Here it is, people. This is no hyperbole. NHK is the worst anime of all time. It is one of the worst pieces of media you can conjure. A reality show about the Kardashians must be better than this. Pathetic YouTube parodies are better than this. In order to make something worse than this, you’ll need to let Ian Watkins brag about his pedophilia in the Lostprophets album that was never made.
There is no correlation between artistic quality and morality, as Lostprophets have displayed. Yet, you have to wonder what kind of awful person would subject the world to this. Worse, what kind of person would make an anime whose purpose is to make fun of anime watchers? Imagine if your ordinary school bully made an anime. There is so much wrong that I want to rant about it, shoot up heroin and watch Texhnolyze. That one was also bad, but it looks like a better version of Digimon Tamers over this, and Digimon Tamers is already brilliant.
I’m not sure where to start with this mess, so let’s get with the art style. Art style is important. If not, you wouldn’t use a visual medium. Why, then, are the artists so unimaginative? Something makes me worry it’s on purpose, like those East Coast rappers who are so afraid of sounding ‘not real’ their beats barely have a drum. Everyone in this series is black haired and has no distinct facial features.
This may sound realistic, only it isn’t. People in real life actually look distinct. Even if you eschew wacky hairdos, your characters must not look like they came out of the assembly line. There are no odd touches to the hairstyle, different body structures, or an arrangement of facial features that stick out. In fact, the artists are so unimaginative that they can’t come up with a basic sexy design. Our main characters work on an eroge, and the design they come up with can barely touch the most obscure visual novels. Even when they could use anything in the artist’s arsenal – twintails split into 4, floating hair, purple lips – they still end up with a dull design. It’s worse than visual novels that have ‘same face, different hair syndrome’ because at least Da Capo’s girls have pretty hair.
Everyone in this show is also fit and quite hot, despite being hikkies. Satou spent days in his room doing nothing (literally nothing, he’s not aware of the existence of porn). He doesn’t cook for himself and drinks a lot of beer. If you expected an overweight dude who looks like George Martin, you’re bound for disappointment. Satou looks more like Brad Pitt in his Fight Club era with a shirt on and a less aggressive stare. If these guys opted for anything realistic, we would’ve seen the consequences of isolation on Satou’s body. Instead, he looks like a side-character from Free!.
As for the story itself, don’t expect any understanding of what pushes people to be hikkies. Don’t expect a deep, dynamic psychology that reacts to the environment and is an active agent in the story. Any comparisons to WataMote are null, since this is the complete opposite. Tomoko struggled. She was lonely but she had to act and do things. We saw her failures, saw her difficulty and it made it so dark. What Tomoko goes through is our every social awkwardness, only every day.
Satou doesn’t really have to struggle. In fact, he’s not much of a character at all. He has no desires, no life outside the story. He exists so others could pop at his door and force him to get help. It’s not much of a struggle if all you do is react to situations. Sure, it’s not enough to just be offered sex. You also have to go through the dilemma whether to say yes or no to that.
These are two different struggles. One man struggles with getting something, the other is being offered something and needs to accept it or reject it. The creators aren’t aware of the difference. They don’t know how to let a character drive a story, so they offer external conflicts he has to solve. The dilemma of whether to choose yes or no is hardly there, because the anime relies on events and not characters. If Satou chooses ‘no’, nothing actually happens. He doesn’t have a personality to move on from that ‘no’.
Satou, as a character, isn’t an exaggeration. He’s inconsistent. Despite spending years locked in his room, he doesn’t know anything about video games or internet porn or, well, anything. Keep in mind Satou isn’t an Unabomber-style hermit. Hikkies tend to have a hobby that keeps them in the house. Satou should’ve done something during all this time, should’ve gained some knowledge even if it’s only about non-canonical Star Wars planets. He’s completely ignorant of culture that it’s most likely he spent the entire time staring at a wall.
That’s not impossible, but shouldn’t such a person be affected with a major disorder? Shouldn’t that disorder affect every aspect of their life? Socially, Satou is perfectly fine. Whereas Tomoko struggles every second, Satou is relatively confident. The only time social weakness rears its head is when the creators need him to scream for comic effect. Oh look, a hikkie yelled bullshit and emberassed himself! That’s some high-class humor!
The anime isn’t really about the pains of being a shut-in. The conflict is solved in a few minutes around episode 23 – no psychology, no development. Suddenly there’s a problem, so Satou walks out and he’s no longer a hikkie. Rather, it’s about the joys of conformity, how the world is a beautiful, welcoming place and you all should stop watching perverted anime and get in line. That’s ironic, coming from a country where people ‘conformed’ and let the military run the Rape of Nanking and Unit 731.
The ‘highlight’, if you can call it that, is the anime’s treatment of suicide. The idea life may not be worth living crosses the mind of the creators for no more than 5 seconds. Except for a brief moment, the creators go hammer about how irrational it is. The people in question have their reasons, but it’s pushed aside using ‘irrationality. At the end of the arc, some dude goes hammer about how their suicide will harm others and so they should stop. What an original argument. All of the philosophy behind is being shattered to pieces the size of the atom. Too bad the logic that fuels it can also be used to coerce people into rape, but better shut up before the thought police come.
Darkness does exist in this anime, but it’s either skimmed over or played for laughs. Misaki’s and Yamazaki’s darker sides exist, but Misaki’s is barely allowed to surface. By the time it does, it reaches its expiration date and Misaki is the redemption. Her dark side never truly hurts Satou. The monologue that supposedly exposes her is to exaggerated, too comical to be a true confession. Like any other piece of darkness, it’s more funny and has zero insight.
Black comedy shouldn’t just have unpleasant topics. It should illuminate them. If you’re going to laugh about sensitive subjects, you need to do more than be funny. So WataMote put us in Tomoko’s shoes, dissecting her failures into little details, showing the absurdity and the pain. Even Borderlands takes violence seriously. Some of it is commentary on how lightly we take violence. By shocking us with how casually the characters treat violence, it gives us a mirror.
Yamazaki is a lonely dude who’s inept with women. You don’t see his failures, or the pain of rejection. You see him spit monologues about how awesome 2D girls are. It’s quirky, funny and makes you feel good about yourself that you’re not such a loser. Satou’s inner monologues aren’t unhinged enough to show a mental instability, but also not coherent enough to show deep thought behind them. It’s funny that he ‘hallucinates’ weird, Doby-like things. Perhaps the voice actor is to blame. Satou reacts mostly by screaming, but that’s once in a while. In general, he functions well enough.
When they fail, it’s always because they were too weird. The world is mostly benevolent, with the occasional schemer here and there. A few scenes comment on the isolation of the modern world, but it’s always implied the characters brought themselves to this eternal isolation. It’s such an optimistic view, a ‘pull yourself by the bootstraps’ crap people tell others because they think luck doesn’t exist. Characters rarely deal with failure that’s caused not necessarily because they’re to blame, but because that’s how the world works. Things just sometimes don’t work.
Based on Satou’s situation, he could’ve easily grabbed to Misaki and use her to increase her social skills. As a later character displays, in this world you can do anything if you only try. Said character starves from shutting himself in, so he crawls out and immediately finds a job. What a friendly world that is, where people walk to your door and offer to develop your social skills and where you can apply for any random job and be accepted.
is a ridiculously optimistic anime that refuses to acknowledge the world isn’t a happy happy joy joy place. Characters who feel bad are mocked or written as irrational morons. As we know, everyday other people walk to others’ doors and offer help. What? It didn’t happen to you? That’s odd. Perhaps this anime isn’t so realistic. Perhaps what makes something truly unrealistic is not things that cannot happen. Rather, it’s when the meaning underneath the symbols – in this case, the optimism – is completely detached from reality.
0.5 out of 5. I don’t come up with a unique phrase for this crap
Weapons 