Deca-Dence #01 — Bagpipe Montage

July 8th, 2020

 

I feel like we could have skipped the first third and only missed some bullying of the a disabled girl.

I'm out of town… just to be out of town at a different remote, isolated place… from Friday to probably next Tuesday. I don't expect posting to be interrupted, but who knows?

Impressions:

Stop me if you've heard any of this before. In a post-apocalyptic world, a mechanic-type teenager wants to be part of the warrior class who gets to fight the monsters that plague the remnants of humanity, but she can't because she's part of the mechanic caste. The drudgery of her life is shown by a montage set to bagpipes. There's also a giant robot with an over-long transformation scene where it transforms from a hand to another kind of hand while an insert song plays. The enemy obligingly sits there and patiently waits for it to finish before dropping over dead. What a fight.

What seemingly sets it apart are a couple things. First, that she's incompetent even when dropped into the melee, so it kind of begs asking why she is the main character at all. Her boss is the hyper competent dude doing ridiculous and honestly pretty silly things. The second thing… I don't even know how to describe. Partway through the episode, the dude is revealed to be part of some kind of secret police, routing out 'glitches', or maybe literally bugs? It's hard to tell with Japanese Engrish a lot of the time. At the end of the episode, we cut away to an alien world of… robots, I guess… congratulating themselves on another profitable exercise. So we're already shooting for the WHAT A TWIST kind of nonsense that seems to go part and parcel with mecha(ish) shows these days.

Well, I guess it's an attempt at a hook, but it's effort that should have been spent on making the main character not an obnoxious idiot. Or perhaps shown the super-awesome warrior caste not getting their asses handed to them and slaughtered en masse by mooks. That said, if I spent two paragraphs talking about the content rather than woeful production (and it's certainly not here, even if the action was… well… goofy as hyuck), that's definitely a win for them.

     

Posted in Deca-Dence | 6 Comments »

6 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • Marmot says:

    At least the character and setting designs are more appealing than Listeners.

  • The Phantom says:

    Just like your laser penis makes any show awesome, this show having similarities to Chrome Shelled Regios makes it automatically awesome for me. Definitely looking forward for more of this.

    • Aroduc says:

      I often think back fondly to Regios, and I couldn’t even say why. Probably just Felli.

      • DP says:

        I think the soundtrack was good. Dropped Regios after five episodes, though… ah, those were the days. These days I’d probably call it a Best of Season or something….

        • Aroduc says:

          I remembered 2009 as being a pretty solid year, but I went back and checked and… yeesh. Winter 2009 was pretty awful. That said, there were a lot of notable multiple-season carry overs from fall (Index, ToraDora, Gundam00, Clannad, Casshern). Still, heads and shoulders over shows that started at the same time as it.

  • DP says:

    Liked the bits with the main character, but once the action started with all the dangling on wires, I had attack on titan flashbacks only this was even sillier/dumber.

    The ending was a bit weird, presumably the humans are puppets of blood drinking mosequito robots from the Matrix?