Murphy talked this show up so much, I just had to check it
out for myself. Now, I agree with pretty much everything he already said in his
review, so I’ll just offer a few supporting thoughts…
The elephant in the room, of course, is that this show’s good despite its origins in mobile gaming (which
would almost guarantee badness). Matt and I talk about this a lot during
our Vice Pit segments, and I likened it to this spring’s BLADE
& SOUL, as both series demonstrate that concept doesn’t matter as much as
execution.
The characters sound
like tropes on paper, but they’re actually mutli-dimensional characters on
screen, and I’m seriously wondering if that might have had something to do with
the show employing a more involved performance capture technique. Almost always, animation is limited by how much of the voice actor’s craft translates
from the booth to the cel. Either they’re having to rigidly match their cadence to
lip-flaps that’ve already been drawn, or their line-readings are being
interpreted by animators who put more attention on making mechs look cool than
on catching the subtle nuances of an awkward facial expression.
In this case, it feels like the recording sessions
might’ve been recorded on video, with the actors even getting enough room to
jump around and emote. There’s a realism to scenes like Favaro and Amira’s
impromptu, drunk dance which makes me think of a more fluid rotoscoping, and
that may very well have been the case. What puts a step beyond the
trite/trope-y ‘scoundral’ is all the minute ticks and asides when he’s squiming around. We forgive him for being a dirtbag, because
he seems so real. Likewise, I was really surprised at how quickly Amira shed
the stereotypical ‘tsundere’ guise and let her hair down. It didn’t feel
forced, because all her little girlish giggles seemed real; not an
abstraction.
Also, given the way the prologues with the backstory of
BAHAMUT are handled, I have to think this is another case where Stereotypical
Anime works because the staff is fully aware of how ridiculous it is. Those
scenes scream “THIS IS BASED ON A CARD GAME!” so loudly, it’s almost like the
show’s parodying them, and then quickly moving away from them.
Murphix was right - - this is an excellent. I’ll be watching
it along with PSYCHO-PASS and PARASYTE this season, for sure.
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