New season are exciting, no? I like to go in without knowing too much about shows, unless of course I’ve read its source material. But as shows started getting released my hopes started sinking, for whatever reason the earlier shows this season were rather weak as a whole. But things kicked in a little later and I’m happy to say the winter season is by no means a flop.
Apparently the formula to the boom and bust of shows getting simulcast is much simpler than I first assumed. Since the Winter and Summer seasons are considered the lesser seasons these shows are cheaper to license so we see far more shows being picked up for simulcast as opposed to the two main broadcast seasons. Now that I know the magical equation for licensing I will reiterate out standard season preview rules. First and foremost we do not watch every show that comes out. We here at Reverse Thieves maintain our sanity and prevent burn out by skipping any show that seems absolutely retched although we on occasion take a risk and will sample something that is probably dire but might have a faint hope of being entertaining. The second is that we don’t review sequels and continuations as you usually know exactly what you were going to get from the earlier iteration. There is one very special exception to that rule this year. We will not be looking at Gosick in this guide because we are going to do episode reviews of the anime every Tuesday. This is hardly our transformation from an editorial blog to an episodic blog but we figured it would be fun to try. (Also this lays the ground work for me to episode blog the Fate/Zero anime when it comes out.)
I’m living in the kernel of a rank-one map
From my domain, its image looks so blue,
‘Cause all I see are zeroes, it’s a cruel trap
But we’re a finite simple group of order two
– Finite Simple Group (of Order Two) by The Klein Four
As a Noitamina show, you can always go in with decent expectations. And the way the director was talking about it, there was no way to go in with anything less than high hopes. Luckily, the first episode was incredibly charming with its family show feeling. Clain’s adventure starts when seeing a beautiful girl being chased, he subsequently helps to hide her. She ends up leaving an amulet with him that contains lost technology. Everyone has already made the Ghibli comparisons but I’ll add that the beginning indeed felt like Laputa. I found myself both thrown off and intrigued by the setting, there is future technology, current world technology, and steampunk technology all set in what looks like the European countryside where small markets and normal looking cars are used. There are also priestesses. Where will this giant mishmash go is what I’m looking forward to most.
There are some pretty high expectations for this show considering how many big names are working on it and how much hype this show has gotten. So far I can’t say the show has lived up to those high hopes but I think it has the potential to do so. The world is interesting and has a very odd feeling of being super advanced but somewhat retro at the same time (with the main character collecting old technology reinforcing this idea.) The interplay between Clain and Phryne was fairly amusing although they both seem to have an odd mood swings at points. At the same time the villains distinctly have the feel of the Dorombo Gang from Yatterman. The plot still seems to be as of yet unrevealed so I am reversing judgment of how much you need to watch this but there is nothing that says you should not give this a chance. It has potential to go either way but if it succeeds it might be wonderful.
Reverse Thieves 