Sounds like this season is good. My problem with this series is that it wants to be a super absurd and weird fighting series balancing that with more serious moments but the writers don´t pull it off as well as JoJo´s. Also, I watched episodes 1-14, but the series drags its fight scenes for so long that they lose momentum between the obnoxious and kinda unnecessary infodumps, meaningless character conversations, and if you eliminate all that from the fight scenes, they last at best 5-10 mins. long. I think most of these problems stem from the manga, and going by how I was previously convinced by other manga fans to read the source materials instead of the adaptations because "it´s better than the anime", only to backfire when the manga is as bad if not worse than the anime, I´m inclined to believe that the manga is most of the times bad. It didn´t help that the fight scenes lacked so much production polish, with a terrible combination of still images that barely move, and CGI models that looked like crash test dummies than detailed characters. It shows that manga with hyper detailed artstyles should never be animated in 2D, because the production staff of today is not as capable of pulling off a TV production near the same level as a Hayao Miyazaki film. Yes, that means that this Baki series is an example of why Berserk should only be done in 3D, and it can be done with a highly capable team available.
I´d tell anybody to watch Kengan Ashura, a series that´s been called a Baki clone, yet it does everything better, and it should be more popular and more discussed. The infodumps are a welcome addition to the fight scenes, the character and plot development flows well, and the fight scenes have appropiate sense of impact, emotion and excitement, and they last the time they need. It´s the first 3DCG anime by Seiji Kishi (Assasination Classroom, Danganronppa) but it´s made with so much love and care, because he loves the manga, he knows some martial arts, and he even got some martial artists to do motion capture for it.On this video you´ll see what I mean by that.. The same cannot be said for Baki, which is made with the same love and care as a typical light-novel based generic anime, and for a manga that´s supposedly just as popular as JoJo´s, I´m not convinced it is so.
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