For an episode that spent about half its time focusing on one battle scene, this week’s Devil Survivor 2 really ought to have been more interesting than it was. It’s hard to talk about the major focus of this week’s episode without using the word “anticlimax”.
So Photo Kano ended up being a study as to why scriptwriters are necessary even for skilled directors. The visual sense in that show is excellent, and fits the main character’s story very well, but the script is a bunch of torrid rust. I’m willing to bet Akitoshi Yokoyama had full control over the situation to the extent that nobody with veto power could come up to him and told him some of his story ideas were really, really bad. Even Masaki Yuasa’s name in a cutaway bit can’t save that script. I would watch another thing of his, provided his next producer keeps him 10 kilometers away from the script.
Moving on to shows that actually have me interested, I really like where Devil Survivor 2 is going. After a mediocre first episode, it’s been picking up the pace by laying down a layer of intrigue, setting up fast-moving, area-conscious fight scenes, and pumping up on drama. Thus, I’m making my hop right back on the ol’ rock-steady Kishi Seiji bandwagon.
I didn’t explain it that well in my first post, so let me say it here. Most modern anime, having lots of competition in whatever season they air, face a real need to prove themselves from day 1. This column is a breakdown of what I saw in various intro episodes that I think will prove indicative of the show’s quality in upcoming weeks, and hence what I plan to be watching. I generally don’t go over plot in much detail, as that’s something anyone can just go to any of a dozen encyclopedia sites for.
If the anime blogoshpere were a field of corn, and each post that summarized the spring 2013 season were a corn husk, then you could stand in the middle of it and toss a match in any direction, and end up with something on the order of 10 gallons of popcorn. And some third degree burns. Um.
So, what I mean to say is this; seasonal anime preview posts are really a saturated field. But we like anime, and we want to cover it, too. Thus, we labored hard to find a hipster angle, and we found it; instead of putting up a dime a dozen post, we’re putting a dozen dimes on the post. In simpler terms, we’re taking mad bets on the upcoming Spring 2013 lineup, Vegas-style!
This column is motivated by a discussion I had two months ago, about whether ARMS, a studio with Queen’s Blade and Hagure Yuusha no Estetica in its recent past, could really pull a good anime out of the Maoyu franchise, even with the writer/director team behind Spice and Wolf helming said show. It was a long, drawn-out debate, and it got me thinking: what names were really most important (in terms of both quality and sales) in predicting how an anime will do? For anime fans without enough time to watch every first episode in a season, it’s certainly an important question. I’ll be attempting to approach the answer to this question by remove my own biases from the equation as much as I can.
Animetics 