres without pausing to consider what it all actually meant and what those other creators had been trying to do, bringing in a pile of extraneous, unexamined gunk that slowly builds up into something... kind of unfortunate.

The end result is hilariously loving weird, though.

Darth Walrus posted:

Darth Walrus posted:

Darth Walrus posted:

Endorph posted:

why is your idea of critical analysis just listing the things that happen in the show

dogsicle posted:

so these posts are weird and feel really cynical. the show obviously has issues with violence towards women (what even is Salva's deal) and dead wives as motivation. going so far as to say the villain is a creepy gay who killed the straight guys' wives is what seems like a leap to me, because the dude doesn't really pass anything but the lowest queer bar: he's a little showy. you also somehow think Kyoma is going to make a 180 and want to gently caress Mira because she has the same type of artificial body as his dead wife, that's weird! there is no rapport between the two beyond Mira constantly offering an olive branch that Kyoma shoots down because he hasn't dealt with his trauma. the body reveal seems designed to, at most, knock Kyoma out of being an rear end in a top hat to Mira (which is its own can of worms). finally, mpdg is a bad trope that its own creator hates, and should be killed. i don't think Mira qualifies because she is a pretty full character in her own right and has motivations entirely separate from Kyoma's/Kyoma's well being. his impending character growth isn't even due to her ~healing his tortured soul with constant kindness/support~, it's because she has the same body as his dead wife.

AnacondaHL posted:

TriffTshngo posted:

idk i'm still enjoying it it's just fun dumb sci-fi poo poo

Some of yall need to relax your sphincters and be a little less severe about animes that aren't instant classic 11/10 show of the year material

e: not that I'm saying you shouldn't be critical and should just accept what you're given, just that there are better things to furrow your brow and get huffy about than some bad tropes in a Pretty Good But Not Great sci-fi anime where the science makes no sense

TriffTshngo posted:

idk i'm still enjoying it it's just fun dumb sci-fi poo poo

Some of yall need to relax your sphincters and be a little less severe about animes that aren't instant classic 11/10 show of the year material

e: not that I'm saying you shouldn't be critical and should just accept what you're given, just that there are better things to furrow your brow and get huffy about than some bad tropes in a Pretty Good But Not Great sci-fi anime where the science makes no sense

Butt Ghost posted:

Sometimes people just don't like things, or at least not like them as much as others. It doesn't necessarily involve the work not being the next Cowboy Bebop, or having something shoved up your butt.

Phobophilia posted:

It was okay. Kyoma finally became a decent character. Salva turned out to be pretty rad, though he's always had presence. Rip coolest guy.

Mordja posted:

Anyone know if this was an anime only ending, whether the manga is still ongoing? Because the finality of it all seemed rather sudden.

quote:

The premise is that unlimited energy is now accessible via "energy coils" that tap into "Dimension W", an alternate dimension of pure magic and possibility, or something like that. The actual workings of this dimension start out pretty vague, and manage to make less and less sense as we learn more about it. In practice, Dimension W is just whatever the show currently needs it to be, which usually comes down to something involving someone-or-another's tragically deceased girlfriend.

There's a potentially interesting thread in the idea that energy coils are tracked and monitored, but the show completely ignores the surveillance and privacy implications, seemingly not even noticing that they exist. The world also doesn't feel believably like a place revolutionized by infinite energy. Energy coils are used to power stuff, a few people have robot bodies, and that's about the extent of it, at least when energy coils aren't malfunctioning and ripping holes in the universe. Hooray for needlessly dangerous technology that's barely being utilized.

Having a nonsensical universe can sometimes be workable, if the characters and their journey is meaningful enough to make up for it. Unfortunately, Dimension W doesn't really deliver there either. Our main character is Kyoma, a grumpy luddite whose job is to seek out and collect illegal coils. Kyoma hates coils, which we know because someone randomly tells us "Kyoma hates coils" every few minutes in the first several episodes.

Kyoma's assistant is a robot girl named Mira, who he hates (because coils!), and who may or may not actually be his dead girlfriend. (Update: Not exactly!) Mira has some cute moments which are generally the highlight of the show, but aren't really enough to make up for its other shortcomings. There's also a guy named Loser, which is a wonderful name for a character. He's a failed thief whose attempted heists have become a spectator sport. He's pretty fun, at least early on. Other characters seem to appear and disappear from the story with no reason or explanation, and it's often unclear what purpose any of them serve.

Four episodes in, the show leaps off the rails with a two-episode haunted house arc in which we discover that Dimension W can house dreamworlds made from memories of alternate timelines and the ghosts of peoples' dead girlfriends, or something goofy like that. It's honestly hard to even write about this show because of how quickly it's piled up nonsensical story threads.

I've seen comments suggesting that this arc needed more episodes to be fleshed out better, but I'd actually say the opposite: this story maybe could have worked as a streamlined single-episode diversion in the middle of a show twice this length, where it could be sandwiched between some episodic coil-collecting adventures to develop the characters and set up their idea of normalcy before shattering that normalcy for a story climax, a la Cowboy Bebop, but in Dimension W it's just a weird derail that precedes the even weirder derail that overtakes the show's plot. What do Evil Steve Jobs, the flamboyant technician from Gurren Lagann, and an African cyborg prince have to do with each other? As far as I can tell, the answer to this question is "basically nothing".

Then a few episodes later, we're suddenly introduced to a massive number of new tertiary characters who are comically incongrous with each other and the rest of the Dimension W universe, and have no apparent narrative purpose. They're like this show's equivalent of the "Sense of Right Alliance", the bootleg-knockoff superhero toy set for sad children, that pairs Batman and Spider-Man with a Power Ranger, a talking Pixar car, and Shrek.

Dimension W's Sense of Right Alliance is like a set of ethnic stereotypes as remembered by someone from a parallel universe, and includes such unforgettable characters as "Mexican guy with sewn-shut eyes and shark-toothed catgirl girlfriend", "morbidly-obese Norwegian twins with hands bigger than their abdomens", and "geriatric Aquaman cosplayer". They mostly exist to occupy a lot of screentime and make the story even less coherent.

In the end, the Sense of Right Alliance amounts to nothing, Kyoma meets up with Loser and an old war buddy, and our heroes end up on Easter Island to face off against a genius scientist who went mad and started wearing a lot of eyeliner when his teleportation experiments were confiscated. He steals a magical do-anything coil and restarts his teleportation experiments in secret, turning hundreds of human test subjects into exploded piles of goop. And because dead girlfriends are apparently Dimension W's one and only consistent narrative theme, his plan also involved turning Loser's wife into a giant killer tentacle monster, for some reason.

I'm doubting that much of this will make more sense after the final episode airs. Dimension W is a show in which few things make any sense or add up to any coherent whole, but it's not even as entertaining a trainwreck as that description might imply. It's just bewildering and disappointing.

To end on a positive note, the OP and ED are quite good, much better than the show they're attached to. The ED theme is especially fantastic, and the OP has a fun song full of memorably broken English that's charming in the same way as the lyrics to Black Lagoon's OP, accompanied by stylish action visuals from the better show that Dimension W initially looked like it was going to be.