Princess Connect #25 — Everything Explodes

March 28th, 2022

 

Remember when the action sequences in this show weren't just a series of explosions?

Impressions:

I guess the music was kind of nice. Otherwise, remember how I mocked this for doing the grunting and indistinct explosions from a distance thing? Well, this episode decided to triple down on that, with the big boss battle being nothing but that repeated about four times. Worse, each one had to be interrupted by the stupid cat pleading for friendship. It's not that a villain can't have a face turn, but you gotta set some groundwork for it at some point, not just spend ten minutes yelling that the crazy sadistic mass murdering lunatic that she has always been is not really her. It very much is. Even King Bowser has more nuance and depth to his character than this crazy. He's at least a devoted father to one child.

 The real joke of the episode might have been trying to milk Yuuki getting hurt from overexertion though. Five goddamned minutes we spent trying to wring melodrama out of that. Not from getting stabbed or sacrificing himself to take a shot for someone else, for grunting too hard during one of the many giant explosions. The damn motorcycle in Vanishing Line was more of a character than Yuuki is, and didn't spontaneously erupt in jelly jam from excessive screaming. But of course he's perfectly fine not thirty seconds later, no harm, no foul. Yay friendship power. Or whatever. Mostly, I'm annoyed at that one over-animated genuinely impressive episode halfway through this season that made me hang on to the end. Why couldn't we at least have had another sequence like that instead of the parade of explosions?

 

Posted in Princess Connect | 3 Comments »

3 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • Joshua says:
    March 28, 2022 at 9:36 am

    *Opened bag fearing a loud, weightless sakuga orgy of a MCU-ish third act where the whole world is at stake but no one really is because the good guys are supposed to win, only to get just that.*

    I don’t what I expected.

    Time to hold my breath, expect them to announce season 3 or a film, and start despairing over the future of anime.

  • Joshua says:
    March 29, 2022 at 2:17 pm

    Okay, to further elaborate, famous film director Martin Scorsese once harshly criticized the Marvel movies, the highest-grossing movie franchise on the planet and which helped Disney become the Galactus-sized threat to all of entertainment, for being the perfunctory, corporate, focus-tested, assembly-line garbage that they are, calling them nothing but theme park films: designed precisely by brand management and studio execs to make people pop at the right moments like a roller coaster but have almost nothing of substance. He got shat on unfairly by MCU fanboys just for exposing their sacred cows like that, with nothing but how much money they made to back them up.

    In a way, you could describe Princess Connect and Uma Musume from CyGames, who desperately wants to be seen as a Japanese modern Disney and has already monopolized the fragmented mobile game market there, as belonging to the same mold, what with being heavily brand synergy-oriented around being extended ads for their respective gacha games and UmaMusu s2 literally becoming the best-selling anime of all time in Japan.

    You can even see this trend of trying to be like the MCU across both seasons of Princess Connect, which is no wonder why it’s gotten so much inexplicable acclaim from Western reviewers. A whole cast of “superheroes” or princesses in this case, constant world-ending threats that mean nothing due to marketing priorities to make sure only the good guys win and utterly pathetic villains that have the illusion of depth, some of the shittiest humor that’s supposed to be sardonic and self-aware with their Joss Whedon-isms, mugging the camera and incessant slapstick, “pathos” written in such a contrived way that you have to feel along with the audience, obnoxious fan service for cheap pops and finger pointing like all of those cameos, guest appearances and idol pandering, and loud, noisy, incoherent third acts that we’re supposed to cheer for solely because they look pretty and well-animated despite having no stakes. Very much like what Scorsese described as a “theme park film” no?

    Hell, one could even point to this series having the anime equivalent of a $200 million budgeted blockbuster, with countless animators being poached away to work on this soulless “content”, including Konosuba’s director whose style has been watered down as a part of CyGames’ “house style” so that it’s little more than trying desperately to copy that one Aqua face ad nauseum. That’s why this makes me so uneasy in this cultural wasteland and struggling industry, where vultures like this corporation prioritize IP over original projects or adaptations, choke out auteurism for brownie points when it comes to stuntcasting up-and-coming talent, and be like the West in terms of doubling down further on algorithmic, assembly line productions, dumbed down big budget tentpoles, vertical integrations and monopolies to reduce anime into just another form of “content”. Just like what I’ve witnessed in Hollywood in recent months.

    That this will most assuredly become the best-selling series of this year, and spawn another season of this corporate drivel (or a film because gotta get those Mugen Train bucks) is only a sign of the times regarding this industry and anime as a whole.