Corpse Princess: Kuro - Reviews

Overview-

Shikabane Hime: Kuro (Black) is the continuation of the story from Shikabane Hime: Aka (Red), so this author will assume that readers are familiar with the plot. This season brings the battle between Makina and the Seven Stars to its conclusion.

Story-

Shikabane Hime: Kuro is more plot-driven than the first season. There are far fewer "random" battles, if any at all; our heroes' main enemies during the course of the show are the Seven Stars (a group of particularly strong Shikabane) themselves. The writers demonstrate reasonable skill, as the pacing and escalation of tension are well done. There are several revelations during the course of the twelve episodes. Some of the talk about the bond between Shikabane Hime and their contracted monks feels cheesy, but it never becomes unbearable. The ending is fairly epic in scope and felt satisfying.

Animation-

Whoever made the character models for Shikabane Hime does not understand the saying that "less is more." The apparent need to demonstrate the large bust sizes of certain secondary characters took away from the show's relatively strong plot. Thankfully, Makina (the heroine) is not particularly over-sexed, though her chief enemy--Hokuto of the Seven Stars--regrettably is, near the end of the show at least.

Combat remains fluid but is nothing spectacular. The show generally uses a darker color palette, which I appreciated, but this is not true at all times. I believe the use of these dark tones continuously would have contributed to a more suffocating atmosphere, which would be desirable in this show.

Sound-

I enjoyed both the beginning and ending themes, with one exception: the ending has such ridiculously unchaste artwork that I couldn't bring myself to watch it more than a few times. It simply degraded this otherwise good show.

I watched the English version of the series, and most voice actors were good. It felt as though Aaron Dismuke (the voice actor for Ouri Kagami) was struggling during the more intense scenes. Also, I had to laugh when I heard Jerry Jewell as Hizuchi, one of the Seven Stars. Mr. Jewell also plays Kyo Sohma in Fruits Basket, which conjured up all kinds of funny images while I was watching. I particularly liked the voice of Isaka, though he didn't get that much screen time. Saki's VA just annoyed me.

Characters-

One has to appreciate some of the stranger villains in this show. Toya--a sort of balloon creature--was one of my favorites, both for "his" interesting method of killing people and his backstory. Hazama, a creature made up of centipedes, was also very likeable. Akasha (the Traitor Monk), however, was my favorite antagonist. He was well fleshed out by the end of the series.

Ouri and Makina as main characters do fairly well. Makina seemed far more intriguing than her one-sided partner, thoug. Her struggle to live as a person is a strong aspect of the series.

Overall-

If you've made it to Shikabane Hime: Kuro, you probably know whether you want to keep watching or not. If you're on the fence, I would recommend that you finish off the series. The second season is superior by a fair margin to the first.

TL;DR - There was potential, but it's totally sabotaged by poor voice acting and P.O.S. characters.

*** REVIEW CONTAINS MINOR SPOILERS, AND IS A REVIEW OF BOTH SHIKABANE HIME: AKA AND SHIKABANE HIME: KURO ***

Story ( 2.5/5 )

The story misses the mark for me. Parts of it are just fine - the idea of corpses is just fine, and the idea of priests using other corpses to fight said corpses is also cool. The part that absolutely dies for me is that:

1. They hardly go into any in-depth detail about any of the characters, meaning you can't really become attached to them, relate to them, or understand why they're acting the way they are.
2. There's not really much of an ending. I know this is based off of a manga so they probably weren't able to cover the entirety of the manga series in just 24 episodes, but seriously... what a bad place to end this 2nd season!

Characters seem shallow because you have no idea what the hell is going on with them, and for the life of me, I cannot even understand the main villains. They're so f*cking dumb. "Oh hur, corpses cling to these attachments, but we're just natural." WTF KINDA REASON IS THAT?! Or the "betrayer priest" guy. One fucking moment, they make it out as if he actually cares about people while he's being bullied by his villain friends and then literally seconds later he's tearing up a bunch of priests at a temple. GAAH?!

Animation ( 2.5/5 )

Animation is actually pretty decent, would rate a 3/5. However, I'm docking half a point because of this peculiar thing: I didn't notice it happen more than once, but it looks like for a single scene, for a single character, they asked a different artist from a different studio to help draw. Observe the attached examples below to see what I mean. For the most part, the animation style of this show is somewhat on the pretty and detailed side. But then for this one brief scene in one episode, literally it turns hardcore shounen-style. Uh?! Heh?!

Sound ( 1.5/5 )

OP and EDs are nothing to write home about. Nothing notable, not that great to listen to. The part that kills the sound score for me is the atrocious voice acting. Holy crap, the main character sounds like a pre-pubescent piece of shit! Couple that with horrible acting and an overall useless character, you've now got a guy who makes it in my list of most hated MCs ever! It is seriously so frustrating how useless the MC is. None of the other characters make this any better either! Normal dialog is fine, but holy crap, it's like none of the voice actors or actresses know how to sound genuinely angry or surprised about anything. It's high-school-attempt-at-a-movie bad!

Characters ( 1/5 )

Let me reiterate the points above: they don't cover a ton of back story, so a lot of the characters are totally ridiculous and make absolutely no sense. Subsequently, you can't become attached to them, you can't relate to them, and honestly you don't give a rat's ass what happens to them. Stack on top the horrible voice acting, and you've got a bunch of characters that ruin any potential this show could have had.

Overall ( < 2/5 )

There's so much bah in this review that that's all I'm going to say to sum things up. I'm literally so mad while writing this review. It's frustrating