They made lots of series I loved, like Urusei Yatsura.
People who shit on Studio Pierrot make me sad.
Yeah. I mean, if a company/studio are around for nearly 40 years, they are bound to be producing a whole catalogue of shows that range from great to bad.
I get if people don't like how the Naruto anime had been handled, but trying to take it as an example for the studio's entire resume is very suspect. Pierrot worked on a lot of great shows as well recently (and maybe more importantly, a lot of successful shows).
Novel characters killed the series for me, if you need a separate medium to tell a story then fuck off, at least have the decency to do a recap because I'm not reading a series that is constantly make me feel like I missed a goddamn chapter.
I feel that's the issue. If there was a more proper intro to these characters, like an actual recap of how they met Asta and Noelle and what happened, I could at least know who they are in context.
Instead, it all is done like we should already know that they are important characters who have established relations to the major protagonists
and antagonists, have key roles in different nations, were all part of major power struggles in the series, etc.
This needs more than just a "these characters showed up once in this side novel" disclaimer in an off chapter.
The sad thing is the novel characters actually seem pretty cool and the glimpse of their story we saw seem really cool. I want to read the novel... but its not in English fan or official translation :|
I mean maybe they are cool if we get to know them properly. But right now they all feel like they came out of nowhere.
The glimpses into their stories is what makes me curious about them, such as Mars and Fenzell stuff which seems cool a bit, and maybe him being involved in a power struggle in the Diamond Kingdom once long ago, and Dimona's relationship seems like it has stuff that I'd love.
But right now it's all treated like it's part of a story that had been told, and won't be mentioned again for a long while. Which is okay, I guess we will just have to wait until either Viz picks up the novel for release in 2017 (when this arc is long done), wait until a fan of the novel gives a summary (which is not ideal), wait till a fan translates the novel (a long shot), or wait till Tabata learns how properly integrate supplementary material into his main series.
As an example right now in English Jump, even Seraph, with it's billion light novel spin offs about the side to major cast, does it better than this and doesn't make it feel at any point like I need to read any of the 20+ side books to get the full picture. It's not a hard thing.
