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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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