It eventually reminded me a lot of the good 'ol days of anime where it wasn't always happy, where sometimes even the good guys made you feel bad, and where there was a fairly complex storyline that you really had to pay attention to if you wanted to keep up. But, I stayed in because I was still invested in the characters and wanted to see where it all went. I've never read the source material, so maybe some were ready for it more than I was, but Index III started off TOTALLY different - the blood and brutality is turned up past 10, everybody up and turned into an a-hole about everything, and it all felt very foreign to me compared to everything before it. They're just that good, so I was beyond excited when a third Index season was announced.
The first two seasons of both Raildex series have casts I'd pretty much take on an entire den of Wendol with a soup spoon to protect. And if those 14 episodes were the only episodes we ever got, I would easily call it one of the best anime ever made. I can’t label the initial tale of SAO as anything but amazing. I am the first to admit I am a huge heel for most of what I have said in support of it in the past. SAO is such a shit franchise - the only thing that has gotten worse than the animation is the writing, the characters that used to be great are so incredibly shallow and annoying now, and I have made more fun of something I used to love than anyone. I made it about halfway through Alicization and I up and quit altogether. Then the Sterben shiz happened and I said ‘yes, it’s the EXACT SAME STORY but it’s going somewhere’, and then it did, to somewhere absolutely worse. I originally considered the whole second half of the first season to be filler and am always turned off at the molestation that it celebrates, but said it was ‘for the story’. It was THAT good, I have somehow watched it more than anything ever made.
Do you think it’s ironic that I’ve been doing this almost 5yrs now and haven’t changed my URL? I’ve always said that if the first Matrix movie were left alone and that was it - Neo giving that threat and then flying off into the credits and we have to make up the reality that may or may not have transpired after that - that it would be in the top 10 movies ever made.
I was so all-in on the concept, the characters, the drama, and the love of the original series. Look, I am the last person you need to tell how much bad this series has divulged into. Massive franchise fail, Xebec - dishonor on you, dishonor on your cow. When you take previously established characters who have always been hopeful, energetic, and buoyant to a fault, always looking forward and up - and suddenly make all of them overtly dramatic, hardened, and inordinately austere across the board, it totally cheapens the original and to an extent that superflous doesen't even begin to describe. Then all the already-established characters took on totally new personalities of grave seriousness, which was never the brand. From go, Kyouka - an important supporting character from the outset - is killed and totally glossed over like it wasn’t significant asf, and I got pissed. Then, some 15yrs later out of nowhere we get Invisible Victory, which Xebec used to completely rewrite everything, and not in a good way. Second Raid was a tad bumpy due to a new studio, but still fantastic, and Fumoffu was the comedic break that an already goofball of an anime conjured up and it totally fit as long as no one took it too seriously. I’ve felt exactly nothing for these characters since the original.įMP is one of my favorite old-school anime ever, because it balances great humor, great characters, and - despite a shload of filler in the second half - a great all-around story. Then we got DanMachi 2, which started out with mediocre writing but a killer arc and the backbone surfaced for some amazing story depth to amass, but all we got in the end was the horribly lame Ishtar arc where a depressed fox girl doesn’t want to be a prostitute and Bell feels bad about it. Oratorio provided some levity, but did nothing at all to advance the story. The Sword Oratorio spinoff was -meh- to me, it leaned too much on the original for hooks as it tried to fill in Ais’ backstory and ended up being more about Lefiya anyways (plus they blatantly stole the marquee anthem from Last of the Mohicans, which turns me off a thousand times every time it plays now). The characters are beyond well crafted, and it is still crystalline-clear that this project was someone’s pride and joy. Everything that should have made it lackluster couldn’t outweigh the feels and I always end up smiling earlobe to earlobe.
The original DanMachi series was proof-positive that predictable and cliché can still yield a really great tale when the directing and production is top notch.