Re:Creators Episode 16 Review

Still waiting

(This review contains spoilers!)

          If anything, this episode personified how I’ve felt about Re:Creators since the season break: almost half an episode’s worth of talking and discussing before arriving at an eight minute long cliffhanger ending that leaves us waiting for next week. Seriously, what happened to the show where something awesome happened every week?

          This episode suffers from an overreliance on the characters talking about stuff we’ve already gone over in past episodes. The big master plan is explained again for what feels like the billionth time, and a lot of the episode is given up to watching the characters goof off and give us hot spring shots that, let’s be honest here, are only there because fanservice. Ugh.

          This is the biggest thing standing in the way of Re:Creators. It wants to both be a love letter to anime with very impressively animated fight sequences, but it also wants to be an exploration of the creative process that goes into anime. There’s nothing wrong with trying to juggle two radically different themes (heck, some of the best entertainment ever is those that do it well), but Re:Creators suffers from the same problem as Steven Universe: it doesn’t exactly know how to do both the slice-of-life segments and the action/plot building segments at the same time, leaving us with radical difference in between episodes and making the show feel almost schizophrenic.

          Fortunately the last eight minutes aren’t too bad…if you like even more buildup. It’s mostly a “rah rah rah here we go!” moment for the characters where they all try out their suped-up weapons before entering the arena for the big event, which I’m sure is going to be great once we see it next week. They’ve been explaining what it’s gonna be so much that it better turn out good.

          This episode is skippable fluff. No development is made in the plot, and while the characters all have minor fun little moments here and there, they are few and far between. The fact we had to wait an extra week to get this is just plain frustrating.

FINAL SCORE

2/10

Awful