I wasn't sure what to expect from RWBY Ice Queendom, I will admit that I was sceptic from the very moment I found out about it, but I had hopes that it woud be an animation I could recommend to people that would get turned off by the very clunky first season of the original RWBY. A remake, something more polished. Needless to say that I was wrong.

Writing

Lets begin with the most diappointing part about this whole thing: The writing. The series often skips over certain events or shortens them in such a way that new viewers who have not watched the main series there is essentially no chance to actually understand what is going on. One example would of this would be:

Spoiler, click to view

The introduction of Penny during Blake's running away and the subsequent fight at the Vale harbour.

It makes you question why the writers chose to include these events at all? Clearly they felt they either were not relevant enough or they did not have the time to do them justice, in both cases it would have been better to fully lean into the fact that their series is set in an alternative universe and forgo the main storyline, either completely or at least parially.

Another annoyance I have with the writing are the characters. For those that already know them from the main series it is merely painful to see them reduced to mannequins with the personality depth of a cutting board, while for new viewers it means that they have to accept that some characters are just there and that they should be happy to even know their names.

Animation

At first I had believed that the animation would be this animes saving grace. I didn't have to be flashy, it didn't have to be amazing. Just decent would have been sufficient, but well that was before I saw what they had come up with. Setting aside the clear budget cuts on the environment/backgrounds and the fact that some characters are sometimes not animated at all if they aren't relevant to the story I also noticed quite some annoyances with the main and supporting characters.

The most obvious of these was when, instead of animating a character (that was positioned right in the middle of the screen no less) turning on the spot they simply went ahead and rotated them. Imagine it as if you had went into the frame in question using photoshop or whatever and then simply rotated them. No animation, no attempts to even make this look good.

Music

Now, the music on the anime is not terrible. In fact I found that some of the background music during the anime was matching the happenings on the screen pretty well. However the biggest gripe that I have with the music is that it is not RWBY music. Those who have watched the main series will most certainly remember the OSTs and will find the music in this anime lacking. Thats not to say that it is terrible, in fact had it been played on an anime that was not RWBY I would have shrugged and called it decent. I am aware that this is most likely a very personal annoyance, but it was the very first annoyance when I watched the trailer and it has not resolved itself in the slightest.

Conclusion

I watched the whole anime, not because I thought it was great but because I wanted to see if it could turn things around, which it could not. I believe that, if looking back at it in a couple of years time, RWBY Ice Queen will be that one failed experiment that wasn't successful and that still has a wiki page, but thats basically it. If you have watched the main series I can assure you that you will not miss out on anything by not watching this, whereas if you are new to the series I would no recommend this either, as it will most likely leave you more confused and disappointed than anything else.