Princess Connect #19 — Gacha Character Cleanup Week

February 14th, 2022

 

These sure are characters who have designs.

Impressions:

Apparently with the 'plot', to be generous, episodes out of the way, it's right back to faffing about with random throwaway characters to appease the gacha gods. This was particularly haphazard even for this show though. They apparently had to get through something like eight of these obligatory nimrods this week, split between a pack of pure fanservice/gag characters that shriek nonstop, and a pack of overly serious, excessively dramatic ones that mope and brood nonstop about how the armor might be their friend, despite it constantly screaming in a monster voice. These things mix together exactly as well as you'd think they would.

Anyway, the common thread being some slime monster running around in drama-side's armor, and animating toys in the idiot's side until they release a giant vein of slime monster that was 30 feet outside the town, which, at about seventeen minutes into the episode, is when they remember that the protagonists should be involved in some way. And so they're summoned to… listen to the drama side and then dispatch the randomly spawned monster in one blow. Very involved. Such protagonists. But the most hilarious part was the pack of blurry CGI knights right in the front of the screen right after that for god only knows what reason for just one moment in a framing distance shot. Why are you plopping out-of-focus CGI for no reason over a third of the screen, people. What is the logic here. This mystery confounds me far more than the dumb "is this obviously an MMO!?" angle.

   

Posted in Princess Connect | 3 Comments »

3 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • Joshua says:

    After sitting through arguably one of the worst TV show episodes in recent memory last week (The Book of Boba Fett finale), I didn’t feel any rage, but felt strangely empty. All I could feel was how deep the corporate tendrils have sunken into today’s media and franchises, ensuring a new degree of shapelessness and brand synergy designed to be fleeting pleasures for the sake of telling people to hand over their money to these corporate gods.

    The fact that Disney will never learn from this failure and instead double down on more Star Wars designed to placate the never satisfied fans over actually providing something engaging is a threat onto itself. If anime goes down this path, then this industry’s irreparably fucked.

  • Joshua says:

    I don’t think this is as “harmless” as some put it as (judging from a response I got), at least from a production standpoint. Narratively, it’s harmless, but it’s frightening how much clout and pull CyGames has given how they poached numerous animators and staff away from competing projects and studios all to work on boring, corporatized shit like PriConne that concerns me. The fact that they see contractors as totally expendable (i.e. PA Works, MAPPA and Studio Kai who all worked on CyGames shows), but seek to bring everything in-house to get all of the money on top of their vertical integration should give concern to what they’re playing here. They seek nothing but control and consolidation of the Japanese anime industry.

  • NeclordX says:

    They obviously run out of budget for animating this one