Tower of God
a review by CuteGam3rGirl
a review by CuteGam3rGirl
My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined, to put it nicely. As I watched each episode I kept telling myself (and the poor victim I dragged into my binge session) that it would certainly get better, but it never really did. By the final episode I was left rather confused and irritated with the obvious sequel/read the manga title drop ending.
It's a shame really as I quite enjoyed the aesthetics of the show, it has a stellar cast of VAs, and Kevin Penkin's soundtracks never disappoint. But the show just felt so lacking in substance that I can't justify the time sink to anyone going into the anime expecting some stellar new IP, read the manga/manhwa instead, it's probably better.
The character designs and color palette are superb in my opinion. The colors are warm and saturated, you have your classic orange on black, red on black, blue on white, etc. The artstyle highlights the character's eyes in a way that's oddly reminiscent of something like Jibaku Shounen Hanako Kun (which is positive, just to be clear).
This character was hyped up over the course of 2-3 episodes before finally entering the fight during the king of the hill style crown challenge. Her character's meant to be a powerful psychopathic killer who we learn later, has gutted dozens of others to reach her Princess title. So why do her strikes have almost no impact in her first showing against the 'mystery' gimp suited lady (and every showing thereafter save for smashing Anaak into the ground)? Why does she get destroyed in every fight she's in? Especially considering that the most powerful princess, Yuri, can literally destroy terrain with a flick of her finger as we see later, what kind of power scaling is that?
Another example of this can be seen with the Ranker Quant, who is supposed to be exceptionally strong as he has cleared the tower.
To give him some credit, his hits are pretty satisfying but for someone who's supposed to be extremely fast his movement feels rather clumsy and slow. No kicked up dust? No screen shake when he starts running circles around people? Is he supposed to be teleporting? Then why have him sliding across the screen like an idiot? It lacks polish, it's not very crisp I guess, there was never really a big budget sink fight (think Kimetsu no Yaiba ep 19, any big fight from any season of Boku no Hero Academia, or any big fight from either season of Mob Psycho 100) which may have been due to lack of budget, or shortage of time but regardless the end result suffers quite a bit.
This is my real main grievance with the show to be honest. Not every IP is blessed with unlimited money to shill out for gorgeous action scenes, plot and good writing can make up for lackluster or even dated visuals easily. But I can't say in good faith that Tower of God 's plot and usage of it's characters is anything but a clusterfuck of surface level ideas that are never actually fleshed out. The premise is pretty straightforward, our protagonist wants to find his old friend Rachel, who has begun to ascend the tower so of course he must follow. He needs to pass a bunch of tests HunterxHunter style with a group of allies that he slowly accumulates over the series. Let's go down the list of strange characterization choices and pacing issues I noticed.
Firstly, we have a typical Shounen protagonist, he's rather meek, stubborn, kinda dumb/oblivious, and extremely kind, cool. It's fine to have common tropes in your characters, what's irritating is when other character's seemingly 180 their personalities for seemingly no reason besides something like 'but Bam was nice to me'.
Take our main side character, Khun for example. This character is introduced as a seemingly selfish, untrustworthy, conniving fellow, from his lackadaisical attitude to his strange briefcase, to his white/blue color scheme obviously implying his cold nature. He's got family issues and trust issues, stemming from a betrayal by his sister, he tends to abide by the 'trust no one but yourself' approach. That's all well and good, but why does he team up so easily with our protagonist? And then, why does he stay perfectly straight with him the entire 13 episodes? I did not think even once during any of his scenes that he was attempting to betray Bam, despite people warning Bam to distance himself from Khun (though this might just be because he's a reject rather than a traitor, kind of unclear). Khun's mantra seemingly only applies to other people besides Bam, 'oh, weird balloon guy offering advice for a test? Doubt', 'oh, Bam likes this lady who raised him and taught him how to literally speak? Hate her, she'll betray you just like my sister'. His love of Bam and weirdly placed gripe with Rachel just ends up making him seem like a misogynist which is pretty hilarious.
How about the 2 Princesses, Anaak (jr.) and Endorsi? A cold hearted lizard who wants revenge on those who killed her family, great stuff, she neglects her team and even bullies the Black March blade off Bam. Then suddenly she's friends with Endorsi, someone she swore to kill and is a great team player willing to listen and carry out plans designated by others, such as Khun. I can't recall any sort of big moment between Anaak and Bam to usher in such a personality change. I do remember Anaak's fight with Endorsi though, you know, the one where she declared to kill the other only for their fight to end in a weirdly placed comedic twist where they fall together and start to reconcile because...Anaak's late mother was nice to Endorsi at some point? Or maybe it was because...Endorsi kept asking prodding questions about Anaak's mother which we know is a sore subject? Their relationship's development felt rushed to say the least.
This next gripe may just be a personal problem but I can not for the life of me even remotely begin to understand the 5 class types or their assorted abilities. I feel like I look down to put food in my mouth for half a second and just miss an entire info dump packed into a single sentence or something. Like hey dude, there's this magical water stuff called shinsu, but only certain people can use it, oh and you have to make a Naruto style summoning pact with the god of each level to be able to use it on that level. Oh also this water stuff can do anything, from destruction to immortality. Also, also there's something called an administrator test that you have to talk to that same god for, does that mean you can only administer tests on that level too? who knows. There's 5 classes/positions but any one person can be apart of various positions. Simple enough right? You have frontliners (fishermen, spearmen), reconnaissance types (scout, light bearer) and multipurpose magical water slingers. How do light bearers work? Where does their lighthouse box come from I must have missed it, is it a piece of technology? Magic shinsu? The weird orb thing everyone has? Do they have telepathy when in the box to talk to people? I feel like the rules are never really established especially compared to it's obvious cousin the HunterxHunter nen system. For example, Khun has a lighthouse, but he is more than capable enough to easily kill people with a knife and demonstrate pretty impressive physical feats, and he has a magic briefcase which isn't really explained. Anaak is for all intents and purposes a frontline fighter who is physically strong, who can also use sushin to empower her movements but ALSO heal herself. Mind you that in the magical water slingers training bit they were being taught to pop balloons with the stuff , and Hoh's lack of ability is a major plot point but my man never even tried other applications of the ability, what if he was a good healer or something. Do you have to be able to shoot a water projectile as a baseline? Anaak never shot shisun and she's doing what I can only guess are high level techniques as healing usually is. Endorsi is seemingly a pure frontline physical fighter, but she's no where near as strong as Yuri, does that mean Yuri is empowering herself with shisun to hulk smash harder? Because Endorsi wasn't smashing boulders and terrain to atoms with her strikes.
Lastly, I cannot fathom why there are so many subplots occurring simultaneously onscreen. We don't need to cutback to Yuri and her group making their way to the testing grounds randomly every episode, 8 episodes in a row, just for them to do nothing but buffer in some comedic relief. How do you expect me to care about Anaak and Endorsi's fight against the assassin fluffball when you keep cutting to Rak and co with their slug things, and then cutting to Khun talking to his gamerbro who he seemingly hates for some reason. Then cut from any action to Bam and Rachel doing literally nothing despite it being a trial that's supposed to test their ability (yes it may have been a setup, but at least have Leo Ro or anyone acknowledge how stupid the test was). It just makes me care even less about any of the things that are happening. Frankly, it just seems like really poor directing, or at the very least the work of a director with his hands tied and a massive time crunch.
Rant over
tldr; This show is a rushed mess and a terrible introduction to the series
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