It was bad enough that the animation, slowly improving though it is, should never have made it to the screen. Up until now, that was the worst thing; the rest of the show had been… lame at worst. Mostly serviceable when you take the art of cinema out of the equation. Now? It’s still the worst, but the writing isn’t doing it any favors. Reaction video and more after the cut.
So, the basic summary of this episode:
we start in high school, like it’s that one section of the last
episode of Evangelion. Eventually we learn that the entire high
school anime experience with all the cops from the future (cute
police girl as the childhood friend, Alma the mysterious transfer
student, and so on) is a simulation based on our main character’s
memories, which they’re using to somehow get to the important bits.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense and is shortly irrelevant because
something goes wrong and everyone still logged in is trapped until
our main character snaps out of it and remembers where and what he
really is.
They try to scheme a few ways to make
him face reality. First, they have him encounter an accident like
the one that got him in life, having noticed there aren’t normally
vehicles on the road in his world, but Truck-san flickers out of
existence before he can see it. We’re let in on the existence of a
crazy-eyed pink haired girl who’s said to be Ygg, the AI of the
supercomputer Yggdrasil, and likely responsible for the mess. The
characters are then confused and surprised that something like Ygg
exists in later scenes as she talks with the main character and
interrupts a plan to jar him out of memory-land with a novel
experience, something he’d have no information on in his brain. (Of
course, the one they pick is kissing a girl, which police girl is put
up to, only to be interrupted by Ygg rendering the boy unconscious,
acting weirdly romantically clingy, and teleporting everyone away to
fight werewolf monsters that are like RWBY’s Beowolves, but
overwhelmingly lame.
Through some really bad action
sequences and a visit from the ghost of big brother (to Police Girl,
no less, which she doesn’t question) MC get’s woken up, and on the
way remembers the existence of the dark claw-armed version of his
human self, which is apparently called Beta. The police crew reacts
like they knew who Beta was but not that he was involved in 2020.
Meanwhile, out at see, a skull-faced
figure with the same Ex-Arm device as Beta (so presumably Beta, now
with Skeletor’s head instead of the main character’s) tests out his
void-rift-causing power while the main character vows to himself to
defeat Beta. What is Beta really? What are its motivations? Not
explained, and never will be if the next episode connects to this one
as ‘well’ as this one did to the last.
All in all, it’s a mess. The animation
may be getting “better” in some ways, like the motions of the
characters (ESPECIALLY in their faces) becoming faintly more natural,
but in the saga of a kid playing with animation software without
reading the manual, every new discovery they make seems to be
accompanied by flagrant misuse, this time of after-images and
“creative” transition effects. And the writing for this episode
is horrible. It’s next to impossible to make heads or tails of who
knows what and who wants what throughout the episode, and they even
seem to contradict themselves on that at times, like about Ygg.
If there’s any consolation, it’s that
the voice actors are on point, particularly Police Girl managing to
give an impassioned “You’re a human and our friend and comrade so I
care about you” speech that actually shines through as believable
despite the horrid animation. I really feel sorry for that actress
(and the other voices who worked on this show) being attached to
Ex-Arm of all things. Somebody had to voice these lines, but no one
deserved to.