This is a horrendous OVA that I can't fathom was produced by ufotable. The Garden of Sinners movies are all generally excellent and have very high production values so when I watched this OVA I genuinely felt scammed. For context, the entire 30-minute-long episode is 2 characters talking to each other. That might not have sounded as bad as it is, but that is literally all that happens. The characters don't move around, the background stays the same, and they just talk until the episode finally ends. We don't even see the character's bodies for most of the episode, just a talking head in front of the same snowy background. Putting the voice actors in VR chat and recording them would have made this more interesting since they would inadvertently move around a bit during the 30 minutes rather than standing and talking like dolls.
What really pisses me off about this abomination is that it being an anime significantly detracts from it. This conversation would have been better portrayed in a pamphlet, a PowerPoint presentation, or a docx document with a gif attached. At least then it would have taken less time to consume. The fact that a word document and a gif file would have conveyed everything this anime did, perhaps better, really makes me question why and how this thing was created. It is an extra episode they could have just not produced it but someone wanted to make this garbage. Someone thought this was necessary to make and that it was a good use of animation.
This episode doesn’t utilize anything about the medium of animation, and barely even has any animation. 2 actors could film this in live action and it would be more interesting to watch without losing anything. Even the PowerPoint presentations disguised as the final 2 episodes of Evangelion are more animated than this trainwreck. In those two episodes, there are frequent cuts, perspective changes, etc. At least they put some effort into making those episodes, while this thing puts the expressionless faces of being characters on top of a snowy background for minutes on end. This has no passion and no value behind it. Even pieces of absolute garbage like ex-arm and mars of destruction at least tried enough to become animated works. You cannot adapt ex-arm 1:1 to a word document but you wouldn’t have much trouble adapting this. Ex arm at least tried, no matter how badly, and failed while this epilogue didn’t even bother.
I would recommend this as an audiobook if you want to listen to something as you do chores and really like the garden of words. It is very rare that an anime fails so utterly at being an anime. This thing is an insult to its franchise and to every single animated work that had a shred of effort put into it. This thing genuinely offends me.
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