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Okay I just gotta ask....

Ace Attorney. Yay or nay?
I've heard incredibly divisive reviews. Like really REALLY split.

I have played the original series. So...
 
Okay I just gotta ask....

Ace Attorney. Yay or nay?
I've heard incredibly divisive reviews. Like really REALLY split.

I have played the original series. So...
It's essentially a heavily-condensed recap of the games with some extra fluff added every so often. I enjoyed it for a few episodes, but ultimately dropped it because I'd recently played through the trilogy. I'd say it's worth giving it a try if you liked the games and if it's been a while since you played them.
 
I had never played the games but watched the first season, and I didn't enjoy it because the animation was horrendously stilted and wasn't dynamic as I thought it would be. But that's what you get with A-1 Pictures.
 
I tried out the first season and the only part I liked was the anime original childhood flashback because it was something new instead of just game content being animated in a mediocre way.
 
People have been making the ADV comparison, but that's not accurate.

ADV started to license some real fucking garbage that nobody bought, overspent way too much on dubs, and was also a much smaller company.

Touting the big names to dubs is usually a death knell for companies that do that, it's happened quite a few times. Big name dubs are only something large companies like Sony and Netflix can do regularly because of their deep pockets.

Besides crunchyroll getting the axe and just being the name of the app and the staff being fired means high guardian spice gets sent to the shadow realm.
 
Okay I just gotta ask....

Ace Attorney. Yay or nay?
I've heard incredibly divisive reviews. Like really REALLY split.

I have played the original series. So...
Haven’t seen it, but the live action movie was great.
 
I bought Pani Poni Dash back in 2007... d-didn't you?
SMH if you're watching PPD without the 10-page pdf that came bundled with each episode of the fansubs that explains all the jokes happening in the background.
 
I bought some stuff from ADV in the mid-2000s, most notably Azumanga Daioh (the second box set release), plus both seasons of the Ah My Goddess! TV series and the first half of Super GALS! (which ADV dropped, leaving the second half to be released sub-only by The Right Stuf).

I think one of the big nails in the coffin of ADV might have been the live-action Evangelion movie project, which never got out of pre-production. Also running that linear Anime Network must have cost a bundle.

At least the demise of ADV ultimately led to Sentai Filmworks, easily my favourite current licensor for anime on physical media.
 
I watche Re;Creators recently and I don't think I've ever felt more divided on a show.

On one hand, the ideas and concepts are fairly interesting, and the "mechanics" of the fictional universes and how they interact with the "real world" are very logical and incredibly well-thought-out. Pretty much all the nitpicky questions I had about "what are the implications of X mechanic" or "how would Y work in this context" actually get addressed by the show, and even the way they defeat the villain plays out logically from the rules they've set. In my experience it's rare to see a show that sets up mechanics and actually follows through on them until the end, so the show at least deserves praise for pulling this off successfully.

On the other hand, the execution is just seriously lacking, mostly due to taking itself WAY too seriously. There's a scene where one character receives a powerup by... literally getting Twitter likes (...it makes more sense in context), which is obviously an inherently silly idea that could probably still work with a bit of self-awareness, except it's played completely straight as this dramatic/triumphant scene that makes the writers come off as hilariously tone-deaf. The other thing holding the show back are the main characters. I think the side characters are actually decent with plenty of good interactions and moments here and there. However, the show's main trio all have some serious issues.
Souta suffers for being an overly-passive average highschool boy who honestly has no logical reason in-universe to even be allowed to tag along on what is essentially a top-secret government coverup. It's not even like the other characters fight for him to be included - the government lady in charge of them literally just says something along the lines of "...and of course that means you're included on the team too", which just leads to him tagging along doing nothing of real importance until it turns out that he actually has a secret connection with the villain, which he hides from the rest of the team thereby causing further issues. I think the easiest fix for his character would be to have the government silence him and send him back to his normal life, and have him actively seek them out again, against orders, to aid them with this newfound information about the villain. Now, instead of his guilt fucking things up for the protagonists, you have him overcoming his guilt in order to benefit them. This makes him take a more active role in the story and gives him a more logical reason to be in the story in the first place, while still keeping his backstory and most of his development the same.
not-Asuna suffers from just being kind of bland and not having any real motivations beyond wanting to return to her fictional world. Being the first "fictional character" that we see, I think she should've been used more to explore the existential crisis of learning that your entire reality is fictional, rather than mostly getting over that by the end of the second episode and never really developing her motivations beyond that.
not-Rei suffers from the writers trying WAY too hard to make her funny. She's definitely my favorite character of the main trio, and is the one with the most real development and motivations, but the try-hard humor comes off as hilariously cringey more often than not just due to how unsubtle and unnatural it feels.
There's also something wrong with the pacing of the show, because the first half was a total slog to get through while the final battle takes up a good HALF of the remaining episodes and likewise started to just drag on after a few too many "secret weapons" by the protagonists.

At the end of the day, there's a lot of good ideas here, which makes the highly flawed execution even more disappointing. It really feels like the creators had this really cool concept with fleshed-out mechanics, but had trouble actually writing a story around that.
 
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I watche Re;Creators recently and I don't think I've ever felt more divided on a show.

On one hand, the ideas and concepts are fairly interesting, and the "mechanics" of the fictional universes and how they interact with the "real world" are very logical and incredibly well-thought-out. Pretty much all the nitpicky questions I had about "what are the implications of X mechanic" or "how would Y work in this context" actually get addressed by the show, and even the way they defeat the villain plays out logically from the rules they've set. In my experience it's rare to see a show that sets up mechanics and actually follows through on them until the end, so the show at least deserves praise for pulling this off successfully.

On the other hand, the execution is just seriously lacking, mostly due to taking itself WAY too seriously. There's a scene where one character receives a powerup by... literally getting Twitter likes (...it makes more sense in context), which is obviously an inherently silly idea that could probably still work with a bit of self-awareness, except it's played completely straight as this dramatic/triumphant scene that makes the writers come off as hilariously tone-deaf. The other thing holding the show back are the main characters. I think the side characters are actually decent with plenty of good interactions and moments here and there. However, the show's main trio all have some serious issues.
Just a scene? That shit's the entire climax, the bad guy gets so much support from the citizens of Japan that she basically becomes a mary sue and the only thing that stops her from destroying all of reality is the sight of her dead creator.

Yes, Japan literally cheared on the possible destruction of not just Earth, but all of existence. And not once does anyone question anything about it besides the main human characters, who are powerless to stop a bunch of neets from rooting for the bad guy and possibly their own extinction.
 
Just a scene? That shit's the entire climax, the bad guy gets so much support from the citizens of Japan that she basically becomes a mary sue and the only thing that stops her from destroying all of reality is the sight of her dead creator.

Yes, Japan literally cheared on the possible destruction of not just Earth, but all of existence. And not once does anyone question anything about it besides the main human characters, who are powerless to stop a bunch of neets from rooting for the bad guy and possibly their own extinction.
I mean, wasn't the whole point that they framed it as an over-the-top anime crossover special? It's not like anybody in the audience knew what was at stake. I thought that part actually worked well as a logical application of the show's mechanics working against the protagonists because they had failed to account for the audience rooting for an underdog villain, because ultimately audience reception isn't something you can always easily predict anyways.
 
Rediscovered an interesting series a few days ago called Deltora Quest
While it does seems like your average fantasy anime at first glance, what makes it interesting is its adapted from a series of Australian children's fantasy books of the same name.
10146704-3x4-700x933.jpg

I don't know how many here grew up with the series but I myself used to read the series a lot in elementary school, Hell I only rediscovered the anime after finding some old books in storage and searching the series online.

I'm not sure why a Japanese studio wanted to make anime adaptation in the first place, but I do know that the author, Emily Rodda, accepted the offer for it because her children were heavily into 1990s fantasy anime and JRPGs and she'd often get dragged along into watching and playing said anime and JRPGs with them.

Its an interesting series when you know the background for it, the anime is OK for being a children's fantasy show (tried reading some of the books I found and they somewhat hold up compared to other series I used to read as a kid), the few places/sites that have it only have the dub for the first 52 episodes, but some group has been fan subbing the series recently with only a dozen or so episodes left untranslated.

Edit: squeezed in the 3rd opening cause apparently they used a song from a famous Australian singer named Delta Goodrem because of the series roots.
 
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Rediscovered an interesting series a few days ago called Deltora Quest
https://youtube.com/watch?v=VFZ2uxWOt-w
While it does seems like your average fantasy anime at first glance, what makes it interesting is its adapted from a series of Australian children's fantasy books of the same name.
View attachment 1787003
I don't know how many here grew up with the series but I myself used to read the series a lot in elementary school, Hell I only rediscovered the anime after finding some old books in storage and searching the series online.

I'm not sure why a Japanese studio wanted to make anime adaptation in the first place, but I do know that the author, Emily Rodda, accepted the offer for it because her children were heavily into 1990s fantasy anime and JRPGs and she'd often get dragged along into watching and playing said anime and JRPGs with them.

Its an interesting series when you know the background for it, the anime is OK for being a children's fantasy (tried reading some of the books I found and they somewhat hold up compared to other series I used to read as a kid), the few places/sites that have it only have the dub for the first 52 episodes, but some group has been fan subbing the series recently with only a dozen or so episodes left untranslated.
That's interesting. I wonder what other anime out there are based off obscure foreign works.
 
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