The bar is just too high this season for series like this to make an impact.
Gyakuten Saiban: Sono “Shinjitsu”, Igi Ari! – 01
Yes, this is technically the same studio that produced Boku Dake ga Inai Machi. If anyone needed a reminder that A-1 Pictures isn’t really a studio in the traditional anime sense, but a loosely grouped production wing that grew out of Aniplex, Ace Attorney is it. They’re a chameleon that takes on the nature of the production committee, and clearly in this case saving money was the order of the day.
I’ll state up front that I’ve never played the Capcom game this series is based on. I know people like it, and maybe it’s great. But the anime is… pretty awful, to be honest. It’s hideously animated and badly miscast, and just generally has the air of a half-assed throwaway. There’s too much stuff that might be decent (never mind actually good) this season to spend more time on this one.
Endride – 01
One of the impacts of a season as deep in candidate series as this one is that shows like Endride tend to get lost in the clamour. That’s true going into the season (it pulled less than 1% in the LiA preview poll) and it’s true after airing, too. The simple fact is that Endride is, frankly, pretty generic. It’s not bad or anything but it does nothing much to stand out. And in a season like this, that’s fatal.
My main interest in this show going in was twofold – first, it had character designs by the great Watsuki Nobuhiro (Rurouni Kenshin), one of my all-time heroes, and second, it’s a new Brain’s Base original series. But once you get past that, there’s not much to chew on here. A boy interested in crystals gets sucked into an alternate world by one when visiting his scientist father’s office, and there crosses paths with the son of the former king, who’s just been imprisoned by the man who killed and deposed him. There are faint echoes of Arata Kangatari in there, but the story is less immediately involving while unfortunately sharing the same lackluster production values as that series’ adaptation.
Maybe in another season I’d give Endride a longer look, but at best it’s going to get one more episode to surprise me. Frankly I’d be very surprised if I blogged it, but there’s an outside chance it could do enough to convince me to at least watch.
danes256
April 3, 2016 at 12:40 amI’ll be honest here, not even ace attorney’s good story could save it’s anime. The game was good fun, and it had a good story to back it up. But such a half-assed work spells doom for an adaptation that could’ve been good.
Morg
April 3, 2016 at 2:42 amI think the biggest problem here is this is basically the game itself without the gameplay. This episode was effectively the tutorial from the first game and it looks like it too, but on a bigger screen. Keep in mind the first game came out fifteen years ago for the game boy advance. Not exactly a graphical powerhouse. The most recent games have better animation in the cutscenes than this episode had at any point. The pauses didn’t matter in the game because you as the player were doing things and here they skip over all the player interaction and don’t adjust well for the switch in mediums. Which is very awkward, but being so similar does have the odd effect of making it strongly nostalgic. Not too mention the VA choice for Phoenix kept throwing me off.
The nostalgia factor alone is enough to keep me watching, but only because I adore the games so much and watching this probably takes less time than a replay of the first game.
Karmafan
April 6, 2016 at 7:17 pmI did not care for Ace Attorney but did like Endride. I’m gonna watch 1-2 more of each before deciding which to keep watching but it does not look good for Ace.