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Here is a list of all qualifying anime: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HT3n2mfQ5JwLGjBVg_Y197QAoUvpAg9V6N2s6kDGdA0/edit?usp=sharing Worst/Most Disappointing Anime 1.) Pick 3 titles from the list that you have watched at least three episodes of 2.) Write about why the show was bad. Was it disappointing? Was it poorly animated? 3.) Discuss choices, but keep it civil. Someone disliking something you liked isn't the end of the world. 4.) Feel free to rank things 1-3 if you want, but the votes are unweighted (weighted votes may be counted seperately) 5.) Feel free to give dishonourable mentions to other things that nearly made the list, but please differentiate these from your votes Most Avoided Anime The main worst anime votes require you to have put in at least a three episode test. This is different. This is about the anime that you felt the need to avoid based on the premise, the anime that you watched one episode then turned it off in disgust. This is your wildcard vote and will go into its own competition 1.) You now get three votes in this category. Choose wisely 2.) There is no minimum watch period. You don't even have to have seen it! 3.) Put a reason why you avoided it. Generate that discussion! 4.) Once again, feel free to debate and discuss choices 5.) Don't be a bigot when using this vote.
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Jan 1, 2024 05:50
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Most Disappointing Anime: Magical Destroyers: I was so in for a b-list Gainax/Trigger-esque take on post-apocalyptic magical girls and willing to put up with the otaku culture focus to get there. The second episode, where they go into the mind of a team member they're recruiting and it's all a Pink Elephants on Parade-esque acid trip, was so cool I was incredibly excited to see more and thought it might be my dark horse AOTY. The next episode and a half focused on the lame stuff and did not do nearly enough interesting to make up for it. I dropped it after a particularly lame joke in the fourth episode and I'm still bummed out because there's a fantastic show in here, somewhere. We'll always have the OP. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaHP_yjEb4E Helck: A really rough adaptation for a well-liked manga I haven't read. What I did see bummed me out, because I could see why people were really into this. Spy Classroom: This wasn't really bad or anything but I think it's the third worst show I got three episodes into this year. It ties up a setup plotline pretty neatly in the first three episodes and I just decided I was good after that. Most Avoided: I avoid a lot of shows that are just like generic looking isekai or just look kinda weird/gross (the pig anime sticks in my mind), but I think it's more interesting to talk about the stuff where I go "eh this could be cool" based on a PV vibe check going through the season on MAL and then go "oh no" after throwing it on. KamiErabi God.app: Thought the idea of a Yoko Taro-affiliated death game could be really cool and wasn't totally averse to the weird CG style, but this show gets really weird quick - the protagonist has a psychotic break in front of a girl after he wishes to bone her with a magic phone app and jerks off in front of her in an abandoned arcade. She later tries to kill him. Whole thing just felt kinda gross and I didn't want to keep going. Rokudo's Bad Girls: A bunch of people were excited for this but I found the protagonist so repellant (at one point he talks about the natural order of women being subservient) I didn't want to bother with any more of it. The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague: This was a cute comedy but I decided I was good after they did a bit where the male yuki-onna lead melts into being a child and his female romantic interest takes a picture of him and that's going to be like a weird tense plot point. Felt like it was going to be weird at best and gross at worst.
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Jan 1, 2024 06:47
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Isekai Ojisan - The anime itself is great, but the hosed up production schedule meant the show wasn't as successful as it should have been and there is like no chance of it getting a second season. Inu ni Nattara Suki na Hito ni Hirowareta - seriously, what the gently caress? All the generic isekai trash - Picking out which one is actually the worst would require watching them.
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Jan 1, 2024 06:50
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1. G Witch is not a bad show at all, but absolutely a disappointment for me when all was said and done. It's really hard for me to deal with something that I really, really wanted to be amazing only for it to end up being just okay in the end. I felt that the first cour/season was a well oiled machine that moved at a steady pace and kept building up momentum with little moments of payoff every few episodes. Season 2 then tried to do the same thing at about five hundred times the speed while introducing new plots faster than it could resolve existing plots. A lot of the little things I liked about season 1 felt like they had to be sacrificed, cut short or thrown in the locker room marked "characters we don't know what to do with for 1/4 of the season's runtime" in order to reach the finish line. Again, not a bad show, but that kinda makes the disappointment worse for me because it could have been so, so much more than it is. 2. Helck was one that committed the sin of being really really boring. I can see why people like the manga because there's inklings of the bigger stuff going on that seem interesting if they were presented better than the lifeless plodding thing I watched for five episodes before ditching. Apart from those two I actually haven't watched a whole lot of shows this year that actually ended up being disappointing. Some mediocre shows, sure, but for me a disappointing show needs to have promise and potential that doesn't deliver as well as it could have. It needs to be something I wanted to be better than it was. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 07:15 on Jan 1, 2024 |
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Jan 1, 2024 07:10
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Avoided, I won't judge, because I've done plenty enough criticism for things I haven't actually watched already. That said, I can do three for disappointing. Not the only three shows I've disliked that I've watched, but three that disappointed me in different ways, to give some diversity of results. In reverse order of quality... 3) Jujutsu Kaisen season 2. To start, Hidden Inventory was really good, probably the best JJK's been. You get good action, strong characterization, and when the plot hits, it hits. I've never been the biggest into the series, but I liked season 1 fine, and 0 a good bit, so Hidden Inventory passing them both up was impressive. And with the hype for Shibuya, I was ready for something excellent, especially with the couple of chapters I'd read of it when the manga was ongoing at that point. Only I didn't get that. Oh, the animation was good, and some moments were excellent (Todo is the best) but mostly it was just fights without emotional investment, killing or maiming characters then moving on without anything beyond the most token acknowledgements. I was thinking it would be downhill after this, but Shibuya felt like a decline itself. Not bad, but a shame. 2) Witch from Mercury. What a shitshow, and like JJK, one made worse by the times it shows real potential. (Although, unlike JJK, this one didn't feel like a net positive). There are moments, and even whole episodes, when it felt like this could work. The Elan arc felt like the show finally figured out a way to balance real stakes with the more carefree surface. Shall We Gundam seemed like the core romance was actually building a good dynamic. And the finale of season 1 was a great hook, seeming like the show was going to pay off on all the oddities prior while carrying strong emotional payout to compensate for any lapses in the logic of the narrative. And then we got season 2 episode 1, and the show went right back to the school as if nothing happened. Suletta and Miorine were split up to ensure their relationship couldn't have any payoff for the season 1 conclusion, Suletta's quirks were treated as cute and normal rather than the result of serious abuse and conditioning, the action got even less interesting, plots were rushed through, the moral issues were handwaved, new factions appeared and disappeared without setup, and the ending wound up a bargain basement knockoff of Unicorn. On the upside, I'm now feeling much more favorably inclined towards Gundam SEED, if only by comparison. 1) Bullbuster I like Patlabor. I like Patlabor a lot. Although it has its ups and downs, it's a smart, funny, and exciting combination of office sitcom and mech action show with a great core cast. It takes giant robots out of wars and puts them into mundane life in a way that enhances both. Bullbuster is not Patlabor. It wants to be Patlabor, in the sense that it's a mech anime with more jokes about bureaucracy than thrilling robot fights, but it replaces episodic adventures with heavy serialization, down-to-earth comedy with conspiracies to make giant monsters, and a fleshed out cast with cardboard cutouts. It barely has enough main story to fill 12 episodes, but instead of using that time to flesh out the cast (giving them hobbies, complex motivations, or just fun little adventures) it spends it cycling through the same things to delay the discovery that the megacorp trying to cover everything up... is bad! I've seen worse, yes. The hand-drawn animation was solid, even if the CG was bad, but... yeah. Pretty weak. But, in the spirit of one of the year's best movies, I think we need something special for the worst anime. We're not just going to zero here. We're going... to minus one.. -1) FLCL Grunge (and Shoegaze, but I didn't finish that one, so this will focus on Grunge). On the upside, it's short. The upside is now concluded. Five years ago, Toonami announced sequels to FLCL, one of the best anime (and worst manga) that I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing. And... they didn't really work out. I thought Progressive was alright, but Alternative was one of my worst anime of the year, and even Prog was more of a noble attempt than an outright success, a 7/10 sequel to a rare 10/10 original. But dammit, they tried. They got an all-star voice cast, new compositions from the Pillows, tried for a diversity of artstyles (and bringing in some of the old guard) in Prog, and even gave the whole thing a theatrical release in Japan. Succeed or fail (and they failed, don't get me wrong), this wasn't a quick cash-in, but a full on attempted revival. Now, though... we got this crap. No-name cast in Japan, three episodes a series, weak CG animation, plots that don't matter with characters that sit in the shadow of the original with no attempt to rise on their own. It's not a bold failure. It's just a failure, something that was seen as pointless from the jump but that was released anyway. Maybe it embodies the spirit of the age it was made in as much as the original. But if it does, I don't want to think about where we're going.
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Jan 1, 2024 08:24
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Going in reverse order (what I disliked the least to what I hated the most): 2023's Worst Anime (That I Watched At Least Three Episodes Of) Magical Destroyers -- Sigh. You know that one guy who has a story he's thought up in his head? A story that he's been thinking about for years, maybe decades, and is so excited to share it with you that he's omitting mundane details that he just assumes you know, like, character motivations, or depth, or what their perspectives might be and how they might change? Without which anyone else who hasn't been thinking about this story for years would just be completely lost? That's what Magical Destroyers is. It's clear that some real, genuine passion went into this work. Which is why it's such a shame it didn't amount to anything in the end. The "storyboard" sequence is genuinely inventive and powerful. As is the OST and the OP/ED. But without those mundane-yet-critical details, the plot and characters populating it come across as shallow, basic, and uninteresting. My greatest disappointment of the year (although if I'd read the manga for Helck that answer might've changed). To its credit, this is the only entry here that I actually finished. Maybe I'm just that easy of a sucker to string along, but I kept holding out hope until the end that the payoff would be worth it. It wasn't. The Legendary Hero is Dead -- You know, an anime version of "The Other Guys" could have been entertaining. There are hints of humor therein. But gradually, that humor is lost to rote power-harem-fantasy nonsense. If the OP weren't as catchy as it was I would've dropped this well before the three-episode mark. Dead Mount Death Play -- A prime example of the incestuous relationship between anime consumer and anime creator. By which I mean not literal incest, I mean that all the characters found in this are just the Nth inbred generation of character archetypes found in other anime (which themselves are the [N-1]th generation of character archetypes found in other anime, and so on). Whoever created this has entirely lost touch with the real world, because not a single person in this acts like how an actual person would. Shark otaku? loving really!? 2023's Actual Worst Anime OniMai -- Just take a look at this brilliant 10/10 character redesign. (Spoilered for mild NSFW)  It's like that one Shirabako gif lmao https://i.imgur.com/MjKP4IE.mp4 FLCL: Grunge -- Look DeMarco, I understand why you did what you did. How many among us have fantasized about getting an anime made? Maybe even a sequel to a work that we loved and would love to see more of? You had that chance and you took it. Unfortunately, your good decision making ended about three steps before this point. Forget Kizuna AI's shilling of NFTs, this is what corporate soullessness made manifest looks like. Choosing to make an all-CGI sequel to a crowning exercise in hand-drawn animation made by experts in their prime? Sure, ok. Ugly character designs that wouldn't be out of place in Ratatoing? No, I didn't misspell Ratatouille, I meant Ratatoing. I didn't even think it was possible for the soundtrack of a show to be described as "cynical," but here we are. Top it all off with a plot that needed more than double the airtime it got to make any sense, and what was there was batshit insane. Even by sequel standards -- no, even by FLCL sequel standards -- this was dogshit. At least FLCL: Progressive, as terrible as its ending was, had moments of experimental greatness like episode 5. My Life as Inukai-san's Dog -- Speaking of dogshit. You know, in some circles, I could see there being an honest, intellectual debate over whether a scene in which a psychotic teen girl breastfeeds a boy, whom she thinks is actually a dog (because he is actually a dog), counts as beastiality. Specifically, the circles of Hell. Malsangoroth fucked around with this message at 23:05 on Jan 1, 2024 |
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Jan 1, 2024 22:43
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This year I think I was hit more by the "disappointing" than the outright bad. Or at least I expected the outright bad stuff so there wasn't an investment. That said, The Reincarnation of the Strongest Exorcist in Another World- A lot of people poo poo on isekai, and this show is the perfect example of why they do. It commits ALL of the grievous isekai sins like it's checking off a shopping list. -Overpowered main character leading to fights having no tension -Main character doing 180 on his goals as soon as a girl bats her eyes around him -Girls who are all into the mc despite him being  and as interesting as a wooden plank.-Annoying goal of "living quietly" and then doing poo poo like resurrecting a regiment worth of soldiers from the dead. I could go on and on but the worst sin was not the show, it was the subber. This motherfucker translated a line the annoying Navi-esque character says to the MC all the time as "You must live guilefully". And I will now never stop saying the word "guilefully". gently caress you buddy. Right, now then. Reign of the Seven Spellblades-I was on-board for edgy anime Harry Potter and honestly the leads get a super good and really bro-y energy. But towards the end of the season it gets really loving weird, culminating in a succubus girl losing control of a spell and becoming an Shin Megami Tensei final dungeon. The overall last part left a really bad taste in my mouth and it sort of soured my experience of this show as a whole. Just a huge waste cause this show felt like it had both budget and talent. The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady-Yuri fans, I'm calling you the gently caress out. You need higher standards for your anime because I feel like you are being taken for a ride by this industry. This one is my number one most disappointing adaptation, I think it disappointed me more than even Realist Hero's. The original manga is excellent, snappy pacing, good worldbuilding and most importantly a yuri protagonist who actively participates in the plot rather than getting dragged by the hand to the latest drama bomb. We're talking about the kind of chaos gremlin who literally kicks down doors to get answers, chows down on magical drugs to go berserk on a monster hoard (literally after taking one she says "there's a tiny side-effect, which causes me to lose all my reasoning, but that's okay!") and gets a sick tat made from dragon soulstone ink. She's bonkers: she constantly goes against societal expectations and she use her own body for experiments (that berserker pill apparently took few tries to get right and she explicitly states she overdosed a few times teehee-pero) so the energy of her character should have been absolutely manic. Then we have this anime. Worldbuilding? Gone, we're now in generic monarchy fantasy land. I'm not gonna pretend that the original was overflowing with imagination, but there were a lot of cool ideas like how spirit stones are apparently either the corpses of spirits or the next phase in their lifecycle. That kind of approach to magic poo poo was really cool! And it's completely absent from the anime. How about the MC? Way more subdued and way more prone to the angst which is the genre standard. They cut out like 70% of antics which makes her much more forgettable, and we don't get to see the steps of her investigation so her moves in the plot feel like random deductions. The anime squeezes down something like 5 goddamn volumes into 12 episodes and it absolutely does not work. I commend the creators for trying to get to the leads' kiss, but it was not worth it since the overall quality cratered as a result. The plot becomes incredibly generic, dragging Anise from one angsty yuri scene to another angsty yuri scene. I was reassuring my friends that it was gonna get better and unfortunately this anime made me a liar. Just awful.
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Jan 2, 2024 21:34
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Worst Anime of the Year Attack On Titan lmao they kept the ending
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Jan 3, 2024 14:20
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Goblin Slayer- the second season avoided controversy by being so boring no one can form an opinion, not even a negative one. Witch from Mercury- I actually liked this show a lot but the back half is way too rushed, doesn't fit with the amount of setup in the early part, and the whole package could have been amazing if it had just been planned better. Jujutsu Kaisen- Started off hype for this but after each long fight with no likeable character in it to root for I cared less and less until I didn't care at all
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Jan 3, 2024 14:52
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Worst/Disappointing:
Most Avoided:
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Jan 3, 2024 17:14
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chiasaur11 posted:On the upside, I'm now feeling much more favorably inclined towards Gundam SEED, if only by comparison. I've read a lot of criticism about G-Witch but legitimately the most heinous thing anyone has ever said about it
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Jan 3, 2024 20:18
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of all the things you can complain about in g-witch s2, 'suletta's quirks not being treated as the result of serious abuse and conditioning' isnt really one of them when suletta being hosed up is like the entire motivation of miorine for the majority of the season
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Jan 3, 2024 22:14
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anyway the only anime i feel like listing is Yohane the Parhelion which is genuinely the worst anime ive ever seen in my entire life. nothing loving happens for 99% of the show, and every character is a ridiculous rear end in a top hat to Yohane for the crime of doing literally nothing. Like they write the other characters like they're reacting to Yohane being an exasperating chuuni like she was in the original show but she's just a normal person??? And everyone talks to her like she's a very slow 3 year old. And then the show ends with Yohane realizing she was wrong to try and achieve her dreams and instead should just stay in her home village forever. Also features the worst fight scene ever put to animation, where they utterly refuse to show the Love Lives in any danger so instead a deer just runs around while stock hit sound effects play offscreen and the girls go 'oh no, it hit me.' its okay to show chika's sisters being hit though, they arent real people it doesnt even look that good, the artstyle's pleasant enough but they never really do much to animate it and the characters dont emote that much (though that could be down to nothing happening)
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Jan 3, 2024 22:18
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i really didn't want to turn another thread into a stupid conversation about chiasaur's gwitch opinions, but i have to admit i am curious what these "quirks" are that are treated like they're "cute and normal" and what the expectation would be for the story to handle them, as everything i can think of rather feels like "personality traits a person just has and not some weird defect that needs to be cured". if the idea is simply that not enough connection was established between present day suletta and how prospera raised her uhhhh i disagree
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Jan 3, 2024 22:42
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Kizuna no Allele: The most openly corporate cash grab anime I've ever seen. I don't believe anyone involved in this production has any passion for the work. There might be other anime I find more frustrating to watch, but this most of all has zero reason to exist. Digimon Ghost Game: Far too long for what it is: strictly one-off monster of the week episodes where no one ever meaningfully changes. Usually an episode will get an okay setup for the horror, but then the resolution is almost always rushed, with our heroes coming in, punching the bad guy once, and then the bad guy giving up or apologizing and going home, because our protagonists are fine with them trying to murder babies or whatever as long as they have probably learned their lesson. Aside from the very occasional rando dying, everyone is fine at the end of each episode, so there's no real stakes to the conflict presented either, especially with how often one or more of the leads is imperiled. The crumbs of hints to an overarching plot go absolutely nowhere until the literal last three episodes of a 67-episode show, so it's insanely rushed trying to answer every dangling plot thread for the first time. And Gulusgammamon is such a cringe edgelord. My New Boss is Goofy: Some real low effort fujobait featuring the fakest anime cat I've ever seen. It'd be one thing if it stuck to the one-joke comedy premise, but nearly every episode also tries to be profound, which basically consists of our protagonist telling some sob story to his boss in public, while onlookers cry and everybody frigging claps. I also don't care for the implications of finding solace in ads about planetariums or aquariums or whatever because it doesn't feel like we're giving enough credit to the people who actually maintain those facilities. It's so sterile and sanitized. (Julias stop counting here.) Bungo Stray Dogs S4: Killing off most of the characters and turning them into vampires or whatever is kind of meaningless when the whole instigating event was some reality-warpinhg macguffin and thus also the obvious solution. Dazai and Fyodor doing their "oh, look at me I'm so smart" shtick is as tedious as ever, and our villain for the arc is somehow the stupidest man on the planet. Also they ruined the carjacking joke from the manga, the one thing I looked forward to for years. Link Click S2: Really enjoyed the small arcs of photo diving mysteries in the first season. This season is all about chasing after one particular serial killer and his cronies mostly in the present setting, with lots of intricate fight sequences, and they're too long. It's a disappointing shift away from the series' strengths, and in the end we don't even get the perpetrator. What a waste of time (ha). Gold Kingdom and Water Kingdom: This was the only anime movie they had on my plane, and it made my 8-hour flight feel even longer. I was immediately reminded of the horrible Sinbad movies Allarion made me watch all in one sitting, and this movie follows through by also being terribly dull. The characters are too nice, and the central conflict is so easily solved by trade that I don't know why we had to spend two hours on pretending to consider alternatives. Sure, maybe that's impossible because relations between our two countries have been tense for centuries, but it's hard to buy that argument when you barely see that sentiment among either country's people. It's limited to villainous pro-war factions and obviously so beneath our reasonable main characters. The romcom misunderstandings trope is just the irritating icing on top. Honorable mentions I won't rewrite recounts for: Winter posted:Blue Lock: The first half was kinda promising in our protagonist being a little freak surrounded by other sickos, but then they keep backtracking on it, and Isagi ends up being one of my least favorite shounen protagonists for how milquetoast he is. In the back half, it's impossible to tell what's going on in games, the animation falls apart, and the episodes are full of padding reminding the viewer what the stakes are seeminingly every three lines. The cast is stuffed full of one-note gimmicks, and man did my patience evaporate when they decided to end the season on introducing 20 more wacky hair guys. Summer posted:Yohane the Perihelion: Feel like we took the worst parts of Love Live anime (bloated cast who does nothing, allergy to drama persisting more than five minutes) and made them worse because there's nothing going on to mask the dull parts. Sunshine S1 is the one Love Live anime season I like with no big caveats, and boy did this show make me question how much I liked Aqours. Fall posted:Paradox Live the Animation: Eh, I dunno man. For an anime ostensibly about the music, they sure do have a lot of the performances happen off-screen. Our main protagonist is also the least compelling on offer; in a competition with ten billion yen on the line, they're the only ones who are already rich and don't really need the money lol. The emotional beats the show goes for could work if we actually spent the time to get to know the characters, but we have to juggle time between four different groups instead, so we end up getting the heavy eps on like the second ever focus episode we see for some characters. The extremely clunky exposition surrounding everything certainly doesn't help. Also for some reason they decided to go with instrumentality as the main villain plot even though they never even bother giving the villain a name? Akira Ishida was wasted on this. Strange Quark fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Jan 3, 2024 |
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Jan 3, 2024 23:01
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OnimaruXLR posted:I've read a lot of criticism about G-Witch but legitimately the most heinous thing anyone has ever said about it That poster spent the first entire season of the show wringing their hands about how they weren't going to focus on the romance enough and about how bad the show was doing in viewership. They weren't disappointed they were just weird about the show from the get go.
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Jan 4, 2024 01:24
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Yohane is definitely the worst of the Love Live's and just really disappointing especially since it does have moments that make you think it could be really good. Yohane can be a great lead, Dia being a Kamen Rider was a great seiyuu call back. But they did nothing with it
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Jan 4, 2024 01:47
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:That poster spent the first entire season of the show wringing their hands about how they weren't going to focus on the romance enough and about how bad the show was doing in viewership. They weren't disappointed they were just weird about the show from the get go.
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Jan 4, 2024 02:08
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SatoshiMiwa posted:Yohane is definitely the worst of the Love Live's and just really disappointing especially since it does have moments that make you think it could be really good. Yohane can be a great lead, Dia being a Kamen Rider was a great seiyuu call back. But they did nothing with it I think they could've done something interesting with Ruby being 5 inches tall for the musical numbers, but then they just inexplicably make her normal human size for those anyway. What is even the point of the setting
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Jan 4, 2024 02:42
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It seems like kind of a flawed premise. The point of a chuuni character is that they're overdramatic at best and delusional at worst, in a setting where they can actually have magic powers aren't they're just a reasonable person? It's a shame because a fantasy spinoff of an Idol franchise sounds like a funny premise on paper.
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Jan 4, 2024 02:49
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Plutonis posted:Worst Anime of the Year 
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Jan 4, 2024 03:19
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mycot posted:It seems like kind of a flawed premise. The point of a chuuni character is that they're overdramatic at best and delusional at worst, in a setting where they can actually have magic powers aren't they're just a reasonable person? It's a shame because a fantasy spinoff of an Idol franchise sounds like a funny premise on paper.
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Jan 4, 2024 03:37
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my favorite thing about yohane is they refer to the characters as 'of working age' multiple times because they seem like theyre adults but theyre also terrified of just saying so
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Jan 4, 2024 03:37
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Throwing this one in because it hasn't been said yet: Birdie Wing: Golf Girls' Story: Literally all they had to do was end it consistent with the manner of the previous episodes (all that matters is that they get to golf with each other) but instead they had to make it that a) said golf match didn't count unless it was an Official Golf Event and b) they didn't play together for several years. I'm sorry, but is this weird doubling down on golf elitism when the whole show was about thumbing their nose at it? Also it weirdly backed away from the lesbianism.
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Jan 4, 2024 03:38
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Getting in my shitlist before the ban kicks in. Worst: Kizuna no Alelle I have never seen anything so devoid of passion in my life. This is the anime equivalent of the alternate universe Jean Luc Picard from the TNG episode Tapestry, unwilling to take any risks or make any sort of commitment to its own world. MF Ghost It's like the author took all the worst, boringest parts of Initial D and decided "hey, let's make this even more corporate and soulless." The cars are all new, but the author is stuck running in the 90s. Uncool vibrations. Oshi No Ko At last, a hot take from Trigger. No, I hate Aka's lazy expository writing style. It was tolerable in Kaguya because it had a narrator joke character for punchline setups but here it's even more insufferable. "Hey, did you know the entertainment industry...is hosed UP???" Disappointing Honorable Mentions: Yohane Love Live has never been a series that challenged boundaries, and I don't usually think of that as too glaring a fault. However, when you get to totally reinvent your setting and still decide to do the exact same (NOTHING) with it, I start to suspect you just don't have any ideas beyond doing what once worked for you. Million Live More like, we waited a Million years of our Lives for this? Hypmic S2 This show is at its best when the characters are just loving around and getting dragged into murder mysteries and such, but this season was going way too hard on trying to be dramatic. It wasn't terrible but S1 was much better. Most Avoided: Kizuna S2 lmao how the gently caress did this get a season 2 approved are they laundering money with this show
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Jan 4, 2024 03:42
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Maera Sior posted:Throwing this one in because it hasn't been said yet: also i didnt really get the latter vibe at all
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Jan 4, 2024 05:14
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Here we are again! Let's do it in threes! Worst Adaptations Helck: So I watched about six episodes of the anime of Helck, switched over to the manga, and figured out very quickly why the show got so much go away heat. The manga of Helck is an impressive action series, it looks GOOD and by god does the anime of it look incredibly drab by comparison. And that is a deep, fundamental flaw of the adaptation. I mean no disrespect to this story which I enjoyed or any of the characters, but the series is fundamentally a showcase for an artist's incredible capacity to draw impressive settings and detailed, expressive characters and jaw-dropping action. Helck is ultimately a vehicle of art and style and the anime does not have either of those things led me to wonder why even bother with an adaptation of this one if it's the best you can do? Shy: I have absolutely no trouble saying that Shy is one of the worst adaptations I've seen all year, but I do feel like the production team was between a rock and a hard place. This show doesn't look bad, its characters pop, their performances are good, the production qualities are very high, and the action is impressive when it chooses to shift into that mode, but the pacing… I'm gonna say again that we got a 3.5 to 4 episode long arc stretched into seven and it was utterly exhausting to watch. And I don't think anyone on the production staff wanted to make that call. I genuinely do think they were up against it when it came to the source material. It's no great shakes to guess that if they had kept the proper pacing from earlier in the series they would've hit the twelve episode deadline in the middle of an ongoing story and when that happens what you do? You either end inconclusively, you rush the ending of a storyline, or you do it they did and stretch the story until it tears. A drat shame this one, I really was on board with "My Hero Academia but it's a Magical Girl show" Apparently, Disillusioned Adventurers Will Save the World: Ningen Fushin is one of those shows you can watch and know immediately it's not the best version of this story because the production here is just not very good. At the same time it is not bad ENOUGH to completely sink the show and that almost makes it sadder. There are enough instances where the characters and the writing shone through that made me want to see the hypothetical good version of this anime. I dug the cast and the setting, I was invested in the plot lines they did, and the choreography was genuinely on point. It just wasn't well enough directed and produced to hold all the rest of it up. A drat shame. Most Disappointing: Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear Punch: I liked the original season of this, but even a good version of this kind of isekai is going to hit diminishing returns if it goes on for long enough. In the case of this show "long enough" turned out to be the ending of season one because season two was boring. Being this is a wish fulfillment isekai our protagonist is crazy OP, but season two is on the other end of our heroine having established an entrenched position and building a network and knowing all the right people to talk to to solve problems, so she does. drat near nothing happens for a while with entire episodes made up of the protagonist hanging out with the various thinly sketched side characters and then the bear girl goes to fight monsters which he can, unsurprisingly, defeat really easily and gets a power up she didn't actually need... And that's the point where I quit watching. At least with the first season it was kind of fun seeing her go around and do all these things to set herself up but she's already done all these things and nothing really happens as a result of this. I put it is most disappointing here because the first season was at least fun even if it wasn't exactly "good" and I was hoping the second season would also be fun. It was not. The Power of Hope Precure 23: In a profoundly ironic turn I think if this show had aimed lower I think it would have ended up much higher. Precure 23 had a very big problem: it was not willing to honestly engage with the subject matter it chose. While much of the show was devoted to character episodes about its cast of established characters as adults, it chose to theme its main story and its central message on climate change anxiety. This is pretty much how the first episode opens, it ties directly into the agenda of the antagonist, and it's a continuous touchstone throughout the series. And the show at no point references anything related to politics, unchecked corporate power, or the systems of abuse that are actually causing climate change instead leaving it as some vague and nebulous thing that is somehow causelessly happening. Surprise! That makes it lame as hell and pulls the teeth out of the show and leaves it weirdly muddled. Meanwhile, when the show was just about the characters dealing with being grown-ups it actually works pretty drat well. There's a couple of really stand out solo episodes in this show, and if those were what the show had really been about it would probably be on my best list instead of here. Also I was really not a fan of them turn into teenagers when they transform, it felt like a copout. Also not a big fan of them using ugly CGI monsters. Also also not a big fan of the idea that this show might be hogging resources from the currently running actual mainline Precure series because that started to look a lot less good in its back half around when Precure 23 was no doubt ramping. It's no more than a vague conspiracy theory, but I wouldn't be surprised if Precure 23's creation means that we ended up with two shows that were half as good as they could have been. Handyman Saitou in Another World: Handyman Saito is a funny show with a great lead, a mostly great party, and plenty of good jokes. It also has a really big problem and his name is Morlock. Morlock sucks. He's annoying, he's disgusting, he's an odious pervert, his scenes are consistently awful, he's thuddingly unfunny, his dynamic in the party is unpleasant, and the show seems to assume you really really care about this obnoxiously repulsive old lecher. Boy howdy does the show think you are a massive Morlock fan, man alive does it expect you to be hanging on to his every word and laughing at every disgusting gag it pulls regarding him. And I can tell this is true because the entire last third of Handyman Saito is ENTIRELY about Morlock and saving him. It really does try and hang a long, emotional arc on an unpleasant one joke character. The gag of the old man pervert was ancient by the time Dragon Ball rolled out Muten Roshi, and it was just exhausting to watch in an anime that aired in 2023. The Actual loving Worst Anime of the Year That I Watched: Yohane the Parhelion: Sunshine in the Mirror: We are now two years running where one of my best anime of the year has been about a group of girls in a band and my worst is an installment in Love Live. I'd make that gag about nickels here, but it really is kind of surprising it's happened twice now. Anyways, Yohane. It had a really strong start and then slowly revealed nothing was loving going to happen and that really sucked. I was immediately on board with the pilot pitch of music witch/fortuneteller teams up with a discount Sentai team and a Kamen Rider to fight monsters in a goofy fantasy setting where the gag is it's pretty much just the present day with a filter over it. And then nothing loving happened. Characters just kind of drift in and out of episodes and nothing would really matter because of it. I feel like you could just swap around some of the characters in most episodes and nothing would really change for it, they are astoundingly ill-defined within this series proper. As someone who really enjoys plenty of episodic series the reason I get on board with them is usually because I like seeing the diversity of situations and have the characters react to them. Here there is basically no diversity of situation nor is there really much difference in who does what. Yohane the Parhelion: the Mad Libs of Love Live. Bullbuster: To reiterate my incredibly spicy hot take from the seasonal thread, this show reminds me a lot of Gridman and why it didn't work for me and why Bullbuster doesn't really work right either. The short pitch is that I think all the pieces are here (and were there), they were just put together wrong. This character should be the one to do this thing, this character arc should be resolved here, this pattern should be repeated and built upon, these plot points should be focused on instead of these other plot points, this interaction should be moved up or pushed back, this sequence is too long, this plot line doesn't go far enough, this plot line goes too far… But the most damning is that both of these shows are strangled by their own genre conventions. Gridman kept interrupting its action and character writing to go have a giant monster battle right up until the end which made the show less interesting to me, and Bullbuster? Bullbuster decided to take the lazy way out by shifting into a story about big business supervillainy and corporate intrigue when it really should have just been a show about this small company that's in over its head trying to do its job and support its local community. If the show had just been about pest exterminators except the pests are giant monsters I think it would have been much better. And as a bonus by keeping the scale small they would've been able to keep the monsters off screen more often because holy hell does this show have putrid looking CGI monsters. Reign of the Seven Spellblades: I have never gotten into the Nasuverse because everything I've read of it feels like it's just trying too hard. It feels overwrought, overcomplicated, and overwritten with a lot of it seemingly trying way too hard to be shocking or bombastic yet feeling weirdly limp. Again, that's just me and my reaction to it. I bring this up because Reign makes me feel just about the same way, almost literally one-to-one. It's trying too hard, it's overwrought, overcomplicated, overwritten, and boy goddamn is a trying to be shocking and the most apathy inspiring way. I had heard going into this it was going to be a Count of Montecristo-esque revenge story and I have rarely seen a sequence of someone brutally torturing a man to death and felt less about it. The tone on this one is just all over the place and I cannot vibe with it. It just doesn't work for me. Maybe the novel is better? I question this a little bit because it had decent production values and good action. It seems like it was a good adaptation but I honestly couldn't say. Honorable Mention: Giant Beasts of Ars: I'm adding this as the singular entry in this bonus, extra category because while it's not my top three worst I've seen I couldn't in good conscience leave it off this list because my god does the show go to pieces in its final act and more's the pity. I was rooting for this show, the opening theme is possibly my favorite of the year, the setting is wild and feels anything but generic stock fantasy, the cast are pretty cool, the action is overall solid for what's obviously a budget title, but it just doesn't go anywhere. We've got a group of compelling weirdos, a really inventive and stylish take on paladins and clerics, a giant monster incursion, a weird evil empire with an Emperor who may have mind control powers, multiple different factions living around the world (including some of the coolest orcs I've ever seen), a possibly alien race of weirdos that manifest as identical girls with animals on their heads (kudos to the people who made the subtitles for finding every imaginable cat pun for the cat wearing protagonist), genetic engineering and cloning experiments and people being Frankenstein'd back to life somehow, complicated skulduggery and politicking, and after all that it doesn't really lead anywhere… There is an entire side plot of a high ranked Imperial lady digging up secrets to find the truth behind the Empire and the big war and she doesn't really find anything out or actually matter all that much in the end. I honestly struggle to remember anything she did. And then we got the ending which, look I don't ask for every ending to provide complete closure. I don't mind an open ending or one that leaves some stuff up in the air still. But Ars? After multiple episodes of build up about some vague mystery threat the show literally ends right as they arrive with no explanation. Disappointing. Most Avoided: FLCL 4: So I do not actually like FLCL1 much. It just never had much of an impact on me. I re-watched it a little while ago after the first two sequels came out and, while I think I get the original more now I still don't really like it. It's just a show that had very little resonance for me. Honestly I'd say I actually liked FLCL 2 more than the original, which I know is not a very common opinion. Honestly I think FLCL2 was at its best when it had as little to do with the original as possible. When it was just a story about an unconventional couple interacting and getting to know each other I was extremely onboard. Meanwhile, when Haruko was on screen and/or they were doing zany shenanigans it sucked. That's a long way to say that when I saw FLCL 4 was pitching itself as being like the original again but with CG animation I immediately put it on my do not watch list. Rising of the Shield Hero S3: Nope. Attack on Titan The Final Final Final season: This series never got its hooks in me in the first place, I just wanted to bring up that I still find it morbidly hilarious that the show got a final season, a finaler season, and a finalest season. Omnicrom fucked around with this message at 01:33 on Jan 6, 2024 |
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Jan 4, 2024 07:21
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Maera Sior posted:Throwing this one in because it hasn't been said yet: This is just classic sports anime tbh, and it's what its all about!!
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Jan 4, 2024 09:00
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I usually don't like doing this sort of thing but I felt compelled this year because of one particular show. I'm not writing a novel because one of my hands doesn't work sorry. Worst 100 girlfriends: Tries to have its cake and eat it too, which works for a little while and stays funny somehow until it really really doesn't. Didn't stick with this trash past the first half. Far and away my least liked. Link Click S2: First couple of episodes get rid of everything I liked about S1. Still it's not abjectly terrible. Isekai Ojisan It's the same joke 1000 times and the joke isn't good enough. Plus all the production issues. Avoided Rokudou: Basically the same as southern cassowary. Plus something about the art style pisses me off (arbitrary). AOT Final: The End: vFinal: whatevers Nope, not falling for this one. Helck I liked the first part of the manga before it sunk into mediocrity imo, so I wanted to check out this season but just couldn't bring myself to continue. maybe I will still, maybe I won't.
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Jan 4, 2024 14:47
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Sleng Teng posted:100 girlfriends: Tries to have its cake and eat it too, which works for a little while and stays funny somehow until it really really doesn't. Didn't stick with this trash past the first half. Far and away my least liked. i finished this through inertia and being bored during the holidays but yeah i think i agree with you. when it does work it's really funny, but it's just content to roll around in the slop and do some really offputting poo poo too much.
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Jan 4, 2024 15:38
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Strange Quark posted:Digimon Ghost Game: Far too long for what it is: strictly one-off monster of the week episodes where no one ever meaningfully changes. Usually an episode will get an okay setup for the horror, but then the resolution is almost always rushed, with our heroes coming in, punching the bad guy once, and then the bad guy giving up or apologizing and going home, because our protagonists are fine with them trying to murder babies or whatever as long as they have probably learned their lesson. Aside from the very occasional rando dying, everyone is fine at the end of each episode, so there's no real stakes to the conflict presented either, especially with how often one or more of the leads is imperiled. The crumbs of hints to an overarching plot go absolutely nowhere until the literal last three episodes of a 67-episode show, so it's insanely rushed trying to answer every dangling plot thread for the first time. And Gulusgammamon is such a cringe edgelord. although i somewhat agree with this, i need to point out that Gulusgammamon being a cringe edgelord is by far the most enjoyable thing in the show and he should have been in more episodes
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Jan 4, 2024 17:05
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 Not to pile on or anything but I don't know how you could watch this whole scene and come away thinking it wasn't portraying an abusive relationship. BIRDIE WING: Golf Girls' Story Season 2: I dunno why, it just felt like this one wasn't as fun as season one. A personal gripe I had was that season one felt a lot better about using its cast, while here there's a whole revolving door of people that lose to Eve and Aoi and then either disappear completely or just go sit on a coach watching them play golf. That's even true of some golfers who were built up as important in the first half. Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout The Animation: Saw this with some friends and it felt like there was never much to say about it beyond 'oh, that's a horny camera angle'. It did make me want to play the game, but that's because the game is probably a lot better.
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Jan 4, 2024 20:14
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Maera Sior posted:Throwing this one in because it hasn't been said yet: birdie wing and gwitch both dropped the ball insanely hard by splitting up the leads for almost the entire season
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Jan 4, 2024 21:06
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Worst/Most Disappointing Anime Yohane the Parhelion -Sunshine in the Mirror- - Decided this doesn't deserve the one point it'd get from being my 5th place out of 6 anime I watched in 2023. The biggest disappointment I've had in an anime since the Battle Athletes sequel, but at least I able to finish it somehow...though skipping parts of some episodes that dragged on. The opening sequence and first few episodes teasing a fantasy adventure with alternate universe versions of the Love Live Sunshine cast hooked me, only to switch to a very boring, plodding slice of life middle before suddenly remembering there was an overarching plot to solve. The characters never felt like they developed despite having moments to do so, and a lot of possibly interesting things about the setting went unexplained, or only explained in voice dramas - why not put that in instead of 10 minutes of Yohane cooking takoyaki and then another 10 her looking for her staff that she can't sing without and then the MV doesn't have her holding it anyway? As a music series as well, there were a few stand out songs, but by the end they felt like excuses to add more things to the soundtrack as the inserted MVs felt out of place. At least the first video game based on this spinoff is much better. Most Avoided Anime Oshi no Ko - People would watch three episodes of this and figure they knew everything about idol fans and also the idol industry. Wotagei now being called "the babu dance" is a plague. The OP is also overplayed. Justin_Brett posted:Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout The Animation: Saw this with some friends and it felt like there was never much to say about it beyond 'oh, that's a horny camera angle'. It did make me want to play the game, but that's because the game is probably a lot better.
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Jan 4, 2024 21:21
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Justin_Brett posted:Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness & the Secret Hideout The Animation: Saw this with some friends and it felt like there was never much to say about it beyond 'oh, that's a horny camera angle'. It did make me want to play the game, but that's because the game is probably a lot better. It's weird because the game is honestly pretty sexless, character designs notwithstanding. Like there is genuinely not a single cheesecake scene unlike 99% of the other GUST games.
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Jan 4, 2024 22:42
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Venting about how mashle is a manga about a brisk fun gag manga that sticks some cool in action in there as a break and how the anime decided that it should just loving drag and drag on the action stuff instead of launching jokes at you nonstop Like drat how do you take out like seventy percent of the jokes in a drat gag manga adaptation
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Jan 5, 2024 00:23
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Seraphic Neoman posted:It's weird because the game is honestly pretty sexless, character designs notwithstanding. Like there is genuinely not a single cheesecake scene unlike 99% of the other GUST games. I was super hesitant to play the game in the first place because of the sheer volume of fans that like scream poo poo like "Thighza!" any time it's so much as mentioned and obsess over the like seventeen year old main character's thighs; something which isn't even prominent outside of specific official arts. So when I did I was absolutely surprised that there's basically zero creepy poo poo in it and it's actually pretty good. Then the anime trailer comes out and it seemed like it was basically made to pander to that kind of lovely loser. So I guess that's my most avoided series. Most disappointing goes to Helck. I was super excited for the Helck adaptation and got like three episodes in before realizing it had absolutely none of the charm or energy the manga did and just kind of gave up.
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Jan 5, 2024 01:02
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Seraphic Neoman posted:unlike 99% of the other GUST games. Dang what Gust games have you been playing cause all the modern Ateliers are pretty equal in terms of that type of content (except maybe Rorona)
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Jan 5, 2024 01:03
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theyre probably mostly thinking of ar tonelico
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Jan 5, 2024 01:19
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They also had a really bad beat em up series at one point.
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Jan 5, 2024 01:36
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