The Kory and Kate Kill Garo Section and yet… it seems Gangsta was The Biggest Disappointment of the Year
This section was originally for complaining about Garo: Crimson Moon, but turned into a look at what disappointed our reviewers the most this past year. So, what was wrong with these two shows and what else made our review staff’s hearts sink?
KC: Garo: Crimson Moon
I don’t usually pick disappointments. I don’t like the category and my expectations are usually low or nonexistent for most shows because I just follow what everyone else says is good and usually ignore the charts. I’m what you call “prepared” for each season. That being said, I came in with high expectations for the second season of Garo. It was set in the weeby-est of times (the Heian era), it followed up a highly successful but unrelated first season, and was supposed to have Romi Park as the lead female character. I dropped it after about five episodes. Not only was Seimei not the lead, but the show was also largely uninteresting. It didn’t have the action or political intrigue of the first season. Its main characters simply weren’t as interesting. I was just left very underwhelmed and often bored by it.
KO: Garo: Crimson Moon
Garo: Crimson Moon. Having never seen the tokusatsu series which spawned these spinoffs it’s entirely possible that Crimson Moon is closer in spirit to whatever the live action version is. What it isn’t is a decent followup to last year’s Garo the Animation, which surprised everyone with its stylish action, unique setting, and interesting characters. Crimson Moon is brain dead, has lousy action, terribly CGI, awful characters, and the cheapest looking animation MAPPA has ever produced. What the hell happened here?
Runner up would be Gangsta. It’s not unusual for the source material to be stronger than the adaptation, but Gangsta was a perfect example of a property too early in its run to adapt. Combine that with poorly directed action scenes and an anime studio in the last throes of its existence and you get a half-baked show which does a disservice to the manga.
KS: Gangsta.
Sadly disappointments are probably a good deal more commonplace than pleasant surprises in any given year (though the latter is thankfully also well-represented in this one), but Gangsta is a pretty easy choice to point to as a standout. It started seeming like one of the strongest contenders of its season but absolutely fell apart by the end. Manglobe already had a bad reputation for churning out some productions of rather low quality regardless of the strength of the aesthetic, but this just got sloppier as it went on, culminating in such an anticlimax no viewer who didn’t know the episode count would believe it was the finale. The punch line was the announcement immediately following its conclusion that Manglobe would be no more, both fitting the shoddy work the studio had done for the series and guaranteeing that at the very least that cliffhanger would never receive a resolution by the same team.
MvP: Gangsta.
It was a great show…until the last episode. Before the needlessly abrupt and messy ending, this show was a blast to watch weekly. Loved the mature character designs, the action, the characters. But it all came crashing to a halt, like the unbuckled driver of a speeding car after hitting a brick wall, with that pseudo-finale.
GBS: The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan anime series
The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan manga is a cute and quirky little series by Puyo that shows a different face to the franchise. Set in the alternate world of The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, we see what might have happened had Kyon just accepted the new world as it was with no Haruhi and a human Yuki. The anime adaptation, however, was devoid of all the charm of the manga and you could tell the production team could not wait to introduce Haruhi and try their hardest to make a pale imitation of the main universe, just with a human Yuki and non-divine-powered Haruhi. It was bland and boring but worst of all, with the exception of brief moments here and there, it was devoid of emotion. It failed to touch the heart.
DW: Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures home video release
Why was there no blu-ray release for this show? I’d have happily bought it. Had to settle for the DVD collection.
AA: Rokka and the Six Braves
In like a lion and out like a lamb. While the action and the dialogue setup to be more of a slow paced action series that would pick up the pace later, it instead turned into a mystery drama. With that shift, it became increasingly clear that the material was boring, lacked in accumulation, and most of all, just didn’t know how to handle itself once it entered into its second phase. It would have worked if it came out a year or two later and actually had enough material to make the mystery part fly by. A shame.
GLP: One-Punch Man
Don’t get me wrong, I loved One-Punch Man. Almost everyone’s main concern when an anime got announced was if its animation during action sequences would hold up just as well as they did in the manga’s ridiculously detailed multi-paged spreads. And they did. What disappointed me was how the majority of its humor was executed. Jokes lasted a beat too long in comparison to the manga counterpart’s more snappy deliveries. And don’t tell me it’s a cultural thing, because Mr. Osomatsu nailed that kind of humor perfectly.
DJH: Tokyo Ghoul √A
Don’t get me wrong, I still like the second season of Tokyo Ghoul. However, when you compare it to the first season and how that one actually cared about character development, it’s nothing more than another average single-season anime. The gap between season one and season two creates a confusing time-lapse in which everything that corrupted Kaneki Ken is just grazed over and left up to the viewers to figure out. Hell, they don’t even explain why his hair changed colors. None of it made sense at first. Then you get the ending episode where they just suddenly introduce some never-before-seen character and have him suddenly be the most important person in the story. Studio Pierrot either ran out of money or just flat out rush delivered this series to the point of unrecognizability.
