What They Say:
Since ancient times long past, this world has been ruled by two tarot cards. Diablos Tarot—The tarot of the devil that feasts on the souls of living humans and uses that nourishment to bring countless pain and suffering. Elemental Tarot—The tarot that draws its energy from the power of nature in order to oppose the Diablos Tarot.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Being a 13-episode series, it could be argued that either episode 6 or 7 is the halfway point. But as both had aired before this episode began, there was no question that the series was most of the way over. This is always a notable fact, as anime TV series tend to wait until their halfway point to bring out the big guns, making the plot far more important and interesting, and keeping us strapped in for the remainder of the story. This is especially true when it’s this short, leaving a very small number of episodes left to deliver the intended effect. As each episode of this series got slightly worse than the previous one, that’s all I could hope for as I went into this slightly-later-than-second-half period that took a little longer than most, but finally got to a very critical juncture.
And in case you peeked down at that grade that’s even lower than any previous grade – lower than any grade I’ve given since I started reviewing, even, and below my usual cutoff point for series I just watch and assign grades to on my own – you can guess that it didn’t work out so well. And as that was really my last hope for this series, I can almost guarantee that it won’t hit above this grade in its final five episodes.
So in case you care what the big revelation in this episode is, here you go: all the Tarot users have Daemonia counterparts, and any damage done to the Daemonia gets done to the Tarot user. It’s a very unoriginal concept and nothing interesting is done with it here. A death flag is very blatantly raised and the rest of the episode plays out extremely predictably from that point on. It begs for emotional resonance but lacks the execution to evoke it in any but the most forgiving viewer. Meanwhile, that main villain guy who’s been lurking around in the shadows the whole time continues to be villainous, has his name spoken, and not much else. Surely he’ll be showing up to be the final boss at some point in these last few episodes, and the series will again insist that you should care about what’s happening. Or hey, maybe the creators were so sure that this would turn out well that they actually planned for a second season. With this show, I wouldn’t doubt it. Normally I like watching original anime because it’s as fresh to everyone, but in this case I wish there was some way of knowing if there was at least a chance for a proper conclusion to the story, since the sales make it pretty clear that there won’t be any more of this title.
My grade could certainly be lower and that’s because some of the action and music are still good.
In Summary:
There doesn’t appear to be much hope for this series at this point. Most of it is over, it’s trying to bring out some major issues to deal with, and it’s even making it clear that not even the few characters who have remained main protagonists throughout the entire series so far could die at any time. But the writing is so unoriginal, uncreative, and predictable and the execution is so subpar that it doesn’t manage to be compelling at all, resulting in further disappointment piled on top of a series that really needed to pull itself up to have any chance of being a success.
Grade: C-
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Custom-Built PC, 27” 1080p HDTV.
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