Fire Force #03 — Obligatory Fanservice Girl

July 26th, 2019

 

Didn't the building have like eight other people in it?

Impressions:

Like what seems like all the action shows this season, this one's budget apparently bottomed out after two episodes. While not as embarrassingly awful as Cop Craft's episode this week, animation basically stopped about 75% of the way into the episode, and completely stopped altogether for the last 3-4 minutes and devolved to voiceovers over scenery shots. I can't even call it an expository infodump either, as it was basically just a dude going "things are complicated, and in a huge organization, there are some people with different intentions than you." One would think that wouldn't need an entire goddamned scene to review, but that's how they decided to spend a massive chunk of the episode.

As for the rest, on one hand, it just straight up decided to say screw the whole tournament/competition thing, which calls to question why it existed in the first place. Any hope for some kind of montage of a bunch of crazy-ass people doing crazy stuff ala the first episode of Horizon on the Middle of Nowhere died immediately. I guess it was to introduce the fanservice girl whose schtick is that she keeps getting groped. If you're going to call out something as an awful cliche, don't just go ahead and do the cliche anyway, you putzes. She contributes nothing but hitting the catgirl fetish crowd though. Then we get to the 'fight', if you can even call it that. They were happy to animate Whose-Its kicking. But the direction decided that the best way for him to be attacked would be to blithely stare at and/or narrate that he was being attacked. Multiple times at that. "Gee, I wonder if the explodey dust will explode again. Better stare at it for another 5 seconds." That's when it wasn't just interrupted by them having a longwinded conversation revealing the shocking truth that the brother who disappeared without a trace in a fire wasn't disintegrated. Again, something anybody with half a brain assumed already, and three episodes in certainly is not a big shocking reveal that could carry a whole episode like they clearly thought it could.

I'm going to continue with either this or Granbelm for Fridays, but I feel like both are trying my patience. We'll see how the latter's episode goes.

Posted in Fire Force | 4 Comments »

4 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • jgoi says:
    July 26, 2019 at 4:48 pm

    The reason I give a shit about fire force is here and they didn’t 100% fuck over her LLL scenes like I feared but since she gets stripped naked later on my fears are still active.

  • arekusu says:
    July 27, 2019 at 9:45 am

    They said they edited the fire’s color and narration. I didn’t see any edits in regards to the fire? Anyone have any ideas on what scene it was? I re-watched the first two episodes, they look the same in my opinion.

  • Bertz says:
    July 27, 2019 at 12:44 pm

    That scene was literally unveiling the idea that even amongst people Shinra saw today there could be enemies, and only a handful of people can be trusted. For a character that believes himself to be a hero such a revelation is bluntly put painful – That there are villains behind the scene, they are not just some flame demons but people with their own agendas. What would be the point of having animation there? Having the starry sky circle around as they talk? Make them talk like that during the training?

  • Nano says:
    July 28, 2019 at 4:33 pm

    Yikes! After reading your review of Fire Force about how the animation production went downhill in episode 3 really makes me reconsider devoting time to watch this. What’s funny was I was just reading another blog how they suggested it to be the #1 anime to watch this summer. Maybe they didn’t get to this episode yet. LOL