Before I start on all that Horizon business, I did also watch the first episode of Tamayura. I’m not going to write a full post on it, because it would just be me asking what’s the story supposed to be when the main conflict has been resolved before the anime even started, but suffice to say it’s yet another anime about a bunch of girls being insufferably nice to each other. In fact, I think it may take the award for the most insufferably nice characters I have ever seen.
But enough of that. Onto Prince Smarmy Grin right here.
Horizon on the middle of nowhere is set in a dystopian future….I think. Everyone left the earth, but then got involved in massive wars and now have to head back to earth…or something. Except now the earth is uninhabitable, except it’s not because they’re living on it. Maybe it was inhabitable if they all removed their noses, which might explain why every single character in the show hasn’t got a nose. Except they’re not on the earth’s surface, they’re actually living on giant floating ships in mid air that appear to create water around them to float in. Or something like that. But now they’ve decided to rewrite history because…I dunno, they decided the real history was too boring. They’ve now reached the part of history where they’ve got to have wars so…they’re going to re-enact a war….ummm…
Oh wait, all of that is total fucking nonsense. What they’re actually doing is attending a magical academy where they practice fighting using magical powers. Not all of them are human though, ranging from a big naked demon guy to what I can only describe as a giant dango. Here they’re practicing fighting. Against what they might need to fight against, I do not know. Why there are aliens when they’re supposed to be on earth, I do not know. Why anything and everything, I do not know. I feel stupid when I’m given all this information and I still don’t understand. Fate/Zero was bad enough, but Horizon feels so hodge podge in it’s allocation of information that I haven’t a bleeding clue what’s going on. They randomly narrated an infodump in the ending credits that made no sense in relation to anything else we had seen in that episode.
To be fair to Horizon, it doesn’t appear to be taking its story seriously either. Any anime that has a giant dango as one of the characters is clearly not taking its sci-fi entirely seriously. This is fine, I don’t mind this approach. But Horizon seemed to think that the only way it could show how non-seriously it was taking itself was by making pervy jokes. Please. Stop. It. Japan. Having a charachter say that they are going to grope another characters breasts is not funny. Please, for christ sake, can you stop this. He made a reference to the possibility that he would like to sex up with person, how hilarious~! No, it’s not, stop! The main character is the worst of all. I’m cool with the idea of a smarmy lead who doesn’t take anything seriously, but this was the worst possible way to do it. He couldn’t be in training because he was out buying porn. Great, that by itself would have been grand, but that was the only joke he seemed to have. I bought porn. Look at me everyone, I bought porn. Aren’t I hilarious, I bought porn! I’m just going to grope your tits here, also I bought porn!
Come on Autumn season. I’ve watched 9 series so far, 10 if I include the Squid Girl that aired last week, and the best first episode of the lot has been Bakuman. That is a really poor showing.
28 Comments
Just wait until Gundam AGE comes out, and the fall season will be saved!
You really don’t know what’s a poring?!
Give a quick google image search with the keyword “poring”…:P
Pah, dangos > porings
A poring. Good Haruhi, Scamp, you don’t know the PORING/Slime reference? *sigh*
And it really seems that this season for you is a loss. Better give up while you’re ahead.
Guilty Crown isn’t aired yet
Fate/Zero is aired. Season saved.
Type-Moon + ufotable = awesome as we’ve already seen in Kara no Kyoukai OVA series.
That’s the way seasons usually go. Crap stuff at the start, good stuff at the end. The last few seasons were unusual in having good stuff at the start
The only real disappointment so far has been Phi Brain, I’d written off most of these series as garbage anyway. You don’t have to watch Maken-ki to know it will be a stupid forced harem with a ton of fanservice and little to no plot. I’ll be happy as long as Guilty Crown, Fate/Zero, Persona 4 and Ben-to or Mirai Nikki are good. With a couple guilty pleasures.
Another thing that completely baffles me is Japan’s obsession over Barack Obama. He will pop up in manga as a sharpshooting badass super-hero out of no where spouting patriotic non-sense. I they heard him speak/do anything they would realize how ridiculous it is. Silly Japan
Actually, given the fact that he’s the AMERICAN president (and an African-American to boot), he’s an easy target to poke fun of. Though oddly enough Bush seems to have dodged that particular bullet (unless you count the Legend of Koizumi mahjong manga).
As for everything else, it’s all down to preference again. In my case, it’s the SOL/SOL-Comedies that are keepers (Working’!!, Ikamusume!?, and Tamayura), with everything else as interesting extras.
Yeah, but I rather liked him in Legend of Koizumi
He was surprisingly badass, you know?
Thanks to this comment, I watched the first episode of Koizumi, damn, that’s a pretty funny show, though, it is unfortunate that I don’t know a thing about Mahjong, so a lot of it was lost on me.
Man, the Koizumi anime is a little… meeehhhh
Go read the manga, they fight Hitler
americans are obsessed with making barack obama a super powered hero as well. or maybe the entire internet in general.
exhibit a:
http://also.kottke.org/misc/images/obama-lightsaber-02.jpg
exhibit b:
http://aafffff.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/obama-hadouken.jpg
exhibit c:
http://28.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llyybyRTK51qi3r22o1_400.png
exhibit d?:
http://memberfiles.freewebs.com/08/40/68454008/photos/Very-Corrupted-Pictures/Brock%20Obama.jpg
might have all occurred after he made that 3-point shot in kuwait.
“total fucking nonsense.”
Pretty much sums up this show.
Un-Go, Persona 4, Guilty Crown is still ahead. Mirai Nikki is still my foolish hope. Chihayafuru just came out.
–season saved–
Bakuman shall be brought down.
Seems as though this season is saving the best ’til last…
My only question is: Do people in Japan realy like watching this kind of sh*t?
At first I tought, maybe this anime with it’s non-generic lead would be watcheable. But, oh god. The producers should get arrested for murdering his character with that ‘VN joke’ followed by that goddamn same old one, Scamp already mentioned for me.
The only time I have seen Obama in an animé was the shitty A Certain Magical Index arc where Obama and Kuroko swapped bodies or something.
???
I would seriously watch that if it happened. It would likely receive a special viewing in Terribad too.
Now that was a weird episode, the setting does sound vaguely interesting but the way it’s presented at the end in a rushed pace it felt like they were recapping another series entirely after all the pointless stuff before that which didn’t really make much sense story-wise.
And somehow it seemed to me like the script-writers didn’t really know either what they were talking about. There were just too many moments that essentially said “I have no idea how this is supposed to make sense.” starting by a teenager asking this teacher what beating up has to do with athletics continuing with this big-boobed girl interrupting to mention that she might have to say something about the one missing student but wouldn’t – because she doesn’t know either (*facepalm* who the hell wrote the dialogue anyway…) and it ends with the teacher beating up the magic demon who has no idea what he has done wrong and the teacher doesn’t bother to mention the reason either. It’s unbelievable how often the story just threw up its arms and said “I just don’t know – but let’s do this scene anyway!”.
I got the impression that it was like a level 1 slime rather than a dango monster.
And everyone riffs (I might be making up words right now) on this show because it’s so hard to understand and because they didn’t bother to have five minutes of a character explaining how gravity work in their world, and what their history is, and why there is some funky Incubus man. Personally I love it, If you just sit back and enjoy the show without wondering about the why it’s pretty good. They’re in the situation they’re in and that’s enough. I’m sure it will gradually start to make sense but I’d be just as happy if it didn’t. I can’t stand when a series starts off with a ten minute dialogue about how their magic system works, why they have magic, why they wear panties, and why humans are humans. I’m a reasonably intelligent man, I can figure things out, pick up on things, draw conclusions. That’s what make a series good is letting you feel like you’re clever for figuring things out. But these drawn out, step by step explanations are clearly meant for the young or the those with seriously low IQs. And then I get embarrassed because I realize I’m watching a show for stupid people.
As for the groping bit…well yeah, it was silly. But at least this character actually groped, and for quite a long time at that!
Anyone else get a very Legend of the Legendary Heroes feeling from this anime?
So you’re saying it’s a dumb move to tell the audience anything because this would mean that the series presumes that they are stupid persons who just don’t get it? Instead of that they should just let the audience keep guessing like everything is a sort of “whodunnit”-mystery-series? Hmm, I don’t think I would like every story to be a test of patience with a cake called story as a prize. Pacing should have more nuances than telling everything at once and nothing at all until the end. But pacing wasn’t the issue here anyway, the real problem was that the setting was explained in a rushed explanation in the last few minutes of the episode while the setting isn’t quite the disney-material it should’ve been if you plan to explain it in two minutes at the end of the first episode. And it’s quite difficult to see the connection between what happened before in the episode and what you learn from the explanation at the end of the first episode.
No, I’m saying that they should gradually introduce us to their world and the state of it when the situation calls for it. Right now there’s no need, we haven’t met the enemy, they haven’t fought. I’ve already made some guesses about their world and what happened.
I can’t stand the big lump sum of information they give you. Especially when most of it makes you want to claw out your own ears rather than listen to five minutes of it. Honestly the things they explain sometimes are just pointless or things that are already obvious to us. And it’s really great when generic harem action series do it. It’s like they’re explanation sessions were all written from the same mad lib.
I think we will get some bits of info here and there throughout this series. And that’s how it should be.
But I also wouldn’t be opposed to not getting any back-story or explanations. I think I could enjoy the series like that. And it would be a nice break from the usual, over explained, Shana clones.
But I know that’s not for everyone, some people might go crazy if every little detail of the plot isn’t explicitly explained to them in very small words. I personally don’t like to be treated like an elementary student.
Well I do believe I’ve missed something…I Don’t recall any explanation at the end?
DISREGARD EVERYTHING I’VE SAID!!!
If they’ve made some humdrum, half effort to explain things in the span of two minutes then they’re falling victim to the same problem all recent anime do. But I didn’t see that and will just act like it never happened, maybe I’ll be able to enjoy the series more this way.
For reference though explanation like Durara…ra? Is how things should be. Through the first few eps we had no idea why there was a smoke monster or why a man was strong enough to throw a vending machine at someone. But gradually things were revealed and started to make sense. Still though, you never felt lost, you were never going HUH???. You just sat back and let yourself be entertained without trying to analyze every splotch of color on the scree.
Ahh, how I miss those days! How many years has it been since we’ve had a proper awesome series like that? Now we get Infinite Stratos seven times over every season for 2 years straight. And what’s not that is just a pathetic K on clone…or K on clone SEASON 2.
This series would be better if it were a JRPG. The character design does resemble Star Ocean. The settings rings your traditional JRPG setting. The attacks is also fits in the game medium.
If it were a game, I would play this.
No! This first episode was awesome! You have these awesome characters BLOWING THINGS UP and EXPLOSIONS and SWORD BATTLES and MAGICAL LASER BROOMS and GIRLS WITH ARTIFICIAL EYES THAT CREATE MIKO SPIRITS THAT ENCHANT ARROWS SO THEY DON’T MISS and SHINTO MECHA DRAGONS and NINJAS WITH BLUSHING HATS and FAT DUDES THAT DON’T DO ANYTHING and wow it was so awesome
Seriously
no, not really
Um, your capitalization schemes are so funny, especially with apostrophe-t’s – I get that a fully capitalized sentence should be in small caps, but it sorta takes the point away from SHOUTING
Then again, you’re not supposed to SHOUT online or whatever.
how do I do this italics thing
One Trackback
[...] “To be fair to Horizon, it doesn’t appear to be taking its story seriously either…This is fine, I don’t mind this approach. But Horizon seemed to think that the only way it could show how non-seriously it was taking itself was by making pervy jokes. Please. Stop. It. Japan. Having a charachter say that they are going to grope another characters breasts is not funny. Please, for christ sake, can you stop this. ” – The Cart Driver [...]