Gunslinger Stratos #12 — Suprise! It’s a Flipbook
June 20th, 2015
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Oh, the animation budget…
Impressions:
I guess a big ol’ shoot ’em up isn’t the worst way to end things, particularly coming off of Seraph not even bothering to try, but there were a couple leviathan of problems. First, this episode feels like it follows after an entirely different plotline than the rest of the show followed, in particular the shouting at the start to kick things off about how “I’m not you. You’re me.” You spent the last month and a half fighting the sand borg. This manner of existential… whatever… has really not been part of the narrative.
Second, while much of the action was fine (barring the usual crapness of magic bullet barriers), it was obvious that the budget simply totally ran out. There were at least three or four instances where the animation stimply stopped and turned into a flipcard sequence. I guess at least showing us what they wanted to do is better than a shot of the ceiling or a wall, but it’s no less awful looking. The rest is one of the two unsurprising epilogues expected, going with the happily ever after in separate worlds instead of the same world. At least they didn’t reset all the deaths and bring people back to life for giggles and poops.Â
Final Thoughts:
This show’s biggest strength is that it had okayish pacing in a season where everything else was moving at a snail’s pace. With a bigger budget and fewer godawful magical shields, I’m pretty sure that it would have been able to make the most of its action too since it did occasionally show some solid direction there from time to time. At least when it gave the magic shields a rest. It had a varied cast who, aside from the somewhat mopey protagonist, existed almost exclusively to shoot or hit things and were correctly never given much more focus than that, let alone each getting some obligatory flashback as it killed half of them off.
Alas, the potential went largely to waste due to a general lack of budget and really not doing a whole lot of anything with its characters. There was certainly a relationship that they could’ve capitalized on between Tohru and Kyoka to add some badly needed emotion to the story, and various interesting things they could have done with the Daibanchou world and the existential stuff they brought up at the end, but that went largely ignored for an overly long aside with evil sand people that started and ended with magic cubes. And of course, the budget. Woe very much is the budget. Granted, I’ll take the frequent background blobface over long pans across ceilings, but ideally, there should be neither, and the action suffered immensely for it, especially in the final episode.
I’m sure I’d be less charitable to this in a stronger season since it has intrinsic issues plaguing nearly every aspect, but hey, it’s all relative, and in a terrible season, the weekly saltine seems all the tastier, even if it is somewhat stale and has been dropped on the floor. Metaphors.
Posted in Gunslinger Stratos | 9 Comments »
I think that manhole cover ricochet is still clouding your judgement and making you give it more credit than it deserves.