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EP. REVIEW: Rage of Bahamut: Virgin Soul


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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11286
PostPosted: Tue Sep 26, 2017 8:13 pm Reply with quote
And I am a fan, but I think she was off-base with a lot of her complaints. So there ya go. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Merida



Joined: 21 Feb 2012
Posts: 1945
PostPosted: Wed Sep 27, 2017 12:24 am Reply with quote
So in the end, as usual, it comes down to how much your own opinion seems to align with that of the reviewer. I have yet to come across a comment like "i agree with the review in general, but i still think it's really unprofessional" at least... Wink
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11286
PostPosted: Wed Sep 27, 2017 7:19 am Reply with quote
Perhaps not, but I disagree with reviewers all the time, sometime vociferously, and this is the first time I've ever called a review (not the reviewer) unprofessional. It's not a criticism I throw around lightly. And I am done talking about it.
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
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Joined: 14 Aug 2006
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 27, 2017 12:15 pm Reply with quote
WeNTuS wrote:

Yeah, and i don't see those aspects in anime. In reality they exists only in your head and head of reviewer. I remember back then Gabriella made some reviews of anime i don't really remember name which sparked outrage here. I guess adequate people already left ANN forums and now only her fans are lurking here.

It's called an opinion. Believe it or not people are allowed to have one that is not the same as your own without being insulted for it. So I suggest if you have nothing of actual substance to add to the discussion your forgo anymore insults to posters in the thread and move on.

I suggest everyone else move on as well.
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Jason Rhoades



Joined: 23 May 2017
Posts: 14
PostPosted: Thu Sep 28, 2017 10:01 pm Reply with quote
Once again, the review really infuriated me. And it's not because her opinion is different from mine, it's because her tunnel vision on the things she doesn't like about the plot is borderline obsessive. This time there wasn't a single comment about ANYTHING regarding art/animation, voice acting or music. She literally zeroes in on the things that rubbed her the wrong way and proceeds to vehemently slaughter that content as if that's literally all the episode contained. It's also very annoying that her "writer's voice" is becoming louder than the screams of the character's in the anime. I can't even visualize her references to the episode because it all just sounds like one big tantrum.

What about Rita's excellent screen time? What about Azazel and Jeanne's amazing fight choreography? What about the nice comic relief with Nina summoning the zombies? What about the other underwhelming things such as Lucifer not making any notion of action yet? Or the fact that we have on episode to wrap up a lot of conflict? This doesn't feel like an episode review anymore. It sounds like a rant.
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tophg



Joined: 22 Apr 2016
Posts: 22
PostPosted: Fri Sep 29, 2017 8:45 pm Reply with quote
Episode 24: Well, I take back what I said about still enjoying the series, that finale has left me speechless with its utter cackhandedness in tying up the plot with a ridiculous one-shot and characters just left to wander off into the sunset in vagueness or half-hearted resolutions ... what a let down. And then the furious mashing of the reset button ...

It's saying something when once-major characters like Azazel don't even speak one word in the finale ... perhaps he was just too meta-disgusted with the series by this point to waste his breath.
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Zeino



Joined: 19 May 2017
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PostPosted: Fri Sep 29, 2017 10:34 pm Reply with quote
So.... Anyone want to bet if Gabriella is giving the final episode an F?
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11286
PostPosted: Fri Sep 29, 2017 11:41 pm Reply with quote
^ No doubt. Smile

I'm actually kinda glad Mugaro didn't get rezzed, since bringing back two would've been a bit much. Speaking of which, Rita couldn't find him some new clothes? Smile I trust that with time he'll become more sentient like Rita. Otherwise, that's nightmare fuel.

Looks like Charioce will be ruling more benignly now at least.

I enjoyed this over all. I think the biggest mistake they made was keeping Charioce's plans a secret from the viewers for so long. He might've garnered more sympathy as a misunderstood despot if we'd known early on what he was after. Once everyone's hatred took root, nothing could turn that around.

::grabs popcorn, settles in for the Rage Against Bahamut to commence::
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SilverTalon01



Joined: 02 Apr 2012
Posts: 2401
PostPosted: Sat Sep 30, 2017 2:04 am Reply with quote
That post credits epilogue... I mean I kind of expected that to be the case, but it really takes a dump on the story. spoiler[Somehow everyone just decided to forgive king douchebag for everything he did because he 'killed' Bahamut. Not only did that seem incredibly out of character for them to let Charioce off, but his needless sacrificing of all those humans, demons, and gods was completely meaningless outside of making himself feel good. He is the one the series gives a happy ending to? The guy who throws countless innocents under the bus to get his feels good revenge?

I did at least like Fava's scenes. His farewell scene with Nina was great.]
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Pierrot.





PostPosted: Sat Sep 30, 2017 6:15 am Reply with quote
The last episode deserves nothing higher than an F.

The sequel has been insult to the first series and in regards to how it has treated the Genesis cast. It's amazing how the new writer doesn't feel ashamed of her bias because of how she's punishing and defiling the Genesis cast. All you need to do is compare the death scenes of both Alessand or Kaisar to get what I mean.

I also hate how Charioce got away with everything and got treated as a hero because of acting like a despot maniac while Jeanne got shitted on episode after episode just for being a good mother and because she wanted a peaceful life with her son. Heck he even taunted her about murdering her child when she was in the prison cell.
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NeverConvex
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Joined: 08 Jun 2013
Posts: 2249
PostPosted: Sat Sep 30, 2017 7:33 am Reply with quote
ChibiKangaroo wrote:
The problem I think is that the last few episodes have been sort of the half assed Charioce redemption tour. It's half assed because we haven't seen an attempt at full redemption, just revelations about his plan and suddenly some characters are giving him more sympathy...


This captures my feelings pretty well. I think even Nina falling completely for Charioce could have worked out OK if Charioce's motives had ever really been compellingly conveyed or the bizarre attempt at redeeming him in the viewers' eyes had been even remotely successful.

As is it just seems like he pointlessly enslaved an entire race (the demons) and really did his best to do the same to another race (the angels) that wasn't yet entirely under his boot, but it's not at all clear why he felt the need to do so. It had no obvious role in his "plan": why do you need this ridiculous race war in order to resurrect and kill Bahamut? Does Bahamut's resurrection require internecine racial strife or something? Was Charioce trying to organize a unified tri-racial force to slaughter the newly res'd Bahamut? And why is res'ing Bahamut to shoot him with your fancy ancient-peoples' gun a good idea, anyway? What guarantee do we have that that's any more permanent a solution than Amira's sacrifice? Was there any debate over whether immediately res'ing him to try to kill him is worth the obvious immediate cost in lives lost that will bring, on top of all of the enslaved and slaughtered demons? As viewers we needed to see at least some of these weighty issues raised, Charioce's reactions to them explained and addressed, and to understand why supposed good-guy Charioce did all of the awful things he did. But we were never given a well-told justification for all of the terrible crap he pulled, and as a result constantly trying to portray him as a 'complex villain' just felt jarring and confused. (I wonder if part of the problem here was that the writing staff were trying really hard to maintain Charioce's distance and mystique while selling him as a love interest for Nina? Maybe they forgot that - because, you know, as far as we can tell he's a friggin' monster -
eventually his brooding mystery needed to give way to actually telling us something about his reasoning, motivations, and how/why he has made some difficult moral choices if we were ever supposed to think he was anything more than a brutal dictator.)

Unfortunately, since the attempt at reframing Charioce failed, Nina's being desperately lovesick fell flat, too. There was a chance to tell the story of a complex romance here, but what we got instead was a previously interesting and fun protagonist with some moral conviction completely subverted by the need to tie her romantically to a poorly explained monster (and I'm not talking about Bahamut! ... although who knows how a dragon x dragon OTP would have worked out, heh...). Had Charioce's motivations been effectively told and the viewers given some actual reason that he felt the need to grind his boot into the other races' collective necks then Nina's internal back-and-forth over whether it was OK to love him could've have parsed really naturally. But as is it just reduced Nina to 'Welp she's a lady character with a crush. Guess nothing else about her well-established character or convictions matters now.'

That Charioce's 'plan' hinged on an unexplained, suddenly revealed 'ancient device' didn't much help the last half of this season, and that his plan directly assaulted the importance of Amira's sacrifice in season 1 was a painfully shallow choice. On the whole the general plot structure of this season felt more like a bunch of haphazardly tossed together fantasy and sci-fi tropes than it did like a coherent whole that built upon the prior character-, plot-, and world-building work that had been done.

To wrap up my wordy pain train of complain(ts): Azazel, Jeanne, and El/Mugaro all felt like their arcs just sort've puttered out without any meaningful resolution. El's death felt appropriate for Alessand's arc but completely ill-timed for El's arc, and Azazel/Jeanne's quest for vengeance ended with them passively, idly watching as the world-saving dragonslayer Charioce was lavished with lionization and returned to the throne. What an utterly bizarre disservice to those characters' stories! (And let's not even get started on the sudden, entirely meaningless introduction of Satan as the demonic leader. All that argumentative back-and-forth with Azazel over whether it was strategically the right time to launch a counterattack against the humans, only to have Satan spend the entire battle sitting in his chair and to apparently retire back to irrelevance after superman the human king heroically gave up his sight to destroy Bahamut. Satan should never have been introduced as an important secondary character if they weren't going to actually use him meaningfully!)

I did have a few more positive notes:

I was actually sort of OK with how Alessand's arc ended; I disagree with Gabriella in that I think he was one of the better written characters in Shingeki S2 (although maybe I don't disagree that badly, since I think being one of the better written characters in this second season is akin to being the best poet in a roomful of random string generators). It was over-the-top, but at least they laid the groundwork for it; he was always portrayed as weak-willed and desperate for the easiest road to authority and ostensible respect/power. Although his transformation was a little comic, in broad strokes it seemed natural to me: he was exactly the kind of character that would A) give in to temptation by doing something awful in an easy gamble for cheaply bought prestige and then B) slowly descend into a gibbering mess as he contemplates how awful what he did was and how empty it was, as even the authority he cheaply bought means nothing and erodes in the wake of the events around him. The gibbering mess bit and his craven attempts at killing his old comrade also seemed reasonable turns in his character for me; that was just a weak, defeated creature grasping at whatever fragile hope it could find left. In that context, I felt Dias mixed feelings about killing him were natural as well, as Dias was always portrayed as looking out for Alessand, and seemed to feel somewhat responsible for not mentoring him well enough to correct his major character defects. My original expectation was that Dias would kill him, seeing it as his responsibility because of his almost fatherly relationship to Alessand, but Dias not having quite that hard an edge to his resolve seemed reasonable as well.

Kaisar dying and coming back as zombie Kaisar was also OK. I had kind of stopped caring about most of the show's characters by the point he died, unfortunately - the incoherent story-telling just slowly killed off my general emotional investment - but he and Rita's relationship was always a highlight of Shingeki. As someone said above, I dearly hope zombie!Kaisar is sentient.

I liked Charioce losing his sight and Nina losing her voice. It's too bad that aspect of the deus-ex-machine for killing Bahamut was only explored at the very end of the show, and that it was overshadowed by the awful characterization of Charioce. It's a neat plot device; the Onyx Knights slowly giving up their senses in order to serve a greater purpose could have been a really interesting portrayal, for example, and could have been a lot more emotionally effective than them just running around coughing up black bile and gritting their teeth with all the steely resolve all the time.

Bleh. I guess I'm not surprised season 2 turned out this way, in any event. It always seemed like this could have happened to season 1 as well, as its writing often just narrowly clung to coherence.
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Pierrot.





PostPosted: Sat Sep 30, 2017 8:16 am Reply with quote
@NeverConvex

I think you mean Lucifer because Satan is a completely different character in Rage of Bahamut's universe. In season 1 he sacrificed himself along with Zeus to seal Bahamut.
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DmonHiro





PostPosted: Sat Sep 30, 2017 5:16 pm Reply with quote
WORST.ENDING.EVER.
Not only did king asshole survive, not only will he forever be remembered a hero (at least untill Bahamut wakes up again and kills everyone) but somehow Jeanne and Azalell just FORGIVE HIM? THE fudge?!!! Jeanne, he's the reason your son is dead. Azael, he's the reason the only person you really loved and who loved you back is dead. And the reason why thousands of demons, including children, were sold and tortured.

Serioulsy, who wrote this? The second half reads like fanfiction written by someone who likes douchebags.

PS: On the note of Lucifer. He should NOT have been part of this franchise at all. Why? Because he can't be used. In the RoB universe Lucifer is obscenely powerfull because he retained his holy atribute even after falling. So he's got both and isn't weak to either. With the exception of the green rocks and Bahamut there isn't anything that can stand up to Luficer. So why write him in to begin with if you can't use him for anything?


Last edited by DmonHiro on Sat Sep 30, 2017 5:26 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Chrono1000





PostPosted: Sat Sep 30, 2017 5:24 pm Reply with quote
NeverConvex wrote:
As is it just seems like he pointlessly enslaved an entire race (the demons) and really did his best to do the same to another race (the angels) that wasn't yet entirely under his boot, but it's not at all clear why he felt the need to do so. It had no obvious role in his "plan": why do you need this ridiculous race war in order to resurrect and kill Bahamut? Does Bahamut's resurrection require internecine racial strife or something? Was Charioce trying to organize a unified tri-racial force to slaughter the newly res'd Bahamut? And why is res'ing Bahamut to shoot him with your fancy ancient-peoples' gun a good idea, anyway? What guarantee do we have that that's any more permanent a solution than Amira's sacrifice?
I get the sense that the writer for this show was so wrapped up with the romance angle that they never even considered asking most of these questions. Of all the horrible things that Charioce does in the show only two things are explained and that was only because of the old man that was standing nearby. Charioce needed to attack the angels to steal parts for his super weapon and he needed to attack the demons to steal parts for his super weapon. Every other horrible thing that Charioce does in the show is never explained and even at the end of the show he is mostly a blank slate. To say the least that is disappointing.
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AiddonValentine



Joined: 07 Aug 2006
Posts: 2200
PostPosted: Sat Sep 30, 2017 5:31 pm Reply with quote
If I were going to sum up what it felt like the second half of the season was going for, it was probably something similar to the second season of Gundam: IBO (or Zeta if you're feeling retro); in fact, it feels like the entire second half was written by someone trying to remake the IBO ending. The story they were going for is that good people can be screwed over and become villains while villains sometimes win and are lionized by the public. History is written by the winners and good things can come from evil people. However, concept means nothing if execution bungles at every turn.

What a lot of bad writers miss about tragedies is that they hit the main characters more than anyone, mostly due to the consequences of their actions. Instead, we get the classic misinterpretation: the misery is on everyone else and the main characters who instigated the tragedy get a slap on the wrist, thus showing that they bear no responsibility for their actions. It's trying to have its cake and eat it with wanting the spectacle of a tragedy, but unable to bring down the hammer on who the tragedy is supposed to hit like a nuke. If they REALLY wanted to hit the tragedy button they should have killed Nina and then had Azazel and Jeanne step into Charioce's quarters to tell him "Your actions were completely pointless. Bahamut always returns. All those deaths, all those betrayals were for nothing. You are an incompetent fool and will never find peace." And then just end with Charioce suffering in his despair. That would have been appropriate for tragedy, but the show chickens out instead, which is baffling considering how mean-spirited it was for the rest of the season.

All in all, Virgin Soul is a terrible followup to a great predecessor, probably one of the worst, at least in recent memory. Like all of them, it starts out with loads of promise, has some interesting ides, gets iffy halfway through before imploding completely, and then giving an odd reminder that the entire season was utterly pointless. If a Season Three gets made, the only way they're salvaging series is if they remove it as far as they can from this one, with perhaps some vicious jabs.


Last edited by AiddonValentine on Sat Sep 30, 2017 5:32 pm; edited 1 time in total
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