Up until now, when I’ve done Seasonal Selection series, I’ve chosen material that I have some interest in or that I think might be of some value. This season, I’m doing something different: Basically since the first trailer dropped, Ex-Arm has been a show people have been talking about, and not in any way good. It was pretty clear that there was going to be a lot of hate for the show, so I’ve decided to strap myself in for the wild ride and see if it’s worth the rage it got before even releasing and will likely continue to get as it runs.
Let’s get the first and most glaring
thing out of the way: the CGI in this is atrocious. I don’t like
complaining about “Bad CGI” because I know some people see ANY
CGI and shriek “Bad CGI”, but Ex-Arm here cannot be allowed to
stand. I’m honestly baffled as to how this got to to screen. Who
looked at the product I just watched in 2020 and said “Yeah, that
looks alright, I can put my name on it as a finished product”?
It’s that bad. I think it can best be likened to an early 2000’s PC
video game. You know, the point where companies could get surface
textures better than your PS2 polygons, but hadn’t really mastered
the art of movement? And actually, most of those fossilized video
games would look a good deal better than what Ex-Arm puts on screen
because at least they understood their limitations and knew how to
work with them, using actual effort.
Season 1 of RWBY is probably the best comparison for the animation and art style. But even then, I think RWBY S1 actually comes out ahead of Ex-Arm in terms of its cheap and cruddy CGI not being overwhelmingly distracting. Because, like early 3d video games, RWBY knew what it was doing. They may have had 32 cents and a half eaten cup ramen to fund the animation but they simplified or abstracted what they could and made sure to deliver where it was most important: the action, and especially the faces of the characters conveying their thoughts and emotions. It was a world populated mostly by black shadow blobs to cover for not having the ability to render crowds, but I’d take it over what Ex-Arm throws up.
So, let me go into detail on what
doesn’t work and how it doesn’t work. First of all, motion. There
are a lot of scenes where Ex-Arm flagrantly can’t animate more than
one motion. One character talks, and their mouth flaps, and they’re
animated for a moment, and as soon as they stop they freeze
perfectly, an unblinking flat image like time has stopped while
something else in the scene moves (like another character talking).
This is everywhere in the scenes that aren’t focused on fighting, and
it’s hellishly distracting. Even the opening, that shows us the
photonegative destruction of society, is almost entirely static,
failing to create even the illusion of motion.
This is embarrassing, but believe it or
not it actually isn’t the full extent of the problem. In action
scenes, the whole thing moves, but it still doesn’t move well.
Everything is stiff and awkward, in a way that really did remind me
of a video game. But in a video game, the basic motions are often
stiff because the programmer couldn’t predict what inputs would be
given. There’s no flow and no choreography, characters performing a
single attack or block animation at a time, because there at least
wasn’t any way to cover for all the potential lead-up and
follow-through scenarios. This is scripted media, it has no bloody
excuse. What’s more, and this is hard to believe, some elements get
even cheaper. If I showed you a still from one of the talking scenes
in Ex-Arm you might not think it was that bad; the poorly-synced
mouth flapping, dead expressions, and general lack of animation only
come across when the scene is (or should be) in motion, the character
models by in large don’t look quite that bad. They’re nothing
special, but they might be serviceable. One glance, though, at the
shipping crate arena with Fire.gif burning low-res in the background
like someone downloaded assets for a different (still crappy) product
and dropped them in the scene will tell you that this doesn’t belong
in a real studio’s release. If one guy put this together in his
basement as a tech demo I’d be impressed… actually, scratch that.
Yandere Simulator is put together basically by one guy and it looks
worlds better than this and pretty much always has. There really
isn’t any way, any time in history where this would be an acceptable
finished product.
And that, alone, probably kills the show as a show. It’s clear that this is kind of going to be an action show, and while pretty animation doesn’t necessarily translate to good action (Star Driver looked gorgeous but failed on choreography), you do at least have to have a baseline competence in motion in order to sell action. Given that the choreography is bad too, rife with zero-impact muzzle flashes and pointless slow-mo as though we should be wowed by the technique itself like it’s 1999 and we’re watching The Matrix for the first time, along with still having stiff and artificial motions… yeah, the action in this action show is going to suck, in addition to the generally egregiously terrible animation making the show hard to watch.
I’m honestly contemplating checking out
the manga this is based on, not because I think I’m going to like the
manga, but because I think no motion is liable to be worlds better
than the “animation” we’re getting.
But, if I did the “mic drop and walk
away” act here, it would be a dereliction of my duty as a reviewer.
I’m going to get through this mess, and along the way I’m going to
take a look at the story.
We open with a scene set in 2020 where
a man stands on top of a rooftop looking sinister, the world is
swallowed by a photonegative effect, and ominous lightning flashes
while a voice asks if he did this. After the intro song (with some
really terrible animation alongside) we cut to 2016, four years
before that mess, and meet our main character, Akira Natsume. He
seems to be an ordinary high school student, except with a deep
distaste for technology like cell phones, being made uncomfortable by
the machinery. Then, on exiting a convenience store and seeing a few
guys harassing a girl, he decides to intervene, stepping into the
street to do so and getting owned by a truck for his trouble.
Truck-san never fails.
That brings us to 2030, where we’re
immediately thrown into a fight between two girls and a horde of
armed thugs at the shipping container arena. Eventually, the girls
manage to grab the MacGuffin and escape the fighting onto a ship,
albeit one owned by the very people they were fighting.
On the ship, the girls consider what to
do, and end up activating their prize, an Ex-Arm, hoping the unknown
superweapon will be able to save them. Turns out it’s no superweapon
at all but a preserved human brain, the brain of none other than
Akira, who is quite disoriented finding his new situation. One of
the girls, an android named Alma, shares her visual feed so he can
communicate while the other, a human policewoman, does most of the
talking. Meanwhile, we’re rather spontaneously introduced to the
idea of the Ex-Arms, a series of unknown superweapons that grant
freaky powers. We see in both the briefing and shortly in play
Ex-Arm #008, a prosthetic arm that allows its bearer to selectively
phase through matter
008 soon arrives on scene, capturing
the cute police girl while (by her orders) Alma excapes with Akira,
taking him into some air ducts or such to hide. There, she plugs him
into the ship systems, saying he should be able to control the CCTV
cameras just like he did her visual feed earlier. Alma then leaves
Akira to go save the police girl, which seems fairly necessary seeing
as 008 has her tied up and is all ready to extract her organs for
sale. Because if you’re in one criminal business, might as well be
in all of them. Alma fights 008 for a bit, but then gets disabled
while Akira gets control of the ship, seeing through the cameras and
messing with all the systems to sow chaos. Alma visits him in weird
naked covered-by-light mindspace and explains the situation. Her
movement chip is damaged so she can’t move her own body, but if he
links up, he should be able to drive her just fine. After some
hesitation, Akira sees police girl in trouble and gets in the robot
to fight off 008.
After a lot of uninteresting punching,
with a decent interplay between Akira driving and Alma guiding him,
008’s weakness is exploited and exposited, meaning he’s captured, and
the other cops arrive on scene. A very basic dressing down is given
to Alma and police girl, and Akira is identified as an “Enemy of
humanity” which brings up a quick cut to the 2020 disaster from the
start.
All in all, not much is explained and
there are some constructive problems. For one, when we move to 2030,
we are thrown directly into the action with no context at all.
Spending five, maybe ten seconds on establishing shot where Alma and
Police Girl discuss their stake and objective, maybe even moving the
exposition about Ex-Arms up to there rather than randomly in the
middle of getting Akira situated, would have done a world of good.
Seeing the lady in a leotard beat up everybody doesn’t carry much
interest if you don’t have a good concept of who she is or why she’s
fighting.
Akira is also… kind of annoying. Now, it’s the first episode and he’s a fish out of water, so there’s some degree to which the annoyance is par for the course… but it’s still there, and needs to shape up quick. He’s not Daisuke “Please let me punch him” Doujima from Revisions, but he is still irritating even aside from the crappy animation leaving him frozen with a really stupid wide-eyed expression most of the time. Alma doesn’t seem like much of a character right now, but I get it, she’s an AI. Usually AIs need to be subtle characters with slow-burn growth like Lacia from Beatless to both feel robotic and have or gain personality, but Alma doesn’t have much of a hook right now and it doesn’t seem like the show would naturally focus much on what she’s like as a person even if it sets her up as having a ‘thing’ with our isolated brain lead. Police Girl is a little better, in that she at least has a personality right now, but if she keeps making justice speeches they’re going to get old. And the other writing is really paint-by-numbers and forgettable.
That said, at least the writing is just
paint-by-numbers and forgettable. It’s not good, but it does do
everything a first episode technically needs to do here, even if it
doesn’t do it well. As terrible as this thing is to look at the
story would have to be way better to drag the whole package out of
the Fail range, and we’ll see if it somehow gets there, but right now
I kind of get the feeling that the story alone is set up to be bog
standard at best. Time will tell if it stays in that bracket, gets
better, or Haruhi forbid gets worse.