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Spring 2014 Anime |OT2| about as likely as a second season of Hyouka
- Thread starter Dresden
- Start date
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MetroidPrimeRib
Banned
Corvo's watching all the stuff I should be watching.
nintendoman58
Member
Welcome back Corvo! Ah, AnimeGAF hasn't been the same without you!
KirbYuuYuu
Member
Clannad and After Story final impressions
It is with the utmost of restraint I begin this writing, and not without the least bit of agitation I confess that I have undertaken this task. The shortest version of what I am about to write here is that Clannad is a horrible show, but rather than just say that, I had hoped to spend a moment to demonstrate and truly articulate to the community why this show is one of the worst anime I have ever seen. I realize these words are already rather bold, but I aim not to hyperbolize nor exaggerate in my explanation of all I feel is wrong with this series as I go forward. It is my firm belief that these points are inarguable, however, and as such I will advance them and let them speak for me hence.
Let us begin with the first and most obviously bad part of the show, specifically the character designs themselves. I do not argue for the sake of photo-realistic character design in anime (and I dare say we all know one or two stills from rotoscopped shows like The Flowers of Evil which we might say were jarring at the very least) and I do in fact favor more stylized looks, but not all styles are created equal, and Clannads is one I dare to call malformed. Eyes consume no less than fifty percent of the skulls of every character, with mouths and nasal passages being no more than a dot and an afterthought. Limbs are perhaps best described as vestigial, and it falls to the age old lot of eye color and hair styles to distinguish characters. There is more to the visuals than this offense I will speak on later, but I cannot stress how false the statement Clannad is not a show you can judge by how it looks! is. These are the character designs of every bad hentai dating VN rolled into one.
But lets table that for a minute for something I feel is much, much more important: Namely, that the entire show is perhaps the most ingenuine, insincere, cloyingly desperate production I have ever watched. Clannad wants very badly to be funny and at the same time emotionally inspiring, but rather than make honest efforts toward this point, the entire product is built up for the sole sake of wringing these from you without earning them. The show has all the humor of a childs slap-stick (if not less) and the inspirational prowess of a Hallmark channel original movie, but I do not feel that it is just the subtle ploys utilized to garner affection that cheapen the experience. Ultimately there is nothing wrong with using your full arsenal to reach the viewers emotions. Indeed, one could well argue that thats what it is all about, and when done properly and with writing that truthfully makes the effort to earn the audiences heart, it can make for some wonderful experiences in entertainment. Where Clannad pushes beyond even this in its sins, however, is that the word subtle simply does not exist in the writers lexicon. Everything is laid on entirely too thick. All humor must be loud, explosive, and exaggerated. All emotional moments are filled with intense sobbing, and rather than let you think about why something is really warming your heart, the show must show it to you in explicit detail. Set ups which are perfectly acceptable are ruined entirely by the staffs need to add too much to them just to hammer across points which are plain and simple enough that the viewer does not need so much thrown in their face.
The perfect example of what I am discussing is Clannads second (third?) arc, focused on Kotomi Ichinose, or as I came to know her, Purple Dumb based upon her hair color and personality type, which is all characters in Clannad really are: hair color and personality archetypes. In any case, the general lay of the Kotomi arc is that resident Idiot-Savant Kotomis folks shuffled prematurely off this mortal coil, and she is suffering from some recently trudged up memories of the event. These memories are triggered by witnessing a bus crash, even though her parents died in a plane crash which she herself did not witness. All the same, Kotomi is reduced to screaming incoherently and holding her head in agony. She then skips out on school, which doesnt matter since she doesnt attend classes anyway, but is treated as a big deal, even though the arc makes no huge deal out of Okazaki skipping. None of this is important other than that attendance is treated as a matter of life and death at one point in After Story, but I digress. Because this is a dating sim, Okazaki takes it upon himself to help Kotomi any way he can through her emotional troubles by cleaning her yard. Which I grant is not really an offensively illogical method and is fairly in keeping with his role as the protagonist who will fix all these broken girls. The arc disables itself, though, by having Okazaki and Kotomi know one another from childhood. What purpose does this serve? Would he not have aided her if they hadnt? Why does she withhold this information when they meet? It is a useless twist that only serves to further complicate the arc. Afterward we find out that not only did Okazaki know Kotomi before hand, it was shortly before her birthday, which was the exact day her parents died, and also he failed to bring anyone to her birthday party, and also her birthday is coming up again! A series of contrivances piling one upon another which just detract from the previously built up image of Okazaki as a genuinely nice guy willing to help other people for the sake of intensifying the stakes. It is telling that none of this serves any real purpose beyond getting you to think that it does when you realize that for all that Okazaki has done for Kotomi, and for all that they allegedly are to one another, neither of them will ever really interact again. Ask yourself: when is the next time Okazaki and Kotomi are alone together, ever talking about anything? The answer? As far as I got, never. Kotomi is shunted almost immediately into the pile of backup girlfriends as soon as the arc concludes, and does not so much as correspond with Okazaki after graduation.
This isnt all that the arc does, though. It is most obvious and blatant infraction is when Kotomi receives the bear her folks had promised her before they died. This would be perfectly fine on its own until someone says that bear must have traveled the world to reach you! After this announcement, the audience is then left to watch as the bear literally travels the entire world to reach them. This is exactly the kind of beating the viewer over the head with obvious stuff that I found the show to be thoroughly rife with. It is not, however, the only part of the arc that demonstrates the shows commitment to cheating emotional response from the viewers.
Color Psychology is the study, in part, of how color effects ones mood and behavior. It holds that color can carry a specific meaning, and it holds that the range of red to yellow is for negative issues, as well as romantic, excited and comforting ones. It is no surprise, then, that so much of this arc makes frequent use of orange, yellow, red and purple. Or rather, its not really puzzling to figure out why so many moments in this arc, and throughout Clannad in general, take place at sunset. Sunsets set the mood, and the dazzling array of colors distracts the mind in such a way that it may perceive issues as more dramatic, important, or meaningful than they would be, quite literally, in another light. The frequent use of certain songs in the show are meant to tell the audience the exact way they ought to be feeling by using the low, wordless singing of female voices in tandem with this. As a third and important part, female voices are constantly quavering upon the edge of tears in this show. Its difficult to name an episode of Clannad in which at least one girl, usually Nagisa, did not sound like she was on the edge of tears. All of this is meant to lure the audience into the appropriate emotional state where, rather than see the comically exaggerated melodrama for what it is, they find themselves wiping a tear from their eye, licking its salty goodness from their finger and excitedly whispering in the shadows: the feels!
All of this goes into demonstrating how the visuals, sound, writing and voice directing are meant to persuade one into feeling things which the writing does not frankly merit, but I do not think this is the only sin which the show is guilty of, and it is not the sole one I wish to address here now.
Clannad, for all that it tries desperately to wring even a tiny positive emotional response from the viewer, is in fact capable of doing so exactly one time in the show. The Fuko arc is in many ways terrible, not the least of which being the author confusing mind of a half-mad two year old for funny high school girl as personalities, but it does in fact succeed in earning those much coveted feels in the end. It focuses upon the dying Fuko, a young girl who (aside from being a spirit) wishes only for her sisters wedding to go happily for fear her medical condition is holding her back. So Nagisa and Okazaki help the girl out, but theres a catch: everyone is slowly forgetting her existence. Although the arc is full of what I would later discover were typical Clannad contrivances, I do confess that the concept of everyone who knew you forgetting you is a good one, and that the shows decision to have her meet her end in peace and have everyone accept her departure peacefully was the one good moment in the entire production.
Fukos emotional death is immediately thrown out in the next arc for a one minute magical girl crane game gag.
Aside from sending the clear message that there is no reason to trust the show, consider with me if other works took famous character deaths and worked them that way! Imagine if in Book Seven Dumbledore came back to help Harry win a game of Solitaire! Or if Obi Wan Kenobi popped up to help Luke beat Han at arm wrestling! Or if Jean Grey had gotten back up to teach Scott how to duggy. Its funny but it sort of cheapens the characters death. I mean, more so than even just coming back from the dead does. It wastes all efforts spent building to the previous arcs finale, and for what? A throw-away gag of no importance.
Theres a serious lack of coherence throughout the series, to boot. Stories all feel exactly like the separate routes they are haphazardly slapped one onto another. In the much lauded Clannad After Story which is supposedly better than Clannad, multiple episodes are spent upon a flashback for a side character and the romance between her and her cat. Okazaki and the gang guest star in a gang war that has nothing to do with them and Okazaki gets to prove hes totally strong in addition to being cool as he meddles in business which ought by rights to end with a knife between his ribs. Indeed, for most of the first half of After Story the allegedly main characters play no real role, save it be in the arc about Sunohara, which reaches an enormously melodramatic climax despite being fueled by the writers trademark stupid lies. For some reason viewers are meant to dislike Sunohara while he mistreats his little sister, but laugh when she mistreats him. Compounded into this is the incomprehensible, recurring, and unrelated story of a little cgi girl and her cgi robot wandering a wasteland where light falls upward in search of "friends." Presumably this pays off in some way at the end of After Story, but for 30 long episodes its only bearing upon the plot was an allusion to it in Nagisa's incredibly melodramatic interpretative dance PTSD very special episode. You begin to see the point, I hope.
Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the entire show is the relationship between Okazaki and Nagisa, which I believe is meant to be romantic and endearing, but lacks any real chemistry. This is because in Clannad, everything goes entirely by the books, and unlike Hyouka, where it is about proving that old things can be done in an extremely well thought out way, its just about checking off boxes on a list. Characters in Clannad, as I suppose you tire of hearing at this point, are base archetypes and nothing more. Okazaki is the cool, disaffected teenage guy who has a troubled past that in no significant way affects him. Sunohara is his requisite loser friend that he treats like shit and keeps around to make himself look good. Nagisa is the demure pure girlfriend who probably weeps profusely during sex. Theres the noisy class rep, the smart girl who is dumb/dumb girl but shes actually smart! and of course the cool girl the fans should really be rooting for! If youre an absolute pervert, theres also Sunoharas little sister. Since Okazaki is a creep who gets off on that, enjoy it in After Story! Werent those twenty five episodes worth it?
Taking a page from Clannads writing, let me beat you over the head with that point: After Story isnt worth it. Unless you want to spend two episodes learning about why a lonely bachelorette makes love to a cat. Unless you like seeing every boring, droll, unfunny piece of newly conceived trauma meant to wrench your precious feels from your bosom, avoid it as you would a leper, a thing unclean, a plague or an anime thread in the OT.
As I grow weary of this telling, allow me to close with a brief summary: Clannad is an insincere, manipulative, hideous to behold work with characters so tiresomely bland that youre apt to find more compelling adventures scrawled upon a bathroom stall, a love story so pathetically devoid of love that youre like to be more moved by the romance in Gundam SEED Destiny or even AGE, and with enough clichés and recycled conventions to make even Rah Xephon look thoroughly original. Shun it, and shun all things which KEY has ever produced, for here there is neither style nor substance.
Let us begin with the first and most obviously bad part of the show, specifically the character designs themselves. I do not argue for the sake of photo-realistic character design in anime (and I dare say we all know one or two stills from rotoscopped shows like The Flowers of Evil which we might say were jarring at the very least) and I do in fact favor more stylized looks, but not all styles are created equal, and Clannads is one I dare to call malformed. Eyes consume no less than fifty percent of the skulls of every character, with mouths and nasal passages being no more than a dot and an afterthought. Limbs are perhaps best described as vestigial, and it falls to the age old lot of eye color and hair styles to distinguish characters. There is more to the visuals than this offense I will speak on later, but I cannot stress how false the statement Clannad is not a show you can judge by how it looks! is. These are the character designs of every bad hentai dating VN rolled into one.
But lets table that for a minute for something I feel is much, much more important: Namely, that the entire show is perhaps the most ingenuine, insincere, cloyingly desperate production I have ever watched. Clannad wants very badly to be funny and at the same time emotionally inspiring, but rather than make honest efforts toward this point, the entire product is built up for the sole sake of wringing these from you without earning them. The show has all the humor of a childs slap-stick (if not less) and the inspirational prowess of a Hallmark channel original movie, but I do not feel that it is just the subtle ploys utilized to garner affection that cheapen the experience. Ultimately there is nothing wrong with using your full arsenal to reach the viewers emotions. Indeed, one could well argue that thats what it is all about, and when done properly and with writing that truthfully makes the effort to earn the audiences heart, it can make for some wonderful experiences in entertainment. Where Clannad pushes beyond even this in its sins, however, is that the word subtle simply does not exist in the writers lexicon. Everything is laid on entirely too thick. All humor must be loud, explosive, and exaggerated. All emotional moments are filled with intense sobbing, and rather than let you think about why something is really warming your heart, the show must show it to you in explicit detail. Set ups which are perfectly acceptable are ruined entirely by the staffs need to add too much to them just to hammer across points which are plain and simple enough that the viewer does not need so much thrown in their face.
The perfect example of what I am discussing is Clannads second (third?) arc, focused on Kotomi Ichinose, or as I came to know her, Purple Dumb based upon her hair color and personality type, which is all characters in Clannad really are: hair color and personality archetypes. In any case, the general lay of the Kotomi arc is that resident Idiot-Savant Kotomis folks shuffled prematurely off this mortal coil, and she is suffering from some recently trudged up memories of the event. These memories are triggered by witnessing a bus crash, even though her parents died in a plane crash which she herself did not witness. All the same, Kotomi is reduced to screaming incoherently and holding her head in agony. She then skips out on school, which doesnt matter since she doesnt attend classes anyway, but is treated as a big deal, even though the arc makes no huge deal out of Okazaki skipping. None of this is important other than that attendance is treated as a matter of life and death at one point in After Story, but I digress. Because this is a dating sim, Okazaki takes it upon himself to help Kotomi any way he can through her emotional troubles by cleaning her yard. Which I grant is not really an offensively illogical method and is fairly in keeping with his role as the protagonist who will fix all these broken girls. The arc disables itself, though, by having Okazaki and Kotomi know one another from childhood. What purpose does this serve? Would he not have aided her if they hadnt? Why does she withhold this information when they meet? It is a useless twist that only serves to further complicate the arc. Afterward we find out that not only did Okazaki know Kotomi before hand, it was shortly before her birthday, which was the exact day her parents died, and also he failed to bring anyone to her birthday party, and also her birthday is coming up again! A series of contrivances piling one upon another which just detract from the previously built up image of Okazaki as a genuinely nice guy willing to help other people for the sake of intensifying the stakes. It is telling that none of this serves any real purpose beyond getting you to think that it does when you realize that for all that Okazaki has done for Kotomi, and for all that they allegedly are to one another, neither of them will ever really interact again. Ask yourself: when is the next time Okazaki and Kotomi are alone together, ever talking about anything? The answer? As far as I got, never. Kotomi is shunted almost immediately into the pile of backup girlfriends as soon as the arc concludes, and does not so much as correspond with Okazaki after graduation.
This isnt all that the arc does, though. It is most obvious and blatant infraction is when Kotomi receives the bear her folks had promised her before they died. This would be perfectly fine on its own until someone says that bear must have traveled the world to reach you! After this announcement, the audience is then left to watch as the bear literally travels the entire world to reach them. This is exactly the kind of beating the viewer over the head with obvious stuff that I found the show to be thoroughly rife with. It is not, however, the only part of the arc that demonstrates the shows commitment to cheating emotional response from the viewers.
Color Psychology is the study, in part, of how color effects ones mood and behavior. It holds that color can carry a specific meaning, and it holds that the range of red to yellow is for negative issues, as well as romantic, excited and comforting ones. It is no surprise, then, that so much of this arc makes frequent use of orange, yellow, red and purple. Or rather, its not really puzzling to figure out why so many moments in this arc, and throughout Clannad in general, take place at sunset. Sunsets set the mood, and the dazzling array of colors distracts the mind in such a way that it may perceive issues as more dramatic, important, or meaningful than they would be, quite literally, in another light. The frequent use of certain songs in the show are meant to tell the audience the exact way they ought to be feeling by using the low, wordless singing of female voices in tandem with this. As a third and important part, female voices are constantly quavering upon the edge of tears in this show. Its difficult to name an episode of Clannad in which at least one girl, usually Nagisa, did not sound like she was on the edge of tears. All of this is meant to lure the audience into the appropriate emotional state where, rather than see the comically exaggerated melodrama for what it is, they find themselves wiping a tear from their eye, licking its salty goodness from their finger and excitedly whispering in the shadows: the feels!
All of this goes into demonstrating how the visuals, sound, writing and voice directing are meant to persuade one into feeling things which the writing does not frankly merit, but I do not think this is the only sin which the show is guilty of, and it is not the sole one I wish to address here now.
Clannad, for all that it tries desperately to wring even a tiny positive emotional response from the viewer, is in fact capable of doing so exactly one time in the show. The Fuko arc is in many ways terrible, not the least of which being the author confusing mind of a half-mad two year old for funny high school girl as personalities, but it does in fact succeed in earning those much coveted feels in the end. It focuses upon the dying Fuko, a young girl who (aside from being a spirit) wishes only for her sisters wedding to go happily for fear her medical condition is holding her back. So Nagisa and Okazaki help the girl out, but theres a catch: everyone is slowly forgetting her existence. Although the arc is full of what I would later discover were typical Clannad contrivances, I do confess that the concept of everyone who knew you forgetting you is a good one, and that the shows decision to have her meet her end in peace and have everyone accept her departure peacefully was the one good moment in the entire production.
Fukos emotional death is immediately thrown out in the next arc for a one minute magical girl crane game gag.
Aside from sending the clear message that there is no reason to trust the show, consider with me if other works took famous character deaths and worked them that way! Imagine if in Book Seven Dumbledore came back to help Harry win a game of Solitaire! Or if Obi Wan Kenobi popped up to help Luke beat Han at arm wrestling! Or if Jean Grey had gotten back up to teach Scott how to duggy. Its funny but it sort of cheapens the characters death. I mean, more so than even just coming back from the dead does. It wastes all efforts spent building to the previous arcs finale, and for what? A throw-away gag of no importance.
Theres a serious lack of coherence throughout the series, to boot. Stories all feel exactly like the separate routes they are haphazardly slapped one onto another. In the much lauded Clannad After Story which is supposedly better than Clannad, multiple episodes are spent upon a flashback for a side character and the romance between her and her cat. Okazaki and the gang guest star in a gang war that has nothing to do with them and Okazaki gets to prove hes totally strong in addition to being cool as he meddles in business which ought by rights to end with a knife between his ribs. Indeed, for most of the first half of After Story the allegedly main characters play no real role, save it be in the arc about Sunohara, which reaches an enormously melodramatic climax despite being fueled by the writers trademark stupid lies. For some reason viewers are meant to dislike Sunohara while he mistreats his little sister, but laugh when she mistreats him. Compounded into this is the incomprehensible, recurring, and unrelated story of a little cgi girl and her cgi robot wandering a wasteland where light falls upward in search of "friends." Presumably this pays off in some way at the end of After Story, but for 30 long episodes its only bearing upon the plot was an allusion to it in Nagisa's incredibly melodramatic interpretative dance PTSD very special episode. You begin to see the point, I hope.
Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the entire show is the relationship between Okazaki and Nagisa, which I believe is meant to be romantic and endearing, but lacks any real chemistry. This is because in Clannad, everything goes entirely by the books, and unlike Hyouka, where it is about proving that old things can be done in an extremely well thought out way, its just about checking off boxes on a list. Characters in Clannad, as I suppose you tire of hearing at this point, are base archetypes and nothing more. Okazaki is the cool, disaffected teenage guy who has a troubled past that in no significant way affects him. Sunohara is his requisite loser friend that he treats like shit and keeps around to make himself look good. Nagisa is the demure pure girlfriend who probably weeps profusely during sex. Theres the noisy class rep, the smart girl who is dumb/dumb girl but shes actually smart! and of course the cool girl the fans should really be rooting for! If youre an absolute pervert, theres also Sunoharas little sister. Since Okazaki is a creep who gets off on that, enjoy it in After Story! Werent those twenty five episodes worth it?
Taking a page from Clannads writing, let me beat you over the head with that point: After Story isnt worth it. Unless you want to spend two episodes learning about why a lonely bachelorette makes love to a cat. Unless you like seeing every boring, droll, unfunny piece of newly conceived trauma meant to wrench your precious feels from your bosom, avoid it as you would a leper, a thing unclean, a plague or an anime thread in the OT.
As I grow weary of this telling, allow me to close with a brief summary: Clannad is an insincere, manipulative, hideous to behold work with characters so tiresomely bland that youre apt to find more compelling adventures scrawled upon a bathroom stall, a love story so pathetically devoid of love that youre like to be more moved by the romance in Gundam SEED Destiny or even AGE, and with enough clichés and recycled conventions to make even Rah Xephon look thoroughly original. Shun it, and shun all things which KEY has ever produced, for here there is neither style nor substance.
Fimbulvetr
Member
Does world building require that you go any further than the initial, basic details of the setting? Sidonia hasn't done much more than saying "here, these are the things that exist," at least so far. I'm not very miffed about that, honestly; a lot's meant to be mysterious at this point, or just doesn't need any real explanation. It's more that nothing's allowed to breathe. I'm saying this without having seen the manga, but it's as if the creator made a solid foundation with great visual concepts, then strove to build the most passionless, cliche ridden thing possible on top of it. The similarities to Attack on Titan haven't gone unnoticed by me, but at the end of their respective first seasons, AoT actually seems smarter. It's a real shame; I think it has more potential than that, not to say that AoT is lacking in flaws.
I have an interest in genre fiction of this particular type, but going into the reasons I find it compelling would take even longer than this post has already, and I don't even know what I was trying to express with it to begin with! So... yeah, I think we're basically in the same boat, being generally frustrated. It sucks seeing the life being choked out of something you believe has potential, but those glimpses of brilliance, even if those are restricted to vague tonal things rather than the big pieces like plot and characters, have kept me coming back up to this point. I don't think they'll be enough from here on, unfortunately.
Thanks for the explanation. While I don't doubt that you're reading of the scene is correct, I'm not really satisfied with the way they executed it. The three never had very much screen time all together, so I would have appreciated something a bit clearer for their resolution. The ambiguity of Koizumi's words at the end is something that could potentially have worked in a different context, but I think it wasn't quite appropriate here.
Jex
Member
Well, companies either don't release movies because they can't acquire the rights or they believe they won't sell. After watching countless companies go out of business I imagine thy have a pretty good idea of how to play it.
Jex
Member
Seeing how many references you actually get in Excel Saga is something of a barometer for how much anime/manga you've consumed. If you understand over 90% of the references you know you're in too deep.
Jex
Member
Mahouka ep 13
"I win motherfuckers"
The composition of that shot is artful. I love all the open space at the top of the frame that exists for no reason.
ZachDeKoromaru
Banned
This is my favorite conclusion to any watchbet so far.
And you only used the Shift key at the appropriate times!
Know what, screw it, go watch Toradora Corvo, I'm curious to see whether you like it or not and how hard a punch you're willing to throw if you don't. I'll watch any one show of your choosing 26 episodes or under in response. (I reserve the right to reject something if I really really really don't want to watch it, but hopefully that won't happen)
Jex
Member
Calm you fire. Save it for season 2!
I honestly don't think he's going to like Toradora either if he tore apart Clannad like that.
Jex
Member
Why did you have to speak so soon?
I am currently not accepting watchbets at this time, I'm afraid.
I was young and stupid but can look back upon this past mistake and learn from it.
Jex
Member
Well, they can just go and read a Wikipedia Synopsis and learn all that so, in that sense, it really is skippable.
nintendoman58
Member
*sees Corvo's Clannad post*
I fear for what happens in this thread when Pshyconinja reads that. I mean wow.
That was total and utter disdain right there. O_O.
I fear for what happens in this thread when Pshyconinja reads that. I mean wow.
That was total and utter disdain right there. O_O.
For those of you concerned for my well being, I'm now only watching ZZ Gundam, VOTOMS Phantom Arc and Macross F.
I confess that I am damaged goods, and am enjoying all three shows even though the first is LOL TOMINO, and the second and third are CGI robots.
But, much like Basara before me, I'm now on a quest of healing and self discovery (and also maybe intimate relations with space vampires!)
like so:
I confess that I am damaged goods, and am enjoying all three shows even though the first is LOL TOMINO, and the second and third are CGI robots.
But, much like Basara before me, I'm now on a quest of healing and self discovery (and also maybe intimate relations with space vampires!)
like so:
MetroidPrimeRib
Banned
I came back to find this post because I just beat Watch Dogs and I really disliked it. That's obviously your fault.
That's never a good alternative!
Well sure, but, and I hate to use this cliche, but you could do that to the whole series, too. Spare yourself from all of Tomino's Tominoisms.
You heartless monster.
phoenix296
Member
Corvo, your write up was excellent in pointing out everything wrong with Clannad but did you find any of it enjoyable?
Jex
Member
Yeah it's pretty weak, all things considered. Almost the very definition of 'trying to hard', SKL thinks it's really fucking bad ass but in reality it's just really average.
Getter Robo Armageddon when?
Looking more closely at Corvo's Clannad impressions, I am even more highly convinced that Clannad works a hell of a lot better as a VN.
I'm actually curious how I would have felt about it had I seen the adaptation first.
Will never defend those character designs though, anime or otherwise. I can't even lay blame on KyoAni here, they had nothing to work with. It's the functional equivalent of trying to cook a plate of spaghetti with no pasta.
I'm actually curious how I would have felt about it had I seen the adaptation first.
Will never defend those character designs though, anime or otherwise. I can't even lay blame on KyoAni here, they had nothing to work with. It's the functional equivalent of trying to cook a plate of spaghetti with no pasta.
Not, really? I mean, I guess Roachdad was okay, and Gray Pres was somewhat less than awful, but on the whole I did not enjoy the show. I found the concept surrounding the Fuko thing okay, but the execution lacked and then the author did that and it burned me pretty hard.
For posterity's sake, I would like the record to simply state "no" on this matter.
Wait, isn't Shin Getter Robo Getter Robo Armageddon? Maybe I put the wrong title up, but the one I watched was the one where
Doc goes nuts and Kei is Genki etc.
Nah, Armageddon's jp title was Shin Getter Robo too iirc or something close. There's the other one that's called New Getter Robo in English which was the one I told you was closer to the manga.
Oh, well I still have yet to see New Getter Robo. I think I will put it on hold, along with the likes of Grendizer for awhile. I tried Grendizer out, but I found it a bit weird, and the young woman, her little brother and their eccentric father looked way too much like Michiru, Genki and Joho from Getter Robo to me.
Then at least watch Shin Getter vs Neo Getter for that sweet Texas Mack action!!
jackie jormp-jomp
Banned
Did you even finish after story corvo
that's when the FEELS © hit
that's when the FEELS © hit
Jex
Member
The titles here get a little confusing:
Change!! Shin Getter Robo - Sekai Saishū no Hi = Getter Robo Armageddon
Shin Getter Robo = New Getter Robo
Lets not forget, of course, that Shin can be though of as "New" and "True" and that there's a Getter Robo, a New (Shin) Getter Robo and a Neo Getter Robo (for Shin (New) Getter vs Neo Getter).
The New Getter Robo OVA is, arguably, even better than Getter Robo Armageddon, at the very least it's more consistent. Armageddon really suffers badly from that change in director at the start.
Oh man, I can't disappoint America, but I think I'm still going to pass for awhile. Three shows is all I want at the moment, even with Layzner and Patlabor begging me to add them.
I made it 11 episodes through After Story, which is more than one can ask of a man after the two episode flashback arc about why a woman is having sexual relations with her not-at-all-anthropomorphic-actually-just-a-literally-a-cat.
I actually didn't feel the change of directors was too jarring. There are some story inconsistencies, but I think the momentum was maintained, which is what I feel mattered most. The moment Stoner Sunshine happens is one of my new favorite SR finishers now.
RyougaSaotome
Member
I had to pop in to comment on how beautiful that write-up was, as someone who feels very, very similarly about that series.
Beautiful.
phoenix296
Member
Ah that explains why your entire write up was filled with disdain. The only part I liked about Clannad is a bit further in. I don't blame you for dropping it though, the first part of AS was very eh.
See, this is a phrase I heard repeatedly during my watching of the show, but I just don't know that I can really agree with it, informed as I since have been as to how it all comes crashing down. I really think that if, in 35ish episodes I didn't like Clannad and After Story, there wasn't going to be a saving grace in the last quarter to dramatically change my opinion. It's possible. I've changed the way I've seen shows before, but then again I do not think I have ever had as many problems with a series as I have had with Clannad.
See now I'm not sure what to say because far be it from me to try and urge you to continue something that you clearly are not enjoying, but at the same time that's kind of a terrible stopping point for a whole host of reasons.
Also now I feel cheated because I don't get to see your reaction to the ending!
Eh Corvo dropping AS?
Its bit of shame he not gonna writing about that dragonball stuff then.
Although that post convince me to never watch the anime, because despite I'm so wary watching it because I hate Maeda Jun and already know basically the ending, there's many people that said I better give it a chance because Kyoani did great job and they also hate the other KEY's stuff but think Clannad is decent. But Corvo convince me entirely to never do it now lol.
Yeah I felt cheated now knowing he never watch the final stretch lol.
Its bit of shame he not gonna writing about that dragonball stuff then.
Although that post convince me to never watch the anime, because despite I'm so wary watching it because I hate Maeda Jun and already know basically the ending, there's many people that said I better give it a chance because Kyoani did great job and they also hate the other KEY's stuff but think Clannad is decent. But Corvo convince me entirely to never do it now lol.
Yeah I felt cheated now knowing he never watch the final stretch lol.
Having been told how it ends, I feel like everything up until Za Twist is painfully obvious, and Za Twist would've just earned more screaming and shouting fucks from me.
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