Anime Review: Death Parade

Based off of the 2013 short film Death Billiards comes Death Parade, a show about death, and parades! Ok, not that many parades really, but there’s certainly a lot of death.

If you want to fully appreciate this show, please watch Death Billiards first, it’s essentially the pilot episode of the series, though it doesn’t necessarily fit perfectly into the canon of the TV anime.

This show is an emotional rollercoaster, from heart wrenching drama in one episode to comedy the next, you never know what to expect from Death Parade, except that it’s going to be good.

For the most part each episode deals with a new story and a new set of characters, with a few recurring characters throughout. This might seem like it leads itself to a lot of underdeveloped characters, but the anime manages to make believable, interesting characters each time even with such a short timeframe to work with.

The series does veer a little into melodrama at points, but with a half hour to establish two new characters and have us care about them it’s somewhat expected and doesn’t detract from the overall quality of the presentation.

I feel like I can’t say much more about the plot, because this series is best going in with no idea what’s going to happen, if you’re at all interested you might want to watch it now before you inevitably get spoiled by a less conscientious reviewer.

I don’t tend to pay attention to the music of an anime unless it’s ill fitting, so if I have nothing to say about an OST it probably means it’s good. I DO however have something to say about the opening and ending songs, the former is an upbeat disco-like beat, while the ending is a much more somber and slow rock song.

Both songs complement the series perfectly in different ways, fitting the different atmospheres of the series, and I didn’t skip either of them a single time while watching, which I’ll normally do even with themes I like.

The animation by Studio Madhouse, one of my top three most consistent studios, is amazing, the use of color and shot angle leads to a beautiful series where every scene is enthralling even without very much ‘action.”

I had high hopes for this going into it after seeing Death Billiards, they were met and then some. This is my favorite anime of the winter season and a contender for a top five spot for 2015. Maybe even first; but let’s just see how the year goes before we make any claims of that magnitude.

Would I have bought: OliOli

Continuing on with my series of first impressions on games I got in bundles, we come to OliOli. This is another sidescrolling plat former, only today the gimmick is skateboarding.

As always, this is my opinion after playing the game for only a short amount of time to see if I liked it, I try to play long enough to judge the game. If I dislike something I’ll probably end up playing it more just to see if it improves, where as if I liked it from the start I might only play a bit because I already knew the answer.

Less like a traditional platformer and more like a game like skate or Tony Hawk in 2d, this game’s emphasis is on hitting tricks correctly in order to score points. Each level has multiple objectives, completing all of them unlocks a new; harder version of the same level, adding quite a bit of replayability.

The art is charming, kind of grunge indie look to it fitting it’s theme of urban skateboarding. I’ve only played about an hour of this game so I’ve kind of run out of things to say, time to get more abstract.

This is the kind of indie game I live for, it’s so unlike any other game I own on steam, it feels classic but also modern, the gameplay is fast and responsive, and above all, fun.

Chaining combos of tricks together feels just as satisfying here as it does in 3d skating games; I was very pleasantly surprised by this game when I got it in a bundle.

Would I have bought OliOli? Yes, had I ever heard of it before the bundle I got it in.

I don’t know how people feel about it but I had never seen it mentioned before. Sorry I didn’t have much to say about this one today, hopefully the next game I try out inspires a slightly longer post!

Would I have bought: 140

Taking a break from my barrage of anime related content (my Deadpool post notwithstanding), let’s dive into another nerdy subject. This will be a series of posts about my first impressions with steam games I’ve picked up over time during sales or bundles and ignored completely afterwards. It’s goal will be to ask a very simple question. Would I have bought this for full price outside of a bundle or sale?

As always, this is entirely my subjective opinion.

140 is an indie platformer that I got in a humble indie bundle, one of many games over the years I’ve gotten from such things that I have no real interest it. This is not a full review of the game; I have not completed it, getting about halfway before growing bored.

Woops, spoilers. I didn’t care for it.

Now 140 has an interesting mechanic, though one I’ve seen before. The beat of the backing music affects the game, platform moves, paths open and close ect on a set beat.

Not a bad mechanic and the game performs it well, however one gimmick is not enough to change the fact that the underlying platform game behind the gimmick is not very compelling.

This is a very slow, methodical game. If you’re a fan of modern twitch gameplay platformers like Super Meat Boy or Dustforce you’ll probable find this rather dull. The music gimmick also tends to lead to situations were you can do nothing but wait for the correct beat, with nothing else interesting happening.

My biggest complaint is this, the style is very minimalistic. Now, if any of you have seen my youtube channel you’d know I don’t mind games with old or non-existent graphics.

However, most games like that I play are either very old games, or have a vast depth of game mechanics to make up for the visual deficiency.

This is a standard platformer with slow controls and one gimmick that features almost no graphics at all. You play a square, when you move you turn into a circle, when you jump you become a triangle.

I’m all for minimalist art guys but seriously, this game looks unfinished. My first impression of the game is “This looks generic”, which in a veritable sea of indie platformers is not something you want people to think about your game.

The gameplay is good but basic outside of the gimmick and the art style is epitome of nothing. Were I to see this on steam on it’s own, would I have picked it up on it’s own merits?

Probably not, but it doesn't mean it's a bad game.

Animation Style vs. Animation Quality

Most of the time when someone says an anime or cartoon has good animation, they leave it at that. Calling something ‘good’ isn’t very descriptive of why it’s good, and it ignores one very important thing; there’s more to animation then art quality.

No matter how well drawn technically your animation is, it doesn’t matter to me if it doesn’t have any style. Inversely, a strong style can surpass a low animation budget; the best example of this is 2012’s new anime adaption of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure by David Productions. 

This anime was practically a slideshow, very little animation happened even during fight scenes, with a lot of freeze frames for emphasis. But JoJo had style, and the lack of animation is easily excusable for the fact that JoJo looked incredible at almost all times, the use of color, ‘camera’ angles, and digital effects add up into a very good looking show.

Another example of this is the recent anime The Rolling Girls, which has an incredibly vibrant color pallet that was extremely pleasing to look at, even though the animation itself wasn’t that high budget.

I’ve seen countless anime that have very high budget action scenes but seem to think that can excuse lazy angles, often showing the scenes in the most boring way possible.

Sword art online is a prime example of this, it has incredible budget and very smooth action scenes… that bored the hell out of me.

The shots are framed in the most generic, boring ways imaginable, completely wasting the budget spent on the scenes.

Style is vastly under-appreciated; good style can counter bad animation, this can be applied to the game industry as well. Which is why 2d sprite based games, such as Japanese fighting games like the recent Under Night In-Birth exe:late (great game, terrible title) still continue to look great. 

Deadpool is mainstream (but that's ok.)

Waaaay back in 2011 I posted about my dissatisfaction with the Deadpool series written by Daniel Way, hereby referred to as Volume 2. It didn’t stack up the 90s era Dadpool written by Joe Kelly, or the fantastic Cable & Deadpool by Fabian Nicieza.

Now, I have not read every Deadpool comic, I largely skip on the side-stories and miniseries, I do this with all comics I read, I only care about the main story unless I hear very good things about a side story.

As of now I have read the original 90s run of Deadpool, Cable & Deadpool, and about half of Way’s Volume 2, which is where I stopped until recently. The modern deadpool just wasn’t working for me for many reasons, it was far too silly, too many memes shoehorned in. But Then I started reading Volume 3, also known as Marvel Now! Deadpool; written by Brian Posehn and Gerry Duggen.

This is it, this the Deadpool I’ve been waiting for since Cable & Deadpool ended. It’s funny, it’s charming, there are almost no in your face memes. Deadpool is a goofy wisecracker who makes a ton of bad jokes as always, but it’s not ALL he does.

It also removes Way’s annoying dual thought boxes that argued with each other, though I don’t know if this change happened in Volume 2 as I have yet to finish it.

Back in 2011 I couldn’t accurately describe why I didn’t like the new Deadpool, and it shows; I really dislike that post now but it’s here if you want to read it. But right now all I can say is this; Marvel Now Deadpool is the real deal, anybody who hates the le epic meme so random Deadpool should give this series a chance, it’s far better.

I look forward to the upcoming Deadpool movie as a reinvigorated fan.

Fate/Stay Night and why anime original content is not inherently bad.

My first exposure to the works of Kinoko Nasu was through the abysmal 2003 JC Staff anime of the Visual Novel Tsukihime, at the time I thought it was pretty cool. Then I played the Visual Novel; my score for the anime dropped from eight to three.

How could they have turned such an amazing story into the fucking mess that was the anime Shingetsutan Tsukihime? Trying to combine five different story arcs that all last about twenty five hours into one 13 episode series probably didn’t help.

Things didn’t fair much better in 2005, when the second game made by Nasu’s company; Type-Moon, got an anime by Studio Deen. The visual novel at the time was not translated into English so the only thing I had to go on was the anime, I thought it was decent. The anime had 24 episodes instead of 13, so it fared a bit better in terms of adaption, or so I thought.

A few years after I saw the anime I learned the Visual Novel was translated (at this time only two of the three routes were completed) so I found myself a copy and sat down to play it. Fifty hours later and I’d thrown the anime in the trash, it wasn’t as bad as Tsukihime’s anime but it wasn’t good either.

The Fate/Stay Night anime was followed up by a movie of the second route of the Visual Novel, Unlimited Blade Works (The 2005 anime loosely following the plot of the first route, Fate.) it wasn’t good but it wasn’t terrible either, it just sort of exists.

This background is all to show that Type-Moon has been extremely unlucky with adaptations of their work for a long time, or so I thought. After Fate/Stay Night and before the UBW movie, a studio called Ufotable started a movie series of Nasu’s oldest published work, Kara no Kyoukai; a light novel series.

It’s Amazing, I don’t know how I didn’t find out about it until 2014, it deserves more recognition then it has.

Ufotable has quickly become “the type-moon guys”, producing incredible adaptations of all of Kara no Kyoukai and the Fate Prequel light novel written by Gen Urobuchi.

Now come to present day, and they have started to adapt the second route, Unlimited Blade Works for a second time. Now however it’s a full TV anime and not a movie. It’s incredible, the animation work is their best yet, the story follows the beat of the VN as best you can in an anime; but it’s not enough for some people.

A vocal minority on sites like myanimelist.net have taken to calling it “terrible” or “not canon” because it dares to be slightly different from the Visual Novel.

Anything short of a 1 to 1 translation of the novel would be met by endless shitstorms about it, interfering with anyone who actually wants to talk about the show legitimately.

I can only imagine that these guys want a 50 episode long anime that is 90% characters thinking, because that’s what a direct translation of the novel would be like. You see, they seem completely, delusionally unaware of one simple fact; Anime and Visual Novels are different mediums.

A Visual novel is essentially a book with a few pictures, sound, and sometimes voice acting, played on a PC or game console. Like a Book, its pace is largely dictated by user input. How fast are you reading? How much at one time?

Anime on the other hand, has to be paced according to episode; you can’t start an episode on slice of life, go into an epic fight in the middle then end on more slice of life, the pace would be all over the place.

Ufotable understands this, so they shorten/extend scenes in order to give the anime a good, steady pace; while also providing more exposition, backstory, or callbacks to Fate/Zero.

But the angry fanboys don’t care; they were calling this anime ruined before it even started, because the main character Shirou, had a jacket. That’s right, changing a minor character design detail got them to call the anime ruined.

Unlimited Blade Works TV is currently one of if not the only anime adaption of something else that changes things and gets better for it.

Why Modern Anime Doesn't Suck

Way back in 2011 I watched an anime called Sacred Seven, and it was awful, so bad in fact I gave up on anime as a medium for a long time and made a post here calling out Modern anime for being shitty ecchi fanservice and nothing more.

Since then however I have gotten back into anime full force, my kneejeck reaction to otaku pandering ended around 2012, when I watched the brilliant Psycho-Pass.

Anime is stronger than it’s ever been; not a comment to say lightly, but in the last few years I have not only watched countless new anime but many old, classic shows.

Anime like Psycho-Pass, Ping-Pong, or Parasyte set the bar for animation higher. Not just in presentation but in storytelling. Sure there are still a lot of crappy pandering shows out there, but even the fanservice shows have improved. High School DxD is one of the most pandering ecchi fanservice shows I’ve seen in years, but it remains entertaining; because it knows it’s stupid.

I hereby resend my opinion of modern anime being shit, except sacred seven; that was just terrible.