Hand Shakers Review:

Here it is, the alpha, the omega, the irredeemably bad clusterfuck. Hand Shakers is the apex predator of the anime world. It eats tropes and shits them back out. Nearly everything in Hand Shakers is fundamentally broken. I guess the question I have to ask myself is what do I talk about first?

I guess the premise would be a natural starting point. Do you want to know what exactly the titular Hand Shaker is? So do I actually. I finished the series and I still have no idea what a Hand Shaker is, how their powers work, or what everyone is fighting for. It has something to do with God I think. At least that’s what the characters say. Do they want to meet God? Fight God? Will he grant them a wish or something? ¯\(ツ)/¯. The show explains itself so poorly that I was lost all the way through. It’s especially bad that so much of the show is just people standing around talking to themselves in long, drawn out conversations. Since I had no idea what was happening, I shut my brain off in my confused stupor and only forgot I was conscious when a fight happened.

Oh the fights ho boy. They are a figurative famine for the eyes. Hand Shakers’ fights alternate between Berserk 2016 esque moving still drawings on a background levels of animation to an over edited fiasco where the characters zigs and the camera zags so erratically that all cohesion is lost.

Hand Shakers is a fugly show in general. Not for lack of effort mind you. The show tries painstakingly hard to look good. Too hard however and the end result is an over stylized mess with more RGB unicorn vomit than my PC. The most immediately off aspect aesthetically is that the backgrounds are real life objects that are rotoscoped into 3D images. The crew behind Hand Shakers used this technique haphazardly and the end result is a show where the characters don’t look like animated people in an animated world, but rather what they are 2d characters superimposed on to a 3d background.

The characters themselves are some of the chuniest I’ve ever seen. Each one looks like they were made by an AI designed for making generic characters. I swear half the show’s budget was spent on the president girls titty physics as they flop and sway without a care in the world for Newton’s laws.

Was that a complaint? I’m not complaining are you? Anyways. Not only does this Hypothetical AI make generic anime designs, it also makes generic anime personalities. Every character has no personality outside of their one gimmick. You have the aforementioned titty president (no I did not bother to learn her name), the middle aged woman that looks 12 and gets mad when anyone treats her like a child, that middle aged woman’s simp, the protagonist with no discernible personality whatsoever, and the main girl who has the temperament of someone who just railed 3 bars of Xanax and is on the virge of blacking out. Speaking of which, for most of the series she just communicates in grunts and the heaviest breaths this side of a shitty letsplay channel. The sounds she makes make me uncomfortable.

The rest of the audio production is fubared as well. When the scene has a crowd of people they have little audio blurbs from the crowd in the background. Kind of like Persona 5. The crowd does not shut up and I feel like a schizo wondering where the voices are coming from. The bad audio does not only apply to the sound design but the OST as well. Hand Shakers music ranges from soulless corporate boardroom powerpoint music to royalty free generic hype songs on some rando’s YouTube channel.

So I lampooned the story, fights, characters, music, audio & visual design at this point. You might be asking yourself is there any aspect Hand Shakers succeeds in? No. Hand Shakers is broken from the bottom to the top. It is a glorious trainwreck full of orphans of an anime crashing through the Winter 2017 season like a wrecking ball. You should absolutely watch it.

I am a firm believer that one should appreciate the lesser things in life. There is something innately gratifying for me to see something that a group of people no doubt worked their ass off for and calling it a piece of shit. My point is not just limited to shallow schadenfreude however. Getting acclimated to noticing when something is so wrong makes you more perceptive to when something is so right. Ever since I started filling my life with just absolute ass movies, shows, games, whatever; my appreciation for art that is great has increased exponentially. Call it contrast, call it variety, call it a coping mechanism. Whatever it is it’s something that has made my experience with media much greater and I think it will improve yours too. So get out there, watch some terrible anime and love the ones you love on an even greater level.

2/10