Forum - View topicREVIEW: Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash
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HaruhiToy
 Posts: 4118 |
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I don't know why this seems to be an issue for the two ANN reviewers that have written about this. Other than the opening credits, most of the view-for-males focuses on Yume and pretty much ignores Shihoru and Mary. Her modesty is never compromised and we never, ever get a "bouncing boob" shot. A bath shot or two but that's it. So why Yume? Is it a fetish for slender pettanko girls? Maybe but I think what they drew in actually supports her character type -- an un-selfconcious girl still in development and sometimes still awkward but with excellent free-spirited nature. She climbs trees and rocks. She has little or no idea that what she sits on is of sexual interest to anyone -- that's what the pictures show. If you want to complain about taking the characters seriously there are a number of more substantial issues to bring up. One is their complete lack of interest in where they came from. Another is that they never talk out the morality of what they are doing in spite of the fact that they started out realizing there was a problem there. It does spend a lot of time studying the grieving process (as noted) which seems to be where the merit of "character seriousness" lies. I think they did a good job of that so I'm not going to complain about the other deficiencies. But fan service isn't even on the list. |
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Stretch2424
 Posts: 166 |
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Although I'm only up to episode eleven, this is without a doubt my favorite anime of the Winter season. I usually watch each episode twice before the next, and that doesn't happen often. I thought early on that it would surely be about the six teens trying to figure out how to get back to modern-day Japan, but on the contrary, there has been so little mention of that that I wonder if they really are modern-day teenagers after all. Instead, it's about what MMORPGs would be like if they were for real, and you really might get killed, and couldn't just restart the game if that happened. This may be an exaggeration, but Grimgar is to conventional trapped-in-virtual-reality animes what Saving Private Ryan was to conventional war movies. I pray there will be a second (and third and fourth) season.
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Larkan
Posts: 73 |
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This "crappy" comedy is not exclusive to Light novels. |
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zensunni
 Posts: 1293 |
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This is a very good review. I pretty much agree with it. The only thing I might add is that the understated "romance" aspect of the story was extremely well handled in the last half of the show. spoiler[The growing intimacy between Mary and Haruhiro, from Haruhiro approaching her as the party leader to try to bring her closer to the group, to Mary starting to call him Hal (or Haru without honorifics in the original, while most of the party calls him Haru-kun), to Mary's desperation when Haruhiro manages to take Death Spots "down a level" with him, to the wonderful moment when Haruhiro askes if he is in heaven upon seeing her when he wakes up, to the rest of the moments at the end of the final episode, where their relationship is shown by body language and facial expression rather than expressed with words or by overt gestures like hugs and kisses.] It reminded me of the way the relationship between spoiler[Sawa and Taichi] was handled in Tari Tari. Very good "show, don't tell" story telling, which was common throughout the series, with its insert songs and daily life montages.
One thing that I really wondered about was the origin of the characters and if the story will ever go into where they came from. Early in the show, there were frequent reminders of their "otherworldly" origins, like wondering where your cellphone is, then wondering WHAT a cellphone is or Manato saying "This isn't a video game" and people asking "what's a video game?" and Manato realizing that he doesn't know either. One theory I had was that the characters "wake up" when they die (or "lose") and they are in some sort of full-immersion game where they are basically on life support while they live their fantasy life, and the ghostly conversations between Haruhiro and the character who died are actually real conversations, with the dead character basically patching into Haruhiro's game system from the game center where their real bodies are in order to appear only to him and give his friend some advice. It's just a theory... but I think it would be a good one. spoiler[Also, you only "wake up" when your game world body is turned to ash, but if you die without being cremated, you are left with a limited set of skills and are basically forced into PvP action against anyone who shows up in the area where you died, unless you are released by the spell Mary uses...] |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4428 |
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Has this show been picked up for a second season yet? If not, I'm hoping it is. The pacing and focus have made it interesting since most shows don't spend a lot of time on actual grief over a death, or showing the characters develop basic competence in their field, but the result has been next to no focus on the issue of the world itself.
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Thatguy3331
 Posts: 1790 |
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It's strange because while I wouldn't say the story doesn't try to get me invested emotionally, it just never really did much for me. I didn't give much of a crap about manato himself and while I understood the idea was to focus on how the group dealt with his loss, nothing made me care as much as the story wanted me to. There are lots of nice moments of character animation and character acting but it feels like the core of said characters simply isn't there. I comes off as salad dressing on a plate.
It's more of an effect of the kind of characterization the show is going for, which is through a variety of smaller moments that move you along an overarching character arc, but it doesn't change the fact that in an effort to make the main team close off towards each other and reserved they can come off as pretty hollow or one note. The only exceptions I can think of are Mary and Ranta for two completely different reasons. For Ranta I will give the review that what the show tried to do with him towards the end is more interesting than per say him having to be "fixed" towards the group, but it doesn't change the fact that he;s by far one of the worst aspects of the show, where a lot of the light novel-isms seem to effect the strongest. (that isn't to say the fanservice in general would go away if her weren't there, but the way he's characterized helps nothing.) While, yes, I don't enjoy any of Ranta's scenes because I find him painfully annoying, that's the point of the story. He is that guy that no one really wants to be around but they have to have around out of necessity and he only meets them halfway. But due to the dumb pervy humor that seems very light novel-y or at least like it came from the mind of an ecchi manga artist, whenever his sexist remarks come off less as a character aspect and more of another means of showcasing the girls and continuing this dumb, tone killing humor. (although there is a post at the front of this thread that I do agree in that the cameras seem more strangely fixated on Yume's butt and thighs than anyone one else... ) As for Mary, she's probably the only one who has any clear motivations for why she is the way she is, and probably goes through the most convincing character arc by the sheer virtue of being the only character that seems to have any kind of core to her beyond the simple relateable fact of "being with people is hard" that seems to be the only defining trait of Haru, which isn't bad in of itself, but makes him feel like half a character. While I can respect the series in it's attempts to be tonally different from other "trapped in a fantsasy game" stories, I can't really say I got a lot out of it other than some pretty colors to some animation that goes downhill real fast. |
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DerekL1963
 Subscriber Posts: 1113 Location: Puget Sound |
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And on top of that, if you gathered all the shots of Yume together (which comprises the bulk of the fanservice), you'd get maybe a minute, minute and a half of total footage across twelve episodes. Most of the rest is maybe a minute, tops, of Shihoru in a single episode. (I'm counting only the purely gratuitous here, but the minute or two of bathhouse scenes in the "underwear" episode are up for grabs, to me they are plot related.) Yet every single reviewer I've read has seen fit to bring up fanservice as if it's some huge part of the series. If there's a place where there is inappropriate fanservice, it's in the OP... and even then, it's only a few seconds per episode. I think the reviewers need to get a grip. |
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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Definitely the stand out show of the season for me, took an approach that's very rarely done not only in "trap in mmo world" aspect but also in anime in general. Similarly the art is pretty unique with its water color feel. It's really slow but I rather enjoyed that since it felt more like learning about character themselves trough there action rather than exposition dialogue or big immediate change in relationship.
I didn't mind the fan service since its few and far between and only really consist of framing shot (definitely a focus on bare foot, which is extremely mild by fan service standard) but there's only one scene that only serve the purpose of fan service, otherwise everything else is just shot angle when there having a conversation. Ranta is to me the unsung hero of the show, it's definitely nice to have a character that just doesn't either immediately click with the group or, like the review said, eventually get "fixed". Like he said in the show, not everyone has to like everyone else. Plus they reach a nice point in the story (although I'm guessing spoiler[its eventually reveal he has feeling for Yume).] |
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jaykayjk10
Posts: 134 |
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my favorite anime of winter 2016. grimgar NEEDS a season 2.
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4082 |
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True. The show's so sexist I couldn't finish the first episode. "All the women are mages, arches and thieves, seems legit to me."; Is that really the case? I thought fantasy in anime was getting a bit more non-indicative of sexual class lines. SWO, Log Horizon and... well, I didn't watch a lot of Overlord but I can't imagine any of its women crying from a goblin attack... those shows either had women with melee weapons as frontline fighter types or at the very least, not have them as objects. "No, it's not that she was helpless, she just felt safer in the White Mage's arms." Yes, the White Mage type, the "paint a target on me because I'm a healer, not a fighter!" class. They don't have to be the best fighters, they don't have to be G.I.R.L.S. But they can't be this, not seriously at least. |
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Raebo101
 Posts: 794 |
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For anyone that's interested, the Broadcast Dub for this show has been pretty strong so far. Though the main character actors are less experienced than their Japanese counterparts (especially Shihoru and Yume's actresses), they still manage to hit those emotional beats just right, especially in episode 4. As expected of a dub co-directed by Mike McFarland
As for the review, I pretty much agree with it completely, though Ranta was always my favorite character 
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18190 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Oh, come off it. While it's not her primary role, Yume is shown fighting in melee on several occasions, and so is Mary. Sorry, but I think you're stretching to find offense in that, as you're essentially saying that a show like this is automatically sexist if it doesn't have a bad-ass front-line female fighters. As for the review, the two main complaints Nick made - about how the pacing drags at times and how the use of insert songs can actually bog things down here - are also my own. Otherwise I quite enjoyed this series. |
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GeneStriker
Posts: 156 |
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... Did you just say that Grimgar is sexist in comparison to SAO? There's so much irony there, I don't even know where to start... If you couldn't watch the show because of you saw the character's class choices and assumed they were being treated as 'objects,' than that's just sad; all of the characters are treated like real people. It's the show's main draw, in fact. NONE of the characters can fight at the beginning of the show. The whole point is to watch them grow, fail, stumble, grieve, and eventually move forward. They all do it equally. They all get stronger over time, both physically and emotionally. I strongly recommend you give this one a second chance. It's worth your time. |
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relyat08
 Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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That really says it all, doesn't it? It's sexist if they don't fit your specific guidelines to what women's roles should be. That's more irony than I needed for today. |
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SnowyLightning44
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This anime was for sure one of my favourite shows of Winter 2016 so I'm glad that this final overall review was made. I think that it was a much better decision to give the characters pretty much complete memory loss, since I find stories of this type of genre seem to work out better when everyone's fighting to survive in that world rather than fighting to escape it and also I do agree that at times the pacing can be a bit slow although it probably made it more realistic and able to get invested in for me with them being 'beginner's' struggling as you'd assume beginner's would and properly mourning the death of a fellow party member.
Also I've got to admit I don't really pay that close attention to the staff in an anime but I was actually curious about this one so I was also amazed/surprised when I saw the type of shows Ryosuke Nakamura had directed previously considering how much I liked this. As for the fanservice in it, although the was a few close angled shots of the male characters as well, I do feel that there was a bit more of it then was necessary and for me it occasionally managed to stop the good flow that had been created previously even more so on the episodes that featured the fanservice at the end of the episode because it felt like it was ending on a sour note which was a shame as well as the change in the opening theme song's animation. As for the art I found that fantastic, especially the hand drawn style used for background, when the view switched to the landscape a few times while characters were travelling or talking for longer periods of time and the art used in the ending theme song's animation and all the music used felt excellent but some of the insert themes lasted too long to be honest but they didn't effect my view on the show too badly so it was still a great watch. |
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