Rayearth #03 — The Tutorials Will Continue
October 21st, 2026
But I will not.
Quasi-Impressions:
So… it's explained for the nineteenth time that this is just like an RPG, that they need a weapon, that weapons are used for fighting, you can fight with weapons, but you can't just use any weapon, you have to choose the correct weapon, wait, no, the weapon chooses you so ignore the last five minutes of tutorial. Also, these aren't your real weapons. You'll get them later once you find the magic widget. Okay, bye, go do your adventure. Oh no, a winged cyclops. Wait, we have weapons now! Weapons can be used to fight things. Let's fight this thing with our weapons. Yay. We fought it with our weapons and that let us win. But wait, there's another monster. Oh no! If only we had a way to fight it with weapons or something. Wait, a cute boy saved us. Cliffhanger.
Sweet Mary of Nazareth flogging Zeus with a stick. It's been three episodes. In the trashy harem fightin' school LN adaptations of yore, we would not only have introduced 80% of the harem at this point, but be close to wrapping up the first arc. Even magic girl shows would've saved at least 3-4 people by now, not… *checks* nobody. And menaced one random cyclops. For all we know, it was just protecting its nest. Here, we have an entire episode where these utter imbeciles continue to be completely passive in the story, while oohing and aahing at the most mind numbing and idiotic tutorialization. They'll probably spend the next three weeks learning that fire is hot, water is wet, and wind is airy. I don't care if this is an accurate 1:1 representation of the manga. If it is, then the manga's pacing and writing was bloated pointless rambling nonsense as well.
I'm out. Which makes Sunday through Wednesday this season a dead zone. Maybe I'll find something else to post about. I've been really tempted to go back and try to fix Battle Moon Wars's incomplete state, though IIRC, that's largely due to a bunch of strings being hardcoded into the exe, which is not something I'm good at handling myself. Maybe I'll just leave the open wounds to fester. I expected this season to be bad, and boy, is it living up to expectations.
Posted in Rayearth | 1 Comment »
EP 3´s ending is about 20 pages into Vol 2 of 3, so the anime pacing makes sense, but the story itself simply doesn’t in the manga. The 90s anime reaches the 5-minute mark of EP 3 at this point, and filler plots truly begin by Ep 7, after all the powers and characters are set up, with the young girls reading/watching by then caught up on what an “RPG” is. Of the 20 S1 episodes, 6 should be pure filler, with others having their content stretched. S2 is mostly original as it didn´t wait on Part 2 of the manga to finish. The 90s show and the entirely original reverse-isekai OVA miniseries look pretty good. So does the manga, but it feels like a proof of concept.