Comet Lucifer #01 — Hoverboarding
October 4th, 2015
I'm pretty sure they should already be dead at least 3-4 times over.
Impressions:
A voice over montage of a kid slowly spleunking and then a naked girl/monster falls on him, turning into a rock in the process, and his reaction is "HOLY CRAP! A ROCK! BEST DAY EVER!" And to come after that was another minute of hoverboarding around town. It was not the compelling five minute intro that they no doubt thought it was, especially since the episode would also end with a giant flash of light and a naked girl falling on him, but it certainly did succeed in its goal of eating up a quarter of the episode. At least it wasn't as terrible about the exposition after that opening bit as most shows have been this season. I'm also pretty sure that they overshot things, what with attempting to murder each other and destroying a few city blocks as part of their youthful hijinks. Luckily, they're all super humans and impervious to bodily harm, so being ground against buildings and falling thousands of feet into a ginormous sinkhole leaves them without a scratch on them.
The bigger problem here is that while it does away with a lot of the clunky exposition, it doesn't really replace it with much of anything else.The totally rad hoverboarding sequence makes me really want to compare it to K's random skateboarding in that it seemed to exist mainly because someone thought it'd be cool, but this came already after a few minutes of hoverboarding and only served to transport Characters A and B into Hole C so they could trip over Magic Girl D. Perhaps if the protagonist's main interaction with other characters and the world in general was something other than staring gormlessly, I could believe that it was in the name of characterization, but after twenty minutes, he still seems to have the personality of a sack of potato flour. His sidekick had more characterization just yelling while mounted on his back, but even that sort of died out soon after to look pensive and say his name over and over and over. There's a magic space girl/monster related to rocks in some way, who summons giant robots, and an evil(ish) mech empire out to get her. These seem like they should be the core concepts of the story, yet are tucked away at the very end of the episode. You could've skipped the first 19 minutes and you still would've gotten the salient points of the setting and plot.
I feel like its heart is in the right place as far as trying to (eventually) organically introduce the main characters and settings, but it keeps tripping over itself in execution and incredibly bland characters. It has a lot of problems to address going forward at any rate, starting with that bubble gum pop ED that was at complete odds with how the episode actually ended.
Posted in Comet Lucifer | 4 Comments »
It kind of reminded me of Eureka 7 mixed in with other familiar elements of anime shows I’ve seen before, but can’t remember though. If this was made a few years ago I might’ve given this an interested watch and reserve judgement, but now I just get that itch that this will suck ass a few episodes in.
I’m guessing the shows that don’t have preview pics are shows not going on to the second round to have the honor of being reviewed by Aroduc, huh?