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EP. REVIEW: Record of Grancrest War


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Cam0



Joined: 13 Dec 2009
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 4:32 pm Reply with quote
Episode 23

How was Moreno surprised when the mages started breaking the cyclop's seal? For what other purpose could they have brought it out? Also if the polyandrist's (was it really necessary for the enemy cannonfire to make her squirm?) army wants to fight half-naked then that's their prerogative, but they should at least wear boots. Going into battle barefooted is going to be very unpleasant.

I'm glad that the metal dude didn't die, but didn't he lose his other eye to the butler assassin?
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#844391



Joined: 09 Sep 2015
Posts: 517
PostPosted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 6:46 pm Reply with quote
I've given up trying to nitpick this series, there's too much to go over.

One question that was bugging me during this episode is; what is Pandora's goal/purpose? their leader was going on about how it's worth unleashing a monster that could destroy the country to accomplish their goals. It's worth the entire city and their order being destroyed if they can kill Theo and keep the age of chaos going. That their principles are absolute. But WHY? What are they they trying to accomplish? Why is the age of order bad? We're just a couple of episodes from the end of the series and don't even know what the primary antagonists are even trying to do.
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Yttrbio
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Joined: 09 Jun 2011
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 15, 2018 7:39 pm Reply with quote
What, didn't you hear? The Age of Order is the beginning of the end. If a demon told me that, I'd totally start murdering people and unleashing terrible beasts that threaten to destroy my city. You'd have to be an idiot not to. You wouldn't want the end to begin.
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TexZero



Joined: 25 Oct 2017
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 16, 2018 1:37 am Reply with quote
Episode 23 is okay.

While i'd like to say something more this basically sums up how i feel about the series as a whole. This is a shame considering the author and his previous works which only leads me to believe that had they greenlight 5 seasons we'd actually get the proper pacing and detail work this serious needs to be a proper adaptation.

As is a lot of integral plot points get glossed over and character growth is short changed for what could be one of the deeper world building / fantasy shows to date.
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11306
PostPosted: Sat Jun 16, 2018 6:05 am Reply with quote
I kinda liked the cyclops battle. I gotta say, the true unsung heroes in this are the horses. They are absolutely fearless! Not a whinny of protest, nor a second's hesitation when told to go charging up a giant's swinging arm. All the horses in this deserve medals of valor. Or at least some nice crunchy apples.
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NeverConvex
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Joined: 08 Jun 2013
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 16, 2018 7:42 am Reply with quote
I really enjoyed the Cyclops fight, and as a result this episode as a whole. I think that's probably the only fight in the series where I thought the artwork, pacing, and choreography seemed well done, engaging, and fun.

If we could just replace the rest of the series with well-illustrated, well-paced fights against monsters we haven't seen hints of at any point prior in the series, and which bear only the most superficial relationship to the actual plot, I would be totally OK with that.
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Time Bandit



Joined: 16 Jan 2017
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Location: Raleigh
PostPosted: Sun Jun 17, 2018 1:08 am Reply with quote
NeverConvex wrote:
I really enjoyed the Cyclops fight, and as a result this episode as a whole. I think that's probably the only fight in the series where I thought the artwork, pacing, and choreography seemed well done, engaging, and fun.


I totally agree with you, Never. I thought this fight was also incredibly fun. Lassic was a downright badass, the fast pace of it all was exciting, and I loved the artwork. (Kinda reminded me of another one particular episode of a particular show (*coughcough* Fate/Apocrypha *coughcough*) that also got bad reviews because of the 'bad artwork' (which I loved in my opinion)).

Now...was it a wise decision to leave just one more episode after this one with all these strings left to be tied up? Maybe not. But I had fun with this particular episode, and in a series where it was so hit and miss, I will take what I can get happily!

This show has been really hot and cold for me throughout, but this episode really was pretty awesome for me. I can't wait to see what happens next with our resident blood-sucker, and hopefully some things will be answered.

If not...eh...then this series gets put into the 'yeah it was pretty, but meh...' bin.
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Cam0



Joined: 13 Dec 2009
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 17, 2018 8:00 am Reply with quote
Eh, I thought that the animation during the cyclops fight was mostly just kinda okish except for the last part of the fight where Lassic goes to finish off the cyclops with his spear. The general roughness, lack of detail and off-model Lassic just made the last part look absolute dreadful to me.
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NeverConvex
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Joined: 08 Jun 2013
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PostPosted: Sun Jun 17, 2018 8:04 am Reply with quote
I kinda liked all those things, felt like a neat (albeit common) way to emphasize how dynamic and fast-paced the scene was. I can see how it might rub some people the wrong way, though; your mileage may vary, as they say.
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NeverConvex
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 23, 2018 10:53 am Reply with quote
The finale was an interesting mess. Were we supposed to know or care who Hubertus was (aside from 'big bad mage guy who apparently won't do anything of note')? The show didn't really seem to, even in his big ending scene, so I guess maybe not.

The ideological premise of Pandora was reasonably neat, and a cool way to tie in this universe to issues near and dear to our own. It's too bad the ten-thousand writing, character, & execution missteps prior to the big reveal made it feel more like a bad attempt at last-minute philosophizing than a major revelation that deepened the meaning of the series in some substantial way. Mmm, and maybe worse in that regard is that 1) Theo & Siluca barely missed a beat, rather than actually struggling with what they'd learned, despite that they offered no actual resolution to the conundrum posed by their new knowledge, and 2) the reveal only seems to really help to develop the global scale of the world's plot, without giving the show's main cast any additional texture or their choices any additional meaning. (Minor tangent: did it bother anyone else when Siluca said 'Remember, only what you feel matters, Theo', or something to that effect? Like.. do we need to obsess over blandy mcblanderson the savior stand-in's personal experience any more than we already have? Maybe it was a bad translation...)

I did mostly enjoy the fight with vampie. On the one hand, it felt kind've ... forced .. as if, you know, they realized even the writers find a guy named Hubertus boring, so they needed a real big bad with which to have a final fight... But, on the other hand, the vampire king's motivations for wanting to maintain the age of chaos seemed a lot more reasonable & grounded than the mages'. Vampie's actually a pretty good character to have champion the age of chaos. Plus, battling vampie meant more goofy fantasy fighting with a monster, which the show seems to be somewhat less bad at than with all of its long, tedious, comically immoral war-waging for literal noble love.

One nitpick about the vampie fight: spoiler[the sub-scene with his coffin and real body was completely unnecessary, distracting, offered nothing new to our understanding or engagement with the fight or what was at stake, and was just really, really, really dumb.] Oh, maybe a second nitpick: spoiler[what in the friggin' world happened to the werewolf pups like halfway through the fight, when they were doggy-paddling through the air while eating vampie's shadows? That looked perfectly hilarious, in the really bad unintentional kind've way. Were they in his blood ocean at that point and so actually swimming? I didn't think they were...] Ah, hell, and a third: spoiler[did we really need a last-second character introduced into the main cast & summarily discarded to try to artificially generate some pathos? Would love to hear why they thought introducing Aeon into that final fight was a good idea.]
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 23, 2018 11:11 am Reply with quote
NeverConvex wrote:
(Minor tangent: did it bother anyone else when Siluca said 'Only what you feel matters, Theo', or something to that effect?

I did a double take over that too, but then I thought that, rather than being wincingly deferential to him, maybe she meant that he needed to only pay attention to what he was feeling and ignore the signts and sounds and propaganda Pandora was whispering in his ear to know what to do. Like she was warning him not to get swept up in the experience? Maybe I'm being too generous.

I thought creating the Grancrest was the thing that would be the End of Chaos. Which was why I kept wondering why they didn't just create the damn thing instead of going off to battle and risking important elements of its creation being killed off. But then it turned out that they defeated all the Evils and became Emperor and Ended Chaos, and creating the Grancrest was just some nice icing on the cake to show off to the peons that everything's cool now, go in peace.

But I just threw up my hands when they let the last shadow vamp go. Just because he's weak now doesn't mean he won't get stronger years down the line and you or your descendants will have to do this all over again! Why are they so opposed to taking prisoners or finishing off their enemies for good and all? smh

And Queen Bitch didn't end up with her head on a pike, but instead gets to be all forgiven and be Queen and live happily ever after, so feh.
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zrnzle500



Joined: 04 Oct 2014
Posts: 3767
PostPosted: Sat Jun 23, 2018 11:20 am Reply with quote
NeverConvex wrote:
Ah, hell, and a third: spoiler[did we really need a last-second character introduced into the main cast & summarily discarded to try to artificially generate some pathos? Would love to hear why they thought introducing Aeon into that final fight was a good idea.]


They introduced him in episode 5 when they first introduced the werewolves, though at least in that episode, the romanization of his name was different (Ion). But they haven't really used him a lot since then.
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NeverConvex
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Joined: 08 Jun 2013
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 23, 2018 11:26 am Reply with quote
gina: I was actually wondering the same thing as I wrote that edit to my post. The alternative reading wasn't one that had occurred to me while watching, but maybe that is what they were going for? They didn't really play up the 'Pandora orb' world as being all that hard to resist mentally/emotionally once they were actually inside of it, which is I think why I didn't parse the line that way in the show, but that could just be yet another execution error.

zrnzle: yeah, I didn't mean that he was a legitimately new character (though I only hazily remembered him), just that he's had almost no role in the show to this point, so why in the world are we dragging him back in for the final confrontation? Seemed like a pretty weak, transparent attempt to use a character they didn't care that much about to drag some sobs out've the viewer, and maybe also the writers trying a bit too hard to tie every subplot together at the last second (if they're gonna fight vampie, then they need general representation from the werewolf clan and not just the two werewolf pup-maid-girls for the clan's revenge to feel satisfying... maybe... question mark?).
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zrnzle500



Joined: 04 Oct 2014
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 23, 2018 11:50 am Reply with quote
NeverConvex wrote:
zrnzle: yeah, I didn't mean that he was a legitimately new character (though I only hazily remembered him), just that he's had almost no role in the show to this point, so why in the world are we dragging him back in for the final confrontation? Seemed like a pretty weak, transparent attempt to use a character they didn't care that much about to drag some sobs out've the viewer, and maybe also the writers trying a bit too hard to tie every subplot together at the last second (if they're gonna fight vampie, then they need general representation from the werewolf clan and not just the two werewolf pup-maid-girls for the clan's revenge to feel satisfying... maybe... question mark?).


I think it gives the werewolves' quest for revenge against the vampire king a cost, without killing off characters that we do care for, not just to try an make the viewer feel sad but to show that an insistence on getting vengeance is not without costs, and that the cycle of violence ends when one forsakes the need for vengeance. I'm not sure I can say that this scene in particular says precisely all that, but in light of the treatment of the last member of the Rossinis and to a lesser extent Marrine, among other enemies that Theo and company have let go rather than take them out, forgiveness of one's enemies is, if not a theme, at least a common enough occurrence. I don't know that the show had much of anything interesting to say on that, or that I can say they have convincingly shown that those folks (beyond Rossini) really deserved to be forgiven though.
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NeverConvex
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Joined: 08 Jun 2013
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PostPosted: Sat Jun 23, 2018 12:27 pm Reply with quote
I think that seems like a reasonable thematic read.

But I think if that's worth expressing as part of the finale, then it's worth expressing with characters we are familiar with and care about, and who are naturally involved in the confrontation, not shoe-horned in at the last second. It makes their message feel cheap and hollow when it's performed through the obviously contrived use of a character who has no particular reason to be there and hasn't played a role in the show for 20ish-some episodes.

Put a bit differently: given that the authors intentionally used a throw-away character no one cares about, does the scene actually say that vengeance has consequences, or does it say that the consequences of vengeance are narratively unimportant, emotionally superficial, and ultimately forgettable, just like Aeon? I think for the authors' message to actually convey this idea of consequences for vengeance, *we* should feel the pain of the characters' loss, and that requires the authors caring enough about their ideas to consider harming the main cast.
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