Ayakashi is a load of garbage that will make you want to delete your memories so you won't be embarassed with how you wasted your time and instead be left with the intriguing proposition that you drank until you blacked out. Don't watch it. Really, just don't. I can't stress it enough. I made the mistake because the first few episodes are promising, and then went through the rest in the hopes that there might be one moment where it stops making me want to cause internal bleeding in my brain. There wasn't one.
Allow me to explain.
Under the definition of ill-executed generic rubbish, you will find the poster for this series. It starts out rather promising, but at a certain point the production team just said "screw this, let's go get some drinks since we ran out of money". What we're left with is more a collection of concept art than actual animation - including choppy animation and just a sliding layer over a background. The soundtrack manages to be both cringeworthy and forgettable. Characters whose development is haphazard at best and mindbogglingly stupid at worst. And the story, dear god is that a trainwreck of cliches and oh god I wish I had never seen it.
Story:
You know the thing where they say that if you put a million monkeys in front of a million typewriters and give them a million years, at some point they will write the complete works of Shakespeare? Well, give twenty monkeys five typewriters and a couple of weeks, and you would probably get a better team to adapt the visual novel. I'm not sure the source material was good, but it couldn't have been this bad.
There are plot twists which are rather nice which save this from being an utter failure, and there were some nice concepts. My guess are that all of these come from the visual novel. But just like they don't make Batman movies by copying comic book dialogue word for word, then... oh who am I kidding, the best thing the writing staff could have done was learn the value of the copy and paste functions.
Oh, and the last three episodes were obviously written by a particularly untalented fifth grade special ed class. A bunch of normal fifth graders could have done better. Just putting that out there.
Animation:
The high point of the series is subpar. The concept art is cool, because hey, magic monsters with scribbly things on them is awesome. But animation is not a collection of still shots, so this feels like something that was produced in the mid-90s. Really, I'm not expecting top-of-the-line stuff here, but in the age where there are computers, I don't want "animation" to be a picture moving over a background. Is that really too much to ask?
In this series, yes.
Now really, I wanted to give it a higher rating because some of the monsters and stuff were rather nice. But I tried giving it four and a half out of ten and just thought "oh who am I kidding?", as the four I gave is obviously too generous and probably because I am rationalizing how I wasted my time with this crap.
Sound:
The sound for Ayakashi cannot be properly described without the use of four letter expletives. I really don't know who to blame for this. Was it the mediocre voice actors? The bad composers? The guy who decided to reuse crappy melodies over and over? The special effects guy? For a better world, I would recommend all of these guys get shot in the face.
The only redeeming factor in any of these things is that I have heard worse. The bad part about this is that in most of those cases, it was for parody purposes.
Characters:
The writing is terrible, the dialogue mediocre, and you can just imagine some douchebag going "hey, this character needs more character, let's have her say 'peace' a couple of times, you know, like a, uhh, thing!" and the other guys just went with it because they're tired of him being so loud and talkative since he's been drinking. I cannot say I liked even one character. I actually hated some of them actively. Do you know how hard it is to get me to actually hate a character in an action series? I cheered for Joffrey in Game of Thrones, and I couldn't get myself to like a single character beyond "they're not a terrible copy of other characters that this has obviously ripped off".
Overall:
There's bad. There's so bad it's good. And then there's Ayakashi. I would write more specific things, but really, you don't want to watch this, I don't want to remember it, and hopefully, I will manage to forget this ever existed. I really wish it was worse, because then it would be funny. Unfortunately, even that isn't going for it.
Screenshots
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