Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 9 · 4:10am May 20th, 2021
Ahhhh, I forgot again! At least I'm only a day late this time. I'm hitting a clump of items I liked a lot, meaning there aren't a lot of the short reviews to include. Featured ones this week are Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure and Ergo Proxy, after the break.
It's been a long time since I saw Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure. I remember thinking it was quite funny, but now I'm having to read back over the summary to recall the particulars.
In the opening scene, a strange object is unearthed at a construction site, and a worker is ordered to bust it up and throw it out so it'll be out of their way. So he takes a piece of it toward the trash. The world then splits into two, based on the two outcomes of whether he tossed it or kept it. Flash forward, and Kazuki is an awkward high school student who writes stories about fighting robots that only he can see. The popular girl in class, Mitsuki, approaches him, saying she likes his stories, but it's all a ruse. Her father is a researcher interested in parallel universes, and he's sensed that Kazuki is the key to finding one. In Kazuki's world, the worker had thrown the item away. But Mitsuki's father accidentally sends Kazuki to the other world, where the worker kept the item and discovered it to be an alien artifact, leading to the rapid development of technology.
In this world, giant piloted robots battle, and of course there's a copy of each person, who are often quite opposite their counterparts. Mitsuki follows him to this world, and... that all sounds serious, right? For the most part, it's all played for comedy, and I thought the show did a good job of it. In the alternate world, several women all find Kazuki irresistible, and the Mistuki from his world decides she does, too.
I don't like harem shows.
There are only a couple of shows where the harem aspect was in the forefront and I could still not only tolerate the show but enjoy it. As it turns out, the other one is supposed to be in the same universe as this one: Tenchi Muyo!
I found Dual! consistently funny enough that I could overlook the harem stuff. The over-the-top villain posturing in the alternate world was well done. Of course Kazuki is going to try finding a way home, but he actually comes across a different solution. But that would be spoilers.
Rating: very good.
Dyuaru! Parare Runrun Monogatari, 13 episodes + 1 OVA (which I don't think I've seen), relevant genres: sci-fi, adventure, comedy, romance.
Ergo Proxy is one of those shows that sounds like they just strung a couple random words that sound cool together to make a title, but then it turns out to actually have some significance.
The main character is a privileged prissy queen named Re-l (pronounced "ree-ell") who's a high-ranking investigator in a self-contained city. She probably only got the post because her grandfather is a legendary god-like figure who runs the city. She even looks like an edgelord goth queen. But she's pretty damn good at her job. She's even a badass fighter. There are two main problems she needs to face. One, there's a virus going around the androids that makes them think independently, fail to follow orders, and sometimes become violent. And two, there have been a few attacks around the city attributed to a monster.
As part of her investigation, she comes across an immigrant (Vincent) and a companion-type android (Pino) who stick with her through the rest of the show. Re-l has an android assistant of her own, but of the type that's more functional. He's also a good fighter and strategist, whereas the companion types don't fulfill any specific function other than give their owner someone to talk to. What's really doing that to the androids is a plot point, so I won't spoil it. Pino is quite the free spirit, and some of the series' best moments are when she calls Re-l on her entitled prissiness. And yet Pino also tries to be a lot like her. Later on, the case leads her to explore the world outside her city, which few people have seen. Everyone's been told survival out there is impossible, but of course it isn't, and what else she learns puts her on the wrong side of the city's leadership.
Part mystery and part action story, Ergo Proxy keeps up a nice noir-ish feel throughout. It's old enough that there isn't but so much CGI, and the occasional oddity does pop up in the animation, but overall, I thought the art was good. I didn't pay too much attention to the background music, but it has one of the strongest openings I've ever seen, both the visuals and the song. It's another one of the shows where I watched the opening every time.
A couple of episodes in particular took a risk, and I think one paid off while the other didn't. In many shows, there's an obligatory episode that dumps all the exposition toward the end. This time it was done via a game show motif, and I was never quite certain whether one of the characters was experiencing it in their head, or whether the people they'd encountered actually set it up that way. Or maybe that you're not supposed to take it that the events even happened at all, just that it's a funky way of giving the background as an aside to the viewer. In any case, I didn't care for that episode. The other one, however, is the type where someone keeps repeating a time loop, but more and more changes each time through. It was really well done, both in how the continual changes keep throwing you off, and in how Re-l reacts to that. In many cases, that setup is used to have the protagonist realize what's wrong and how to fix it, but here, it's more her just accepting what the situation is. It's one of the best uses of the time loop and "something's off" tropes I've seen.
The ending wasn't the best, as it's just kind of noncommittal and vague, but it didn't bother me too much, and it was a strong journey to get there.
Rating: very good.
23 episodes, relevant genres: mystery, thriller, action, sci-fi.
And onward to very unpopular opinion time!
Dragon Ball (153 episodes)—I just couldn't get into this at all. I actually watched the whole thing, but everything about it rubs me the wrong way. I dislike most of the characters, I dislike the art style, I dislike the music. I also usually dislike tournament plot arcs in any show, unless it's, say, something like a game- or sports-based plot where it makes sense to structure it around that. But in other shows, they just feel like lazy storytelling to me, a way to stretch out a thin plot over a large number of episodes. Dragon Ball itself didn't do that so much, but the sequels certainly did. I've only seen a handful of episodes from various ones of them. I don't even need to go into what the show is about, because unless you've been living under a rock for 25 years, you already know. Rating: yuck. Relevant genres: action, adventure.
The Vision of Escaflowne (Tenku no Esukafurone, 26 episodes)—I liked the setup for this, where a girl is inadvertantly pulled into another world, and she shares some sort of spiritual connection with the large mech she witnesses fighting. This came well before isekais were a thing, and I don't know that it even strictly is one, but that's splitting hairs. A lot of isekais seem to revolve around the alternate world being something the protagonist had some previous knowledge of, whereas our protagonist, Hitomi, is completely at a loss. Plus it turns out it's not an alternate world so much after all—she can see Earth from where she is. But her psychic abilities manifest there like they never could on Earth, which the bad guys want to use for their own purposes. I really enjoyed the setup, though I would cop to it being rose-colored glasses, as it was one of the first animes I ever saw, so the premise felt rather original to me. Of course, this exact kind of thing is actually pretty common, but I liked the combination of Hitomi trying to reconcile a lot of things at once: being in an alien place, developing her new abilities, and not wanting to be involved in conflict. Rating: good. Relevant genres: action, fantasy, sci-fi, romance.
Seen any of these? Did I convince you to try any of them? I'd like to hear about it in the comments.
vol. 1 here
vol. 2 here
vol. 3 here
vol. 4 here
vol. 5 here
vol. 6 here
vol. 7 here
vol. 8 here
Oh, wow. Escaflowne. I had all but forgotten about that one. While my sister enjoyed it far more than I did, I still consider it a classic.
A Tenchi Muyo spinoff? O.o Unexpected!
Escaflowne is actually the first anime I ever watched, and so will always have a special place in my heart. :)
Yeah, Dragon Ball isn't for everybody. I applaud you for actually taking the time to watch it, even I haven't bothered, and I watched all of Super. If there's one thing to watch, it's Team Four Star's hilarious abridged DBZ series. It's what got me into the franchise.
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Dual! doesn't have any obvious ties to Tenchi Muyo!, but it's the same art style, and the author at one point said he considers it to be in Tenchi's past. You can watch them completely independent of each other, though. They're only in the same universe because the author says so. Knowing that doesn't change your understanding of either one, except perhaps for why Earth in Tenchi has advanced technology, but that can easily be taken as a given or just a result of the contact they've clearly already had with other planets.
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I might need to watch that abridged series. When I first heard of it, I took it literally, that it was just a condensed version of the plot with filler and extraneous arcs removed. I didn't realize it was supposed to be a humorous take on it.
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Oh, and Escaflowne was probably around the 5th or 6th anime I watched. The first was a show that came on network TV around 1981. I'd rarely get home from 1st grade in time to see any more than the last 10 minutes or so, but I loved it, and I had the lunch box of it. It was called Battle of the Planets, but I gather that was an alteration for American TV and I saw it once under the title G Force, though I can't find it under that name now. The original was Science Ninja Team Gatchaman. Second would have been the old Voltron series around '85 or '86. Then Sailor Moon in college, a few movies I got together with friends to watch, and Escaflowne and Pokemon at about the same time.
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It's essentially a remastered version of every arc except the Buu saga. Even the soundtrack is improved.