
a review by Abdiel7

a review by Abdiel7
Let us engage the mind's eye....
Imagine you have your typical shounen story about defeating monsters but replace your quintessential, teenage, hot-headed, dumbass, boystrous and loud over-the-top MC with a middle-aged man.
You are probably thinking; Wow! Lucky me, what a treat! The most annoying part of shounen is gone and we can enjoy some good story-telling with a realistic edge, a focus on strategy rather than boring obligitory 1v1 fights mid-piece style. You'll hope that the writer will explore deeper into physical and anatomical aspects of the monsters to give a more immersive and engaging edge to such a classic shounen genre.
Surely they can't possibly screw this up right?
Wrong.
What we got was exactly the same archetype of MC we're used to but now we can bombard him with old-man jokes. This moron behaves, converses and projects the exact same as your cookie cutter shounen MC in his teens. The problem is that he's double their age. It makes no sense, it's unsufferable and woefully, it's not even funny. Oh, and let's give him the editors-choice inspired obligatory simp Mantra which spearheads his vocational convictions. He will then repeatedly squawk these foolish ideals reducing his dialogue to the realm of the barking dog.
Let's add a couple of stupidly overpowered girls with innate, unearned talent that completely breaks the power-system. These annoying little tramps proceed to non-challantly and trivially oblilterate kaijuu who everyone else is stonewalled using extensive strategies to defeat. The excuse for this poppycock? Behold! this preposterously fashioned "combat suit scaling" system totally decided by congential aptitude. All of the fun, curiousity and tension of strategic victories are just thrown to the coal to empower these two vacant characters. They, in turn get overpowered by random antagoinst jobber so we can enact our favourite damsel-in-distress routine. Lest we forget to preclude these events with unorthodox sequences depecting those same girls stepping on him and humiliating him, socially, physically and mentally. This medium has been taken over by cucked underdog story merchants.
There's the concept of purposeful writing, where characters put on display are utilized efficiently by skilled and experienced(in life) writers using the major traits and attributes they differ from others. If a man is older than another by 10 years, if the writer knows what they are doing, he's supposed to have a mental advantage. On the contrary we instead get Asta with a beard and a pot belly. In refusing to make the correct moves in writing and characterization, they pretend to appear unique but in their mediocrity they end up on the same level as novice works. Why make him older when you don't utlize the advantages in being an elder?
This MC's goal isn't anything profound, it's a woman, he wants to be close to a woman. A woman who after watching the entire 12 episodes isn't even worth a penny. A woman who did absolutely nothing to help him reach the goal he desired. A woman who doesn't even acknowledge him till she saves her and her entire company from getting point-blank nuked. The utter lack of compassion or humility shown to a man who in the flashbacks(utterly insufferable) taught her what she knows, A man who played a massive part in setting the stage for her to reach her current position is just unbearable. This guy is on his knees to a teenage girl at least twice during the first few episodes. Another blatant example of the ludicrous progamming that conditions the masses to just eat up this boring predictable tsundere simp programming. No girl who really respects you will behave like this.
"Kaijuu" this name is disrespected like no other, these shameless jobbers are going 0-30 against zero-experience teenage test applicants. I lament the sorry sight depicting enormous, hard-scaled, towering, 10-story 'Leviathan-Behemoths' getting one shotted by mere bullets. Most of them move like robots not beasts. They simply exist to die, and whilst getting obliterated they barely fight back. The most interesting part about them was right at the start of the show, a segment about cleaning out intensitinal waste from the Kaijuus' deceased bodies. They catfished us because it never got that nuanced again despite having such massive potential.
The sheer amount of sponging is mind-boggling, I suppose it's absolutely fine if giga-titans tank powerful bullets, lacerations and slashes all day, but i'm pretty sure humans in sleek, skin tight combat suits shouldn't survive 50-ton+ crushing blunt-force blows from these beasts on several occasions. They don't even have combat-helmets on but their heads aren't crushed from the utterly overwhelming pressure. Let's not even begin to talk about the amount of times they are drilled through like a nail through paper, a bona fide impalement execution, neverless 24 minutes later and you wouldn't be a fool for concluding that these men have the same regenerative powers the "Kaijuu" do.
Characters are thankfully less terrible than the MC, but there's barely anyone likable and to top it off, none of them really evoked any laughter from me during their desperate waves of banter bombardment. I'm not going to laugh at old man deprecation jokes and these incumbent tsundere routines have frankly run their course; i'm more disgusted than amused. The author showed glimpses of creating an environment or atmosphere which could breed some organic humor, but the whole context of everything just ruins my ability to understand or get immersed into it. Lest I forget how poor and forced alot of the dialogue was. Looking back, this show would benefit a great deal with just men in the combat roles, it would go a long way to solve it's story-telling issues, relying less on the rank nonsense of combat suit power amplication. I will fondly recall again that same section at the start which was just a bunch of swell guys, not a woman in sight, doing their not so average day-job of cleaning up the out-right "unnatural" disaster scenes, in other words the aftermath of a skirmish with the 'Kaijuu'. You'd think that would be the most boring part of the show, conversely those scenes had wholly bewitched me. Cut forward to the ludicrous sight of 27-year-old attractive long-haired female squad captain, what a jumpscare! We would scoff at a male 27-year-old squad captain. It seems you can't sell to the masses with a show that makes total sense nowadays. We have the kind of audience that highly rates garbage like Wistoria, this show; praising the likes of Oshi no Ko, and exalting that decent at best "Frieren" show to total masterpiece status, a veritable mark of our fall from grace.
Plot? There is none.
It's just a seemlingly unexpected reoccuring sequence of ambushes only varying by the agent of the ambush. His power-up is an ambush in absence of any logical and thought-out backstory. Will he engage in diligent training to use his power-up effectively and efficiently whilst slowly discovering abilities, guided and based on anicient statues governed by the precursors of said power? No, he will just ambush us with his unfounded profeciency accompanied by a deluge of unothordox skills. The driving force of this show is defined by a staircase of continuous spontaneous ambushes, till we reach monster gets big enough for MC to stomp with his overpowered abilities, we then venture up the winder of the staircase repeating the outline of the scenario in kind. It calls into question how life in such a city is even possible despite constant unpredictable kaijuu attacks leaving entire city blocks inoperable. By the end of the show, it's all so stale. I kind of wished that instead of MC striving to save all these people, on the contrary he was a cruel, callous and conniving enemy agent who had to kill them. It would force the MC to be much more complex as well breed more tactful characterization. That kind of story would accentuate the tension and multiply the stakes. Just picture the sheer chaos and panic caused by the lack of knowledge of his idenity or powers; the kind of riveting lisason between him and his retinue of powerful and odius "kaijuu" operatives then try not to smile in awe of how amazing a story that would be.
So why did i finish it?
I made a promise that i would stick around as long as the MC continued to hide his powers. This kind of suspense was the only thing keeping me watching. However, by the time he revealed them to the world, I was in too deep. You can understand that the only logical next step was to complete it.
The animation was it's saving grace. There's was a great deal of quality, a blast to watch with very well respected perspectives, proportions and consistency. The OP and ED were quite good and it was generally pleasant to hear it's soundtrack. I noticed that they were very wise in animating at least a fight every episode to satiate the voracious apetites of the credulous weekly watchers . You can't fool me, as for my ilk and I of house "Bingère", it's all a smokescreen hiding how poor it is a narrative package beneath it's charming production.
Lastly I'd like to point the stark difference in the quality of written depictions between China and Japan in animation nowadays. When chinese shows undergo a premise like this they usually understand how to make knowledge, strategy, and wisdom with experience take centre stage in the fighting, dialogue and discourse in the show. Here in Japan we are again left despondent, it's truly a shame the writer was just not up to the task. I'm sure the writer was very much surprised such an average work would gain so much traction.
Final Rankings
Animation 8
Sound 8
Story 3
Characters 3
Enjoyment 5
26/50 - 5.2/10 - 5/10
Here we have a verifiable staple of the mainstream, whilst somewhat entertaining, i've had my fill and will not be returning for a second seasn.
Hope this helps.
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