Steins;Gate #01 — DRINK DR. PEPPER
April 3rd, 2011
Yes, my corporate masters.
This was a special ‘broadcast’ on Nico’s live stream (hence the super awesome low res widescreen within 4:3 res caps because that’s how NicoNico rolls… like a cube) that didn’t include the OP or ED. The first real broadcast is April 5th.
Impressions:
This was… talky. And very very white. The whole thing was basically a never ending monologue out of Rintarou Kyouma with barely enough space given most of the time to even take a breath. But the problem is that very little of what he was going on about was interesting in the slightest. About 75% of it was random technobabble and another 15% was his delusions of grandeur. The little bit that was left was lost in the wasteland. This was further hurt by extremely uninspired direction, particularly with the sound. Random shots of backgrounds, buildings, the backs of people’s heads, etc are rampant. I guess the art looks good, but they really needed to do a lot more to make suitably different from an audio tape. There’s barely even any music in the episode at all. It’s literally about 20 minutes of just listening to him rant.
The poor direction hurts the thriller side of it too. There’s a murder, people are randomly disappearing, bananas are being turned green in the microwave, crazy stuff be going down, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that from the production at all. They could be using the almost monochrome art to good use by highlighting strange things with color, and that’s what I thought they were doing with the bright blood. But then the next vividly colored thing was a llama on TV and after that, the time bananas. I suppose setting the contrast knob way too high does a good decent job of hiding its relatively low production by making everything hard to even see.
All in all, this was very boring. I’m really not sure what it’s trying to be yet. If it wants to be a decent thriller, it needs to do a much better job creating atmosphere. If it wanted to just be some guy ranting for 20 minutes, then they should have given it to Shaft. Yeah, I know, the fact that I don’t like a talky show is a shock, but this really needed to do something… anything… to actually present it in an interesting way. So far, all we have are bright green bananas.
Posted in Anime | 12 Comments »
That’s what the VN generally was – talky. Plot isn’t very strong overall, and its focus is scattered till the later chapters.
Seeing as this will be 26 episodes, there will be a lot more talking, and unless you enjoy seeing HOOOUIN KYOUMA and his antics, you likely won’t enjoy the show.