First Impressions – Page 11

SAO Alternative: Gun Gale Online — First Impressions

Published on April 7, 2018Leave a comment

How do you make a good Sword Art Online series? Drop Kirito, set the story in Gun Gale Online and make the new protagonist a girl who prefers to wear all pink armour while kicking ass.

SAO Alternative: pink is a warrior colour

This first episode managed to do what the original series never managed: make this look like a game people would actually play. The plot hasn’t kicked in yet, if there’s going to be any, so instead this whole episode was one long team match played in Gun Gale Online, which, as you may know from the second Swords Art Online series, is a sort of modern or post-apocalyptic shooter VRMMO. The way it’s presented here it seems to be a fairly serious sort of game, realistic enough that there’s a team of “pros” in the battle, a group of soldiers using it as a training exercise. Why they don’t use a dedicated server instead of mixing with actual gamers is a mystery. In any case, it all looks and feels like a proper game, even with all the virtual reality nonsense in it.

SAO Alternative: Team LM

Our protagonist calls herself Llenn and her team mate here is M, so obviously their team is called LM. M, with his tactical camouflage gear and general build contrasts well with the adorable tiny, pink Llenn. They’re an odd couple but they work well together, with Llenn the nominal leader but M guiding her all the way through the fight. Which for most of it consists of actually avoiding fighting and letting the team of pros deal with the other teams in their neighbourhood as they keep themselves out of danger. It’s only at the very end, when everybody else nearby has been killed that they enter the battle themselves and it’s Llenn’s turn to shine. I liked their team work and how the anime didn’t feel the need to over explain their choices. There was still a bit of hand holding, with M explaining things to Llenn she should’ve already known, but it wasn’t intrusive.

SAO Alternative: priorities

Llenn’s whole GGO personality has the cuteness factor build in, but she’s serious about her gaming. Her first thought after surviving an ambush is that she nearly died without firing a single shot. She’s smart enough to realise when her team mate uses her as a decoy and pouts adorably about it. Her team mate is less fleshed out, the silent stoic type, but then he doesn’t need to be. How and when they teamed we don’t know and we only get to see Llenn in the real world at the very end of the episode, when it turns out she’s very different from how she presents online. It will be interesting to see what the series will make of this and how much it’ll be just GGO battles and how deep it’ll go into Llenn’s background and motives for playing the game.

Megalo Box — First Impressions

Published on April 7, 2018Leave a comment

It’s the future. It’s not nice. And ordinary boxing is no longer enough to placate the jaded masses. We need super boxing:

Megalo Box: Super Boxers

Yes, that’s the way my mind works, that the first association Megalo Box would trigger for me would be a long forgotten, not very good 1984 graphic novel. But the setup is so similar Ron Wilson should’ve gotten royalties for it. You got your cranked up boxing, your mildly dystopian future where cooperations rule the world, an underdog hero from the wrong side of the tracks who would be the best at megalo boxing if he could enter the ring legally instead having to fight in fixed, illegal fights. Even without that particular association this is far from an original story, but the difference lies in the execution. Because hot damn, is this done well.

Megalo Box: real weight to the fight

Just look at that. There’s a real heft and weight to those punches, a meatiness that shows that these jabs can do real damage if they land. Also look at the faces, not your normal featureless, smoothed out high school faces. They actually have real noses, not just a modest indication of where a nose would be on a real person. When they get hit or injured, you see the damage it does. That level of detail and grittiness carries over outside the ring as well. I have no problems with modern television anime, but this is what anime looked like when I first started watching it.

Megalo Box: Junk Dog

Junk Dog makes for an interesting protagonist, even though he’s very much a cliche: underdog fighter from the streets with ridiculous but unrecognised talent. For a start, when he’s asked why he’s not entering the Megalonia tournament that will be driving the plot of the series, he says that it’s “open for all citizens”. And since he doesn’t have a citizen ID, he therefore cannot enter. It’s new for anime to have an actual undocumented citizen as its hero and it’s equally rare for the protagonist to be a person of colour, as Junk Dog seems to be. The setting is left somewhat undefined but seem vaguely South-West America to me, with a lot of the secondary characters looking Mexican or Latinx. It’ll be interesting to see if the series does anything with this.

Lupin III Part V — First impressions

Published on April 4, 2018Leave a comment

In the first episode of the latest Lupin III series, Lupin travels to France, the land his grandfather came from, to hack into the dark web data centre of an underground drugs & weapons market called Marco Polo, rescue the hacker genius imprisoned there and steal all their bitcoin, so in revenge they turn him into a meme game and:

Lupin III: everybody is a cop now

In case you worried Lupin would be a bit anachronistic in the modern digital world. Like everybody else I came to Lupin through The Castle of Cagliostro, which on rewatch recently turned out to be half a proper Lupin adventure, awkwardly welded to half a Miyazaki Hayao movie. The original tv series came out in 1971, three years before I was born and this is the fifth instalment, the most recent one coming out in 2015, set in Italy. There have also been several more movies, an annual television special and multiple crossovers with Detective Conan. As this one is set in France, we get a Frenchified version of the classic Lupin III opening theme:

This first episode was rather tasty. Which may be expected from the first episode of a new Lupin series, showing off Lupin and pals for new audiences and old fans alike, culminating in a set piece caper and inevitable chase scene. But the quieter moments looked good too and there was a real sense of place to the episode. This felt like the real France (though romanticised) in more ways than just having an accordion playing during the opening. It helps that the backgrounds are utterly gorgeous too:

Lupin III: gorgeous backgrounds

I really like the direction the Lupin series have gone in by setting each series in another country. The previous series made full use from being set in Italy and I hope the same goes for this one. With this strong an opening episode my expectations are high. One things both series have also in common apart from their foreign setting is the introduction of a new female foil for Lupin. In Part IV it was Rebecca Rossellini, heiress and businesswoman who was love interest, partner in crime and friendly rival all at the same time. Here it’s this woman:

Lupin III: Ami

She’s Ami, the hacker Lupin set out to “steal” and her introduction is perhaps the best scene in the episode. We only get glimpses of her moving through the fog, until Lupin (in disguise) hugs her and claims to be her father, which she immedaiately sees through as she pulls her gun on him. Now, because this is Lupin, she does pull her gun out of her panties, not wearing anything other than that and a shirt and that particularly sequence is suspiciously well animated. One of those things you either like or put up with when watching Lupin. Personally I don’t mind this sort of fanservice here because it fits with Lupin’s brand of blokey escapist fantasy. And while an Ami or a Fujiko might be there as lust object, they at least always have agency.

Uma Musume — First Impressions

Published on April 3, 2018Leave a comment

How can you not like a series where a girl is running late for school and instead of the inevitable toast hanging out of her mouth as she runs it’s a carrot, because she’s a horse girl?

Uma Musume: late for school

Yes, this is a series about horse girls, girls born with the soul of a race horse from another world, who are “born to run” and go to special schools were they learn about horse racing. And this is the protagonist, Special Week. She’s from Hokkaido, where she was raised by her mother but had no other horse girls to race with. Now she has made her way to the big city, to the country’s best horse girl school to become the best horse girl in Japan. From the two episodes of Uma Musume released so far, for all the strangeness of the core idea it’s a remarkable straightforward sports story. We got our inexperienced, naive newcomer with raw talent, her senpai she looks up to who turns out to be her roommate and part of the same time as well as remarkable nice and there’s the rival team with a different philosophy to overcome.

Uma Musume: Special Week has two mums

In the second episode it’s revealed that Special Week has two mums: her biological mother, who died giving birth to her and the mother who raised her as a horse girl. Her first mum made her second mum promise to raise her into the best horse girl in Japan, which is why Special Week is so driven. On the one hand having the series be so matter of fact of her having two mothers is great, but it’s somewhat undercut by having one of them die immediately. Seeing the training montage scene with the surviving mum trying her best to train her right was hilarious though.

Uma Musume: sexual assault: just say neigh

Less hilarious was Special Week being felt up at the racing track in the first episode. She’d gone to watch the races live for the first time, when somebody felt up her legs from behind. This was of course all intended to be a joke about how trainers examine actual horse legs, complete with the requisite kick by Special Week that sends him flying. It’s still obnoxious though, still sexual harassment as a joke. Fortunately it seems to have been a one-off. In general this is a nicely cheerful series that takes a dumb idea and makes it work.

Death March? More like Dud March amirite?

Published on February 1, 2018Leave a comment

I’ve tolerated a lot of dull anime in my time, I even managed to finish the one with the smartphone from last year. But Death March kara Hajimaru Isekai Kyousoukyoku isn’t just dull and borderline creepy.

Death March: she sure has big tits for a thirteen year old hur hur

Death March is dull and full on creepy. First thing you notice about a thirteen year old is how big her breasts are? Creepy. Being an adult, twentysomething year old programmer reincarnating in a fantasy world looking suspiciously like a mixup of the two games you’ve been working on, with unlimited power and looking like you’re fifteen again? Boooring. Thinking about how wonderfully soft those thirteen year old breasts feel, then thinking you’d totally hit her mother if only she was twenty kilos lighter? Nope. Nope. Nope.

Death March: only hit on women of the right weight

Isekai or trapped in fantasyland stories always tends to be power fantasies, some hapless nerd trapped in an meaningless life dying or somehow being transported to a world where his talents (rarely her talents these days) just happen to make him the most powerful person in existence. You know they’re nerd fantasies because so few have any imagination than to then stick their overpowered self inserts in anything other than rote roleplaying scenarios, going into excruciating detail about how the adventure guild works and such. Death March is worse than most: nothing happens in the first three episodes after douchebag here wakes in fantasyland and gets his power ups by genociding lizard men. There’s just endless fuzzing about getting to a city, getting a place to sleep, to be registrered with the guild, going on a tour of the town with the first of what no doubt is going to be an extensive harem. Nothing happens, and in great detail. And this is not an anime that can makes this interesting. The really obnoxious sexism is the rotten cherry on the shit cake.

Death March: only hit on women of the right weight, manga version

Now I did actually read the manga version of this until I got bored, but I’d hoped that the anime version could improve on the source material. Sadly, no. If anything, it made it worse. There was no internal monologue on enjoying the softness of a thirteen year old girl’s breast for one thing and while protag-kun made the same remark about wanting to bone her mother if only she was twenty kilo lighter, it’s so much easier to ignore if it’s just one panel rather than having to listen to it.

I haven’t even mentioned the slavery thing yet, where basically our hero sort of kinda inherits some slaves and they’re of course all cute little girls for him to spoil and them to call him master and it’s all icky and ew and if you’re any kind of hero and have god like power levels, why wouldn’t you want to actually do something about slavery other than rescue some cute preteen girls from it?

So yeah, I’ve watched a lot of shitty anime, especially newly streaming anime, because it’s only twenty minutes a week and if it’s dull or obnoxious I can do something else and just have it on as visual wallpaper. But there’s a limit and Death March has reached it. I need to cut down on my intake of shitty anime anyway, so on the chopping board it goes.