This anime is a cheaper knock-off of Fate that fell flat on its face via story and production value, genuinely awful.
Read my rating scale first before you decide to jump to the bottom of the review and read the score.
Explaining my Rating Scale
A common mistake with looking at ratings is assuming all of our rating scales are the same, while realistically that is never the case.
People rate average anime differently, some rate it as 5, 6 or a 7 depending on their own personal criteria which is subjective in nature. This explains why we all have different tastes.
My Personal Rating Scale (Anime):
4 and below = Considered dropped but I finished it for some reason.
5 = Meh, no rewatch ever.
6 = Meh, would only rewatch if forced.
7 = Acceptable and good entertainment, enjoyable.
8 = Great entertainment, not one of the best though.
9 = Loved the story!! Not life-changing but incredible!
10 = Chills, intense emotional catharsis, perfect, and possibly life-changing.
Setting expectations:
- This is a subjective review and mainly for enjoyment. A very critical opinion will not be found here, my apologies.
- Spoilers will be as minimal as possible with images being all out of context.
- I’ll try my best to explain what worked for me and what didn’t to help you understand my point of view. This will help you come to your own conclusion about what this anime might be like for you.
The preface is because a lot of people online expect reviews to fit a certain mold. For me, I just like to talk about anime I enjoy and want to share my thoughts about it in review-form.
Alright, let’s get to the review already.
Verdict
Marchen Madchen is a 12 episode anime that aired in Winter 2018 season. It was produced by Hoods Entertainment (3D Kanojo, Mysterious Girlfriend X, Drifters). This anime was directed by Shigeru Ueda. The story is from a Light Novel by Tomohiro Matsu and touches upon the genres of Fantasy / Isekai.
The one unique thing about the show is how Fhana - the artist - is attached to it via singing the Opening Song. That is it. Fhana sang Dragon Maid’s Opening and other various anime.
[Summary of: Background]
This started with forcing 2 friends to watch Love Live because they hate it and now I got forced into watching this bad anime. Did not expect it to be this bad but here I am.
[Summary of: Story / Plot / Characters]
This is a cheaper knock-off version of Fate with a generic plot structure and some interesting characters but a lot of boring ones.
[Summary of: Visuals / Animation]
Great first episode but that is bait, it just gets progressively awful to the point where it’s so bad so good but then it offended me afterward. The final episodes got better but that journey gave me the most boring guh.
[Summary of: Audio / Soundtrack / Voice Acting]
Serviceable audio, great OP, okay ED, generic OST, and good voice-acting work from only a few. A lot of forgettable shit that I will never remember later.
[Summary of: Overall]
I fucking hate this show.
I would only recommend this if you want to watch a purposefully bad anime. Otherwise, go spend your time on anything more worthwhile.
Background
I went into this show completely blind other than the fact that it had a low rating.
This all started because of spending over $100 to have two friends watch Love Live and watch them suffer for my enjoyment. Now, I got the taste of my own medicine with this anime in the hot seat and I fucking hate myself. I feel the empathy for the nakama’s that I made them suffer through Love Live School Idol Project Season 1.
The show was streamed on Crunchyroll in Japanese dub with English subtitles.
The Review
Now the review. I’ll be talking about the anime in the following categories:
1) Story / Plot / Characters
First episode was bait, that is like the only genuine good episode.
The story was awful. It took inspiration from elements of Fate, Evangelion, Madoka Magica, Kill La Kill, Shounen, and Isekai shows. Then it decided to play the same story beats as every generic anime. Problem was that it did not understand what made it work, it just sort of copied and pasted it poorly. This is a literally example of an anime copying popular tropes for the sake of the trope being popular without understanding why.
So, all I just witnessed was seeing so many anime tropes smashed into one huge orgy.
Kid: “Can I watch the new ufotable Fate?”
Mom: “We have Fate at Home.”
Fate at Home is this fucking show.
And yet, I have seen them given thought about the backgrounds of some of the characters and their histories. Like they are referencing upon real stories but like… I just could not give two shits about it like how Fate did it. Sure in Fate I did not actively look into each character’s background but the way they presented the story made it intriguing.
Also, the Yuri-Baiting, holy fuck. Like I can understand the Yuri Undertones because I have consumed Yuri Undertones but it got so fucking obnoxious here, like the story was sucking hard and so the undertones just stuck out as a bad sore thumb.
The story was self-aware but this does not give it points, it did not try to do anything interesting with this self-awareness. There were really good one-liners but it felt more of “so bad, so good” territory instead of genuinely good.
Not only that, there were so many fucking stupid reasons and story points cited that genuinely offended me. It was so dumb that I did some double takes because I could not believe what the heck I was witnessing.
Plot structure was an overarching arc with multiple story threads like any generic anime. There was literally nothing noteworthy about this plot structure, at all.
Hazuki is a nice main character but is very shallow, hard to care for me personally at this point in time.
I hated Shizuki so much, she was one of the most boring main characters I have seen in anime. She played the same tropes of a tsundere / kuudere but like, all she is like a leader of some Japanese school then is gay for Hazuki. I cannot recall any other interesting fact about her besides her superpower which loses its appeal after the first showing.
The only redeeming characters were Lynne who represented America and the Russian girls that represented Russian. But then, they fucked up Lynne later so I mean, I guess only Russia is best girl, thanks Putin.
2) Visuals / Animation
First episode was animated so well but then as it progressed, you can tell their production scheduling got fucked so hard because the B-team was doing a lot of the episodes in the middle. So many janky shitty art that it was really funny to look at but then it just fucking offended me. They finally picked up at the last two episodes but holy fuck, that was so bad.
I was getting sick of seeing shitty art that amateurs on the internet could do better on. And I cannot blame them for crunching so hard considering some anime like to produce while the season airs. Just, the quality was genuinely awful to consume that the bar of quality kept on dropping so hard that it went beyond 6 feet under and went into the middle of the fucking Earth.
It depended on the production team but it was genuinely good for the first episode but it got laughably bad during the B-team episodes. The ending picked up when competent animators came back.
Also, the Opening had a fucking montage for the first 6 episodes and then really shitty editing tricks into the official opening. The official opening animation looks really cool…. For the first half and then the last half made me go what the fuck.
3) Audio / Soundtrack / Voice Acting
The show’s audio was serviceable but nothing note-worthy at all.
The OP song is the only good shit this show has to offer. For the ED, it was chill but generic as fuck.
The OST was so painfully generic at most points, some tracks were good but my god a lot of this shit was painfully forgettable.
The voice-acting was only good for Lynne and Hazuki, the rest were either generic or just completely forgettable due to shit story or direction.
4) Overall
I fucking hate this show and I regret watching this to completion, I completed a genuinely bad anime and have a baseline for what awful an anime can look like but I did not need to spend this much time on it. I could have dropped it and consumed actual good shit but I forced myself through it. This show fucking sucks and I have extreme buyers regret from spending my time on it.
Hopefully, you learned something useful from the review. Thanks for reading. :)
