Build Divide: Code Black #01 — It’s Time For My Serious Bunny Hoodie
October 9th, 2021
Said the goth teenage boy.
It doesn't speak well to my weekend morning mental acuity when my first thought on the opening sequence is "Why the hell is she humming the alphabet song while looking up at stars."
Impressions:
I'll admit that the first few minutes had me feeling a little hopeful for this. It used music well. It jumped straight into dudes chasing girls, throwing explosions around without explaining the intracicies of how they were casting magic, wacky dude mourning for squashed bread and flexing on some poor insomniac punk while also meet-cute-ing it up. I thought for a moment that maybe the cards would just be how they cast magic and it might end up being a high paced explodey action show. But that only lasted maybe two or three minutes and it all turned out to be a lie. And how.
Literally the entire rest of the episode is sucked into a goddamned card game where one girl monologues the rules and what's going on almost nonstop for fifteen minutes straight. Pay her voice actor more just on the sheer amount of work you're shoving on her back. That's pretty much the entire goddamned episode; one game of Yu-Gi-Oh and explanation of most of the rules for it, which I couldn't even summarize even if my brain hadn't been turned to mush about thirty seconds in. I don't care. Nobody cares. If you had emphasized the magical girlfriends boobs a bit more, maybe then you might get some horny people to care slightly.
Posted in Build Divide | 2 Comments »
Anonymous
The difference between this and the first episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! is that that actually had characters and motivations. And they never went in-depth into explaining the rules. And you could actually follow the game there, something that can’t be said for this because this goes with the WIXOSS approach of not making the card battles followable per se, which kind of makes you wonder why they would eat up so much time then.
What adds insult to injury is that this thing, like many others of its kind, doesn’t even understand card game anime. The visuals don’t support the show at all. This is fatal. Card game anime _need_ visual support. For instance, Yu-Gi-Oh! gives you posing, framing and dynamics as a means to compensate for the lack of animation. That’s kind of what you have to do when your show is technically about two people standing at a set spot. This isn’t rocket science or magic but basic thinking that they figured out 20 years ago at their very first attempt. And this episode was just that. People standing around. Mouths flapping. With no expressiveness whatsoever.
Take original Yu-Gi-Oh! wherein the characters are more akin to stage performers and angles and whatnot are actively used to create variety in an otherwise perfectly still environment. It works with its limitations.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19yRHkzprp8
Who is this aimed at? It technically has a story but that’s obviously cut down by card games. These card games themselves can’t be followed either and the overall direction doesn’t do anything with them. What is the result supposed to achieve when you do two things half-assedly?