Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Charlotte
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secondkas
 Posts: 95 |
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Charlotte has a good story in it but it was very rushed. I stand by what I suggested before, they needed more episodes to make it work. That scene where Nao and Yuu reunited, I would've cried (I'm a sucker for scenes where the forgotten tries to be strong) if I wasn't so aware that they only had a few more minutes till closing (the credits were already up, for chrissakes). Plus if they're going to do a 'round-the-world bit, it's 2015, a small research wouldn't hurt. I'm from the Philippines and –man! From the car plate to the “slum” areas, that is definitely not the Philippines. As I watched this episode the CinemaSins counter was going off in my head. |
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Hyperdrve
 Posts: 276 |
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I think that the final three episodes were justified.
The first problem that we were introduced was that Yuu was a good-for-nothing cheater, and he got into the nicest school by taking advantage of his ability in the wrong way. Up until the last episode, the story didn't really solve this problem of Yuu being cheating scum. He cheated death by going back in time and changing the timeline so that his little sister doesn't get killed. He then used his stolen ability his from little sister to save his own life and, due to that selfishness, he would've killed the girl he would've confessed to if Kumagami hadn't saved her. So Yuu definitely needed to do something to prove himself. This is why I'm satisfied with the last three episodes. Overall the series turned out to be quite good. |
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kinghumanity
Posts: 365 |
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I mostly agree with the review. Towards the end, Ayumi, Yusa, Takajo, and even Nao to an extent became side characters.
Remember Your Lie in April? That was a slice-of-life show with many characters, each very well developed with their own story arcs, and each having their satisfactory conclusions (possibly except for Watari, who was mostly used as a bro/love rival device). Nothing felt rushed, everything felt natural, relatable, and deeply emotionally resonating. That's why I gave it 10/10 on MAL. If it was a 13 episode series, it would have become a trainwreck. Charlotte was a 13 episode series with almost as many characters (maybe even more), but with added plot twists and time travel action shenanigans added on top. It would have never worked, especially with Yusa's song (which were cringeworthy AND a waste of time) and the filler baseball episode. We never found out more about Sala and her deal with god. We never found out more about the evil scientists and the foreign terrorists (who could, and probably should have, been merged into one entity). We never found out more about Yusa/Misa's development, which was at least satisfying to see wrapped up but could have been so much more. In fact, that last sentence probably describes Charlotte for me. It was satisfying but could have been so much more. |
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Silver4000
 Posts: 181 |
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Like I said on that Clannad special, the anime should've had 2 cours, or split cours for it to be one of the best. And I still defend that this story in a Visual Novel format would be great.
Anyway, this final episode really could have used more than 20 minutes, I actually was expecting a first half of him around the world, and then a second half against those scientists/mercenaries. But in no way I imagined that the "psychotic" Yuu would return, though it was quite interesting to see him traveling around the world, and those powers too. My favorite part of the episode was spoiler[the courage one, among all those powers and a Yuu overpowered that could take control of the world if he wanted, the last one was something as simple as the strength to face another. Same thing could be said with the healing one, where Yuu could see that those powers could be used to help people, but the courage one had more impact on me for some reason. With all his powers and in a moment of life and death he could've had lost it and started hurting people (which he almost did before) but there was one young girl that stood up without knowing the situation, just that one hurting another was wrong.] The ending of the episode was ok by itself, I was just sad that I didn't got to hear the ED (seriously both OP and ED are wonderful, in both music and visuals), and I can say that by completing the show it left me with a strange feeling in my chest just like Angel Beats did. |
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Hiroki not Takuya
 Posts: 2514 |
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The sequence in the Philippines made me laugh, it was so badly done. Oh,Gosh! The dialog was stupid, though not bad English unlike the Engrish that they have Yu spouting. If someone delivered Yu's English lines in another show, the Japanese would surely be offended at such a stereotypical delivery. Really, do everyone in Philippines speak English?? I don think so... So Gabriella, I can explain this shows baffling pacing and changing direction simply, the writer screwed up! Maybe they were too busy working on the recently announced Rewrite VN anime adaptation. Ende. |
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Sahmbahdeh
Posts: 712 |
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Overall, I think this show is very unbalanced and thematically unclear, but still solidly put together. I think a 13 episode runtime was actually mostly sufficient, it just wasted an episode on baseball. It's largely the same problem I had with Angel Beats, but I think it was a bit better here.
For all its many, many flaws, I still liked Charlotte and enjoyed it just about every week. It kept me guessing and invested. |
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Spotlesseden
Posts: 3514 Location: earth |
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Asians have different storytelling and writing style. There is a Stanford paper and many article about it. We can't use our standard to judge Japan and China movies. Even scary movies have totally different storytelling style. In this case anime. please at least read it and understand why Asians write like this. Asians like to put backgrounds first and main point later. totally different than US writing style. US teaches will give you a bad grade because this. https://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elcttr http://www.distans.hkr.se/rikskonf/Grupp%207/Mattisson.pdf /Problem%20of%20Culture.pdf Last edited by Spotlesseden on Sun Sep 27, 2015 11:11 am; edited 1 time in total |
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R315r4z0r
 Posts: 717 |
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I loved this show, but I thought that the last episode could have been extended. It could have really benefited from a 14th episode.
Just a little bit more time to give a little bit of closure to the characters, rather than "welcome back, even though your mind is screwed up, let's all be happy forever!" It kind of trivialized his struggle to retain sanity. I felt like they built up this new conflict for him to overcome only to have it pushed aside for a quick, happy ending. |
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A random dude
Posts: 4 |
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I have to say I have been enjoying reading these reviews every week. Charlotte is a intricate melodramatic work where every week you have to reconsider your thoughts and feelings on a single episode since the content may baffle you or blow your mind completely asking "Okay Maeda, where are you going with this?" I would turn to these reviews to look for that answer and glad you are as clueless as I am when it comes to predicting where the show is going since I'm not the only one struggling. I especially enjoyed reading this review since my thoughts where aligned with yours on how this last episode fitted in with the rest of the series and how the big picture of this show is one big question mark.
I think I have to marathon this show later on in the future in order to get a different perspective out of it since it's still fresh on my mind. But all in all great reviews and I hope you write one on the whole show itself since the some episode had enough material to stand alone. |
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ebv2406
Posts: 54 |
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I completly agree with the grade for the last episode (???)
Overall I would give it a 6 or 7 |
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vonPeterhof
Posts: 729 |
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For the most part I agree with the complaints about the portrayals of foreign countries and cultures in the finale, but at the very least I really liked the establishing shot they used for Moscow. Normally in order to show that the setting is Moscow you'll be shown shots of the Kremlin/Red Square, one of the "Stalin skyscrapers", random garish Soviet-style apartment blocks or just a street in the middle of a snowstorm with people in wooly hats (this gets used later in the episode for "Siberia, Irkutsk"). What does this show go with? The freakin' Moskva-City!
As a former Moscow yuppie I almost feel pandered to  If only they had put the same research effort into Russian text. Seriously, they hire Jenya to say two barely audible lines as a Peruvian healer and don't even get her to spellcheck one line of written Russian? Oh well, can't have it all I guess..
As for the episode as a whole, pretty much agree with Gabriella. Really hard to rate this episode without rewatching the show from the beginning, and I don't think I even want to do that. Oh well, at least I wasn't bored and the show was beautiful to look at and listen to. |
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Black Thunder 6
Posts: 128 |
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It's times like this where I miss Hope's brutally honest reviews because it feels like everyone who reviewed something this season, despite all the claims that it was a weak season, gave the season finales above average scores when none of them were particuarly memorable or well done and ironically enough despite her harsh criticism of UBW she seems to give a pass to Charlotte's abundant plotholes, lapses in logic and underdeveloped cast because "it was unpredictable" which says a lot about her mindset. I'm not sure if the lack of a final rating is more of a sign of refusal to admit when something turns to crap despite being initially engaged in it or downright delusion. That said even in retrospect this show wasn't good when you see how much time was wasted or how little anything actually mattered as a whole but happy ending I guess so its good?
No, what this show needed was a complete rewrite or a good script editor because there's a abundant amount of flaws in its writing that would not be fixed by making it longer. Angel Beats was a show that suffered from lack of time, Charlotte suffers from a very weak script and premise that could have worked as 13 episodes if they had not wasted so much time in the beginning and if it hadn't gone of the rails in the end. It's a show that wants to be so much at once but ultimately winds up being a whole lot of nothing if Maeda wanted to use it as a prototype for a VN he'll finish in a few years like Angel Beats than he has his work cut out for him. |
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abeltensor
Posts: 3 |
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Its funny. Even this review mentions a few things that came to mind as I was finishing up Charlotte. As some one who has been a Key/Jun Maeda fan for almost 12-15 years now, at every moment of Charlotte I could see how its visual novel counterpart would play the scene, plot and characters in a much more interesting and consistent way.
Charlotte suffers due to a lack of exposition (never thought I would write this line about anything because usually its the other way around). We miss explanations about so many things that it just becomes a mishmash of concepts and ideas from which you have to infer that things happened. It also suffers from the lack of character development that came as a side effect of trying to slam this much content into such a little amount of time. As the reviewer mentioned, there were small ways that that story could have made some of the less relevant characters more relevant and thus more emotionally weighted in the parts of the story where they needed to be. But that's not the only problem, even the main character, Yu, was never fully defined as a character until the final minutes of the story. The bizarre tonal shifts never allowed his character to cement in one form or another which ultimately made the catharsis at the end feel emotionally flat. The lack of foreshadowing really hurt the show as well, just having things fly out of left field as much as they did made it feel like the show was running by the seat of its pants and barely being held together. Hell as an example, Ayumi's death felt extremely forced and frankly never needed to happen. They used her death as a method of allowing Yu descend into darkness and then come out good, be introduced to his brother and the time leap ability; all of these events would have worked better in their own context. That is to say, that many of the time travel problems came from Yu traveling back in time, but this event never needed to happen. All we needed to see was a flash back of his brother using it until he goes blind for it to have emotional weight. The time travel element had so many problems that they simply removed it 2-3 episodes later. (time travel rarely works in stories that aren't about time travel and even then, there are only a select few that work with out creating major plot holes.) Only to have it potentially show up in the last episode with Yu finding an ability to heal himself. (it bugged me that even if he never planned to use the time leap ability, he never healed his eye regardless.) Imagine a visual novel that opens up on the desert and we have a nameless character talking to himself. The next scene we see the scenes from the first episode and through out the rest of the novel we keep moving back to Yu's world tour and decent into madness without being told that it is Yu until the plots merge. I could have seen this working so much better with this type of plot. It not only shows foreshadowing, it allows the story to flesh out both the period of time when they are in the high school and the periods of time after Yu leaves to collect all the abilities with out making the story too long winded. That all being said, (for a first post this sure is long), I didn't like the anime as an anime. It doesn't captivate me as it currently is. What kept my mind busy while watching it was seeing how the show could have been rather then seeing how the show was and that's a little depressing. If they ever decide to make a visual novel out of Charlotte I would be interested in reading it (I wont hold my breathe though, I could see a kinetic novel being made at some point, since it doesn't really need routes. A visual novel is probably out of the question). |
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bibotot
Posts: 79 |
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Charlotte has its ups and downs, but the latest episode feels like a waste of potential. Again, the pacing is rushed as hell and we even get new character introduction even though it is the last episode. Many plot holes related to Yuu's abilities, especially time travelling, remain unresolved and there is not much in terms of emotions for me to have.
Ayumi staying dead would have been a much better anime. Charlotte is simply not the kind of tragedy we were all expecting from Key and Jun Maeda. Animation and sound are great, though. There is clear investment in at least those aspects. Overall, the series get 6 out of 10. You might enjoy it, but you won't remember it in 2 days or so. |
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Alabaster Spectrum
Posts: 528 |
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Honestly the way Maeda has so many super mega fans it wouldn't surprise me if people are afraid to give something by him a truly poor review because that would be like an admission that he truly failed at something and I've never seen a dedicated Maeda/Key fan admit he/they are anything less than flawless at what they do. Personally I don't see how you can look at this shows finale or as a whole and possibly make an argument that it's good or satisfying or even functions as a proper show during some stretches. It's like many crammed into one for the purposes of maximizing it's marketing appeal. |
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