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Jun 17, 2017
You've all heard about the horrors of video game movies: They're ludicrous messes of distorted, mismatched plot elements that show no respect for the source material. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is not necessarily limited to Western games. In Japan, prominent games are regularly made into anime series, and more often than not, they end up just as convoluted as their western equivalents. Devil May Cry, as most of you readers probably already know, is a fairly successful video game franchise developed by Japanese publisher Capcom. It was only a matter of time until someone decided to make an anime out of it. Well, nothing can possibly
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go wrong here, can it?
The anime series in question is Devil May Cry: The Animated Series. It follows the misadventures of Dante, a tall, half-demon man that fights other demons with automatic pistols and a nine-foot-long sword. There are other characters, too, but none of them are particularly interesting, nor do any of them stand out as unique or dynamic. Dante is the owner of "Devil May Cry," a business that investigates demons... or something. That's about as far as the plot gets before it decides to throw storytelling out the window. Who are these demons? Why are they attacking? What do they want? Why is Dante hunting them? Well, the writers didn't seem to think any of these questions were very important, because they didn't bother to answer them. I guess they couldn't cut a few minutes out of the fight scenes to make room.
Oh yes, the fight scenes. So very many mindless fight scenes, complete with copious levels of gore. Let me put it this way: The title for this show would probably be more accurate if it were "Dante Stabs Demons in the Face." Now, don't get me wrong, I like fight scenes, and I can see why an anime based on an action game would want to have a lot of fight scenes. But when the fight scenes preclude any form of storytelling, as they do in Devil May Cry, then I can't see the justification in making an anime series at all. The only story elements that are given any time are those that set up the given episode's action sequences. Anything else is apparently not worth the time - including things like, say, concluding the episode.
For example, in the first episode, Dante is tasked with guarding a young girl named Patty, who is apparently the illegitimate heir of a local rich man who just passed away. Okay, that's simple enough. Then, as the climax of the episode draws near, another woman shows up at the man's mansion to claim the inheritance, claiming that she is actually the heir and the girl was a decoy. Except she's in her twenties and the man (presumably) wasn't that old. So who's the real heir? The "epic" fight scene of the episode ensues, but in the aftermath, the issue is promptly dropped without any explanation. To boot, the woman who claimed she was the real heir asks to help take care of Patty, completely out of the blue. What's the history behind these two characters? No matter, the credits abruptly roll, and then we never see her again. Thanks, Devil May Cry, I guess concluding your own stories isn't important after all.
I do have to give credit where credit is due, though. Despite all of its many faults, Devil May Cry is very well animated. The fight scenes and action sequences, countless as they are, are all fluidly animated. The backgrounds are crisp and clear, and provide a good contrast to the characters that inhabit them. Devil May Cry just looks good, and if there's one thing I can say about the series as a whole, it's that it definitely had a big budget.
But at the same time, when you realize the work that went into this show, it's distressing that the writing managed to come out so badly. Did they just hire a hundred animators and one writer? Didn't anyone see a problem with leaving entire episodes' worth of story hanging without any sort of conclusion? Perhaps it's better not to analyze it so closely; no matter how much you pick apart and examine a train wreck, it's still a train wreck.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Jun 2, 2017
To say that “Your Name” is visually striking would be a giant understatement. Shinkai and his team have both an eye for detail and a poetic vision. The settings of “Your Name” somehow feel both lived-in and magical at the same time. Whether it’s the train system in Tokyo, its gorgeous skyscrapers touching the sky, a never-ending horizon in Itomori, or even just a series of streets on a mountainside, “Your Name” is one of those animated films in which one could pick any still frame from it and hang it on their wall. Despite the gorgeous visuals, the story falls flat on its face.
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The story continues to stumble over and over due to the lack of any explanation and character development. There was never a point in time while watching this movie where I wasn't confused. Your Name just throws out ideas and just rolls with them without much thought put into it and no matter how much you think about it it will never make sense. One example of this is when the two main characters suddenly forget about the other's existence even though the cause of this has nothing to do with their memories. The romance is shoehorned in, even though neither of the characters have actually even met they fall in love over the fact they took over each other's body. I feel if this were a series rather than a movie they would to flesh out and explain a lot more. It is still a good movie, don't get me wrong, but the story feels rushed and imcomplete.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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May 2, 2017
Here we go again. I'm going to make this review quick because I have already reviewed the manga. The first two arcs were amazing with an interesting story, memorable characters, and great fight scenes. However, shortly after the Soul Society Arc, Bleach saw a rapid decline in quality. Gone was the creativity of the first arcs. We're left with a sloppily written story, characters that no longer develop, and art so lazily drawn there aren't even backgrounds anymore. And it only gets worse from there. The Fullbringer and the 1,000 Year Blood War arcs were both a complete mess. The Fullbringer Arc is uninteresting and
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rushed. In the 1,000 Year Blood War arc, almost every fight is won using a plot device and the pacing is all over the place you can barely keep up, especially when it comes to the ending.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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May 2, 2017
I don’t think anybody really thought for even a second that Chaos Dragon was actually going to be good when they saw the team attached to the project. The plot is pretty simple to explain, but that’s actually its biggest problem. It’s so simple that Chaos Dragon tries to distract us from that fact by over complicating everything to the point that we have nothing to focus on, and when you do, you’re too embarrassed to spell it out for the audience. There’s this red dragon guarding this generic fantasy land who has gone mad, and the only one who can stop him is this
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royal boy who can use the dragon’s power at the cost of a beloved one’s life. He gathers a crew of RPG rejects and goes on a journey to hunt the dragon whilst trying not to use his power. And…that’s it. That’s literally all there is to the story with no attempt to spice it up whatsoever, unless you count the boy’s obsession with certain females that are so creepily handled I’d rather not dwell on them. Well, that’s not entirely true. Fucking up even the most basic things is kind of a spice in that it takes a specific kind of talent to do that. I know Silver Link animation is never good, but even by those standards, Chaos Dragon looks like ass. The character designs look like something you’d find in the trash bin of a fetish shop, the action is incoherent and poorly choreographed, and…well…the visuals look like ass. When your all-powerful red dragon is basically a CG monstrosity that would fit right in with a Passione anime or the miniseries adaptation of The Langoliers, you know something has gone wrong. When you have every other visual disaster share the same screen, I speak no hyperbole when I say that watching RWBY would be less taxing on the eyes. And it’s not like the writing helps, considering it’s as fucking standard a fantasy quest as you can get, except with most of the dialogue consisting of boring exposition dump after exposition dump. Chaos Dragon is not, and I can’t stress this enough, NOT the least bit memorable in its badness at all. Very little actually happens in the show, and whatever does happen is buried under so much bullshit. I know some people got enjoyment out of pretending that Urobuchi’s character likes to grab people’s boobs, but I wouldn’t even know which character he’d written if I didn’t look it up on Wikipedia. And any anime that requires outside knowledge you couldn’t possibly get from the show proper to understand seriously needs to go into the corner and think about what it’s done. So in case you didn’t understand all that, no I don’t recommend Chaos Dragon at all. In fact, it’s one of the few anime where I’d go so far as to say you’re wrong for liking it, which is no mean feat given how little I care for what the fanbase thinks. It’d at least be better than that shitty Arslan adaptation if it wasn’t for its utter disinterest in trying to entertain people, which makes me wonder, why was anyone even interested in making a public spectacle out of the D&D games that certain industry people do in their spare time anyways? How exactly is that sort of thing appealing to anyone not within the circle? Might as well introduce the Yu-Gi-Oh card game to the homeless while you’re at it. Chances are one of them has an interest in foreign card games that he can use to win big and get out of his sorry state.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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May 1, 2017
Those of you who have been anime fans for a while probably know that Garzey's Wing is one of the most reviled, known-to-be-awful anime titles of all time, and, quite frankly, I don't intend to change that opinion. I think that, if you need a reason to watch Garzey's Wing, that's gonna have to be your reason going into it. But you have to be ready for it, because even preparing yourself mentally might not be enough. And that's because Garzey's Wing is so unrepentantly terrible. In fact, the dub will immediately let you in on what you're in for. I've had my shares of
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bad dubs up through the ages, most of which usually make me switch to Japanese. Not so with Garzey's Wing, though. The dub is so utterly wooden, most of the characters sound like they've never set foot in a dubbing studio before, only starring in this OAV because they're literally forced to at gunpoint. "You are so easygoing", the female love interest chides as our hero drives off on his motorcycle to attend a class reunion pool party. "My necklace is rattling. I wonder, could it be the shiratori shrine?" Chris muses as he drives by during the night. "This must be where Yamato-Takeru-no-Mikoto came down from the sky." And the exposition goes on and on and on. It humorously reminds me of what Carlos said about the dialogue in his Escaflowne movie review, where people would uncharacteristically throw monologues about the land, the mythology or the people to aid those who walk into this OVA not knowing what the hell is going on. And it's not helping. The dialogue only serves to make the video feed redundant, but doesn't really do a whole lot making things clear. Fellow reviewer Jason Huff was the one who made me aware that Garzey's Wing is actually related to another show called Aura Battler Dunbine, which only serves to bring even more questions into the equation. Would I understand this show better if I had watched Aura Battler Dunbine? Or would that only make this one worse by comparison. Would switching to Japanese help? Somehow, I doubt that. If there's one positive thing that can be gleaned from this, then the show is at least visually interesting. Character designs are actually pretty good for the most part, and the backgrounds are also nice. If you've seen screenshots from Garzey's Wing, you might actually wonder why people complain about it. The animation is just terrible, though. I know I complained about the animation in Record of Lodoss War, but Garzey's Wing has animation more on the level of Crying Freeman. Hell, Garzey's Wing might actually beat said show when it comes to animation cel pans. The story plays out like a fairly typical fantasy story. Our main hero is summoned to an alien world, and has to save an enslaved race of people from their oppressors. The angles, if you can call them that, is that Chris is apparently separated into two identical entities through the summoning, and the two of... him... can communicate with each other through... well, interdimensional telepathy, I guess. Garzey's Wing sounds fine... on paper. And that's kind of the problem, because the execution is just terrible. It's almost like Amon Saga; Chris might have more of a personality compared to Amon, but both stories are hilarious, confusing messes with vaguely impressive fantasy elements and terrible, Zero Wing level dialogue. For instance, the first hurdle you'll face is exposition that doesn't teach you anything. Mostly, it's namedropping, and you're left asking "What the hell is a Gabujuju?" "What the hell is a Bunzudo?" "What the hell is Gabygas, and is that related to the Gabujuju?", but more importantly: "Why are all these names so darn goofy?!" And Jesus Christ, the aforementioned terrible dub just makes the whole thing so much more difficult to digest, which is only made worse by the many ways this show doesn't make any damn sense. For instance, what's the importance of the leap year? Who are all these people, and what's their history? Why are all of Chris's friends in the present time taking everything that goes on at face value? It would help to know these things, but Garzey's Wing just throws its main protagonist straight into the whole thing, and I swear; he goes through most of the whole show sounding as confused as I was when I watched it. There was also the whole subplot thing centered around Falan, the small fairy-like girl of a race called Fellarian, and for some reason, they're ostracised in Byston Well for largely unexplained reasons. Seriously, Garzey's Wing proceeds to literally smash us over the head with it somewhere in the middle of its runtime. Apparently, they're a race not to be trusted, at least according to the Bystonians. But, if this show is anything to go by, they have a strong sense of community, and Falan herself is quite loyal to Chris, even if more by necessity than desire. She might be annoying at times, but she's hardly malevolent. The show proceeds to give a half-baked explanation to this; that Falan was pulled with Chris, and that somehow purified her in the process. The rest of them just curse and mess with people according to the priestesses, which sounds more like an excuse. And so -- I write, sighing heavily -- she's also one of the more developed characters in this show. Which isn't saying a lot, granted, but her basic personality means she actually has one compared to the hundreds of nobodies running around. Even the villains are almost comically villainous, all going "We enslave them all and force them to do our bidding, and they rebel against us? The nerve of them all. I will make them pay." Unfortunately, the only other Yoshiyuki Tomino show I've seen is the almost equally infamous Ideon. Not being a mecha fan, I haven't really experienced the man at his best, and as much as could be said about Ideon, it doesn't reach the level of absurdity and sheer badness of Garzey's Wing. The maddening thing is that Garzey's Wing is so terrible, so bizarre, that it will influence how you look at other fantasy shows. It's more or less like certain scenes in the Lord of the Rings movies once you've seen a certain remixed song -- they bleed through and lessen the impact of said scenes, inspiring humorous smirks instead of grim pursing of lips. And much as I love watching a really bad show, Garzey's Wing does things to me. Bad, bad things. Things that may never heal properly. How do you outdo a show in being terrible? By being a terrible show made by someone who really should be able to do a whole lot better, that's how.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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May 1, 2017
The end of the world has never looked so stupid. First off, with a nineteen minute runtime, you don't have a lot of time to develop the characters. However, Skelter Heaven doesn't even bother introducing them properly, instead, flashing character names and bios with still shots during the opening sequence, which, incidentally, features "Naked Heart", possibly the worst theme song ever recorded by Minori Chihara. And, no, it doesn't get better. Any google image search could tell you that I'm not exaggerating an iota about the badly animated CGI giant squid. Now we all understand that Japan has a long-held obsession with tentacles, but that
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doesn't automatically make them a compelling, or remotely scary antagonistic force. So when the tentacles start flailing around and slapping around the good guys (generally fatally), it looks less like unstoppable evil, and more like these characters are too stupid to just get out of the damn way. What's even funnier is that the girls' mecha are, in at least one synopsis, apparently referred to as "Battle Soles", which prompts me to ask which member of the staff has a foot fetish. It doesn't particularly help that the CGI is so badly textured that it looks to all the world like Japan is being assaulted and/or defended by enormous vinyl figurines. Not that the 2D is much better - it's purely perfunctory at best, and both the openings and endings, normally the home of your best sequences, are essentially character art slideshows. What's even more hilarious is the anticlimactic ending, where the lead girl Rin, is able to essentially talk the giant squid into self-destructing into squid paste, only for something like a zillion of them to show up a year later, with no hero team in sight. The sad thing is that this isn't even particularly fun to mock. Even at nineteen minutes it's a chore to watch, and you could probably fast-forward through half of it, or watch it with French or Polish or Swahili or Tocharian B subtitles and still pretty much end up with exactly the same result. You couldn't find more buncombe in North Carolina and they've got a whole county of it. Skelter Heaven was clearly intended as a promotional tool for the original work, which apparently features the main male character (who looks identical to the protagonist of Sakura Taisen) dating the five-girl hero team and shacking up with one of them depending on affection levels and, ostensibly, whether or not they were able to dodge those giant squid tentacles. And thanks to this anime, I find I've never been less interested in a video game in my entire life, which means this title has succeeding in doing the complete opposite of its intended purpose. But that should've all been expected, because these are the same people who would bring us the equally embarrassing Mars of Destruction just a year after this one. Skelter's writer, Yoshiaki Sato, would go on to direct that piece of shit. About the best thing that can be said for Skelter Heaven is that I got a fair number of laughs out of it; unfortunately it's not a comedy, but one of the greatest accidental tragedies of modern anime. All Skelter, no Heaven. This is an abject failure of an anime that deserves every bit of its embarrassing reputation.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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May 1, 2017
The story of Corpse Party is about a group of High School Students conducting a ritual in their abandoned school. Right off the bat you’ll know how bad this title is – lightning strikes constantly in spooky-wooky way and the amount of ridiculous dutch angles makes you wonder if they were even intentional, or the person in charge of the camera was just drunk or falling asleep from boredom. It doesn’t take long for our lovable retards and their overly moe teacher to fall into the alternate world filled with blood, corpses, blood, despair, blood, loneliness, blood, violence, blood, ghosts, blood and most importantly, mystery
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blood. If you’re getting Silent Hill 1 vibes at this point, you’re more or less right. Just like in SH 1 we get a young girl responsible for everything and school full of tormented souls. The only difference is that in SH, the school was just one of the locations and, most importantly, the Japanese Team Silent wanted to scare you with sex and violence without showing you these thnigs. they were hinted, but never shown in your face. Here… not so much. The anime definitely feels like it’s being written by a complete sadist who considers Higurashi no Naku Koro ni a way of life and masturbates with a vice. Without any reasons, the protagonist and her friend start talking about lubricant to make their asses shiny then share a yuri moment together, only for the friend character to leave our heroine alone to get her part of a torn paper doll used as a catalyst of the ritual. What follows is a mix of a panty shot, tentacle rape and soon after, gore. I know that the tradition of horror films is to make the cast dumber than they already are in order for the interesting things to happen, but Corpse Party ruins everything with moe heroines. While it is explained that the windows cannot break in this world, before it happens, our heroines don’t even think of using one of the many boxes or tables to break these. They’re squeaky, super delicate and hopeless while facing the hostile ghosts. It goes even further, though. The author thought of adding a loli character as well… Of course, there are male characters here too. They are bland, stupid and get less screen time than the girls. One of them actually does bring his little sister along. It doesn’t take much time for a gripping subplot involving her having to take a pee start. Instead of letting the brat urinate int he corner of the destroyed bathroom, her brother decides to drag her around the corpse-filled school, then leaves her without a second thought to a creepy little girl, promises that he’ll wait, leaves this place and you can guess what happens next.At this point, I was hoping that the author at least will have some dignity to not show us the loli urinating all over herself. Unfortunately, he went further. She urinates herself, takes off her panties, so we can get a close look at those (and for Otaku to start sniffing the screen) and stating that she’ll go on without these. You know, Japan… These are the situations where I really hate this country. Cultural differences aside, such scenes are simply distasteful. They’re not here to portray anything, they don’t contain shock value or development, they’re just here to appeal to a really horrible group of anime fans. and because it’s in title containing so much cruelty already, I can say that Corpse Party may be my contender for the worst anime of this year, just because of how insulting it is and people actually charged money for it. Even Silent Hill: Downpour, the game that doesn’t make sense at all, does put urine in a better use, by mentioning how the warden in prison the protagonist was in got framed by another corrupted warden and beaten up to the point he was mentally retarded. And even then it was simply a verbal mentioning. This anime is simply unpleasant to look at. At first, I was laughing out loud at how overused the lightning and dutch angles are. However, starting from the third episode, the anime decides to focus on boring expositions and repetitive torture scenes. And even if you can't bear the sight of an eye gouged out, no worries, this anime makes you not care about it. Especially after showing such scenes about 15 times. Same goes to tongues being cut off, these are the two gore scenes you’ll see the most – tongues and eyes. I’m not asking for variety, but every time you’ll throw a gore scene at the viewer, complete with loud shrieking, you better do your best at shocking, not boring. Remember the scene in Texas Chainsaw Massacre where the heroine gets tied up to the chair and forced to eat corpse along with the demented family? This scene had much less gore and more shock value by simply using a visual filter and camera angles to portray hysteric terror of a character. And what do we get? Tongues, eyes, tongues, blood, and vomit. There’s no build up, no tension. Simply because the violence is overused to the point you don’t care. And that actually stopped being funny to me. Instead you’re forced to sit through a marathon of the girls getting violated. The anime also plays a lot of stupid cliches like the characters always spreading up instead of sticking together, or one of the guys going crazy tot he point he starts killing others. Everything just for the sake of more violence. From what I know, Corpse Party was supposed to be an adventure game with the emphasis on the atmosphere. Here, the two episodes contain more guts than a single story arc of Higurashi, which, to its credit, at least padded it out with some decent build up. The animation in this OVA is poor, to say at least. While I do appreciate the lack of censorship, which is a cheap way of selling people more DVD/BD copies, the actual quality of the animation is average at most. The characters look simple, like in most modern titles, the lip synching is off at few parts and some moments just look awkward. It’s like they wanted to make their violence stand out, and even this doesn’t look as good as in the old OVAs. As far as the sounds go, it’s really bad. While the male voices are passable, all females sound overly cute with obnoxious squeaky tone, no matter if it’s loli or a teacher. The music is a mix of ambience and piano, filled with depressing sounds working perfectly with the overall mood of this pathethic excuse of a horror. If you want a good guide how to not scare your three month old child, Corpse Party is literally a textbook case here. The spooky sounds straight out of bad horror flicks are just laughable. Even the non-horror films, like Pi, had a better usage of sound during more intense moments. Hell, this movie alone is much more involving than Corpse Party, being made with little money, but huge effort.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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Apr 16, 2017
Girls Bravo is a prime example of what not to do while making an ecchi anime. It starts off with a very stupid premise that a boy who's allergic to girls falls into a bath and is teleported to a world with only girls. This is never explained and is hardly ever brought up. At one point, they don't even bother coming up with situations for each episode. All the characters are extremely annoying. Kirie is only there to beat up the wimpy main character Yukinari when one of the brainless generic girls, usually Miharu, finds any nonsensical way possible to "accidentally" get naked in
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front of him. if something embarrassing happens between Yukinari and Miharu, expect Kimie to walk in on them every single god damn time. Mind you, these are childhood friends and at one point, Kirie actually kicks Yukinari's head, making his head slam into the edge of the bathtub so hard, he starts bleeding profusely. What does it take for him to say "get the hell out of my house, and never return"? And that was just the first episode. Later episodes presented us with such wonderful paragons of humanity, like Fukuyama Kazuharu -- a mix between Kuno Tatewaki and Nanbara Kotaro with all the charm and fun removed, and also the only person who deserves all the violence directed at him -- and Fukuyama Risa -- because every romantic comedy needs a psychotic suitor that decides the main loser should be her boyfriend through completely insane reasons. The animation and soundtrack are both mediocre. Girls Bravo doesn't attempt to be anything but really cringey masturbation material.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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Apr 14, 2017
Berserk is one of the best long-running manga of all time. Its story is very interesting and its characters are are unique. Although the Golden Age Arc is a little too slow as it is supposed to be only a prologue but still keeps you engaged nonetheless. The plot is full of unpredictable twists and you really start to feel the struggle the characters are going through. The artwork is highly detailed and only gets better as the series goes on. One of my biggest gripes I had with the series is that it sometimes tries too hard to shock the audience with its uncomfortable
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situations such as demons raping characters (yes you read that correctly), torture, etc. Needless to say, this manga is not for everyone. If you're one of those people who can't handle seeing gore you might want to stay away from Berserk because it does not hold back.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Apr 14, 2017
Mars of Destruction is easily one of the worst anime I have ever seen in my life. The animation and direction is fucking abismal. A character's head gets shot off and all the blood starts shooting out as if all her blood rushed straight to her head, never mind the fact that her friends don't have any reaction to it. All the characters apparently lack the ability to think. For example, they take the girl whose head was shot off to the hospital as if it wasn't obvious that she was dead. The voice acting is fucking horrible and the script feels like it was
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written by a child. The plot is impossible to follow as nothing is ever explained and you're left confused trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. It is also horribly inconsistent. For example, bullets shot in point blank range have no effect but by the end of the OVA, they suddenly work like a charm. Mars of Destruction is horrible on a level not thought possible before and is downright painful to watch.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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