Forum - View topicThe Spring 2021 Preview Guide
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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Vivy was pretty weak as far as SciFi goes. It start with the regular "robot decide the best way to make humankind happy is killing them all" which has been done so many times before. On top of that it's a time travel story that fail to realize that once you change something, everything else will change in a domino effect and so your knowledge of the future becomes near useless. Saving the congressman from a bomb would have also saved him in the evening since his life post bomb blast would have been very different (or at least the information of how was going to get killed would be useless). This goes for everything else that happens and render most of the drama moot, the record from the future are already about as reliable as just running a basic simulation.
The one interesting idea is that AI can only have one "mission" which could have been cool... if it actually had been implemented. Right out the gate we're told that Vivy help the little girl find her parent, so she can do stuff outside her mission that offer no advantages to the mission, so already the concept is in the garbage bin. 2 mins in, Ai can do other stuff. Could have been cool if Matsumoto had to "trick" Vivy into helping him by focusing completely at making her a better/more popular singer (say creating song for her and implementing clue or subliminal message into them to try and warn humanity). As it stand Vivy is barely distinguishable from just a focused human, other than she apparently has super human strength and can infiltrate area, something completely unnecessary for a singing Ai (plus she apparently has a room and bed for some reason). In the last few years Ai technology has made some massive progress and started going down a road that's not usually explored in most Ai story (training network on large dataset which can have serious gap/bias and cannot explain their internal reasoning). There's also been the first few steps toward commercialization of Ai, including some deaths because of Ai action. That's some interesting stuff that could inform cool Scifi story, but instead we're getting the same story people were making almost a century ago : ( |
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Agent355
 Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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Good reviews! But did you all catch that Defrott seems like a reference/homage to Oscar Wilde, at least visually? He’s a British Dandy, Queer coded (his English VA is trans), involved in the theater (as an actor rather than a writer, but close enough) ageless with Dorian Gray-like blond curls to boot. I’m hoping we get more of him. I never knew how much I wanted Anime Vampire Oscar Wilde until this show presented him with a gorgeous British accent, but I am all in now!
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Agent355
Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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Mars Red:
Good reviews! But did you all catch that Defrott seems like a reference/homage to Oscar Wilde, at least visually? He’s a British Dandy, Queer coded (his English VA is trans), involved in the theater (as an actor rather than a writer, but close enough) ageless with Dorian Gray-like blond curls to boot. I’m hoping we get more of him. I never knew how much I wanted Anime Vampire Oscar Wilde until this show presented him with a gorgeous British accent, but I am all in now! |
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ThatGuyWhoLikesThings
Posts: 1011 |
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I...don't think they meant "You can literally only ever do one single thing and are completely and utterly useless and incapable of doing everything else". I feel like you're interpreting it a bit too literally. And regardless of if by chance that was what they meant, Vivy is the first fully autonomous AI, the first of her kind, so it shouldn't be any surprise that she's capable of doing more than those that came before her (and even then, Navi suggested she may have needed to execute a separate program to do that). |
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Sven Viking
Posts: 1039 |
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Considering the ED I’d guess he’ll be the main recurring antagonist. |
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Covnam
 Posts: 3698 |
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Combatants Will Be Dispatched: This looks like it will be fun. So far I'm still in the "I'd rather they made Konosuba S3", but I'm looking forward to watching more
Dragon Goes House-Hunting: This wasn't quite what I was expecting. I was expecting more of an iyashikei series, but just got an ok comedy. The world show in the intro looks amazing, with a wide variety of places and creatures I look forward to seeing (if I keep watching), but most of what happened after that wasn't too great. Usually I don't mind or even enjoy the use of game mechanics, but it seemed out of place here (though the ID photo joke was a good one). I didn't really care for Letty and so far, not really interesting in the main hook of him finding a house. The tone shift with the heroes suddenly being burned alive (with a pile of charred bones left behind!) after the 2d game mechanic fight parody felt off to me too. I'll give it another episode or two, but so far this one isn't high on my list of sticking around. |
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KitKat1721
 Posts: 955 |
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I feel like I don't even need to read the reviews to know that Megalobox: Nomad will have just straight-up praise across the board. I enjoyed the first season (maybe just not as passionately as others), but that was an amazing first episode for S2. Brought me back in instantly and then some.
Vivy had an interesting premiere, but yeah I think this is one I'm going to wait and hear what word-of-mouth is like a few weeks in (probably similar to Joran tbh).
I actually didn't catch this, but I can see it haha. Also fun fact, Ciaran Strange (Defrott's English VA) is also actually British. I didn't know this until later since I mostly knew him from the Astra Lost in Space dub (no accent) rather than other projects like Lorelei in Borderlands 3 (kept his accent). |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5871 Location: Virginia, United States |
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Koikimo
Well, we had Diabolik Lovers where the girl is harassed and tormented by seven vampire men, until she falls in love. Personally, I thought Diabolik Lovers should have been a 'revenge road' type of anime, alas such was not the case. So it is no surprise, we have another anime where harassment and torment is the road to romance and love. So does Koikimo have an end game or is it just a romantic comedy? Burning Kabaddi For me, Kabaddi can never be separated from "Chio's School Road". Anything else is just boring. But that is just me. Farewell, My Dear Cramer No where in these reviews did I see an image of "Farewell, My Dear Cramer"'s iconic manga cover girl. Sadly, this probably means the actual animation is so bad that her character is almost unrecognizable (either that or a style choice by the animators). This will do nothing to keep manga readers watching. Anime only watchers will not have this problem. |
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SilverTalon01
Posts: 2404 |
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I'm not super surprised by the Combatants will be Dispatched scores, but I was surprised to see so much Konosuba hate expressed in those reviews. I feel like the reception of Konosuba both by fans and ANN reviewers was very positive between the episode reviews and the call outs at the end of the season.
Combatants definitely seems to heavily borrow from Konosuba so I'm not really sold on it being anything better than ok. Konosuba was great, but if a new series is leaning on it that much, we might as well have just gotten more instead. It was only the first episode so I still have some hope that the characters will come into their own a bit more. |
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Jonny Mendes
 Posts: 997 Location: Europe |
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Combatants will be Dispatched
This first episode is all I was hopping for. Great humor and good animation in the line of Konosuba. For fans of good fan-service and humor with plenty of sex jokes this will be one of the highlights of the season.
Combatants take Konosuba humor to a all new level. If you will think it will be a higher level or a lower level depend of the kind of humor you can take. From the LN the way Agent Six will gain his "evil points" (I prefer the translation "Atrocity points" because that represents what he will do better) will be probably be a "take it or leave it" for the people watching this. |
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maximilianjenus
Posts: 2872 |
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ah , this season is looking absolutely awful. i guess i will be taking my hero academia and leave. the only shows that look moderately interesting are sequels of shows that i have not watched anyway.
i guess i will be taking a look one month from now so maybe a show ends up being good by then. anyway, a bit about combatants, i guess konosuba felt like the best isekai comedy because it had more variety to its jokes, the other two shows by the same author feel very one joke indeed, though for someone in the fence, combatants is not as bad as kemono michi in that aspect. id rather watch killing rimuru for 300 years than that show, tho. |
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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Well if it doesn't mean "You can literally only ever do one single thing and are completely and utterly useless and incapable of doing everything else", what else does it even mean? We're told about this over exposition of Ai being quite literally only ever able to do one thing and then shown the main character who has no issue doing other things. The way it's shown in the show is so utterly meaningless that you could remove the entire segment/idea and the show would be no different. More so, Vivy could literally be a normal human and the show would need almost no changes to make it work just as well. And the part about Vivy being first fully autonomous, I though I imagined that or it was a miss translation because if not it's truly the dumbest thing the show does. You have a bunch of really smart Ai scientist who bust their asses trying to make Ai work and, in the end, are only able to make it work by limiting them to one "mission". But then some random maintenance guy at some amusement park casually solve that issue, make only one autonomous Ai, tell no one and make her into some random side show singer that nobody care for... what? |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18240 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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If you actually believe that last sentence then you're utterly missing the whole point of the story, especially the ironies inherent in the premise. While the exposition does not outright say this, the implication here is that the singular focus for AIs doesn't lock them into rote tasks; those are basically core directives. They can function more broadly than a simple automaton as long as they are pursuing that objective. Because she's fully autonomous, Vivy may be able to stretch what that means further than earlier models, but note how she doesn't trying anything unless she can justify it by her directive of entertaining with her voice (however thinly that may be). She's also clearly being modified by the bear.
There is no indication whatsoever that the "random maintenance guy" is responsible for her being fully autonomous. I did think also it was odd at first that such a revolutionary jump in AI tech would be in such an ignominious assignment, but it could be that she's an experiment being tested and the experiment isn't doing anything impressive so far. |
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ErikaD.D
Posts: 659 |
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Off topic a bit, since Black Clover is over (for now), there's no weekly reviews of Boruto on ANN for three months I think. Will someone review Boruto again?
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Swissman
Posts: 769 Location: Switzerland |
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I don't get the criticism for the so called average to bad animation in Sayonara, watashi no creamer. Granted, it doesn't look so incredibly lush like in the famous violin scenes of Your Lie in April, but it isn't Violinist of Hameln or the first season of Captain Tsubasa either. Just keep your expectations low and you'll be rewarded with a more than decent animation for TV anime standards of nowadays.
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