Even out of context this is a terrible, cliched “joke” but in context it doesn’t even make sense:
Because this is a player in a virtual reality MMO game! She designed this character herself! Why would she be bothered by the fact she doesn’t have breasts when she choose not to? (Heck, why assume she’s actually the same gender as her character?)
It’s the perfect example of how lazy this series is and how little it and its original creator ever thought about its videogame setting. I’ve read the manga version of this until I got bored of it and never ever got the sense that this was indeed a game you could play. Let alone have fun playing it. Playing a VRMMO casually with a focus on crafting rather than combat is not inherently a bad idea for a series, but you have to have some energy and thought behind it to make it worthwhile. Reading a manga where every other chapter is the protagonist inventing another new crafting method is one thing. As an anime series it’s just dull.
In nothing of what Toaru Ossan no VRMMO Katsudouki does is there any hint that the author thought about what it would be like to play a game this way. Why would our hero be the only one to play this way? Why would anybody else care that he does, or even know how he plays? Why is this world so underpopulated in the first place? It all feels ripped off from other, better stories. If you want a series about virtual reality gaming with some actual impact, go watch Shangri-La Frontier instead.
The entire episode is nigh-unintelligible thanks to what is almost undoubtedly unedited machine translation. On the lighter end of things, there’s almost no proper punctuation. Four out of five sentences end without a period. Later in the episode, there are sections where two versions of a subtitle will appear side by side for reasons I cannot even figure out. I’m pretty sure every line in the subtitle script was fed individually through a translation program – because every line starts with a capitalized letter, regardless of whether it’s a new sentence.
The examples given are indeed egregious, but I want to focus on some less obvious mistakes, mistakes you can find in other anime as well. In the screenshot above, the translator has confused who is the subject of the sentence. When watching, it’s clear that she’s talking about him, not herself. Even if not clear from the scene itself, it should be clear from the preceeding ones, which saw him getting upset by his brothers not trusting him to do house work. It’s the sort of error you can make when you only have the to be translated text to go by, not the actual footage. An editor should’ve caught this, but how well if at all is any subtitling edited at Crunchyroll these days?
Here the tense is obviously wrong: it’s should be copying, not copied, as they’re still doing it. Ending on “as if nothing had happened” is also weird, a bit of a cliche translation of “atarimae darou”, more literal, as if it’s obvious or the most normal thing in the world to do. It does get the gist of what he’s saying, but it’s slightly awkward and lazy.
Watching through the rest of the episode it all gets so bad that it completely ruins the show. I cannot believe any human looked at this and thought it was good enough to release. You wouldn’t tolerate this reading a scanlated manga, let alone from a paid for service. The one thing Crunchyroll offers other than a convenient place to watch anime at and they fuck it up like this. Hope you weren’tlooking forward to this show.
Alex, an art student, dreams of joining Eve, the “Elite’s Visual School”. Together with her best friend Kimmy, they train hard to pass the notoriously impossible entrance exam. Alex’s training turns into an obsession, compromising her friendship with Kimmy.
Try Hard is the first of the graduation animations (teaser) made by the class of 2023 at Gobelins, a French school of “visual creation”, with each new animation released weekly on Wednesday. English subtitles are available if you don’t understand French.
Really a lovely bit of animation that makes me look forward to the other entries.
With the final episode of Bang Dream! It’s Mygo!!!!! only two days away, let’s look back at episode ten’s epic climax:
From the start Mygo!!!!! has been different from any other Bang Dream series, rougher, darker. Suddenly being in a girl’s band wasn’t all smiles and friendships anymore. Being in a band could hurt you, as it hurt Tomori when Crychic, her first band broke up in the very first scene of the series, leaving her feeling lost and blaming herself for the breakup. Episode three showed exactly how much its breakup messed her up and why she was wary when Anon dragged her into a new band. Yet she did join, as did Taki and Soyo, both also having been hurt by that breakup, both now looking for a new start.
But that was a lie. Anon may have been transparent and open in her desire to use being in a band to get popular, but both Taki and Soyo had ulterior motives too. Taki just wanted to be with Tomori and it didn’t matter how, while Soyo saw the new band as a way to get the old one back together. When that failed Tomori’s worst nightmare happened again. Once again she was alone, once again she failed in keeping her band together.
Episode ten is where she fights back, the only way she can. She books a series of performances at Ring and starts singing her frustrations. First alone, but quickly joined by Raana, the lead guitarist, who is content to be there to provide the background music. Taki too joins quickly, forced to by Raana. Anon is harder to convince but Anon is also the one who gets Soyo to be there, who drags her onto the stage and gets her to play.
It’s hard to understate how different this performance is from any other Bandori performance. The band completely ignores the audience, are purely playing for themselves. Their focus is Soyo who in turn only has eyes for them. The song’s structure too is a far cry from what we’re used to from Bang Dream songs. Just compare with the much more typical Haruhikage from episode seven. Both are good songs but even the slightly more polished official release is so much more interesting. The rawness of Tomori’s singing, the willingness to abandon the usual structure of Bang Dream songs, the emotion, it all makes it the perfect climax to the first ten episodes. The band has come to its lowest point and together they’re climbing back up again. And it’s all thanks to Tomori.
It’s Tomori’s desperation to be understood that drives that performance. From that very first performance, standing along, reading out the song as if it was a poem, the need to connect to her band mates is clear. That it’s Raana who’s drawn in first fits. She may look like she has the least connection to her fellow band members, but she also understand them the best. It’s her that then forces Taki to join, exactly the person Tomori needs to be there before she can even think about getting Anon and Soyo back. It’s also the first time we’ve seen Raana be restrained in her guitar playing, to support Tomori like Taki supports her.
Tomori then recruiting Anon is the mirror image of how Anon got Tomori back into doing music. And it’s only Anon who could’ve brought Soyo back. Anon might have been hurt by her manipulations, but she understands Soyo, she knows how to push her buttons to get her there. Tomori dragging her to the stage and Anon dragging her on it, a cocky grin on her face is the perfect encapsulation of their relationship. The small details of Anon cupping her face and Raana skipping back to her position after handing Soyo her bass are the cherry on the cake.
The performance itself, Tomori facing down Soyo, back to the audience, with Raana and Anon flanking her, Taki providing rock solid support from the back: you can feel the emotions running loose even before the water works start. It’s the sort of performance that you’d never forget if you’d been there; there will be quite a few people wishing they had been there, or will make out they had been, or at Tomori’s earlier gigs. It’s like having been at the first Sex Pistols gig: something new is starting even if you don’t quite know what.
Bang Dream! It’s Mygo!!!!! is the most darkest entry in the Bang DreaM franchise so far. Instead of nice stories about starting a band together, this one started with one breaking up and things did not improve from there. This episode again was as emo as your average Roselia concert. The focus this time was on Soyo, the ex-member of Crychic who seemed the most put together. Seemed. To be honest, I distrusted her friendliness and cheerfulness from the start. She seemed to be in denial about how badly Crychic had ended, a bit obsessed with getting back in touch with Saki, the one who broke it up in the first place. She seemed friendly and helpful, but there was always something manipulative about her.
After episode’s seven’s concert, what should’ve been a triumph turned sour because Soyo got upset they played Crychic’s old song. Soyo got upset because Saki was in the audience and she got upset hearing it. So this episode she spent ghosting her team mates and guilt tripping Mutsumi, another ex-member in bringing her to Saki’s home. Which did not went well. Saki confronted her with the truth: Crychic was not coming back and trying to revive it for her own selfish reasons would just hurt everyone. That Soyo took it badly is an understatement.
by contrast, Tomori is moving forward, even inviting Anon in to her house. I liked how we got a slow pan of her bedroom with all its various collections neatly stashed away. Also liked the detail of her serving Anon milk, when you’d ordinarily expect some sort of tea. With five more episodes to go it will be interesting to see how this will all get resolved.
