Pierrot? Is that you?
What They Say:
Long ago the human world Terrastia, merged together creating people with abilities called Adapters. With their abilities the Adapters have the power to open the Divine Gate which has the power to make any wish come true but most believe that to just be a myth. In the present, a boy named Aoto is recruited to join an academy of Adapters called the World Council but he must first overcome his past and the murder of his parents.
The Review:
Content(warning as portions of this review may contain spoilers):
So truth be told, although there a couple of shows this season that I expected to be more worthwhile, this was the show I was the most interested in. Particularly because of the studio behind it, Pierrot, who we’ve all more or less come to associate with stuff like Naruto, Yu Yu Hakusho, Bleach and most recently Tokyo Ghoul. See Pierrot is generally known for doing anime adaptions (and your opinion of those may vary) but generally nothing original, and that goes double for the director Noriyuki Abe whose work on Bleach and Yu Yu Hakusho helped to elevate some of the material in those shows. Of course this show based on a mobile game, but given those don’t really have much in the way of stories, that more or less gave these guys free reign and I was really curious to see what we’d end up with. The result is…certainly unexpected to say the least.
So what technically happens in this episode is that a boy named Aoto stops a crazy guy from attacking someone and ends up catching the attention of a group called the World Council. Both Aoto and the members of the World Council are what’s known as Adapters who have powers thanks to the merging of the human world Terrasita, the fairy world Celestia and the demon world Hellistia. Their powers are connected to something called the Divine Gate and it has the power to make wishes come true, though the gate is only considered a legend. After discovering Aoto’s potential as an Adapter, two of the World Council members are tasked with recruiting him onto their team, but Aoto isn’t interested. Aoto is rumored to have killed his parents and while the truth behind what actually happened is unknown, it’s enough to keep him in solitude.
That sounds semi-simple enough but it’s buried under one big mash of confusion. While I somehow managed to explain the premise, the show itself barely manages to get that across clearly, and it’s juggling so many things at once that I don’t even think we ended up learning the name of the female member of the World Council. Needless to say it’s nothing like what I was expecting given the studio’s general pedigree as it’s as far left of their usual shonen-y titles as you can get. Despite carrying some of Abe’s usual sense of direction, it feels incredibly different from other stuff he’s worked on both visually and in terms of the material we get here. That would be pretty interesting…if not for how utterly confused the show seems to be. While there’s nothing too difficult to understand here aside from the amount of terminology thrown at us it almost feels over-directed in regards to how simple most of it’s elements should be. It’s certainly eye-catching and it has a pretty unique look but this opener left me more than a little weirded out, and so much so that I’m honestly not even sure how to feel about it. We’ll see how the rest of the show fares, but while it’s certainly different from what I’m come to expect of both Pierrot and Abe, I’m not sure if it’s for the right reasons.
In Summary:
Divine Gate opens with a rather bizarre start as it has a pretty interesting visual style, and some solid bits of direction here and there, but it’s buried under material that comes across as being far more complicated than it probably should be. Curiosity is more or less what’s compelling me to go forward with this and I can’t say there’s anything about it I particularly hate, but I don’t think I’ve ever been left as confused by a first episode as I was with this one. Hopefully, the rest of the show can fix that.
Grade: ???
Streamed By: Funimation, Hulu
Allow me to quote myself from the forum thread on this episode: “WTF did I just watch?” Confusing is quite the accurate assessment. my pretentious “male cow feces” detector went off the scale, was another reaction that I had. There’s just waaaaaay too much going on in this opening episode.