One day, out of nowhere, the world fell under attack. Appearing suddenly, an alien force known only as The Abyssals emerged from the depths of the ocean to become a scourge upon humanity, attacking from both above and below. In response to this, humanity launched the deadliest force they could possibly counter with... Teenage girls with the souls of Japanese war ships inside of them. Might not seem like much, but at least if one gets shot down, you don’t lose an entire crew. Anyway, these girls, known as “Fleet girls,” use magically augmented military and naval technology to battle the Abyssals up close and personal! Our story begins when Fubuki, a rookie Destroyer type vessel, joins up with the Third Torpedo squadron, and despite her lack of experience, she vows to become as useful and talented as one of her senpais, the one who saved her life, and whose name I don’t remember. It’s a deadly battle between the Fleet Girls and The Abyssals, and we’ll just have to sea who prevails.

Kancolle, which is short for Kantai Collection, was produced by a studio called Doimedea, whose output I haven’t seen very much of, but the quality of what I have seen has been... Mixed, so far. Squidgirl, for example, was a really good looking anime. Fuuka and Shobitch were not. And I’m just going to put this out there, there is a special place in hell for the studio who produced Kodomo no Jikan. Kancolle, for better or worse, is somewhere in the middle of all of this. For the most part, it’s fair to say it’s a pretty good looking show. Outside of battle scenes, the animation is conservative enough to save money, but confident enough to still flaunt what money they’re spending at any given time. There’s a lot of dialogue in these scenes, so there are long stretches of time where a characters’ mouth will move but their body will still freeze under the lip flaps, which isn’t that big of a problem because these scenes are often very well lit and edited.

The downside, however, is the action. I’m not going to pretend these fight scenes aren’t well choreographed and planned out, which they were, but the animation style for these scenes is notably inconsistent. I’m going to be making a lot of references to Strike Witches in this review, which is largely inevitable for reasons I’m going to go into later, and in early Strike Witches, when the witches fought, they were animated in 3D in the distance, and 2-D whenever we saw them up close, but Kancolle doesn’t bother with this. When characters are out on the sea, either fighting or about to fight, they’re sometimes in 2D, sometimes 3D, with little to no rhyme or reason inbetween, and it changes from shot to shot. It almost feels like, whenever the ocean or other characters are in the shot, THEN the characters are in 3D, but when they're in closeup, then they appear in 2D, and while I do generally have a soft spot for anime characters moving in CGI, it just looks unforgiveably uncanny here.

The other downside is the character designs, and that extends to both the Fleet Girls and the Abyssals. For the most part, I guess any individual character from the heroic side of the equation doesn’t look too bad, but when you see them all together, you see an absolute dearth of variety. I felt hard-pressed to tell a lot of these characters apart, with the exception of a handful of garishly over-designed characters like SPNATI veteran Shimakaze, and a tiny group that I can only assume were created to be the lolicon clique. A lot of the characters dress the same, combining traditional Japanese attire with ship parts for some reason sticking out of their bodies, and you can usually find multiple characters at once wearing similar outfits, which only adds to the confusion. As for the bad guys, you rarely ever get a GOOD glimpse of the female humanoids controlling the Abyssals, but they look fairly derivative, and the minions that they send out against the Fleet Girls look like the love children of Bullet Bill and a Sharpedo.

The English dub was a funimation effort, and in an extremely unusual twist for me, I don’t really have anything to say about very many of their performances. You have pretty much the majority of the Funimation stable, from less common names to industry veterans, but when it’s already hard to tell the characters apart, it’s equally hard to appreciate any of their individual performances. Everyone does their jobs well, turning in adequate performances, trying their hardest to elevate the shallow material for their shallow characters. I guess the only real standout to me is Cherami Leigh, whose character has the emotional range for the actor’s actual talent to shine through, giving her a chance to prove her own abilities outside of just filling her role. She plays the main character’s best friend, which is a little ironic since back in Strike Witches, she was the one who played the protagonist, so it does kinda feel like she’s passing the torch to Felecia Angelle. It’s a good dub, I just can’t think of anything particularly remarkable about it. I guess it’s interesting to note that the original Japanese version retained the entire cast from the game the series was based on.

Yes, this series is based on a game, which means that even before I can talk about my thoughts on the series proper, we have some significant baggage to unpack. First off, when a piece of media like a movie or a series is based on a video game, that is almost always a good cause for worry, save for a few very recent exceptions like HBO’s The Last of Us and the recent Mario and Sonic movies. I’m also partial to Silent Hill. As for Kancolle, I have no experience with the games whatsoever, but from what I hear, it started out as a free-to-play browser game that was exclusive to Japan, and it used Gacha mechanics... Which I’ve come to understand means you randomly collect characters in order to use them in Gameplay. I’m pretty sure this is also how Genshin Impact works, right? I’ve heard stories about people bankrupting themselves and/or their parents by playing Gacha games, but apparently Kancolle lets you do this for free? I honestly have no idea, I barely care enough about this show’s source material to do the slightest bit of cursory research on it. I basically skimmed Wikipedia.

So yeah, in Kancolle, you collect teenage waifus that are based on historic war ships in order to do battle against other players, and in 2015, they made an anime out of it. From what little I’ve learned, the game doesn’t have a whole lot of lore behind it... You don’t know what the world was like before the Abyssals attacked, or how the Fleet Girls came to be, and I’m guessing the gacha girls also don’t have the most defined identities or backstories, and while you would think an anime adaptation would be the perfect place to finally develop all of these details, they really don’t, which is ultimately how I would summarize all of the major problems with this series. Well, before I get into all that, there is one other thing I would like to point out about this franchise... It’s about teenage girl waifus who personify war vessels battling monochromatic, monstrous aliens over the sea. It came into existence in 2013. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it was a direct rip-off of Strike Witches, but there had to be some influence there, so just like in my review of Vividred Operation, I’m going to be occasionally mentioning Strike Witches, making comparisons where I have to, you have been warned.

First of all, there are way too many characters in this show, and the early episodes do a flat out terrible job introducing them. We’re introduced to the team through a rookie named Fubuki, who is a humble, friendly, fucking boring blank slate of a borderline Mary-Sue who has no backstory whatsoever. Yeah, remember in Strike Witches, how we spent two entire episodes with Yoshika, one detailing her personality and life at home, and another showing her bonding with Sakamoto and adapting to life on a warship, before she officially joined the team? We don’t get anything like that with Fubuki, who never goes through any conflict other than her own self-doubt and training, and never develops a complex relationship or unique dynamic with anyone. There are characters she looks up to, characters she befriends, and characters she cautiously avoids, and that’s it. There’s nobody really interesting beyond her, either, just repetitive character designs that occasionally have some kind of shallow gimmick attached. Like, there’s one character who mentions a couple times that she likes the night time, and fighting at night, but at no point is it ever revealed WHY. What does she like about night time? What advantages does battling at night gain her? If she loves fighting at night so much, why is she active during the day? Shouldn’t she be a night owl, or are they not going to push this concept as far as Strike Witches did with Sanya?

I have seen this series three times, and yet, I only have five characters' names memorized. I know Fubuki, Yuudachi, Sendai, Shimakaze because she’s also in SPNATI, and Ro-500 because she’s a popular MMD model. And Ro-500 isn’t even in this series! There’s little to no focus on character development in the first half of the series, and with so many characters having barely distinct designs, I found myself saying “Who the fuck are you?” to speaking characters multiple times an episode. I still don’t know what actual significance half of the cast was supposed to have in the story, as most of them could have been cut completely and not been missed, at least not by anybody who was unfamiliar with the game. Bringing up Strike Witches again, that show didn’t have a small cast either, but they resolved that issue by pairing the cast off into units of two so while one character was being explored in their own episode, their counterpart could also be explored through their unique dynamic with each other. In Kancolle, I can’t imagine anybody going into the series blindly without getting overwhelmed by its bloated cast.

The lack of lore is also a problem, as this entire concept doesn’t make any sense, and now that that concept is being represented by a full series, that’s something you have to think about. Yeah, you could have ignored all of this when you were just playing waifu cards against each other, but now that we have a story and plot, those chickens have come home to roost. I have so many fucking questions about the world this series takes place in, and if any of them were answered, I must have fallen asleep through that part. Where did the Fleet Girls come from? Did they come into existence before that Abyssals attacked, or were they created in response to it? How does one become a Fleet Girl? How does that power manifest, and how is it discovered? If a Fleet Girl can shoot an arrow that becomes a tiny airplane piloted by a little Chibi homunculus, why does she have to have perfect stance and aim when firing? Wouldn’t it be up to the pilot to aim? Why do some of these warplanes start out as arrows, when the ones launched by grenade launchers start out as little planes?

How do upgrades happen? If Fleet Girls are able to receive upgrades that completely change their appearances, does that mean they’re not actually human? Are these girls cyborgs, or were they created in a lab to be used as weapons? Why is it that at no point in the series do we actually see real people who aren’t Fleet Girls? What kind of relationship do Fleet Girls have with non warship people? Is there any kind of prejudice against them? Is there any friction between them and traditional military people? Is the battle only going on in one area, or are the Abyssals attacking all over the world? What kind of relationship do different Fleets across the planet have with each other? Is there ever competition between them? How exactly has the existence of the Abyssals affected the current culture of humanity? Has mankind been pushed to the brink by constant alien assault, or do the Fleet Girls pretty much have things under control? If any of these questions WERE answered, either in the anime or somewhere else in the franchise, please tell me.

Of course, I am assuming a lot of these issues tie directly into the game. There are a ton of characters because, of course, the game has to have a ton of characters that you can win through the Gacha mechanic. There’s a metric fuckton of them, so giving them each unique identities and backstories probably just sounds superfluous. A lot of them look similar because they were designed to appeal to players who have a specific taste to cater to. A bunch of characters wear similar outfits to suit collectors who would naturally want to track them all down. Upgrades are probably some kind of Pokemon-like evolution mechanic. And of course, unless there’s some kind of victory cutscenes with narration attached, you don’t need to know jack shit about the outside world. I’ve never played the game, and I COULD play devil’s advocate on all of this in regard to said game, but you know what? Just because a series is based on a game that doesn’t have a lot in the way of story and character doesn’t mean the adaptation can’t put in the effort to fill in the blanks. Just look at what Arcane did with League of Legends. I’ve never played that game either, but I have no inconvenient questions nagging at me when I watch that show, and it does make me kinda want to check out the game someday.

But even taking all of that aside, the Kancolle anime is just really badly written. One of it’s biggest sins, hell, probably THE biggest sin, is what happens in episode 3, so consider the rest of this paragraph a half-spoiler warning. There’s a major character death in episode 3. I’m not gonna say who, but it really only affects one other character. That character deals with her grief in the following episode, and then she only brings it up a few times in later episodes, while everyone else moves on. Now, I have no military experience whatsoever, so for all I know, maybe that’s just the reality of the situation. Maybe losing your teammates and friends is something you just get used to after a while, I don’t know. But what I do know is, that’s not what I want for a story. When a character dies... Not even a main character, just a member of the main character’s team... I want it to be one of the most important moments of the story. I want it to leave a fucking impact. I don’t want to be sitting there bored through a terrible Curry-contest episode suddenly thinking “Wait, didn’t somebody die three episodes ago?”

And even then, as much as I want to care about that dead character, I can’t stop reminding myself that the only reason I’ve been given to care about her is that another character made some vaguely potentially romantic overtures at her, despite being her ‘sister ship,’ whatever the fuck that means, at the end of an episode where a bunch of girls were blushingly throwing around “I love you” declarations to each other despite in some cases knowing each other for less than a week, and while every single one of those exchanges was TOTALLY PLATONIC YOU GUYS, DON”T WORRY, YOUR WAIFUS ARE STILL PERFECTLY AVAILABLE TO YOU SO YOU CAN KEEP BUYING THEIR MERCH, FAPPING TO THEIR RULE34 FANART AND HUMPING THEIR BODY PILLOWS WITHOUT FEELING GUILTY ABOUT IT, the one character who might have been actually romantically pursued is the one who died faster than you can say “Bury your gays.”

I’d like to think that I’ve made a lot of progress as a critic over the years. I used to be the kind of person who thought there was an objective good and an objective bad in media, yes, I used to be really cringe like that, but especially since coming out of retirement in 2021, I’d like to think I’ve gotten a lot better at understanding what people see in anime and movies that I dislike. Still, I’m not perfect, and there have been pieces of media that I found so terrible that I couldn’t see their popularity as anything other than an elaborate prank. There’s the movie Pitch Perfect. There’s the cult hit Librarian franchise. And up until just now, there was Kancolle. Throughout my first two viewings of the series, I couldn’t for the life of me understand why it was so popular, until just this week, when I found out it was based on a gacha game. Now I kinda get it. People prefer this over Strike Witches for the same reason people prefer Idolmaster’s anime over Love Live... While one may be a better series on its own, the other is catering to an already massive pre-existing fanbase of a popular game. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that on its own merits, this anime has nothing to offer.

Kancolle is available from Funimation, with season 2 being available for streaming on Crunchyroll, where season 1 is for some reason listed as season 3. The original game franchise is not available stateside, nor is the movie, or even the manga.

It is entirely possible that, if I had prior experience with the source material, I would have a more positive opinion on this anime. I mean, there are a lot of issues with the movie Serenity, but I still love it purely because I’m a huge fan of the Firefly series that preceded it. Fandom can skew or even outright change a person’s perception towards a piece of media, but I can only review Kancolle from my perspective as a newcomer to the franchise, and from that perspective, this series is just terrible. Each episode is a slog to get through, because I don’t know any of the characters well enough to like or care about them, and I don’t know enough about the world around them or actual status of the war to find any engagement in the story. Without anything or anyone in the story that’s worth grabbing onto, the series is a chore to get through. The animation was good for the most part, but that’s really the only positive thing I can say about it. I have nothing against anybody who loves this series as an extension of the game, but for me? It’s boring, it’s lazy, it’s bland, and it’s just overall kind of worthless.

I give Kancolle a 2/10.