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REVIEW: Rewrite season 2


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invalidname
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Joined: 11 Aug 2004
Posts: 2434
Location: Grand Rapids, MI
PostPosted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 10:00 am Reply with quote
To Theron: in the end, would you have liked the opportunity to dig in with episodic reviews of this second season, or did you dodge a bullet when Rewrite flopped in the Winter poll?
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Hiroki not Takuya



Joined: 17 Apr 2012
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 10:34 am Reply with quote
Mr. Martin hit all the problems with this show and mirrors my view also. I suffered through the first season hoping that the story would become more compelling or at least interesting as "everyone" was saying Rewrite was Key's ultimate VN and I loved Clannad.

I got through Ep14 and 15 before dropping and so glad I did. The girls always seemed to be lacking in personality and mere window dressing on a jumbled mess of a story. Really, if Kagari had been a vampire and the other girls were vampire hunters it have been much more interesting despite being a copy of a good story.

Then "everyone" was saying that Season 2 was the real story and would make everything right. Well, if bringing all the uninteresting girls back to act in even more uninteresting ways and turning the story into something like a yakuza drama was making it "right" I wanted to be wrong and say it stank. So if the reviewer who seemed like part of the "everyone" says it was so, I guess it was a stinker after all and Clannad was Key's ultimate VN. RIP Rewrite
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Vaisaga



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PostPosted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 10:50 am Reply with quote
The highlight was that brief scene where we see Koutaro and Kotori happily married. The rest was pretty meh.
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maximilianjenus



Joined: 29 Apr 2013
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 11:13 am Reply with quote
the second season was better but not better enough; it's a hard choose of worse key show between this and air (the toei ones do not count, though I admit the toei clannad movie is GREAT for a certain mindset.)


now my question is, is this really that much worse than the game, since we supossedly got a plot outline of it, but at the same time, while the game ahs better execution (just a guess, with how popular and liked it is, it can't be worse) , does watchign the anime actually ruin all the surprises from playing the game ?
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Key
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 11:37 am Reply with quote
invalidname wrote:
To Theron: in the end, would you have liked the opportunity to dig in with episodic reviews of this second season, or did you dodge a bullet when Rewrite flopped in the Winter poll?

Boy, I don't know. I fell way behind on this series and ended up watching the Terra arc in one shot, so it might have been interesting to see how my opinion more gradually evolved from positive to negative about the season as it wore on. But I wouldn't for a second have taken reviewing it over KONOSUBA 2 or Saga of Tanya the Evil. (Would have been a toss-up vs. Masamune-kun's Revenge.)
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Via_01



Joined: 24 Aug 2014
Posts: 551
PostPosted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 12:42 pm Reply with quote
maximilianjenus wrote:
the second season was better but not better enough; it's a hard choose of worse key show between this and air (the toei ones do not count, though I admit the toei clannad movie is GREAT for a certain mindset.)


now my question is, is this really that much worse than the game, since we supossedly got a plot outline of it, but at the same time, while the game ahs better execution (just a guess, with how popular and liked it is, it can't be worse) , does watchign the anime actually ruin all the surprises from playing the game ?


Yes to your questions. The game itself is messy and flawed, but still leagues better than what this show tried to pull. Here we got not only a plot outline, but a watered-down version of the themes the game touched on, a focus on romance that wasn't present during Moon and Terra, etc.

While the theme Theron mentioned ("humanity has fucked up so much that there's no way to revert it") IS present in the VN, the game actually acknowledges this pretty early on. It mostly focuses on the question "alright, so we screwed up. What do we do now?" and tries to give its own answer (giving the topic itself waaaay more time than this show allowed).
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Blood-
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 12:48 pm Reply with quote
The first season was a mess, but I did manage to wring some entertainment value out it due to Kotarou's interaction with Kagari, the girls and even some male characters which sometimes had a level of enjoyable goofy humour. The second season dispensed with even that meagre pleasure and left us with a grimdark Kotarou who I did not give two poops about.
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rizuchan
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Joined: 11 Mar 2007
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 1:56 pm Reply with quote
I played the Rewrite visual novel 5 or so years ago, so admittedly I have some difficulty remembering the full details of the story, but I do remember at the time thinking that, when taken as a whole, it was Key's most powerful story. But the entire time I watched the 2nd season anime I just kept thinking, "I think this is a really close adaptation of Moon/Terra. So why am I feeling so 'meh' about it?"

To be honest, I still can't put my finger on it. Maybe it was the way the story was presented in the anime, but I really think maybe I just... lost interest after the first season's adaptation was so disappointing? It's quite sad, because I was a huge Rewrite fan before the anime. I even cosplayed as Shizuru. (And now that the anime was such a flop, I'm never gonna get a scale figure of her. *sob*)

Via_01 wrote:
While the theme Theron mentioned ("humanity has fucked up so much that there's no way to revert it") IS present in the VN, the game actually acknowledges this pretty early on. It mostly focuses on the question "alright, so we screwed up. What do we do now?" and tries to give its own answer (giving the topic itself waaaay more time than this show allowed).


This is a really good point. Only one or two of the routes in the original ended without at least a near extinction of humanity. The 1st season of the anime ended the same way, but I think having multiple routes doing it really drove it home. Because, just like in Terra, Kotarou and pals had really good ideas each time that ultimately failed. Then in Moon you see Kagari's "route map" (because that's totally what it looks like in the context of a VN) and it starts to sink in how many good attempts there were to solve the problem that all ended in disaster. So, I think in the VN, you tend to play through Terra with skepticism, thinking, "Is this really going to be enough to save the world?" While in the anime, it's probably expected, after an entire season devoted to this plot line, that we're going to get a happy, or at least satisfying ending...I guess in the end the 2nd season suffered from the same problem as the first, in that regard.

In fact, now that I think about it, the key problem with the Rewrite anime was that the first season spent far too much time joking around and it set the wrong tone. Rewrite isn't a happy story. All of the routes end on bittersweet notes. To be fair, the VN's common route spends far too long trying to be fun and happy as well, but you have at least 5 playthroughs (and a fast forward button) for the despair to sink in.

And as for the ending being kind of a cop-out... I honestly didn't even remember the ending from the VN, but it's apparently identical. So I get the feeling I wasn't very happy with it in the original, either. But, when I was listening to the lyrics to the ending theme, CANOE (which of course, Crunchyroll didn't translate...) I suddenly realized that it suggested something even darker, but less of a cop-out IMO, that I don't think was really expressed in the Anime itself... spoiler[That when they abandon Earth for the moon, humans still won't necessarily learn their lesson - they will probably hop from planet to planet, exhausting all of its resources, and then moving on to the next, with the vague hope that maybe someday they'll get their shit together enough to be able to stay somewhere forever. Or not.] Not happy at all, but it definitely has a deeper message than spoiler["Oh hey wait, let's just go to the moon! Why didn't we think of that sooner??"]
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grooven



Joined: 16 Aug 2006
Posts: 1424
Location: Canada
PostPosted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 2:10 pm Reply with quote
As a novel reader and KEY fan, I can say this is my least liked novel in the franchise. The writing, characterization, and plot (in my opinion) isn't done well. It feels convoluted and messy. It started with the mediocre routes of the girls and then Kotarou's characterization was extremely hard to digest in Terra. I have similar feelings with Theron about the show as a whole and can relate it to how I feel towards the game and anime.

When I realized Kagari was the true love interest in the game I couldn't get invested at all (I assume in the new version this may be fixed). She was hardly present and came out of the blue. In the anime they some what fixed this, but I still couldn't get that emotional attachment like I had for other KEY games (except in Little Busters with Rin and Riki, which really felt more like friendship than anything).

While I enjoyed some aspects being fleshed in the anime with Kotarou and Kagari, there was that feeling like they lost the whole idea of the series. I didn't ever feel any empathy to Kotarou in the game or anime. The idea of making him take on the burden of humanity to save the world, never feels real to me. I attribute this to the writing. The writer for this arc, Romeo Tanaka, makes him like a villain without any redemption. His actions feel hollow and meaningless. I have not played the Rewrite+ version, but maybe one day when it's out in English on steam I'll have another look. The anime didn't quite fix the issues I had.

Hiroki not Takuya wrote:
"everyone" was saying Rewrite was Key's ultimate VN and I loved Clannad.
I have no idea who has said this, I can highly disagree. The head writer only did music and quality control for this game. It doesn't have the heart of other KEY works, it feels like it was someone trying to make a copy of one instead. Anyone who is fan of KEY's past works may find this a nice change or a disappointment like me.

I do like some aspects of the game. A few routes were done decently well (none ever gripped me enough to call any of then brilliant) and some tracks were fantastic like the menu screen and the final song . But as an overall game, not a favourite.
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Kougeru



Joined: 13 May 2008
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 2:13 pm Reply with quote
maximilianjenus wrote:
the second season was better but not better enough; it's a hard choose of worse key show between this and air (the toei ones do not count, though I admit the toei clannad movie is GREAT for a certain mindset.)


JEsus. It's not hard at all for me. AIR is actually good if you just focus on Misuzu. They didn't merge the routes well. Of course they learned their lesson fast and made Kanon 2006 and Clannad fantastic, even when "merging" routes.
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Kougeru



Joined: 13 May 2008
Posts: 5521
PostPosted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 2:22 pm Reply with quote
grooven wrote:


Hiroki not Takuya wrote:
"everyone" was saying Rewrite was Key's ultimate VN and I loved Clannad.
I have no idea who has said this, I can highly disagree. The head writer only did music and quality control for this game. It doesn't have the heart of other KEY works, it feels like it was someone trying to make a copy of one instead. Anyone who is fan of KEY's past works may find this a nice change or a disappointment like me.

I do like some aspects of the game. A few routes were done decently well (none ever gripped me enough to call any of then brilliant) and some tracks were fantastic like the menu screen and the final song . But as an overall game, not a favourite.


Firstly, it was a large % of the online KEY fan community that said this. You can disagree, because everyone has opinions..but it WAS a favorite to the majority of users that were doing reviews and expressing their feelings about it as a whole. Right now though, it's only barely behind Clannad and Little Busters! on vndb.org's rankings. So clearly it's loved. Anime executed it so poorly. The Jun Maeda tracks were my favorite but overall it's still my "anime" OST of 2011 and 2016.

rizuchan wrote:
I played the Rewrite visual novel 5 or so years ago, so admittedly I have some difficulty remembering the full details of the story, but I do remember at the time thinking that, when taken as a whole, it was Key's most powerful story. But the entire time I watched the 2nd season anime I just kept thinking, "I think this is a really close adaptation of Moon/Terra. So why am I feeling so 'meh' about it?"

To be honest, I still can't put my finger on it. Maybe it was the way the story was presented in the anime, but I really think maybe I just... lost interest after the first season's adaptation was so disappointing? It's quite sad, because I was a huge Rewrite fan before the anime.




This is exactly how I felt, too! I really can't explain what the hell went wrong. The only thing I can think of is that it was executed really poorly by 8-Bit.
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wastrel





PostPosted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 6:15 pm Reply with quote
I often disagree with ANN reviews, for various reasons, but I think this is the first time that I disagree with a review because the reviewer was far too kind and generous towards this hideous abomination.

I think I should explain where I'm coming from. I do not like visual novel games. I just don't like a story that changes, has multiple variants, "bad ends", etc. However I actually do like animes based on visual novels, as they collapse the variants into a single story line (even if they visit elements of the game's multiple branches). In particular, I have great fondness for Key adaptations: I regard Clannad/Clannad After Story as one of the best animes ever made; Kanon is also one of my top favorites; Little Busters was very enjoyable; I even liked Air. The recent adaptation of Planetarian was great (especially as Planetarian was actually a 'game' I played and enjoyed, as it had a single story thread). The point is, I like Key's anime adaptations, in general.

The first season of Rewrite was okay, as well, although I guess it was a "bad end", which rather confused me until I heard there was a second season coming. At least the first season had the fun and interesting characters that are the primary reason I watch anime.

Here I'm just going to go into massive spoiler mode so I'll tag it as such. spoiler[As the second season started, with being in the meta world/universe/dimension whatever where the Key is choosing which world variants to use to save the world, or a world, or whatever, the protagonists' experiencing and remembering different lives made sense. To start with. Then... maybe it was me, but I started having a great deal of problem following what the hell was going on! First we're in this life, then in that one... wait, what? Oh, we're all back defending the Key, and everyone dies again at the end of that one, and next... wait, what, we're starting over again? Is this a new life, or a different anime that got streamed by mistake? Oh, okay, I guess... And now we're in a variant of the Fruit of Grisaia, but with all the humor, interesting characters, and plot taken out?

So he joins one group, kills a lot, then the other, kills folks here and there, finds the Key...

Key: Help me save humanity by showing me fond memories!
Killer Guy: Sure! I'll kill most every adult in the city, emotionally scar every child I can find, and the one kid who's left I'll shoot her zombie parents so she can watch them die again! Then slice and dice the one adult who's ever been kind to me! That's fond memories, right?

What??? At this point, as I was watching this with mouth agape, I had to think of the poor people working on this project, as they trembled at night in the filth-encrusted cages they're imprisoned in, with their bloody welts from the daily beatings, obviously dreaming of escaping the dungeon, er, I mean production studio, to the world outside; and then flinging themselves in front of the nearest bullet train to embrace sweet death and thus prevent the thousand generation stain on their family name that would otherwise result from their being associated with this feces-infused dreck.

Okay, then they're a tree, then people are in bubbles, I've stopped trying to understand any of this stuff, the girls from the first season are back, they do things to the tree, then it's finally one of those days, Alice, because bang! straight to the Moon! WHAT???? This... this... what???
]

I could babble, perhaps for days, about how incoherent all this was. About how I felt I was being insulted by watching any of this show (and I've watched plenty of anime that I just didn't like; this is way beyond that.) Perhaps all this confusing mess makes sense to those who have played the game; I'm not sure about that.

I'm pretty sure of two things, though. First, if anyone complains about Kemono Friends having bad animation, show them Rewrite, and thus teach them that you can have okay animation but if you have no story you have less than nothing.

Second, for me at least Rewrite has damaged Key's very brand. The only reason I watched this to the bitter bewildering end was because it was from Key. They'd pull it out at the end, right? Right? Nope! Now, I don't want to watch Key anime in the future, at least not until others have watched it all and come out of the other side still retaining some sanity.
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter



Joined: 07 Mar 2009
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 6:30 pm Reply with quote
Ha ha, great rant, wastrel! I agree with everything you said.
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Cam0



Joined: 13 Dec 2009
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 6:51 pm Reply with quote
Yeah, like wastrel I was really confused watching this 2nd season.

Anyway one thing that bugged me: During the first half of this 2nd season, didn't Kotarou mention that those monsters appearing from dimensional portals or whatever were sent by that leader of Gaia, whatever her name was. How? Isn't she like supposed to be dead at that point... Like everyone is supposed to be dead, right? How can she send monsters through dimensions? Wha-? I don't get it.
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Melicans



Joined: 01 Feb 2012
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Location: Canada
PostPosted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 8:43 pm Reply with quote
Count me in the minority that actually liked the ending to the first season. I enjoyed that it ended in despair and destruction, which is something that doesn't seem to happen too often. It was tragic. They fought their hardest but they lost in the end. I liked that and respected that. To that end, this second series made no sense to me.
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