Mekaku City Actors Anime Review

Spring season was a weird one this year. J.C. Staff broke their track record of great romance anime that made me squeal like a schoolgirl with Dai Shogun. An anime so bad, that despite the giant target it painted on its head I couldn't drag myself through the rest of its 12 episodes to pull the trigger. While on the other hand Studio Brain's Base came out that with an anime that I am so biased about, the review might very well be featured on Fox.

How is this in anyway related to Mekaku City Actors? It's not, why do you ask?

Mekaku actors is anime about Shintaro. A shut in, who unlike most of us, has a reason for shutting the world out behind layers of anime and forum posts about how 'the manga was so much better.' He is the main charac--- actually I lied. This anime is about an idol named Momo. She has a problem that most of us can only dream of--that being that everyone likes her too much. Which I would say on the scale of things would exist only slightly on the first world problems side of—this anime is about a monster and her kids who—okay if you haven't gotten that this anime is confusing as all hell allow me to bludgeon you over the head with it; THIS ANIME IS CONFUSING AS ALL HELL.

See there's a little problem this anime has. It tries to take a massive amount of source material and cram it all into the span of 12, 20 minute, episodes. Which, in terms of telling a coherent story, is about as small small as the mental issues of people claiming that Obama is a socialist terrorist trying to overthrow the 'murican dream.

If you're going to have a cast large enough to make up a small nation, you need to the screen time to, I don't know, develop them. It doesn't matter how well it does in developing the characters if the time it has to do so is as much as a play-through of Half Minute Hero. But if the fight for character equality is what they were trying to win, let me just say that they lost so horribly they Brazil look like Napoleon Bonaparte. 

See aside from splitting the already small measure of time among a large group of time, the anime really likes to play favorites. Like seeing Mary compete with Momo over the Ms. Moe award? Great, not like it matters because Mary is voiced by Kana Hanazawa! You like Seto? 

  Not to mention that the anime is constantly playing catch-up. Characters are constantly having dream sequences, flashbacks or otherwise complaining. It's almost as though Shaft didn't give it enough time for full character development.

Now that's not to say that the anime has nothing going for it in the character department. That being this guy. That being Hibiya, the little boy who started out as an annoying brat, but slowly became my favorite character of the whole lot (Ironically is voiced by Misuzu Togashi, who seems to be the queen of such characters). Who's only distinguishing characteristic from the other wimpy character who goes for a girl for reasons that no-one else can comprehend, is that instead of said girl stalking him and killing everyone he cares about, she ignores him like yesterday's trash. See he gets a whole episode devoted to him and benefits because of it. Not to mention his development happens in real time.
 


Now, while I'm certainly no Einstein , I don't consider myself stupid and am generally able to follow complex plots in things like Game of Thrones or the Wire, but hand me a fiddle and call me psyduck because I was confused. 

Then again, what can you expect when your show is produced by anime's equivalent of Picasso on  an acid trip, with a plot-line with the consistency of the political climate in Israel being set hundreds of years in the future.

Even the aforementioned episode with good character development left me dazed and confused.  To give an example one episode involved a girl repeatedly getting run over by a truck, with
 the protagonist  trying and failing to save her,until finally taking her place. Without giving away any more, this never seemed to have much impact on the real world as a physical manifestation ended up having the real consequences. 

Whoah sorry had a bit of Déjà vu

Like I said when talking about Captain Earth, I have absolutely no problem with an anime treating me like someone with a higher IQ than your average George Bush, but there is a balance between expositional dialogue and completely isolating anyone who hasn't received a P.H.D in bullshit.
 
Like the characters the plot of the anime had potential. I love the idea of time looping, with anime like Higurashi and All you need is kill proving that this can work. It's an original structure of storytelling that unlike the traditional time travel concept has not been recycled to stage where if not for the amount of car chases, I'd think that Hollywood was going green.

Problem is Mekaku wants to have its cake and eat it too. Let's compare; Higurashi, 50 episodes. Mekaku, 12. Hmmm, y'know for an anime about repeating the same series of events like a washing machine stuck on spin, that seems like a pretty damn short time. 

Yeah, remember the pain you felt as your favorite characters died horrible, horrible deaths while the anime dangled the words 'happy ending' in front of you face like a carrot on a string? See, Shaft knows that that gave so much more meaning to the ending and so development to the characters, that they decided to skip to the end. 

All the tragedy and character development happened, but do you ever get to see any of it? Silly, Shaft can't spend that much time on this, they have more important things to Bioshock and actually playing it yourself. No matter how well they tell it, it will never match up to experiencing do. Like procrastinating on releasing Kizumonogatari.

This results in the anime having so much of the potential stripped away from the show. It's the difference between having someone tell you how much fun they had playing something like it yourself. 

Since I've already wasted enough of your time, I'll keep this next part short; 

Overall the experience is best described as a roller-coaster, with the peaks of animation being higher than Colorado on the twentieth of April and the low points hitting rock bottom so hard you'd think that the whole thing was set in a quarry (don't worry that joke hurt me just as much as it did you). Special shout-out goes to the ninth episode for ruining good impressions of 3d animation leftover from Ars Nova. 

That Tree...

Now you might think from what I've said here, that my overall impression of the show was negative. Yet...hmm. I liked it...sorta.

The anime was fun, and as anyone who has seen any Shaft anime can testify to, even at its lowest points the anime was nice to look at. The plot and characters, if given enough time and a bit more exposition, had enough potential to become at least above-average if not becoming genuinely unique and interesting. Not to say that their bad here, but due to time constraints and an over-reliance on flashbacks as a means of development, they never manage to break out of the 'average' category. The plot, while confusing and riddled with enough plot holes to make it a 'holy grail' if you will, was entertaining and tried to keep things interesting. The sound design is great, with an all-star cast and some fantastic ost and insert songs. 

So I'd say that if you've really got your heart set on the latest Shaftien mystery wrapped up in an enigma, or if you've still got Edge of Tomorrow withdrawal, give it a shot. 

For the rest of you, my friend strongly recommends checking out the manga or light novels, which he says are much, much better.

Thanks for reading, and as always likes, follows and spreading the word is always appreciated! 
 

No Game No life Anime Review

No Game, No Life is both an anime that came out in the spring of 2014 from studio Madhouse and a summerization of what I do when not writing things like this. The basic concept revolves around a dynamic duo that are really, really good at games. Unfortunately as much as they (and I) would love it to be, life isn't all about fun and games. That is, until they are transported into a different world where everything is a game. I wouldn't want to give away everything (because I'm the sole member of the beginnings-are-just-as-important-as-endings party) but the only way to get anything is to win at a particular game. The winner of the game will get whatever it is that was agreed upon before the start of the game.

Now I know that I usually praise the animation of a show, but this time...I'm going to do it again. Glazing over the fanservice complete with the latest Havoc boob physics engine, the anime looks pretty. Not in the whole Captain Earth style of flashing its budget in your face right before diving into a pile of greenbacks, but more in the style of creating architecture that would give Frank Lloyd Wright a boner and injecting everything with so much color it makes a modern military shooter look grey dull and lifeless in comparison—oh wait.

They also decided to outline everything in red, a choice that not only makes the anime ten times better to look at, but also begs the question;

How the hell did they have enough to color her hair?!

 Plot--While it was no Lord of the Rings, No Game, No Life took me by surprise. It felt...epic. The whole way through it felt like there was a serious sense of progress. This wasn't an anime content with having its characters fish while everybody else is dying. It's not like the characters just faff about until the next plot-point, they're busy strategizing, or conquering territories or

...faffing about

The point is that all this feels one of those grand 4x strategy games. Unlike something like Naruto where the ending could be as far away as the release of a third season of Haruhi or as close as that guy the side of the street makes it out to be.

Instead with every territory conquered it feels more like the duo are slowly building an empire, against overwhelming odds, in order to face an overwhelming threat looming on the horizon.


 Sound---While I'm afraid I can't exactly let you listen to any of it (freaking companies wanting to protect their intellectual property) I can tell you that it is worth it.

       Note; this isn't the original and hence its grandeur is cut into fourths and ground into pieces so  small that EA's dlc plans would look like expansion packs if compared.What does this have to to with anything? Hmmm.

The voice actors really sounded like they were having fun with it. They may not be nominated for the emmys, but they sounded like they weren't half assed and made the characters a lot more likable/memorable.

Characters—Well, hmm. I think the characters are the worst part of the show. Now I'm the singular member of the 'characters-don't-have-to-have-meaningful-development-to-be-good' (acronym in progress), but unlike something like Kill La Kill, I don't think that these characters stand up so well. Kill La Kill had at least one character with some kind of development. The problem here is that none of the characters get any development. They try to introduce some kind social commentary on gamers and those who don't have great social skills, but doesn't get enough analyzation to make it stand out among so many other anime that tackle the same sorts of issues.

That being said the characters are likeable. Especially the main character. He follows the Kamina style archetype of being so charismatic that could make the French run towards a battle. While we're on the subject Shiro (the sister who isn't really the sister) gets so little screen time you'd think she was a transformer in a Michael bay movie.

Is that...

So why should you watch this? It has little to no character development...and I haven't said anything else negative about it. Not the lead-in I was hoping for, but here-goes. 

If there's one thing that anime does that you won't see in any other medium it's the over-the-top crazy ideas that are found in it. Where the hell else are you going to find a war between humans and penguins over porn fought in offspring of hellboy and the Rx-78-2? Where else are you going to see an interdimensional head boner? And how I wish that there was some other place could see more of this.

By the same token where else can you find a word game that literally begins with a nuke being dropped on the playing field. Where else can you find a chess game where moral and ethics are the determining factor of victory. These game are the reason you watch this and are easily the best part of the show. They give it flavor; you always want to see what crazy situation they're going to find themselves in next, and how they're going to get out of it. 

Thanks for reading! As always follows, likes and stuff are greatly appreciated. Still trying to organize a video review of something, but like everything it isn't as easy as I thought it would be.