If you've fallen as far down the anime rabbit hole as I have over the years, you would know about some really bad anime. Two anime largely considered to be the worst of them all are a pair of OVAs known as "Mars of Destruction" and "Tenkuu Danzai Skelter Heaven". Personally, I still think "Kono Aozora ni Yakusoku wo" is worse than both of them, but I can't deny how incomprehensibly bad both are. Before those two bad anime could run, however, Spectral Force had to walk. Like Mars of Destruction and Tenkuu Danzai Skelter Heaven, Spectral Force is based on a game from the video game company Idea Factory, and like the idiot I am, I decided to watch this as punishment for incorrectly guessing that the upcoming "Haite Kudasai, Takamine-san" would be streaming on HIDIVE. I don't even know how to begin with this one, though; it's just that incomprehensible.
Spectral Force takes place in Neverland (not related to Peter Pan or The Promised Neverland), a once peaceful land now caught up in a power struggle between humans, demons, and gods. Although it seems like the demons are winning, things take a turn when a hero named Chiffon finds a sword called the Tenmaken, which he uses to kill the Demon Lord and give humans an edge in the war. Right before this, our main heroine, the half-demon and half-human princess Hiro, is sent away with a bunch of mercenaries, and right when they come back is when her father is killed. Now, it's up to her to avenge her father and end the war, and during that process, she somehow comes to trust humans, who she hates due to an incident in her past. At least, that was what I interpreted the plot to be.
I apologize if I summarized this anime wrong, but can you blame me? The story isn't that easy to follow in terms of how it's structured and in how entertaining it is. Throughout the entire thing, I was either bored, confused, or some weird combination of both. The characters don't help make the story any interesting, either; they're all typical fantasy series characters with no real characteristics that could make them stand out from one another. Not even our leading lady, Hiro, is all that interesting; her whole thing of being a not-entirely-human who hates humans has been done multiple times before in more interesting ways, and the way she eventually comes to trust humans doesn't feel organic, either. I'm sure the story and characters are expanded on better in the original Spectral Force game, but whether it has an English translation or not (seems like it doesn't, despite the fact that the third game did get an English release in 2008), I can't be bothered to play it and know for sure.
For the first six minutes or so, I was watching Spectral Force in Japanese with English subtitles, and the voice actors for the Japanese version didn't sound too engaged in their roles. However, due to some circumstances that I don't feel like explaining, I was forced to switch to the English dub for the rest of the series. On that note, I just want to question ADV Films's choice to even give Spectral Force an English dub really quick. I can't imagine the original OVA earned a lot of money when it was released in Japan, and it's very easy to see why; why in the world did ADV Films decide that something like this - something that would very likely cause them to not make any of the money they must have spent on licensing, dubbing, and producing the DVDs back - was a good anime to dub into English?! The quality of the dub certainly didn't help matters; perhaps it was due to having little experience with voice acting at the time, but it saddens me to hear English dub voice actors who have shown incredible talent such as Chris Patton and Jessica Calvello give such lackluster performances. Well, at least the background music and ending theme were okay; they fit the fantasy vibe of the series well.
The worst part of Spectral Force is, without question, the animation. To be fair, this is the first Idea Factory anime that ever came out - God help us all for what was to come after - so the animators probably weren't entirely sure of how to animate at the time. With that being the case, however, they could have gotten some more experienced animators to help them along so that the end product didn't end up being as much of a mess as it is. There is a lot of ugly-looking CGI animation in the first episode that I'm sure nearly made my eyes bleed, but luckily, there isn't as much of it in the second episode. The 2-D animation, however, is consistently bad throughout both episodes. From characters seemingly glitching out in the middle of a walk cycle animation to lips not moving when they're supposed to and even one scene in the second episode where a soldier literally slid into frame, everything about Spectral Force's animation should be the subject of a study on animation disasters. Well, at least they were able to improve on this terrible animation with Mars of Destruction and Tenkuu Danzai Skelter Heaven, right? (It's been over a decade since I've watched either of them, and I'm not going to rewatch either of them just to answer my own question.)
Overall, Spectral Force is a terrible anime, and I implore you to not watch it. If you did, you would have to suffer longer than you would having to watch both Mars of Destruction and Tenkuu Danzai Skelter Heaven. Question is, though, is it worse than "Kono Aozora ni Yakusoku wo"? I'd say it's not, because I can confidently say this about Spectral Force and not the other one with a long title; even though I don't do drugs, I can see people enjoying this if they got really, really high and watched it with equally high friends. I would prefer it if people didn't do non-prescribed drugs, though, so....yeah. Don't watch this.
2 out of 2 users liked this review
