‘This Is #COMPASS2.0″
What They Say:
In the combat providence analysis system, “COMPASS2.0,” heroes gather alongside human partners in a dreamlike space. The heroes have to keep fighting to produce enough energy to keep the system running. One hero named 13 is a troublemaker who refuses to find a partner. When 13 is nearly kicked out, a new player named Jin agrees to join him. Can they bring peace to the world of #COMPASS2.0?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
App game becomes anime. These can be good, these can be bad, these can just be… there. This series hasn’t had a ton of promotion but it has Hitoshi Nanba directing it who has some interesting credits to his list, from three seasons of Golden Kamuy to Gosick but also Tomo-chan is a girl. They’re working from scripts by Hikaru Okawame who has two previous credits to their name, though scripting is just with the Fanfare of Adolescence series. Lay-Duce is handling the animation production and they’ve got almost two dozen projects as the main studio from Classroom Crisis to ICHU and projects like Release the Spyce. They’re a solid studio that can do some neat things.
The show does the heavy lifting at the start with a presumed robot making clera the basics of how this world works, which is basically the summary above, and treats the viewer as the player. Something that doesn’t exactly feel like a draw to me, especially as it just shifts quickly to moving to a group battle to introduce more of the basics in how this world survives. Again, the summary above covers it better than I could because the show almost instantly feels off-putting with how it’s introducing everything and engaging the viewer. It’s a lot of shiny with great character designs and gorgeous animation when it comes to them and how they move about the screen – particularly color design – but it’s a steady rollout of information at first more than anything else. It’s not an organic introduction which may work for some but will be more frustrating for others.
Eventually, the show does give the viewer an avatar named Jin as a new player who ends up helping a popular but problematic player known only as 13. And honestly, I gave up by the ten-minute mark. Perhaps the show just rubs me the wrong way, but it’s another anime project that’s part of a larger game world that doesn’t feel like it understands how to draw in new people and only appeal to the actual players of the game. Which is fine, they do need to be the ones served best in terms of story and content because it has the most meaning to them. But if you make your show feel inaccessible to people outside of it, that just limits things even more. It’s just such a cacophony of noise and action unfolding with wildly diverse and intriguing-looking characters that you keep waiting for the hook. Sure, the hook probably shows up late rin the episode, but when the first half of it feels like it’s actively telling you that this show isn’t for you, just for those that play the game, I’m not going to find out.
In Summary:
Visually striking but empty when it comes to character, Compass just didn’t work for me. It feels like it’s trying to be inaccessible to new people and just throws a lot of stuff but not in an organic way that draws you into it. I’ve done plenty of shows that just throw you right into the deep end but it gives you something to latch onto. This one just has a lot of things happening and a mild introduction through a robot character while still feeling like it’s not saying anything. Honestly, it felt like being dropped into an open-world game and you just kind of wander through various locations where all these cliques exist and you’re not a part of it any of it. You wander around for a bit and then just wander away from it entirely.
Grade: D
Streamed By: Crunchyroll
