Re: Repeat
(This review contains
spoilers!)
The idea of the “slacker dude is
trapped in a video game/transported to a fantasy world” anime is one that’s
taken the industry by storm in recent years since Sword Art Online. Every once in a while you’ll find something like Re:Zero that gives a unique take on the
genre, but more often than not you’ll end up finding an anime like Overlord that is clearly nothing more
than a cheap cash in on what was already popular. Even the original Sword Art Online is pretty darn bad
looking back at it, but since it was a huge commercial success it made sense
for everyone and their mother to try and put their two cents in the genre.
Which leads us to today’s anime, Re:Creators. Does it have a unique voice
or is it just another drop in the shounen bucket?
The first thing I like about this
anime is that, in terms of the setting, it’s a complete swap of the genre norm.
Instead of the guy from the human world being dropped in an anime setting, the
anime characters are transported to the real world. This leads to a lot of
entertaining “fish-out-of-water” moments from the anime characters that you don’t
often get in shows like this. The characters do seem to rely on old tropes
pretty heavily, so we’ll just have to see if they get developed more in the
coming weeks.
The story involves a guy who wants to
write stories for anime and manga watching his favourite show of the season,
when suddenly he’s transported inside the screen and into the middle of a
battle. While he returns home quickly, he brings the anime’s protagonist with
him. The villain of the series follows shortly, leading to a fun car chase and
an aerial battle. There seem to be other anime characters arriving to the human
world as well, but we haven’t seen many of them yet.
The animation is very nice and much
smoother than most of the other stuff I’ve seen this season, but the major
characters definitely feel a little too familiar-looking for their own good.
The female protagonist resembles the lead from Yona of the Dawn with almost frightening accuracy, and nothing
stands out about our main dude. He looks, sounds and feels like your average
everyday male anime character, and thanks to that is completely unmemorable in
every way. Again, I’m hoping we get more development over the course of next
twenty-one episodes that are planned, because right now he’s definitely the
weakest part of the whole show.
I found the fight scenes very well-choreographed,
especially the car chase escaping from the villain. It’s very entertaining from
start to finish, combining suspense, action and even a bit of humour to create
a great action set-piece. The CGI animation used is also much better than we
saw earlier in Alice to Zorokou. The
cars and the characters actually feel like they belong in the same universe
this time around, so that’s good.
While Re:Creators doesn’t seem original by any means, I actually found
myself having a lot of fun watching it. I had no expectations going in (and to
be fair, I was ready to jump ship as soon as it looked like we were going the Sword Art Online route), but I left
watching the episode feeling that it was well worth the twenty-two minutes I
spent on it. I can’t say for certain if I’ll make it through the whole two-cour
series, especially if they disappointingly start pulling out more and more clichéd
stuff, but this was a very good starting point.
FINAL SCORE
8/10
Great
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