
EX-ARM
a review by Jamiebreeze

a review by Jamiebreeze
-This review will contain spoilers. ( I doubt anyone even cares about what fucking happens in this show at all but alas. I don't know if profanity should be warned about either but I already cussed and it will happen again and again so there is that too.)
-This show isn't for: the faint of heart, those with anger issues, people with drinking problems, people with expectations, people with eyes, me, everyone.

When the first episode of Ex-arm dropped, I went in without remembering it was that terrible show for which Crunchyroll had dropped the trailer for in December. Needless to say, I got pissed off and then dropped it. There wasn't really a good comedy show airing at the time and The Promised Neverland kept getting worse, so I thought, "Hey, let's watch this and lose even more brain cells I guess." I never expected this show to make me laugh so hard, albeit for the completely wrong reasons, and for it to actually be not a completely terrible experience.
Sometimes, one is lucky enough to exist at the same time that a star is born. This is not to say that I recommend this series, however, since it is still shittily mediocre on many levels (Crunchyroll outdid themselves this time. They are always pushing the envelope.) and besides laughing at how bad everything looked, there really is nothing much else to enjoy. This show clearly has an Ecchi tag, but it is nonexistent since the art is ugly as hell (In episode 3, we are in the middle of a battle and for some reason, the camera zooms in on alma's ass and camel toe and well, this just in cinematography flexes.)
Ex-arm is set in 2030 after years have passed since a big terrorist attack inflicted by these weapons called ex-arms took place. Our main protagonist, Akira, used to be your average and awkward Rom-com guy, who then got hit by a truck. In this case, though, he did not get sent to another world. He just passed away, and then got made into an ex-arm that's just a brain. There are a ton of characters whose names I cannot believe I remember, and none of them are particularly stellar but they also never did anything to particularly make me want to punch myself and most of them have a decent amount of common sense, no matter how dumb their terrible CGI model makes them look.
Our main team consists of: the Miraculous Ladybug (Minami), a white-haired chick named Alma who is an android, a loli with an umbrella, the dollar store version of Hange from Attack on Titan, a big-tit blonde girl, and three other dudes who don't matter. We also have a pretty good team of villains which includes: Deadpool, Arabic Itachi, Todoroki's long-lost brother, Mewtwo, and two Russians. The show looked like it was going to mostly be monster of the week format, and similar to other cop shows but from episode five onwards, the anime launches into a big ass final arc where everyone's lives are at risk and I cannot express how much I laughed when the main antagonist turned out to be Chewbacca (ok his real name was Beta, but the resemblance is uncanny) from Star Wars.

There is CGI, and then there is CGI. The models used for our main team and other key characters are abhorrent and expressionless. Akira looks like he is shocked all the time, Minami looks high on drugs, you name it. Since the characters barely show expressions resembling a real human, many moments when something "emotional" happens just fall flat. The worst thing, and also kind of hilarious, is that they have an amazing cast of voice actors. These actors are giving out the performance of their life sometimes, and the visuals just don't help (sometimes the audio is not even properly synced in LMFAO), so it is inevitable to just laugh uncontrollably.
Minami's VA had an amazing moment in episode seven, but since the artwork is bland, the emotion is lost into the void. Many times, there is 2D mixed in with our 3D characters and it looks dreadful. In episode one, Akira is in 3D, while his brother isn't. Plenty of civilians in the story are also 2D while the rest of the people aren't, etc. This decision probably meant to save both time or money, or maybe Crunchyroll and the animation team just didn't care anymore, but it all was a shitshow and it isn't like we haven't laughed at Crunchyroll before, especially given how the Webtoon adaptations went, but this season they really were the laughing stock of the whole community and nobody is surprised as to why.
Continuing on the gorgeous visuals this show has, plenty of times we are lead to believe action happened, but it is either hilariously badly animated, the aftermath, or a still shot while a character screams. Some notable examples include:
It is impossible to turn one's brain off when watching this show. Your brain will be constantly working out since there are a ton of things that lack logic or are just way too stupid to not think about them. From characters having immense respect on the battlefield, and not interrupting characters while they chat, to women getting transported back to the fifties and having their kiss censored, anything goes in this show. Some of my favourite ones include:
The production value of the series is worse than trash (so much that it feels like an insult to even call it production), there is no actual soundtrack (all the music sounds like royalty-free one from Youtube and no, the theme oddly reminiscent of a song in the Batman Lego game, that appears in one episode, doesn't count), the fighting choreography is actually not too bad but since the animation is none, it ends up sucking ass, so what about the characters? well, they exist and that's it. There is character development, but I was not able to care about it at all since the show looks so bad that I just laugh at everything.
None of these characters are memorable for any other reason than just the fact that they appear in one of Crunchyroll's shitty anime, and I doubt anyone will have them as favourites , unless it is part of a joke. I want to highlight, however, that Akira is pretty much okay as a protagonist. For one, he has enough common sense to know that he and the others, cannot coexist with the main villain ( unlike a recent one I know ) and he even attempts to go in for the kill. Yes, it is unthinkable to take him seriously, but if the show had been shown even a bit of love, it wouldn't be too bad. It would be generic, but it wouldn't have made everyone and their grandmother laugh, and it wouldn't look like shit.
There is no merit to watching this. I don't think anyone expected this to go well, maybe not even Crunchyroll. They have once again proved to plenty of people that they just can't produce anime and that they should stop attempting to do so. This is one of those times when I firmly believe that sometimes you just gotta accept that you suck a ton of ass and move on to just stream shows.
The webtoon adaptations didn't receive particularly high praise, but Ex-arm just hurt more whatever dignity they had left. If the only reason people watch something you produced, is to laugh about how shitty it looks, you have failed, and given how this trainwreck unfolded, the losses are probably going to be insanely big. To make this even funnier, one of the episodes is titled "Fallen Messiah" and well, guess who astral projected a thousand miles per hour to the fucking depths of hell and mediocrity? CR.
Overall, Ex-arm is best watched if you look at it as a comedy while you drink and eat shit, and then after it ends you can just forget about it and actually watch a decent show of your choice. To end this I just want to grieve about this potential waifu being massacred by Crunchyroll:

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