Aw dang, I reviewed the season/year’s big breakout hit. My review turned out roughly how you’d expect if you’ve been reading my weekly thoughts – I felt the show certainly had beautiful animation, occasionally had interesting moments outside of that, and was mostly just a kinda mediocre gag comedy/action thing. I guess it’s become traditional at this point for me to have lukewarm feelings on the year’s big action hit, from Attack on Titan through Kill la Kill up to One Punch Man, and I think that makes sense. Action shows care about action, and I personally think pretty much any show is lesser if it doesn’t provide you with characters or ideas worth caring about – but the sorts of scenes that result in those things aren’t necessarily the kind of scenes people who like action for its own sake want to see in their shows. Pure action shows will continue to come out and electrify the western fanbase, and I will continue to find them kinda mediocre. So it goes.
You can check out my full review at ANN, or… wait, nevermind, I don’t have any notes. So go over there!
Putting KlK, AoT and OPM on the same bag of “big action hit”. I really enjoyed the fresh take OPM had on it’s parody. I agree that the show tended more towards the action, mostly due to it’s highly refined animation to acquire viewers through eyecandy (just like KlK and AoT), but it was a far more interesting show than, say, Akame Ga Kill or similar cliché-infested action anime.
Giving credit to where it is due, I hope all anime aim for that freshness, instead of going back to the staleness that was the moe-blob decade.
We seem to see eye-to-eye on this one. I also pointed out how the comedy among the supporting cast is uninspired to say the least, and it was fairly uninteresting when they were focussed on (the penultimate episode being the biggest example of this). Regarding popular series, it certainly surpasses SAO, but it lacks the magnetic tension of Attack on Titan or the gothic individuality of Tokyo Ghoul. I hope My Hero Academia shall be more well balanced than this.
One Punch Man is on my list of things to watch in the near future, if only because I’m a sucker for beautiful animation (especially where action scenes are concerned). I really liked Kill La Kill though, I have a lot of respect for a series that can turn over-the-top action up to 11 while still maintaining a high standard of quality.
I wouldn’t say OPM is quite that good, mostly because Kill la Kill also had this crazy sense of unbounded creativity (the episode where they conquer the other schools which fight back with the most absurd of weapons is genius). But the fights in OPM are definitely even more spectacular than Kill la Kill’s budget could allow. And the show can really mix well the sense of whimsical and that of awesome.
But if we try to mix action with thoughtful verse, we get Medaka Box Abnormal.:)