Good thing this aired early; it makes it easier to take it out of the running before the season truly gets underway.
I'm glad I had next to no expectations for this series, since thanks to that outlook I'm not disappointed in the least. Dating girls to save the world always did sound like a
dubious premise, something I've only ever seen pulled off satisfactorily in the likes of
The World God Only Knows, which, for some bizarre reason even I can't quite figure out, is one of the two weekly Shounen manga I still follow and am mostly happy with (the second is
Nisekoi, which I follow out of loyalty to Komi Naoshi, who really should stick to fantasy). However, any comparisons with the much better
TWGOK die out after the basic premise; to put it mildly,
Date A Live just isn't very good. Its animation is subpar (even below NicoNico standards), the characters are boring and one dimensional, and the humor falls flat. Not to mention that about five panty shots
in five minutes is stretching it, even for this type of series.
The idea is supposed to be that our protagonist,
Itsuka Shidou (
Shimazaki Nobunaga), must date girls known as Spirits, which are mysterious girls who cause catastrophes known as "spacequakes" when they arrive on Earth (from where, I've no clue). Unfortunately the plot isn't explained very well at all, and this whole set up doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I'd assume it would be easier to stop the Spirits from destroying everything if, you know, a team of
barely-dressed super girls wasn't assembled to kill them every time they showed up. After all, making a Spirit fall in love with Itsuka
after she's arrived on Earth won't stop the initial spacequake from happening, so why not just try and
talk to them? Not that I expect a series with a bipolar sister, a guy with a siscon, and an array of random fanservice characters to make sense right off the bat. It's just that it's not very entertaining regardless.
Then there's the execution. The series switches from ridiculous to drama too quickly for any real feeling to come through (if it's supposed to do so, anyway) and
none of the characters really carry any weight. There's nothing to make the characters sympathetic, and some, like the cutesy teacher and the high-pitched incestuous/tsundere imouto Kotori (
Taketatsu Ayana), are just plain annoying. If even just a little development was thrown in, perhaps the episode would have felt
less tedious to get through, but unfortunately that wasn't the case. All in all, there's not really much to say about this series, and unless the second episode manages to be absolutely superb, doubtful as it seems, I'm considering
Date A Live dropped from the season schedule.
N.B.: Thanks to Ivan for the caps, though next time I'll watch the episode before asking you to cap it.
Episode 1 Screencaps
ED 1
And yet...we get whole basket of this kind of show every season...mind boggling indeed.
ReplyDeleteThankfully there's so much mecha/sci-fi on the schedule this time around that I can afford to ignore all of these and still have enough series to cover. Otherwise I'd be more upset about it.
DeleteWatch this rock the sale chart lol....ahh...you never know what people like these days. Well, I'm gonna stop judging, we need more flowers and rainbows in this world.
DeleteI don't mind if people like it; there's some things I like and others don't, but in this case, I'm just not part of whatever opinion likes this. Hopefully those that do enjoy it.
DeleteI didnt like when, the genuis girl had to say "my parents were killed by a spacequake" o.e , i facedesked. So does resorting to violence actually help..? That is the question *-*
ReplyDeleteI... facedesked for most of this to be perfectly honest. I never even got to the second episode, not least because the rest of the season is superb and I have no time to facedesk all the time.
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