Typical [Villain intensifies.] episode, not much here. Feels like there are a lot of overly long pauses during dialogue, like they had to fill air time.
Having an 11-year-old nephew sometimes means I'm in the room for some random stuff.
To my lay ears, the scientific explanation for what happened in Japan sounds like utter babble—but then, I don't know anything about lecithin or what it does, so…let's call it TV magic.
I can't very well stop reviewing these after 4 episodes, can I?
Sunrise more or less did it again. There's character development in here! To be quite perfectly honest, I expected to hate this week's episode simply because it (obviously, from the title) focuses on Yohane/Yoshiko. I couldn't stand her when she showed up before in the anime, and I have a general dislike for chuunibyou characters, so I didn't expect much. But after this episode, I actually kind of like her now. Did I mention there's character development again this week? If this keeps up I might start looking forward to the new episodes again.
Everything @Maiklas3000 says is true. Most of the emcee team seems to have been chosen for celebrity value, rather than insightful commentary. (The same could be said of all of season 1, since it's the same three people as last year with a different pretty face to introduce them all. No, I don't agree with the decision to stick a woman in the "introduce the men" role—not last year, and not this year. They should have had her talk seriously about the bots, right alongside the men, or found someone else who could.)
Editing out some of the qualifying matches also happened last year, and it was just as annoying the second time around—especially because the premiere episode was double-length. One would think that they could make time for all 24 battles in the first two episodes. Or, if not, here's a novel idea: Have three episodes about the qualifying round! Or, cut out the bad puns and repetitive pre-battle routine ("Robots, activate!", "Red team ready?", "Blue team ready?", etc.) to save some time for the extra fights.
And it really couldn't hurt to ask Grant Imahara to replace Kenny or Chris and give solid technical commentary before matches.
Still pretty generic. Some hints of intrigue, but it ain't promising that episode 2 is essentially an excuse to put the girls in bikinis. The shoddy character introductions in episode 1 also mean I don't know who anyone is. (They just put up everyone's name really quick during a meeting, which doesn't really help the viewer remember who people are at all. "Show, don't tell," and all that.)
You know what every idol show needs? A villain who hides in the shadows and plots to destroy the group. iM@S totally needed it, and so does B-Project. /s
After such a strong start in the first episode, the second backed off a bit. Still held my attention almost all the way through, but this week's plot was somewhat less compelling than the experience of watching it.
As has been typical of this new BattleBots series, the hype is real but the matchups aren't. I immediately predicted three of the four winners, despite claims that these 12 bots were fighting because they were all "so evenly matched" that the selection committee couldn't agree which ones to put in the final field. There were some spectacular moments along the way, but for the most part I was completely unsurprised by who got knocked out and when. I mean, come on: did they really think Creepy Crawlies stood a chance against any bot in the entire field? No way. No combination of 50-pound bots with anemic claws on the front could possibly stand up to even one half of Gemini (125 lbs), let alone Son of Whyachi.
However, I do have to give this special an extra rating point for the one match that saw the bot I predicted as the first loser (Black Ice, driven by former astronaut and bot-battling rookie Dan Barry) come out on top—the arena proved to be hazardous even with the hazards turned off, and that took my predicted winner (Skorpios) completely out of the running.
Needs more world-building. I suspect some of that will come in the next episode, based on the closing narration. But just as a premiere episode, it's just a generic high-schoolers-fight-never-ending-waves-of-aliens show.
As a first episode, this really worked well. Got me wanting to watch more.
I mean, I was going to anyway—it's a noitaminA show, after all—but I'm looking forward to it.
Ugh, some cute moments between Reina and Kumiko ruined by drama nobody asked for.
Convinced to spend an hour watching this absolute pile of crap by literally my oldest friend. Am now questioning whether she's really a friend. But oh, did we laugh at this. It's SO BAD.
@LuckyNumber78, it's your turn.
Pfft, continuity is hard. Door halfway shut, cut SLAM. And why are they just ignoring Parker's changing voice?
As for the writing…did they really not have enough material to fill the last few minutes? So they resorted to stretching out gags that weren't even that funny in the first place? Sigh.
No. NO. You can't just magically sink the Harekaze in the harbor after everyone disembarks without any explanation. It doesn't work that way!
Some great stuff happened in the rest of this episode, but oh, that terrible ending. Absolute bottom tier writing.
Great premise, great execution, great writing. There were a couple of bits that could have been done better, but if Trakt offered a 9.5 rating option I would use it.
Anyone else find it concerning that the interview clip used from ABC 7's coverage of the new FCC rules for cell phones features a woman sitting in front of a computer clearly running Windows XP? John wasn't kidding about outdated technology, man. Those new rules are from last year.
Apparently bias is an emotion now? But still worth it for the comparison of tomatoes and Judaism.
Feels flawed, but it'll hold your attention even if you're thinking "That's not right!"
Almost worth watching just for Sean Connery's off-and-on Scottish accent. The effects are a bit dated, but it is almost 13 years old… and I've seen worse in blockbuster films from last year.
Pretty much everything I want to say has already been laid out quite eloquently by Abstractals (spoiler tagged): https://trakt.tv/comments/80896
But in summary: There is a lot of technically impressive work in this film, especially the long takes with tons of extras and action in the background. But dramatically, I don't think this film is there. The aspect ratio and narrow depth of field feel like gimmicks, like the screenplay was written entirely to enable their use, rather than making those choices based on a fleshed-out story. I was entirely done with Saul's head being constantly in frame within five minutes, only to be stuck with it for most of the rest of the film. Everything we see (with exceptions covered in Abstractals' review) is either around Saul or through his eyes, and that forced perspective dramatically limits the story. The blurred backgrounds detach the action, making it seem less real. I still have no idea what Saul's motive was. I'm not even sure I care, sadly.
Maybe showing the viewer a Holocaust story that they can't connect with emotionally was the whole point. But if it was, I would have been happy to pass on this.
The setup is a high school concert band that wants to get to nationals…and there are maybe two pieces of music in the entire show? This was not good. The whole thing is focused around mysteries that the main characters get distracted by when they're supposed to be making music. They're not even interesting mysteries. Every one is the same: Stump the two self-appointed detectives until some deus ex machina reveal lets them solve it. Character development is mostly nonexistent.
I'd award an extra point for having a queer MC, but the show never actually does anything with that fact after establishing a love polygon in episode 1 (which persists for the rest of the series, unmentioned except for a couple throwaway comic bits).
I watched the first half of this season in 4 days, and then stalled out for 5 months. Something shifted in the tone of the show that made it suddenly a lot less interesting around halfway through. There's a bit of a resurgence during the Awa arc, near the end, but it's still a mixed bag at best.
I'm not sure if I'm interested in a second season, should this get one, or not. It's certainly scripted to set up for continuation—and there are plenty more manga volumes to adapt—but the anime might or might not continue. Maybe it will, and maybe I'll watch it. Dunno yet.
Random HTML code as an access log? I could make some joke about Japan being Japan, but the same kind of thing happens in American and British TV too. Ah, well.
It took me (checks MAL) 486 days to force myself through this series. I have not watched the OVA. I don't need an extra 11 minutes† to know that I don't care for this show. Allegedly it still has yet to be either renewed or cancelled, but I hope that Studio 3Hz will move on and leave this behind. It really shows that production values alone cannot make an anime good. The writing in Sora no Method just isn't there, and no amount of moe can hide that.
Up next from Studio 3Hz is Dimension W, which will hopefully be better. (Yes, I'm way behind on anime.)
† - The OVA shows as 25 minutes because no metadata source that Trakt pulls in allows overriding episode duration. It's set at the show level, and that's what you get, period. It's too bad.
I think the actors did their level best to put believable characters on screen after being given very little to work with by a mediocre script. There's a lot of focus on the robot battles, but the characters seem underdeveloped.
The visual effects could be called impressive given the small budget this film had to work with, but visual effects are kind of the easy part of filmmaking these days—the software has already been written, you just have to use it.
Scriptwriting is the hard part, and this story could have said so much more. It started to develop characters in the first act, but once the action started all character work basically fell by the wayside. It's too bad, really—there's a kernel of good world-building in here that was never really utilized.
Feel-good, it is, but it's hard to overlook the slow pacing and predictability.
There are some interesting facts in this show. Too bad they're dramatically overshadowed by the hyper-sensationalized narration that attempts to make the average viewer deathly afraid of anything technological.
Oh, and most of these aren't disasters of engineering at all. The vast, VAST majority of incidents this series scrutinizes are either natural disasters that no amount of engineering could prevent or protect against; or human failures of the people responsible for maintaining the systems that were engineered to perform well within tolerances. I'm sorry, but equipment that goes 16 years without inspection, or human errors at the controls, do not qualify as engineering problems.
Skip this.
Poor choice of words to say that an engine fire that disabled a ship left "thousands of vacationers dead in the water", no? Surely there was another idiom that would have served the purpose without implying that anyone died.
"Co-two-du-lack"? That's not how "Coteau-du-Lac" is pronounced… It's "Coo-toe-du-lack". Learn some French, announcer guy.
Lots of points for being thought-provoking, but points off for the ridiculous depiction of the after-school activity center.
