Dear Fractale. You suck. Yours sincerely: someone who always knew you weren’t very good but was still astounded by how low you sunk in this episode.
Fractale has no idea what it’s doing. It has taken a look at other popular anime, decided to take cues from them and copy it without understanding what it is they’re copying. The various scenes from this episode look like moments you would see in a great anime with well developed characters and a coherent plot and tone. But Fractale doesn’t realise that these things are required and simply throws them in because it thinks that makes it good. Take the creepy villains and the ‘old’ lady who chokes Phryne. Why? What does this have to do with the plot? Why is she choking her? What part of the story does her getting angry at Phryne does this fit into? Why is this relevant to the Fractale system that they were discussing a few seconds before this scene? Fractale doesn’t know why. Fractale has just seen mentally unstable villains elsewhere and thinks that’s what all good anime should have (hello there Hamdo yet again).
Things are happening in the plot, but they’re just that. Things. With no apparent connection to what has occured previously or what the characters motivations are. Characters become idealistic when the plot feels like it should and realistic when Fractale remembers that one time Good Anime #43 had a character being realistic in a battlefield and felt it needed that too. So Clain now shoots grannies too, eh? Why exactly would that be? Have you forgotten every single thing that happens before this episode Fractale? Why is the entire world apparently at the beck and call of a mentally stunted hologram?
There’s no theme, no point, no purpose, no direction, no clarity and no continuity to Fractale. It hasn’t even thought about such things. It saw other stories had a post-materialistic world and thought it wanted to do something similar to that by putting in scenes where characters spout such lines. But these lines are in no connection to anything else that happens in the story, or who the character are or how they act. It’s just a massive fucking mess. You fucking suck Fractale. Up until now I genuinely thought people were being too harsh on you. Yeah, you weren’t very good, but you were mildly entertaining and brought up some interesting points, albeit extremely clumsily. Now you just plain suck.
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That old lady needs a good spanking.
Obviously.
I heard that Fractale and Honorable Son combined have the worst noitaminA ratings ever.
SAVING THE INDUSTRIES WITH LOW RATINGS AND SHITTY STORIES
There’s always [C]
…please save this timeslot [C]
I was so, so disappointed in this anime since it was one of my biggest hopefuls for the winter season. The first episode really caught my attention and I had nothing but high wishes for where the show would go; little did I know we were stumbling into an inescapable maze. I’m afraid how this will end, but looking forward to what you’ll have to say about it :p
I hyped it up before the season began.
I feel kinda stupid now
Would be different if it was in the Anime no Chikara time slot.
Funny, cuz it felt like I was writing about Occult Academy again -_-
Meh.
I am very disappoint, noitaminA.
I’M THINKING OF LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE
“Dear Fractale. You suck. Yours sincerely: someone who always knew you weren’t very good but was still astounded by how low you sunk in this episode.”
I recall you being hopeful for at least 4 episodes. By then I dropped it so I didn’t follow closely but your statement above is definitely not correct. =p
Yes, Fractale sucks. Get over it. We only have to suffer one more episode before we can honestly say that at no point Fractale gets better. It just gets more and more how it tries to do a bunch of stuff, but end up doing all of it with mediocrity.
That must mean that Fractale’s ratings are so horrible that even Wandering Son’s great ratings can’t lift it up. You might get from this that I like the latter show. It is well done.
I’m pretty sure by “ratings,” he meant TV ratings, i.e. how many people are watching. Which is a crying shame, because Wandering Son is bloody brilliant.
Yup, TV Ratings for Wandering Son + Fractale are the lowest for Noitamina ever. This is part of Noitamina’s ratings slowly falling anyway, but neither of these shows have helped turn the decline. Wandering Son is too inward looking and inaccessible to those outside its minimal audience.
At least, I know I am. It made out the character like me to be the villain!
what character? the bullying schoolkids? in my opinion hourou musuko has no villains except the usual ideas of “society” or “yourself” like in other slice-of-life’s.
(yes i said the japanese name. manga is always referred to as such so deal with it.)
I know what ratings are. Don’t worry about that. I made a joke about how Fractale’s ratings are, or should be in the perfect world, the one guy capping the show for the internet. Nothing more, because it sucks and there’s better crap to do when Fractale airs.
Actually, this is the first time Scamp’s complained that it sucks…
While the better, Wandering Son is very flawed in itself. The main problem it has with hooking viewers as it starts in the middle of the story and relies on flashbacking to what happened prior in the manga. It’s a different technique, but I personally don’t find it works very well.
Scamp complaining should be taken seriously, and every single time is a time too many for humour’s sake.
I agree that Wandering Son has flaws, like everything. But to say very flawed is a bit weird if you ask me. It’s a calm and soft anime presenting quite a heavy coming of age topic. As such it reflects the main character strongly, in that he too is quiet and soft-spoken, but very determined once he puts his mind to something. I can easily see how most people wouldn’t bother with the show after a few episodes though. I myself only picked it up after 7 or 8 episodes had aired and I feel like such is one of the better ways to watch the show. Show for a quiet rainy day. Might check out the manga after the show ends.
P.S. your new avatar is horrible. Kyouko needs to tie up more ears.
hey, does this mean Yamakan will retire now? :D
This probably makes me evil, when I’m happy about that.
But peh~
He’s all talk and nothing behind that.
Very good point. I wonder if he will stick to his word? I doubt it, but this will hover over him for some time now
Japanese word for ‘retirement’ is 辞任 if you wanna bug him on twitter :3
*Puts dictionary back on shelf*
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(actual image filenames, content may differ from expectations though)
It took you until now to realize that it sucked? You really thought that there was any hope for this show? Fractale has been a downhill ride since about the 1st half of the 1st episode. One that didn’t start off very high to begin with.
must agree with this, really. In fact, it sucked as soon as I figured out it used Ghibli style.
Pah…
…now I know what it was like for sorrow-kun when I was so assured of what Ore no Imouto would turn into…
Agree. On top of what you wrote, the action scenes were some of the worst I’ve ever seen. The standout was when Clain and Sunda were surrounded by the dudes with the laser staff shooty things and were saved in the nick of time by a shot from an airship on the other side of the wall which eliminated all of the bad guys but left the good guys unharmed.
B-but the protagonist has grown tremendously! Sunda said it, so it must be true!
Yup. Now he shoots grannies
yawn. i would drop this, but im curious to what you might have to say if you continue watching. this anime is really beyond saving, though, really. someone please make a better apocalyptic-ish anime.
Madoka Magica
*end of discussion*
Go and blog Madoka.
Maybe you can get them all done by the time the last two episodes are out
I vote for this too.
Just pretend it came out that day. You know, like your season previews.
eh, I wish I’d picked it at the start of the season, but I was understandably wary when it laid itself out with a bit of girls being insufferably nice to each other to start with. But nope, not picking it up. That would hinder my choices for this upcoming season
Hindsight is 50:50 in this particular case, eh 5camp? Expectations destroyed in a bad way (Fractale), expectations destroyed in a GOOD way (Madoka).
eh, i guess madoka is along those lines, but it focuses more on the mahou shoujo aspect and not enough on the apocalyptic aspect.
lol post. that is all i can say.
It’s funny, and not a little scary, to note that this is more or less exactly how I felt about Fractale last episode. As in, down to the letter.
Knowing that things hadn’t really improved entertainment-wise, let alone in terms of proper writing, since the introduction of Aleister Crowley (of Index fame) with a multi-eyed monkey perched on his shoulder pirate-style and a flintlock pistol produced from thin air, I was at least expecting… some kind of consistency going forward. I mean, at least that looked interesting and off-kilter weird, despite being a dramatic reveal of exactly nothing, never to show up again. I could watch a show about artificially-preserved people inside self-propelled suits of armour with buccaneer sensitivities.
Instead the rate at which Fractale jumped genres, atmosphere, overall style, degrees of insanity, and possibly amphibious predators accelerated. With the end in sight it tried to cash in on development that didn’t happen, drama that wasn’t there, revelations that weren’t or had no impact, and themes only thought up on the spot. And it failed pretty overwhelmingly.
The sad part? In spite of all this I still rank Fractale in the upper half of series airing this season. It was an original setting, it looked nice, it inspired actual thought (even if this was mostly incidental), and dude… monkeys and flintlocks. I would rather this exist and people learn from its mistakes than it be replaced by another mindless cookie-cutter shounen/moe/harem series in a lighthearted contemporary setting. Damnit, anime. I want more Baccano.
I would have agreed with your last paragraph an episode ago, but this episode just made me rage. It’s obviously hard to tell when I haven’t watched everything from this season for as long as I’ve watched Fractale for, but I’d be depressed if, even after this episode, it still was better than half of the anime airing this season.
Well to be fair, through grim MST3K-esque fascination I also watched the entirety of Dragon Crisis this season, so my perspective may be slightly skewed.
What really dragged it down for me was the abundance of series like Infinite Stratos and Zombie, which simply aren’t my thing. The “light” comedies padded with fanservice, one-dimensional characters with no development, woefully boring male leads, and plots not worthy of any attention carried almost entirely by their humour which pop up like clockwork every season. Except more often than not their humour – their raison d’etre – is completely tired, formulaic, and painfully cliche, thus not funny to me in the slightest. There’s little in life more wretched than a comedy that isn’t funny. Gosick sounding on paper like an amalgamation of things I would love, yet instead displaying some of the worst writing yet seen didn’t help either.
For me Fractale’s rage-factor comes from disappointment and exasperation at an overload of what could have been good ideas individually being crammed together and completely squandered. It’s preferable to raging at a complete absence of new ideas. I’m willing to overlook some pretty massive shortcomings if there’s a concept somewhere in there which could have been coaxed into something great, but was let down by the execution (Gunslinger Girl did this to me big time).
I suppose I’m just a real sucker for world-building science fiction/fantasy?
I was convinced Fractale would be a winner at the start of the season and then look what happened. >_< Did Fractale EVER know what it trying to do?
Fractale had a pretty good series of episodes (7 – 8), but I think it’s a victim of too much ambition cramped in a tight space. Give it one more cour and it would probably improve.
I don’t think it sucks that bad, but it could have been much, much more than it currently is.
Fuck Fractale
Let’s Speculah on something else: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vIsQ25Krq8&feature=player_embedded
How fucked are we? Very.
As a whole it seems like the anime industry has forgotten how to do good sci-fi. The broad strokes and world-building are all still there, but when it comes time to fill in the fine details all they can come up with are the same regurgitated memes. Fractale is bad in this regard, but Sora no Woto takes the cake. The writers put a lot of effort into building an exciting and believable post-apocalyptic Switzerland, and then proceeded to populate that world with characters lifted out of K-ON! acting according to a plot so light and fluffy that it could be used to fill weather balloons. Even when writers are willing to break out of the typical high-school setting, they can’t seem to shake the accompanying tropes.
At least we still have Directions. Eve no Jikan was one of the best takes on Asimov’s three laws that I’ve seen in quite a while.
Well, I’d mostly credit Studio Rikka/Yasuhiro Yoshiura for Eve no Jikan, but I agree. It was a great little ONA, much like Pale Cocoon and Aquatic Language before it.
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[...] 29:31 – Fractale #10 [...]
[...] READ THIS ONE IN FULL:“There’s no theme, no point, no purpose, no direction, no clarity and no continuity to Fractale. It hasn’t even thought about such things. It saw other stories had a post-materialistic world and thought it wanted to do something similar to that by putting in scenes where characters spout such lines. But these lines are in no connection to anything else that happens in the story, or who the character are or how they act. It’s just a massive fucking mess. You fucking suck Fractale.” – The Cart Driver [...]