Forum - View topicWorst first episode for an otherwise good anime
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jgreen
 Posts: 1325 Location: St. Louis, MO |
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As a companion piece to this thread, we all know that a great first episode can suck you into a series. But have you ever encountered a show where the first episode left you bored and disappointed, only to stick with the series and discover it gets much, much better?
I experienced this very phenomenon with Gasaraki, a series I just started watching a few weeks ago. The show had been described to me as "an Evangelion ripoff, but one of the better ones," so I bought it sight unseen during a RightStuf sale and sat down to watch it, expecting an existential mecha series. The first episode, however, was anything but. Instead, we're greeted with a teenage boy in a Noh costume dancing on a stage as a bunch of mysterious millitary men monitor his vital signs. Weird things start to happen, and the military men all start yelling at each other, and then a girl appears from out of nowhere screaming "DON'T BRING BACK THE TERROR!!!!  ". And that's it. No context is given for any of this, and you're left with no conceivable reason to come back and find out more about mysterious dancing boy and his scary new blue-haired lady friend.
Then the second episode kicks off and said kid is in a military issue Bad Ass Robot conducting war games, you're introduced to the rest of the characters, and a rip-roaring political thriller begins to take shape. But NONE of that is implied by the first episode, which is so different it almost feels like a different series entirely. If I hadn't already bought the entire boxset, I probably never would have watched more of the series, but now that I'm halfway through I'm completely hooked. So what about you guys? Any series you disliked at first that you stuck with and learned to love? |
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bonbonsrus
 Posts: 1537 Location: Michigan, USA |
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Berserk, as watched on disk. I had heard this was good, picked it up and the first episode baffled me. I realize it was technically the last episode chronologically after watching the rest of the series, however, this would have put me off from the series if I hadn't had the rest of the disk to watch. I am glad I had the rest of the series to watch however, I enjoyed watching the characters grow, the story I thought was good, the animation never became "great" but I still enjoyed the series more than the first (25th? ) episode would have led me to believe.
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BrothersElric
 Posts: 1996 |
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I think that Eureka 7 was a show that started out really kind of boreing, or if anything, mediocre. Then as I continued to stick with it (like I do with pretty much any anime series I start), I began to realize more and more how good it really is! It just requires a whole lot of patience, really.
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jgreen
Posts: 1325 Location: St. Louis, MO |
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Oh, you're so right! I completely forgot about Berserk, but I remember my roommate in college renting the first disc and I was, as you said, so "baffled" by the first episode that I didn't want to watch anymore EVER. Turns out there were much better things to come.... |
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Rakushun
 Posts: 116 Location: Hawaii |
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s-CRY-ed looked like a plotless slugfest at the start. The main character is a typical never-say-die shounen character, whose only weapons were his loud mouth and a magical boxing glove. In the first episode, he faces off against a giant robot controlled by an overmuscular thug. Nothing could be more mundane.
I held out a little hope for the series, and it eventually developed into a decent story with interesting twists. It really made so much when starting with so little. I decided to remember the director and picked up one of his other anime, and hit paydirt. Infinite Ryvius is a superb anime, but without the speedbump at the start. |
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Drowning_Wolf
Posts: 193 |
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Shuffle!'s fist episode was far from a good experience in my book, actually I thought the first half of the show (with an exception or two) pretty much sucked. It turned out that the series did have great drama bits and that some of Rin's groupies actually started to make sense latter on.
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selenta
 Subscriber Posts: 1774 Location: Seattle, WA |
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Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya - This one gets my "kind of" award. Why? Because I can't stand poorly done things. I understand, looking back on it, that it is a parody, but at the time the only thing I could think of was: "Wtf is this?!". It was the first episode of some brand new show neither I nor anyone else knew of, it seemed pretty terrible, so I stopped less than halfway through and never looked back. Well, at least for another month when people started to really talk about it, and I caught some comment about the nature of the first episode. Naturally, I went back and watched it, and found it hilarious; so it wasn't really a terrible episode, I just never expected that they would expect people to watch the ENTIRE first episode before they put anything in even some mild kind of context.
Monster - Actually, it was the first couple episodes for me. I first downloaded the show, and watched the first few episodes, but quickly wrote it off and the premise that I had read online as ridiculous and uninteresting. Sometimes I enjoy political intrigue stuff, but sometimes I don't, depends on the setting and how it is handled. The hospital intrigue just seemed so petty to me that I could hardly avoid falling asleep while watching it, so I dropped the series. Maybe 9 months or a year later, I kept noticing rave rave reviews, particularly here at ANN for this show that I had dropped because it was boring. I read a little more about it and decided to give it a second chance. What I found left me literally shaking after many blocks of 3-4 episodes; watching any more than that at a time was too stressful. Last edited by selenta on Fri Mar 09, 2007 7:42 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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kolibri
 Posts: 712 Location: Vancouver |
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Totally. I watched the first episode, half of it doing something else because it was so boring - didn't make any sense and I just couldn't stand the bounce-bounce scenes. I don't even remember why I picked the series up again few days later - perhaps because people kept talking about it, but I'm glad that I did in the end - it turned out to be my favourite series of last year. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18220 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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[Off Topic] Anyone who describes Gasaraki as an "Evangelion ripoff" doesn't know what they're talking about. It is utterly different from Evangelion in style, pacing, and tone, and emphasizes its dense plotting and focus on the technical aspects of mecha far more than its character development. Frankly, I thought its first episode did a pretty good job of setting the mood. [/Off Topic] The best example I can think of where a horrible first episode almost destroys an otherwise-good series is Divergence Eve. The first episode makes no sense, is adrift in a morass of technobabble, and doesn't explain anything, really. It's just plain awful. Those who weather through it (and can get past the massive racks of its female characters) find a remarkably solid sci-fi/horror series. |
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fighterholic
Posts: 9193 |
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The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Definetly confusing, and the camera view is one of the worst to try and open a series with. And then with Kyon's narration it's not helping much either. Fate/Stay Night. What is up with this first episode? One of the slowest and boring episodes with how they're trying to bring in characters, but there's nothing that points to how the series can become exciting. Bad enough I wanted to cry.
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Niceguy9418
 Posts: 82 |
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Yeah, I'm totaly with everyone who said "The Melanmcholy of Haruhi Suzumiya." Don't get me wrong - I absolutely LOVED the series, and after seeing the whole thing, I could go back and appreciate how brilliant that first episode really was. But the FIRST TIME I saw it? Oh man - I'm like: "What the hell is this STEAMING PILE OF CRAP?!" And "Why the hell is it ranked #1 on ANN?!" (Which it was, at the time!
 ) Plus I just didn't "get" what the deal was with episode 11 being first. (newby ) Needless to say I think the series is a masterpiece. But I don't see why everyone raves about it after seeing only the first episode. Out of context... IT SUX!!!!
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frentymon
Forums Superstar
 Posts: 2362 Location: San Francisco |
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Many many series made made have first episodes highly inferior or at least somewhat inferior to the rest of the series, but I'll limit it down to a few.
Code Geass: The first episode was kinda dull, nothing special, not actually bad but just wholly uninteresting. To me it seemed like one of those "kid nobody knows comes in and wows everybody" titles that I couldn't possibly imagine to be interesting. Yet, somehow they made it work, and managed to steer the series in a direction I never would've imagined, incorporating stunning visuals in the fights, secrets and more secrets to make everything more suspenseful, great characters, comedy to some extent, all sorts of different settings, and a fast-paced and exciting plot. And of course, fanservice. One Piece: I'll be blunt: the first episode was awful. Not in the sense that it was actually a poor quality episode, but it lead to all sorts of wonderful misguided conjectures as to where the series might go. I pictured One Piece being episodic after that point and abysmally boring; that every episode after the first would be modeled just like the first. Luckily I was wrong and it turned out to be a fun and exciting adventure packed with drama, GREAT backstories, action, excitement, and all-around awesomeness. |
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Ryvius213
Posts: 291 |
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Chrono Crusade. The first episode was too slapstick for my tastes. Episode 2 caught my interest, but episode 3 was what got me hooked. After that, I just couldn't stop watching.
Rahxephon also had a below-average first episode, imo. It just seemed too much like an Eva-rip. I didn't take much interest in the series until episode 5. Oddly enough, watching the whole series first actually makes the first few episodes more enjoyable the second time around. X had a HORRIBLE episode 0 that ruined most of the twists in the actual series. In episode 1, the annoying characters just kept me from watching the series for a while. Episode 2 was a little less dense, but it was still decent at best. Some things are finally explained in episode 3, and the plot pulled me in slowly from that point. |
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EngrishFan
Posts: 75 Location: Somewhere in chilly Canada |
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If the first episode of Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni/When They Cry hadn't started with spoiler[a scene showing Rena and Mion's violent deaths at the hands of a completely paranoid and out of control Keiichi] and the OP I would have thought the series was an extremely subpar and completely painful harem anime with awful animation and some lolicon tendencies (which would normally have turned me off completely). Thankfully, the aforementioned sections and the general hype behind the series made me overlook the (perhaps intentional) direction of the episode and I found that eventually the series would grow to be one of my favourite mystery/thrillers, despite many of its weaknesses (mainly the [at times] amateurish animation).
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ManOfRust
 Posts: 1935 Location: Seattle, WA |
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I had this same experience with Rahxephon. I actually kept falling asleep during the first episode and had to start it over a couple of times. I ended up really liking the series, and like you when I re-watched it I had a hard time figuring out why the first episode had seemed so dull originally. I also agree with jgreen about Gasaraki. I didn't hate the first episode, but the series got a lot better starting in episode 2. spoiler[Unfortunately, it tends to fall apart again at the end, especially the last episode after the political intrigue aspect of the plot has been resolved.] I know a lot of people are going to disagree with me, but I almost quit watching after the first episode of Ai Yori Aoshi. I just couldn't stand how subservient Aoi was. Her total devotion to a man she had never even met as an adult was somewhere between unsettling and stalker-level creepy. As the story progresses and you start to learn more about the characters, their histories, and what motivates them it gets a lot better. Another series where I thought the first episode was much less enjoyable than the rest of the show was Record of Lodoss War. They just throw you into the middle of the story, which while not by itself a bad thing, doesn't work well with this story. The character types in Lodoss War are not exactly original or very compelling or dynamic on their own without any background to them. It is through gradually getting to know them that you become attached to them, so the first episode comes across as a bit of a boring generic fantasy that was written by someone who read Lord of the Rings one time too many. Starting in episode 2 you get to go back and see the story from the beginning and getting the context of who the characters are and what they are fighting for went a long way towards increasing my enjoyment of the story. By the time you get back to the point in the adventure where the first episode took place, you have a different perspective. |
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