Forum - View topicScared Rider Xechs (TV).
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DuskyPredator
 Posts: 15457 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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Scared Rider Xechs (TV) Genres: action, science fiction Themes: mecha Plot Summary: The Blue World, a world symbolizing reason, is under attack by fierce creatures known as the Nightfly O'Note sent from the Red World, a world symbolizing instinct. Elected to lead the Blue World, 17-year-old researcher Akira Asagi will take charge of the combat unit “IS”. These six riders, also called the Scared Rider Xechs, will fight at the Ryuukyuu LAG to protect their world and each other. ---------------------------------- I just finished the series, episode 12, and found out that there was no discussion about it, which is not without reason as I never wrote posts about it weekly. But god willing that I actually finished this show, and I am going to talk about it. I will follow up this post with a last episode discussion . Read what I write to know what others dodged, and if by some off chance you actually finished this, share my pain or tell me how I am wrong. |
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DuskyPredator
Posts: 15457 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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First I am going to explain what I thought at first, and what I hoped this would be. If I would describe what I thought, it was that I thought that this would be like an alternate gender version of Symphogear, where we have a mix of music and mecha cross with hero fighting. The differences would be that there is a male fighting cast, and more of a hero team like super sentai, and would be aimed at a female audience. It was not exactly aimed at me, but in taking an interest of watching shows not aimed at my gender, I thought that I could still enjoy it, but I was wrong.
Episode 12 (finale) I did not enjoy Scared Riders Xechs, instead I loathed it. I hated it, but by the time I realised nothing would change, I was so along that I felt I had to finish it, partially out of spite for the time I could finally review it, and show that there are series worthy of my low ratings. A big sticking point was what I thought would be interesting, the blend of music and super heroes, simply put it was not combined well at all. The music part of Scared Riders Xechs is pretty shamelessly stapled on. Music seems to have no part with their fighting ability, it just seems to have some weird things like some sort of guitar pick in their ship, a giant tuning fork at the school (for some reason), and some sort of thing where the put some sort of plug things from their headphone looking neck thing for their transformation sequence. But what makes it the worst is that the show still tries to implement music as part of the plot. See, for some reason the super hero team each play a musical instrument on top of whatever other interests they have (more on that later), it is never explained if this is part of the selection process for how they become a superhero, no one explains how they are. Fairly early on the narrative makes it clear that their teamwork needs improvement, you could think of any sorts of activities that could be done to help their teamwork, but the star female main character (more on her later) decides that them all being in a band. You think, fine I guess a band could help them get to know each other better or something, but it does not end there. The characters decide that they don’t just need to be in a band, they have to be in a popular band. Suddenly the show shifts from a group of super heroes that are fighting to save the world, to a group that is treating becoming a successful famous band as their goal, their apparently master tactician instructor (teenage female protagonist) is now acting as their manager and putting a lot of energy into thinking how she can get their name out. And that touches on one of the problems, they are apparently the last defence against the alien threat and yet they are apparently not famous, no one cares that these guys are the ones stopping alien monsters, or that apparently that it is how they spend their time. And it is not like their roles are secret, because they are in a freaken school. The school is my next point. From the first episode you could probably guess that their base is a school, I don’t think it is ever stated, but the environment kind of says it. They hold their meetings in classrooms and the cast seem to wonder around various school like areas, based on the story you could probably see that with the alien threat they had people move out of the area and set their military operation up in this school. But you would be wrong. See, it is at some point we suddenly have a school festival, which feels pretty confusing, starting with cast members putting up posters and they have run in with someone who I think was student president. Out of the blue we find out that this is a fully operational school, there are an array of students but we would not have known because you never see any other students, and none of the cast ever goes to class, instead we get random lines like one of the main characters saying he is apparently the only member of the cooking club. Apparently the group of Earth saying heroes are struggling with the need to attract people to their performance as if people don’t want to go look at these guys, and it is treated as a real threat. Onto the main characters, they are all either incredibly two dimensional, or incredibly annoying. At first I actually did not mind the guy who says random English words, but after a while he became incredibly hard to deal with, his partner, the cat guy, was also somewhat interesting until he wore out his welcome. By the end of it I just wanted to be done with the random gibberish. I wanted to punch the guy with the stupid orange scarf, if only because on top of his bland character his appearance with the scarf and open shirt looked only like something on the front of a magazine and not how someone would actually dress. Pink guy I think was supposed to be feminine, but it never really came across in his actions, and was over compensated with his partner, he did have an episode about him but I can’t tell you as being anything that set his character apart. The partners, the monster like characters, were really only caricatures of what the guys were, it did not make them interesting, there was never really any good explanation of why they are on their side to help them transform, and it is actually pretty difficult to know which one was speaking when they were talking to each other. I will use this chance to talk about the main female character. The show started off with some sort of laboratory where military lady is getting some girl out of it to do something hard that needs to be done. It seems safe to assume that the girl at the end who utters that she wants to do is the same one, but this was wrong, but perhaps for slightly better reasons. The main girl Akira gets brought in next episode, noted as the girl who was saying that she wanted to die, but she seems perfectly fine, that we have to assume she had her memory altered, so when weird inconsistencies show up later we can guess that we are seeing a realisation that her memories are false. It is a little weird that she has apparently been paraded as a master tactician, but one must trust that she needs to be in this position. But in an interesting twist, we find out that the girl at the very start of the series was actually Hako, the girl in the small shorts who appeared at the school first, apparently being an “engineer”, but no real explanation of what that means or what she does. It would actually be a bit of an interesting twist, but at that point it is only confusing. Hako is apparently a clone of Akira, and it was her memories that were false, despite the fact that something must have been done to Akira. Akira is revealed to be some sort of game piece between the Blue world and Red world, where winning her over would save one over the other. We are assured at this point that strength wise the other world is stronger and the real goal was to convince Akira that Earth was a better place. Evil military girl does not get the memo, kills a bunch of people and kidnaps Akira, her goal apparently required using Hako for reasons, and her plan lured in the enemy army into the path of an attack they would underestimate. No surprise evil military lady’s confidence is apparently baseless, more people die, and before the good guys come into win somehow, whatever brainwashing was apparently required with Hako with whatever plan she had in mind, did not require being nice to her as she starts being cruel to her for like the sake of being cruel. It is actually pretty hard to watch because it is hard to understand what villain lady was thinking, she must have known they were strong, and it isn’t quite touched on what to do with her character next other than kill Hako. The good guys come and save the day from the enemy, sacrificing one of their members to get the killing blow, him being blown to pieces. Now ask yourself how a show could ruin a dramatic moment of a main character dying? The answer is reveal they are not really dead, but even more, he has apparently has come back evil and for some reason is now the leader of the enemy side. There is no explanation of how this happened, the evil guy he was with did not survive, not even the copout that they fused together (that happens with the aliens and humans). And there is no explanation why he suddenly feels that Earth is a bad place where only bad things happen, the only bad things that happen in the show were kind of what the aliens did, and did I forget to mention that his base on the red moon like red planet looks like the palace from Sailor Moon? The aliens in general are horribly explained, there seems to be little rhyme or reason to them. Akira apparently cares for their safety of their planet as much as Earth, so she cannot make a decision of saving either one, despite the reasoning of this not being conveyed well. Guy who came back to life is about to beat all the heroes by using all the alien monsters when he is convinced of something. His decision was no to destroy everything (not really logical following his reasoning), and now the heroes he could easily have beaten before are given the chance to team up and beat him. The winning factor that helps the heroes win is Akira’s strategy, but the deal is that she is yelling it right out in the open which would have meant the guy they were fighting knew the strategy, yet somehow they win. In the final act to beat him as he goes to destroy everything she sacrifices herself and everyone gets to live on Earth, no real explanation of why the aliens could not just go to Earth anyway, and it finishes off on this cliché ending, guy who died is like back to normal. The plot explanation maybe does not even sound too bad, maybe even interesting, and there could be the chance that I am being too hard, but in general I was just so frustrated with this that I hated it all. Concert scenes were bottom of the barrel as far as anime goes, even if it is not really common with male cast. World building sucked, characters were lame or frustrating, story was confusing, animation and design was nothing special, and overall I do not enjoy my time except for writing up this review. The rating I give Scared Rider Xechs is Bad, where I give a couple points because I don’t think it was entirely the worst ever, that some people might enjoy this. I have never rated anything as lower, not sure what would even qualify…….. Wait, no scratch what I said above out, I am rating this show Awful (1/10), I did not even get any so bad it is good enjoyment out of this, regardless of what others think, I think less of this than I did Amnesia, where I can kind of look back with some fondness, which I doubt I will get from this. I leave this series with a 2,000 word essay of how much I did not like it, and as an example of something in anime that is actually awful. |
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 23742 |
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Whelp, looks like I was justified in dumping this after three eppies.
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