Forum - View topicREVIEW: Plastic Memories Sub.Blu-Ray 1
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HaruhiToy
 Posts: 4118 |
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also: is it just a robot or is it a person? I had a lot of problems with this anime although I thought it was pretty well done as described in the review. If you focus on how the people and Isla interact it has some value but I felt there was just too little pushback on fate. If you are going to take a technological premise like this you can't just go "that's just the way it is accept it." In the real world Stage-IV cancer patients will opt for drug tests but I don't see the same mindset here. Although I watched it streaming I have no reason to watch it again. |
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Kougeru
 Posts: 5527 |
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This story just didn't work for me. The technology made NO sense at all. When you do scifi, the science has at least be somewhat believable.spoiler[ Data that for some reason cannot be cloned or backed up, and machines that just magically break down at a specific date...completely unrealistic. Sure you could program to happen, but someone would quickly figure out a way to disable that.]
The emotional aspects of it I also felt were really week. The beginning part where they've seeing customers and such....that was actually pretty good. But then the premise changed completely to a standard "Tragic girl" trope and lost anything that was remotely unique about it. |
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Joe Mello
 Posts: 2258 Location: Online Terminal |
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I beg to differ |
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DerekL1963
 Subscriber Posts: 1113 Location: Puget Sound |
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Precisely this... Though, to me, it seemed less of a problem of integration and more of a problem of lack of focus. Basically PlasMem couldn't decide if it wanted to be high concept SF, a romance tale, or an office comedy. It seemed to jump from one to the next almost at random. Which is sad actually... Any one of the three could have made a decent show. But giving each concept only a fraction of the screen time required just resulted in a muddled mess. |
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Lemonchest
Posts: 1771 |
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Didn't care for Plastic Memories. It was about 6 episodes too long. The first half was all over the place tonally. It suffered from a bad case of "it's got to be bigger!" so our robo repossession company are suddenly spoiler[wielding Halo swords & Dominator guns while the androids don't just switch off when they pass their arbitrary use by date, they turn into superpowered zombies. & even when it stopped faffing around & settled on being an allegory for being in a relationship with someone who has a terminal illness,] it was still a mediocre version of that one episode of Chobits where the baker tells Chi how he was once married to a robot whose hard drive corrupted.
Speaking of Chobits, I thought it was funny that both Hideki & Tsukasa failed their final exams, but Hideki had to resit his while Tsukasa got parachuted into a cushy job by his rich uncle. [EDIT: Added spoiler tags. This isn't an episode review discussion thread, so don't assume that people reading this thread have seen the whole series. - Key] |
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cloud8100
Posts: 550 |
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B is a pretty good score
 . One of the anime I got quite into as I ended up becoming pretty attached to the characters quite easily.
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kinghumanity
Posts: 365 |
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Plastic Memories is probably THE textbook example of wasted potential in anime.
There were so many options the show could have picked to tell a great story, and so many topics to delve into. Human-robot relationships. Robot-robot relationships. Politics. Laws. Philosophy. How to live with a terminal illness. But nope, they went with a generic romcom full of cliche tropes with a side sprinkle of half-baked science fiction. The first two episodes were amazing and showed vast potential. It fills me with regret to see what it could have been. |
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9839 Location: Virginia |
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That is not how Planned obsolescence works. Cars didn't break down after a year, they just got replaced by fancier models with tail fins and more chrome. Now it is manifest by smart phones. Every year or so Apple and others bring out a new model with more features and a fancier appearance. It doesn't mean your old phone doesn't work. It just means you lust after the new version and your friends make fun of you if you can't afford it. |
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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↑
This does remind me of the controversial "suicide batteries" sometimes used in arcade machines. After a certain time elapses, machines thus equipped are designed to become unusable without manufacturer intervention. |
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HaruhiToy
Posts: 4118 |
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I think the person who originally brought it up might have been thinking of the famous "suicidal light bulb." The reason it is designed to fail after about 700 hours or so is so that the consumer is forced to buy a new one, keeping the company in business. I think there was a similar practice in automobile transmissions for a while. That does sort of sound like a Gifta, but the difference is that the companies offering the suicidal products were doing it on purpose and were fully capable of producing products that would have natural lifetimes much longer than the suicidal version. That isn't the case in this story, where everyone is mystified as to why this happens and are unable to do anything about it but somehow predict the syndrome's progress with precision. And in spite of that, everyone close to a Gifta seems to be completely surprised when it is time to retrieve them. The whole setup makes so little sense it undermines the tragedy they were trying to build. |
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Lorias
Posts: 14 |
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Am I the only one who saw incredibly blatant Blade Runner parallels in this series.
For those who don't know Blade runner is a 1982 sci-fi classic starring Harrison Ford. The basic concept is there are androids which are near indistinguishable from humans, the have a limited life-span and will die after a certain time, the company that made them hires people to identify and retrieve androids who near the end of their lives, the androids become increasingly violent and crazy when they get near the end. The similarities are far to important to the setting of both to be coincidental. The main difference being is genre, while this is a weepy melodrama Blade Runner is a action-thriller. |
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lhernan02
Posts: 196 |
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While there are some similarities to Blade Runner, the basic reason why replicants (the name for androids in BR) have a limited life span is that they could easily become a "master race" and dominate humans (much like past in Dune before the Butlerian Jihad), therefore a preprogrammed death is a failsafe measure. Such an idea and the related discussion is beyond this "tragic girl" anime. I personally liked it, since it works for what it is, but it was strictly stream worthy, I do not see any reason to buy the physical product. A side note to Key, feel free to spoilertag any part of this, I think I am safe, but you be the judge. |
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wastrel
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I guess I was one of the few who liked this show.
Yes, if you began watching this show expecting perfect explanations of why all the technology involved works the way it does, you were disappointed. If you wanted emphasis on the science fiction aspects at all, you were disappointed. Because this wasn't that type of show. What it was (spoilers to be extra safe) spoiler[was an exploration of how different people handle the fact that at a certain time, a person they've come to care for will be taken away from them. Absolutely will. That's what you see from the point of view of Tsukasa, who has to be one of the ones taking them away... and then the person he cares for goes, too. The SF trappings were just there to hang the story on, and explain why Tsukasa sees it so often in so short a time.] This was a character story, the kind most ANN readers and reviewers seem to hate a great deal. |
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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I think a huge reason why this show didn't go anywhere really is that it was clearly just using it's setting to talk about another setting. This show wasn't about trying to be about SF robot and all those implication, it was about terminal illness... except it wasn't, so you just ended up with this weird half show where the message didn't really fit with the setting/story.
If you consider the "are robot people" aspect, you either have a yes or no. If it's no, well who care about all the drama and such, there just robot that can be replace. But if they are people, well they the owner just brought people, essentially slave except on top of that there brainwashed slave to act exactly like the owner want. |
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