Series in one sentence:
Boy with no parents and no explanation to why he does the things he does does things.
Series in more sentences:
A
new continent with strange plants and wildlife has suddenly appeared on
Earth. While humanity tries to make the land their own, many fall
victim to its ruthlessness and are in need of specially trained people
to rescue them.
One of these people is a boy with the rare power
of creating anything he wants.
It could've been a good show, it had a few interesting things to show and tell, but it was lacking.
The episodes were like Pokémon in the sense the main characters meets new people every time and immediately befriend them, or talks to them as if they're good acquaintances. I never really liked that in TV-shows. Relationships take time.
The climax of the show was a drag and had nothing to do with the continent Magmell, and the whole ordeal ended without the audience having learned anything about the main guy. Why was his assistant more important to devote the last 3 episodes to?
If there's a season 2 planned, I'm not watching. Won't be checking out the manga for answers, either. I just don't care enough.
Series in one sentence:
Alternate realities show that anyone can be a harmless friend or a psychopath.
Series in more sentences:
A secluded town with a dubious history holds many secrets, mostly covered up or explained with their belief in their god. A group of friends have to deal with their personal problems on top of that and there are countless of alternate realities where these play a crucial role.
Interesting setup with little explanation to why this "time reset" keeps happening or why every setup focuses on a way different story.
The basics are always the same: the same people visit town, the same people befriend each other, the same people die at the upcoming festival, but the role of evil psychopath is often switched around. Some of the later episodes connect themselves to earlier ones, so those weren't alternate realities, just a different view. I really liked that as well.
The series sounds like a clutterglutter, but I had alot of fun watching. If I ever get around to it, I'll check out the other seasons/instalments. This one is a "good" for me.
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9-7-2021 UPDATE
When They Cry: Kai
Season 2, finally checked it and the following seasons out, here's my view on it.
Concerning
this season, the first handful of episodes were a chore to sit through.
Episode 1 was just a barrage of repetitive talking, and afterwards, the
plot progression got ruined by filler scenes where the characters acted
overly happy and quirky with each other. It was pretty annoying.
Their
playful banter was so boring to sit through at times, I had to skip
these scenes. I get it, you're super close friends, chill out, just give
me the real story.
When the show got to the point, I was
enjoying myself, though I can't say why the beginning was set so heavily
on the abusive uncle storyline, out of all things, or why it took 100
years of getting reborn for Rika to attempt some real measures to
change her own death. That feels very late. To have not figured out in
all those years that the possibility exists her allies might be enemies
was also weird. You can casually try to call the police, but why carry a
shocked face when those people don't show up?
The main story is
put to a halt in the second half of the season and instead takes a look
in the past of the recently revealed main villain and some of the events
that led to the show's present time. I see what the series tried to do
with her, but I was not emotionally invested in the slightest. All her
hardships were pretty overdramatic and it really didn't need this many
episodes to tell her story.
The other events weren't that exciting to
sit through, either, but I guess they were important in the sense it
answered some loose ends. Don't know how Rika can sit there and watch it
all happen again, since last time she reincarnated she clearly stated
her time was shortening and she only to had 2 weeks left, but perhaps
this is a 4th wall narration of a flashback? Don't know how else to
describe it.
The end battle was fun, but I'm surprised these kids
took the non-lethal Home Alone route and didn't just brutally kill
everyone. Not because it felt out-of-character for them as kids, but it
did feel out-of-character for When They Cry.
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When They Cry: Rei
In other words, season 3, here we goooooooooooo.
Ridiculous
start. Episode 1 was this confusing filler ghost story shit and you
might as well skip it, it'll just leave you confused.
It
supposedly follows up after last season's victory, but then, why is the
mentally insane villain chilling out with them? Is it because Rika went
back in time to meddle with her past by letting her join her parents on
the bus, as shown in last season's end credits? Wasn't that supposed to
mean her death? An older Rika approached her with the offer to live or
die, and without running away crying over getting threatened by a
stranger, this little girl joined her parents, you see them on the bus,
the driver gets a heart attack, but then you see her stash away a
miniature flag from a meal she supposedly got that day. I first assumed
it represented afterlife happiness, as we're not shown how/if everyone
survived the bus crash, but I guess it was real?
But even if
the villain survived, how did she and the doctor character end up
meeting the main cast again to act cute with them at a swimming pool?
The sole reason they got stationed in their town was because of the
villain's bad past and drive to investigate its local disease. Are we
supposed to ignore the credit scene and assume this villain received no
punishment for her crimes and everyone forgave her? I'm really confused,
and the writers seem confused as well.
But alright, episode 2
knows what the audience wants and introduces a pretty interesting
conflict, though I'm not sure why Rika cares. She's in an objectively
better world, where the once dead and suffering are now walking around
in peace, yet here she is, entertaining the prospect of killing her own
parents if it means returning to the previous world. Ridiculous.
Rika
should've just settled with this world and put all that effort in
re-establishing the friendships she's lost. Or not. What does it matter.
Go make new friends. And the show itself brings this up, yet there are
no scenes of Rika actually putting in the effort of befriending anyone.
Instead, she kills her mother off-screen and returns to her old world
with her heavily traumatized friends, and the show/characters act like
that's a good choice. I'm not blind for the message they tried to
convey, but I simply don't think that going back to an inferior, yet
familiar world warrants killing a person.
But here's the fun part
about all this; it's just a troll. Rika is being stalked by a deity,
who made her dream all this, just for teh lulz. Or well, she claims it
was to make her re-appreciate her parents, because apparently, she
actively tried to hate them as not to feel sad about their death..
alright then?
And I say "fuck you to that logic". Hasn't this girl
suffered enough? What the Hell is this goddess' deal. After 100 years of
struggling, everything was going fine for Rika, and then randomly out
of nowhere, she's forced to go through a staged setting that has her
believe there's a chance of losing her old friends and killing her
mother is the only way back. That's sick.
The last episode of
this already short series is the same Looney Tunes shit as in episode 1,
no point in watching it, and since the conflict ended up being fake as
well, I'd say you might as well skip the entire season.
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Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kira
Hardly a season, rather a short spin-off series.
Firstly,
it has a very inappropriately happy intro. It made me worry that it was
going to stray away even further from the intriguing horror genre When They Cry once started with.
And..
I was right. Episode 1 is again this Looney Tunes shit, which includes
the involvement of that weird "Soul Brother" group that really came out
of nowhere. Keiichi doesn't have a particularly close relationship with any of the men in that "group", why was this made a thing?
Anyway,
the majority of the episode is about these shameless pedophiles
fantasizing about the girl cast, I had no patience for it, but by
skipping to the end, an interesting idea was being brought up.
I
didn't care for the new disease that was being shoehorned into the
story, but if every one of those stupid out-of-place episodes is in
actuality Keiichi's delusion.. that would still not make me like those
episodes, but they'd have a place in the series.
In episode 2,
all the scary elements from season 1 are turned into jokey gimmicks and
Rika is a magical girl, again stuck in a weird parallel universe, but
this time she's not stressing out about it for some reason, fucking
grand.
Did they steal a bunch of lazy fanfictions from the internet for this season or something?
Episode
3 was a breath of fresh air, there were no openly supernatural
occurrences inserted here for the sake of comedy, but 4 was a drag, I
just couldn't care.
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Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kaku: Outbreak
Not a season, a short movie/OVA.
An
average pandemic story with a slow start, yet it's a rushed case of no
show and all tell. But after all those horrible seasons I've sat
through, this one at least went back to its roots.
It apparently
plays off in another alternate universe, I really have no idea how it
fits in the main story where Rika's death has been the end game every
time, but if the creators don't care anymore, I won't either. Apparently
she's not a queen carrier in this reality either, since the characters
are able to leave town without the original Hinamizawa disease
activating.
The ending is pretty open, not sure what to think of
it or all else that happened prior. It left me with no strong feelings,
though there were some cool scenes here and there.
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Higurashi: When They Cry – Gou
A
very recent sequel that revisits and combines some of the original
show's episodes, and gives them a new ending. Halfway through, it
introduces a new story that more clearly explains why we're getting all
this deja vu.
I hated the idea pushed upon Rika that she should
stay and appreciate a town that killed and held her hostage for the
entirety of a human life. She deserves to see the outside world, she
didn't ask to be this revered person or reincarnation of a god.
I did
like the twist, and that it gave a better explanation to how the
original villain might've earned herself redemption, though I still
believe she was too leisurely added in the later seasons of the original
series. If we have to believe that's canon, then nothing has been
really fixed in that department.
I think the writing and delivery in
some parts are better here than in the original series, though whenever
Hanyuu "explained" something, I pretty much never understood what she
was saying.
Near the end, you get another twist. I'll try not to
spoil things, but I want to ponder this section of the anime, as I'm not
sure how it makes sense.
If Rika's been dealing with another
reincarnating time traveller, she should've noticed it way earlier. It
was also a bit strange to think there are multiple Rikas now, caused by
someone else's time travelling, who've all met with a non-lethal ending,
while Rika's entire deal was that she'd always die. And after looking at everything she's gone through in the last heavy 100 years, this
other time traveller doesn't conclude it's better to accept her dream
of wanting to leave the village that offered her nothing but heavy
trauma, but to wear her out by ruining her happy endings. One Rika from a
particular timeline was being targeted.. So, a "happy" Rika should
still exist out there; a Rika who has been accepted into her school of
choice and was heading off to a restaurant with the rest of the cast.
Nothing happened to that version of Rika so far anyone knows, so what
whisked her away from this reality and why?
Why is this newly spawned
goddess so powerful that she's able to undo everything that happened in
the original series, just to please her pompous time travelling buddy?
The anime basically argued that everything has been made undone, but
that can't be possible, since Rika still remembers her previous
experiences and the fact she lost her happy ending.
Time travelling in fiction, always a mess.
Also,
is it implied that this time traveller keeps killing themselves and
starting over from the very beginning just to get small matters right,
like winning card games and guessing briefcase codes? That doesn't sound
practical at all.
Anyway, most of the original voice actors
returned so far I can hear and remember, which is good, though I'm not
too keen on the new art design. It made some characters look off. The
photographer guy looks 20 years older now, though Keiichi grew on me.
Could be worse, but I liked the previous 90s look.
Note: I watched this series till episode 17.
Series in one sentence:
😬
Series in more sentences:
After people started randomly transforming into dangerous fire creatures, an organisation of fire fighters are set up to get rid of them.
This same phenomenon causes some people to be born with fire powers they can control, and one of the new recruits is a grinning boy with the gift to spawn flames from his feet.
He desires to be a hero, but was dubbed a "devil" ever since his family died in a house fire, believed to have been his doing.
Aw, I loved this boy's face. Ever since I watched Soul Eater, I can't resist an inexplicable shark smile on a regular human being. But the series itself lost me.
The main character got less screen time every episode. Instead, newcomers were given the stage, with backstories and drama I couldn't care less about. This promising show ended up boring me, and I'd like to say that's my own fault for simultaneously watching 5 animes right now; but these other shows still have my attention. With Fire Force I stopped caring many episodes ago.
I really wanted to push myself through the season, but I can't. There's no entertainment in it for me anymore. Grinning boy rarely grins and the overall humor has dwindled.
If Fire Force had just focused on him and his journey, it would've been a banger.
