...Yami Shibai 5? Yeah, Yami Shibai 5 isn't scary at all. I don't know why you would have thought I'd say it was.
...
BUT WHEN YAMI SHIBAI 6 STARTS AIRING? WHICH WILL CROSS OVER WITH ICLA'S
#AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA#
_COMING SOON TO ACCOMPANY THE TGG REVIEW SERIES™: TGG YOUTUBE REACTION VIDEOS TO YAMI SHIBAI, ALL SEASONS. WE'LL GET A BILLION HITS AS I FAKE SCREAM INTO A CAMERA WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY JUMPING OFF OF THE ROOF OF MY HOUSE IN AN ATTEMPT TO SPONTANEOUSLY GROW WINGS AND FLY TO ANOTHER PLANET_.
#Introduction (an overview of Yami Shibai as a whole)#
Ahem, sorry about that. The truth is apart from Yami Shibai 5, I've only watched Yami Shibai 1 and 2. I've done like one episode of 3, but that was about when 5 started airing and I figured there'd be no harm in just jumping on that instead. The announcement of Yami Shibai 5 came not too long after Sekai no Yami Zukan finished airing which I also reviewed and... I was curious to see what a new Yami Shibai could do after witnessing that horror.
Honestly just thought it'd be another clear and cut Yami Shibai season. But there were some surprises they had tucked away
But before we go into Yami Shibai 5, I went over 1-4 and made a little guide thing. Because at the time of writing this so far, it feels like they've done the "ghost/creepy girl" thing an intolerable amount of times just in 5 alone. So I said hey, what would the basic ideas of all of the episodes of all four prior seasons look like if put in a list thing? Would we actually be able to see the decline of imagination in a visual form?
It's a bit long, hence the spoiler. Admittedly, for 3 and 4, I straight up just looked at the episode summaries on Wikipedia. So take those with maybe a grain of salt. Anyhow, the way I'm gonna review Yami Shibai 5 is just tackling it episode by episode like with Sekai no Yami Zukan but instead of just marveling at ICLA's insanity, I'm going to go into the problems and faults of each episode since Yami Shibai is slightly easier to take seriously compared to Sekai no Yami Zukan.
...OR MAYBE NOT. WHERE DID I PUT MY MULTICOLORED RAINBOW AFRO, IT'S GONNA BE ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE REVIEWS, I GUESS. THANKS ICLAAAAAAAAA.
#Domestic Distress, Random Creepy Girl, Friendly Old Lady#
I'm a bit biased here since I haven't even watched the majority of season three and four, but I really found the first episode of season five disappointing, and perhaps a sign of the things to come. Like I just can't help but think back to the first episode of season two and think man, that was a pretty solid opening episode for Yami Shibai. Like a puppet was getting possessed by a kid that died in a traffic accident and this officer who was just doing a normal puppet show is freaking the fuck out and the kids in the audience don't know a thing.
With season five it's just... a wife finds her son and husband (BUT ESPECIALLY THAT BRAT, HE WON'T EVEN PICK UP HIS TOYS HOW DARE HE) annoying, and then she gets a phone call. I can't help but mention that every single time the mysterious person calls, it's the same exact drawing of the mom holding the phone. To be fair, they were a lot worse with this in Sekai no Yami Zukan but... just... why not at least change the position of her face (her expression at least changes in two of the calls I guess)? Just because she answers the phone multiple times doesn't mean you HAVE to use the same exact drawing...
Then, finally, the ghost woman (it's a ghost woman by the way) just shows up at the door, the mom grabs a knife, and as hands are coming at her, it goes to black. Fade to black endings are my favorite type of ending. Don't get to see the actual ghost, don't get to see the mom try and stab a ghost... don't get to see anything.
The "fade to black before a spooky thing happens" thing is probably a Yami Shibai staple (I'm too lazy to go back and see how many episodes in the original two seasons end this way but I know at least more than a handful do), but I hate it all the same.
Weirdly enough, the second episode is probably one of my favorite episodes of this Yami Shibai season. The idea
I mean I appreciate that they didn't over to the top with it and have her face be all demonic and shit, but could have made it... a little spooky looking, I guess. Additionally, perhaps I just like this episode as much as I do because it doesn't end immediately with the reveal. Her hands slowly come out from the side around her boyfriend and you think it's gonna end, but nope, now her face is also slowly coming out from the side. Didn't scare me, but I do remember thinking genuinely: "Okay yeah, this episode wasn't a complete flatline."
Also, don't want to mention it, but all the times she talks to the little girl, it's basically the same exact...
Then, the third episode gets a little weird because while it follows the theme of the last two episodes in the sense that's there's just a weird creepy old lady...
...But, this episode's intention kind of gets muddled. The creepy old lady doesn't get the daughter as the mother finds her in time right before the creepy old lady takes her, and then... they just leave, and the creepy old lady just waves at them. Oh... then, the old lady really wasn't a monster and trying to take the daughter? Wow, that's surprising.
...But then, the daughter looks up at the tree where a bunch of crows are.
...Oh, the crows are... spirits of lost children. But wait, if the crows are in fact lost children souls who have been taken by the old lady, then that means the old lady is in fact bad. It's not like the daughter had been lost for more than a few hours, and the old lady sure did seem intent on taking her until right when the mom showed up. Also, why would the daughter willingly want to join the crow children if they're children who get lost and then get spirited away to become crows?
It feels like they wanted to do a thing about lost children while still wanting to do the Yami Shibai thing and making the creepy old lady be a monster. It doesn't... you can't do both. You have to pick one.
I mean don't get me wrong. I like that they're trying around with different things, but trying to get messages across in a Yami Shibai episode... I don't know, sure there wasn't a jumpscare or whatever, but wasn't scared or creeped out at all. The children on the tree were just... goofy looking which should not be a thing that could be said considering they're supposed to be dead/spirit children.
Like the entire episode is they see a creepy old lady, the daughter gets separated from the mother, the mother finds her, and then they leave. A Yami Shibai filler episode? Tell me it ain't so.
#Copycat, Shadow Women, Dial-a-Curse#
I can't imagine that a viewer who's actually stuck with Yami Shibai all five seasons straight through wouldn't actually just start trying to predict what happens in the episode. Because that's basically what I started doing. With the fourth episode, I was close but no cigar.
Two college students that are friendly with each other, and one basically follows the other one around everywhere and copies everything she does exactly. Immediately, I form the prediction that the copycat girl is a ghost which was a bit silly of me, because the second episode already did the sort of "ghost wanting to copy or imitate the living" thing.
No, it turns out I guessed wrong on out of the two characters of which one is the ghost. It turns out that the copycat girl only made it into the college her friend wanted to go to because she died and therefore created a new spot, but then the copycat girl just finishes off her copying the way she died.
But it also treats the copycat like the creepy character which... like if the ghost girl genuinely wanted to stop the copycat girl from copying her exactly then why didn't she just say "please don't walk out into the street when the sign is clearly don't walk" and also she smiles when copycat girl dies so... the twist is pretty muddled at this point, and I can't even tell who's the good one and who's the bad one anymore. And that's not exactly a good thing because sure the copycat girl could have just been acting insane because she's talking to the ghost of her friend who recently died, but why does the ghost smile when her friend dies despite the fact she was trying to get her to not copy her to the grave???
Next episode's just an incredibly distrustful wife believes her husband is unfaithful, and then it's just a bunch of shadow women are clinging to him. She then proceeds to get converted to a shadow woman as well, and the episode ends.
Typical clear cut Yami Shibai episode with no twist or moral quandaries. Creepy women are creepy, we get it, we understand horror.
Sixth episode is about a girl who's all torn up because she lost her boyfriend to her friend or whatever and then she just happens to read a book saying that if you dial a number into a phone exactly at midnight, you can make a ghost or something return your boyfriend to you. But if you don't call back the following night, something bad will happen to you.
How this episode fails is... she does this, her friend dies (of course) and her boyfriend returns to her, and then she's supposed to forget about calling back. That's the way it's supposed to go. Instead, she remembers, and then returns to the phone booth in time to make the call BUT there's her friend's ghost using the phone already which prevents her from using the phone in time. Then it cuts to black and gore sounds, and then it shows the bloodied phonebooth.
I suppose the implication here is that her friend's ghost used the phone and dialed the number for the curse to happen to her friend, but there's one major problem here. ~~Apart from the goddamned cut to black ending happening, AGAIN.~~
GHOSTS CAN'T USE TELEPHONES, ICLA.
Wait... the entire first episode of this season was a ghost using the teleph
___#Hide and Seek and Creepy Women Apartment#
The hide and seek episode (we're onto episode seven) was a fine Yami Shibai episode for the most part, there's a spooky and decrepit house, and a bunch of kids decide to go play hide and seek in the house. Then there's a (albeit random) monster who joins the game of hide and seek. The monster's arm comes in and grabs the straw doll resembling a boy, and a moment of uneasy silence before the monster opens the door again to grab the real child.
The problem is why did the parents just forget entirely about their child? They go to visit grandma's with their son, then leave without their son. And... the grandmother seemed kind of aware of what was going on with the house and also didn't forget about her grandson? Why wasn't she more prudent in helping prevent her grandson's demise?
"Why are you nitpicking the plot of Yami Shibai episodes? You're supposed to just watch for the spooks and the scares and the AAAAAAAAAAA I'm scared!'s."
Then why do they have plot at all?
Episode eight, and perhaps more or less a bunch of the later episodes of Yami Shibai 5 are where it gets fun. Or at least weird. Like watching Yami Shibai, I've always wondered, WHERE are all these creepy or ghost women coming from? There just seem to be so many in the Yami Shibaiverse. Episode eight is when we finally get the lore. See, there are so many of them in this universe, that there are entire apartments for ghost women to live and hang from the ceiling to periodically drop down and jump scare in.
It's great! I can't believe ICLA has finally upped their lore game and finally showed us where all the ghost women go when they're not scaring or murdering people!
Here we go, the episode that caused this review. Just like how the live action clown episode of Sekai no Yami Zukan suckerpunched me and caused me to temporarily be unable to breathe because I was laughing so hard out of disbelief, ICLA yet again caught me completely offguard partway through one of their shows.
Okay, we start with two college students and one of them turns to the other and tells her that she can see ghosts because her friend taught her how and she can teach her present friend how to see ghosts as well. She tells her friend to look into her eyes and oh no, there's a white blobbish CG ghost.
Now since her friend has seen a ghost reflected in her friend's eyes, she herself will now see ghosts as well. But literally two seconds after teaching her friend to see ghosts, she realizes that after her past friend taught HER how to see ghosts, she never saw her again and immediately puts two and two together for a result of five.
Despite the immediate horror dawning on her face, the friend she just taught how to see ghosts leaves for a seminar plainly ignoring her friend's pleas not to leave her alone.
~~This episode is a farce. This episode is a farce. This episode is a farce. This episode is a farce. This episode is a farce.~~
Then she immediately goes and talks to two of her other friends and the ghosts come up in conversation and she says to HER two friends: "Hey, look into my eyes. Do you see ghosts?"
So then THEY become capable of seeing ghosts. But the original girl realizes the CG ghosts that were previously white are now turning red and are approaching her and EVERYONE KNOWS THAT RED IS THE SPOOKY COLOR TO INDICATE SPOOKINESS.
So she runs. She gets the fuck out of there and QUICK, but CG ghosts are coming from every which way. She has spilled the beans of how to see ghosts to new people and therefore she must be punished BY BEING FORCED TO BECOME A GHOST. She runs to find her friend whom taught her the ways of the ghost finding, BUT SHE IS ALREADY DEAD AND HER CORPSE JUMP SCARES HER OH NO.
THE RED CG GHOSTS ARE COMING FROM EVERYWHERE AND THERE IS NOWHERE ELSE TO RUN, and then it just fades to red and a bunch of voices of people spreading the secret of how to see ghosts and that is how Japan fell as a country.
Ghosts murdered everyone in Japan.
...
...This is the most clumsiest and shoddiest attempt to do a "well you can only keep a secret among three people if two of them are dead" story I've ever seen. Like the live action clown, I simply cannot believe this is an episode that exists. Clearly, the implication of the last thing being seen is the the ghosts reflection in the girl's eye is that oh no, now everybody who watched this episode of Yami Shibai are going to be haunted too. What a fucking joke.
Wait... oh fuck. THE GHOSTS ARE COMING THROUGH THE WALL, I HAVE TO VACATE THIS AREA UNTIL I CAN REACH A PHONE TO CALL
No, I was of course just joking. ~~I already have ghosts living inside of my brain, that's why I do anime reviews.~~ The review continues ~~unfortunately~~! Because there's actually more ICLA weirdness to discuss. The immediate next episode is so tonally out of place that it was an equally unexpected but much less intense slap to the face as the previous episode was.
Basically, a businessman encounters a weird creepy girl who is doing flower fortune telling. You know, pulling one petal and going he loves me, and then the next he loves me not until all petals are gone. The moment the businessman's wife was brought up, I immediately predict that his wife is now a ghost (the way the businessman speaks about her obviously implies she's dead), and that the whole thing is she's coming to get her husband despite the fact he's still alive.
The flower girl is doing her fortunetelling of whether or not his wife's gonna come and get him and she's almost out of petals and she ends with "your wife's gonna come for you."
Immediately, you expect a monstrous or at least spooky woman to appear, but no, his wife's ghost is all bright and emotional piano music is playing, and the husband sounds as if he's relieved, and willingly goes with his wife. The flower girl starts doing another flower of whether or not the guy is dead and I guess you could still interpret her final reading of "you're dead" to mean he died when he went with his wife's ghost but...
The episode starts with him being caught within a rainstorm and waiting for it to stop, and him watching a couple leave while musing he was like them once. Therefore, I think the most logical conclusion is with this and the presentation of the wife ghost being not a spooky Yami Shibai ghost at all that the husband himself was actually dead as well and he himself was crossing over after being reunited with his wife.
...This episode is a lot better than the last one, and honestly a lot better than the other episodes. The issue is, and I immediately thought this after watching the episode, what the fuck is it doing in Yami Shibai? No jump scares, no creepiness or spookiness really, just a heartwarming story about the ghosts of a wife and husband moving on with a completely random and unneeded fortune teller girl who is undetermined whether she herself is a ghost or not ("I won't go home.").
I really would love to know any of the creative decisions for why these two episodes of Yami Shibai 5 exist. But... I never will, so let's move onto the final three ~~so we can end this already~~!
___#A Woman's Creepy Reflection, Two-in-One, Preying Mantis Woman#
Episode eleven is pretty clear cut. I usually like psychological stuff, and the idea of the girl's massive vanity taking a life of its own works.
It's just... the end kind of sucks. Her reflection just comes out of the mirror towards her with a pair of scissors, and the screen fades to black as we hear the pair of scissors cutting. The fade to black ending aside, they've already done spooky girl with menacing pair of scissors. It's literally the only episode of season three I watched. Kind of think someone at ICLA had a bad experience getting their hair cut once or something, because I don't know why else they'd do the scissors thing twice. Scissors (unless you've specifically had a bad experience involving them) aren't scary!
The second to last episode is pretty notable in the sense that it's probably the most incomprehensible Yami Shibai episode. Genuinely was not sure what was happening for part of the episode, which I guess is an accomplishment considering the episodes are like three minutes long. The idea of this episode was that two ghost stories were happening, or like one of the characters was telling a ghost story with the presentation of a mini Yami Shibai episode to one of the other characters. Or something. I really don't know, all I know is that it more or less ended exactly the same as many other Yami Shibai episodes do. The idea could have been neat I suppose, but they did not do it well at all.
Finally, we have the finale of the fifth season. Which perhaps notably or not notably does not begin with the opening of the Yami Shibai guy about to tell a ghost story to a bunch of children crowding around him. I guess the implication is that some detective is investigating into a Yami Shibai story. Which is fine sure, but why is the episode itself about a woman just turns into a human eating preying mantis? This genuinely feels like something that should have been in Sekai no Yami Zukan. There's no spookiness or creepiness, she just turns into a giant preying mantis and eats a guy.
...Then Yami Shibai 5 ends. What the fuck.
#Riding off into the sunset for another season...?#
Okay so, overall, absolutely terrible. Season one and two were at least hit or miss and the art remained at least somewhat consistent, and I think there was less clear laziness on ICLA's part. Less reusing the same drawings, I remember characters and etc moving more rather than just gliding around which... can I be honest? It just looks bad. When one of the characters just begins to move without any of their limbs or literally any part of them doesn't also move... I just kind of sigh.
Especially if the characters are supposed to be fleeing for their lives. I didn't even mention it because that's the least interestingly terrible thing about the episode, but it's REALLY BAD with the CG ghosts episode. Holy hell.
But in addition to just the general quality going downhill with every additional Yami Shibai season, if you just gaze back at season three...
youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdUfJCMP7rI)
What the fuck happened? There were actual monsters, and they actually could move! There seemed to be actual weirdness or creepiness and just overall effort put into it! Like as far as "scariness" goes, season one and two I'd probably guess is still better in that regard. I have zero ideas what season four was like, but I can't believe it's any worse than five is. Like I brought up in this review/was thinking of Sekai no Yami Zukan an upsetting number of times.
This may as well as been Sekai no Yami Zukan 1.5. Like I don't know if the Yami Shibai guy taking his bicycle off towards the sunset at the end was supposed to be like ICLA saying...
"Okay, we'll be back for a season six!"
Or...
"Look guys, we just don't have it in us anymore. We're clearly out of ideas. We only did a four and a five to have a four and a five. This is already a pretty weak note for Yami Shibai to go out on sure, but what the fuck can we hope to do in a season six? We just... just need to let the mask guy ride off into the sunset for at least a little while."
I mean while I may think the original season (aka arguably when they were trying their hardest) was largely hit or miss, I do appreciate Yami Shibai's existence. The horror genre of anime is a bit... lacking, to be honest. There's nothing much else other than Yami Shibai that's of this particular flavor of horror where "scares" or being "creeped out" is the purpose of the show. There's plenty shows and series where yeah it's tagged as horror, but it's more or less just because there's gore or people die. I mean if you actually build an atmosphere or you have some genuinely disgusting or revolting stuff (should add that it has be to the "good kind"), like that's one thing.
But I don't know. There might still be some hope. Or I'll end up getting burned, and just go back to waiting for Yami Shibai 6 or a Sekai no Yami Zukan 2.
A 3 out of 10.
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