The Abandoned Sacred Beasts #01 — War Is Awesome Until Someone Dies
July 1st, 2019
Mappa's writer room must be a fascinating place.
Impressions:
It's hard to even fathom how to get into the headspace where most of this episode and all the first impressions take place. The protagonists are a bunch of super powered experimental transforming monsters that effortlessly slaughter anything and everything that gets in their way. The enemy has no defense or answer to this. They don't have their own monsters. There's a montage of them merrily massacring enemies set to a cheery military comraderie tune. Then one of them succumbs to the beast within, kills a couple allies and then himself, and all of a sudden, only at that moment, does any of this become in any way bad. So bad in fact, that it instantly drives their creator insane with guilt and into a mass murder/suicide pact with apparently the craziest of them. Things were all sunshine and rainbows until then… quite literally. Except then the protagonist turns it all around by saying that he's going to ask a girl out, which isn't high school nonsense from supposedly grizzled soldiers, but exactly the morale boost they needed.
Just to make the obligatory comparison to Fairy Gone because the two are damn near identical in setting, this would be like if they started out with an episode entirely of flashback. It also shares the affinity for poorly fitting music, but veering toward cheery military rather than rock. The animation is strong, but the baffling direction and writing certainly hurts there. Moving into a more monster of a week format as the ending speech rather unsubtly laying out the structure going forward would certainly help matters there, but giving up the silly montages and using the animation at actual dramatic moments would do that as well. The last couple minutes were close to the only part where my prevailing thought wasn't "good god, this is complete nonsense", which isn't a great first impression, and, as usual, the whole thing would've been greatly improved had the previous 15 or so been a quick montage lead-in to this. It's not like we needed a setup for "making war monsters probably has some negative consequences."
Next Episode:
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Posted in Sacred Beasts | 5 Comments »
The Phantom 
residentgrigo 
Gamen 
Dave Baranyi
The only things that really annoyed me were how they appeared walking slowly on the battlefield dressed in White and no one shot them and the stupid evil laught at the predictable “betrayal”. Without the evil laught this would have been really nice because it would have seen someway reasonable action, which would make it interesting, but instead they had to fuck it with the evil maniatic laught.
Aside from that I really enjoyed it to be honest.