Haiku summation:
Animation gets better,
The writing gets worse.
Live reaction audio and details after the cut.
So, this time we start with Skeletor
creating his spheres of destruction, only to cut to a plot about an
illicit Ex-Arm Auction that the police group is attending in order to
arrest criminals and acquire the Ex-Arms. Presumably. They don’t
really act like it. This isn’t Bond’s Casino Royale, guys, you
should have some more forces.
It turns out that Skeletor, who might
be Beta, is also the auctioneer, appearing by hologram to announce
the Ex-Arms up for bid (there are three, including the one he was
using earlier) and the rules of the auction: namely that, despite six
factions showing up, only three bidders will be allowed to
participate. Why did Skeletor kick off a survival game for his
auction? I honestly don’t know.
It might have something to do with the
fact that one of the prospective bidders, though a jpeg with a 3d
granddaughter both deep in organized crime, is working with our
government friends to seal the threat of the Ex-Arms, particularly
the claw of doom that is #11. However, the wormy guy from the
incident with the maid is also here, and inclined to build his own
power base and destroy the government-friendly organized crime
people. I’m not sure what his goals are supposed to be, but he does
bring with him an army of robotic (really robotic, with shiny chrome
bodies) cat girls to do battle with our heroes in the middle of a
street.
Of course, they were already fighting a
third party, a guy who looks like Deadpool who possesses some sort of
telekinetic Ex-Arm power. We get an action sequence that’s not quite
as bad as the one with the maid, but which is still a lame Matrix
ripoff, and that’s… basically the episode.
I honestly don’t know how Ex-Arm is
doing it. It seems like this show has less to say and less to do
with every passing episode. The animation is getting steadily more
competent. It’s still awful, especially where they blend the
heinously poor 2d animation with the incompetent 3d animation, but
the production obviously started with absolutely no experience and
has slowly gained it through working on each episode. They know more
than they did five episodes ago how to compose shots and keep things
moving, they just still have the unbelievably cheap assets and
MMD-tier rigging that they started with. I still think an
experienced hobbyist with MMD or Gmod could animate a show better
than this, but they’re rapidly approaching the level of fan content
typically delivered via YouTube without monetization.
That shouldn’t be a compliment. It’s a
bar so low (at least for professional productions; no insult meant to
the creative folks doing that Gmod/MMD content) that ants are having
fun trying to limbo under it, but Ex-Arm hasn’t been managing, so I
have to give some crumb of credit for the improvement.
The writing, though, as I’ve noted, is
the other way around. The first couple episodes were… cheesy, and
not notably well written, but they were fairly bog-standard in terms
of keeping the audience in the loop and the scenario consistent.
There was a basic threat-response framework, an acceptable premise,
and the seeds of what might have been a decent mystery. Now, it
doesn’t really feel like that any longer, we’re bouncing between
scenarios without a lot of rhyme or reason, and spending more time on
lame action than on making these elements land.