Dies irae

ThatAnimeSnob Dec 28, 2017

2

We begin with badly stitched together scenes of psychotic Nazis killing and blowing up shit while reciting emo poetry about destroying the world. And if you ask me what their motivation is, they are bored, they have too much angst, so everyone has to die. Then we see the main character fighting his obligatory rival. We are never shown why they are fighting, which comes off as silly since you know nothing about them and yet this is the only characterization they begin with. But I guess if Black Clover, the king of shonen anime, does it as well, that means its great writing. Then we are introduced to the platonic girlfriend during a horribly written dialogue where everything they say is a lazy infodump of what they were doing all day. It’s as if they are reading their diaries out loud. True to its origin as a porn game, the platonic girlfriend goes inside the protagonist’s room through a hole on the wall. Because their rooms are next to each other and this way she can sneak inside while he is masturbating or wants a quick fuck, without anyone noticing it. Did I mention they are siblings? But it’s ok because they are not blood related, so incest if fine. Then the protagonist goes to a high school, because where else could he go, and has a discussion about breast sizes with the second harem bimbo. That’s the first thing we learn about her by the way, her breast size. Characterization at its finest. And then we get typical misunderstanding jokes that exists as sexual foreplay for when you actually get to bang these bitches later in the story. Because porn games. The protagonist is revealed to be special with hidden powers, which is something we have never seen before. This by the way is his only characterization. He is special. Talk about self-inserts. The psychotic Nazis conveniently become mysterious transfer students in the same high school. Because that’s the reason schools exist for. What follows is the obligatory overly convoluted explanations of magic, which always boils down to “if you really want something to happen, it happens”. Chuuni at its finest.The protagonist trains for a couple of hours which is somehow enough to match the experience others gain after decades, and is then challenged by one of the psychotic Nazis. That means, the Nazis train him so they can kill him, instead of simply killing him right away. Porn game logic. The battle takes place while he is surrounded by tied-up naked women who get butchered to pieces by a one-dimensional manic laughing light novel rapist. This amazing characterization is done so perfectly, even Black Clover, the king of shonen anime, uses it all the time. The protagonist gets all his limbs sliced off, but with the power of Tite Kubo, he sprouts new limbs and unlocks his bankai, thus winning the day with a technique called plot armor. At this point I need to stress what a retard the platonic girlfriend is. Aside from how she constantly ignores and forgets all the horrible things going on around her, she also constantly hits the protagonist for being close to other girls while befriending them at the same time. It’s almost like this is a porn game where the girls get jealous but don’t hate each other so you can have an orgy down the line. We also get Elfen Lied level of brilliant writing, where they find a mute naked girl they have never seen before and instead of calling the police, they dress her up and go on a date like it’s the most normal thing ever. Said girl is also cursed with the power to behead anyone who touches her, but that conveniently doesn’t happen when a harem bimbo touches her. The mute girl is not even real. She’s the personification of the protagonist’s bankai and exists only in his hand. Get it? His waifu is in reality his hand. Fap fap fap! Just like all waifus!Then the big bad appears and summons a gigantic skeleton than blows up a huge bridge. This is quickly disregarded by everyone in the city as a hallucination, since as we all know gas explosions happen all the time and are the explanation behind every unexplainable phenomenon in the history of mankind. Then a bunch of edgy crap happen, such as dancing in a room made of skulls while people are bleeding out of their eye sockets. It’s subversion. Then dialogue continuity ceases to exist. I mean, when the protagonist says “I haven’t given up yet” like a generic shonen hero, how the hell do you follow this with the bimbo replying “then make love to me, if you want to do something then rape me, then just kill me.” All while you are shown skulls and shit. How does any of that connect? Oh, wait, I know. Gas explosions. This explains everything.After that, the protagonist goes back to school, because where else could he go, and finds all the students being hypnotized (with gas, obviously) to go there no matter what. I didn’t get this part. Why would you want to hypnotize people into doing that in porn games? It’s the only fucking place they all go to all the time, so what kind of a vapid explanation is this? … Oh, gas explosion, now I understand, carry on. Then the Nazis kill more innocent people in gory ways. And by gory, I mean using the paintbrush tool for sprinkling some red color over their heads. It’s really amazing to see how far special effects have gone thanks to technology. Remember how it was all practical and took a lot of effort, instead of three seconds on Photoshop?After this the Nazis show their past in flashbacks, which predictably is full of edge and makes absolutely no sense. Did that manage to make them sympathetic or memorable? Hell no! At this point nobody cares about characters or plot anymore, since their masterplan comes down to killing enough people for a huge swastika to form, with which they will kill even more people. Then the rival is killed, but he doesn’t die because he has a weird power that lets him come back to life, because plot said so. We get a flashback where he stabs to death the father of the protagonist, who turns out to be another one-dimensional evil rapist. Then he comes back to life by bursting out of the belly of a psychotic Nazi, and that makes complete sense because gas explosions. Then the rival goes on to fight another psychotic Nazi, who for some reason he is fused with his own sister, who is also his mother. How is that possible you might ask? Because porn games. Then another psychotic Nazi appears who loves to torture to death the people he loves. His personality is very deep and complex, and if you don’t see that you are a hater of this critically acclaimed masterpiece. And then the show ends in the middle of nowhere, telling you to go fuck yourself and play the porn game, which as you can see from the statistics most people gave it a 9. That can only mean it’s a masterpiece and you are wrong for not liking it. Abrupt ending of review.

Rascal Jan 20, 2018

1

*spoiler-free review but who cares* If hitler was an author You scramble around in the darkness, your bare hands slapping the cold hard pavement. You're searching for answers. To what? You aren't sure, but you'll know when you find them, because at least they'll have shape. The darkness you feel now has none, it's incomprehensible and cold. The most cold you've ever felt, as emptiness often does. Seconds tick by, then minutes, then painstaking hours. You've given up all hope on understanding. And then, finally, you reach it. You finish Dies irae. What the fuck did you just watch? Well I have the answers. Sort of. Dies irae is an anime about a small boy with big aspirations. He's just a typical high-schooler but he's always wanted one thing: to be involved in a war where neo-nazis wearing retro-nazi garb have magical demon powers and want to ressurect nazi superheroes. Wait no? Oh yeah he doesn't have any aspirations he just winds up here by plot bullshit and is conveniently wound in later by stupid flashbacks. The nazis were a thing though, whether he wanted them or not, and there's also medieval shit and demons. At one point you'll be watching a flashback where someone fucks a monster and then gives birth to a quickly-growing demon thing to epic orchestral music and you'll think "what the fuck" The next you'll watch someone walk up to someone while getting their arm cut of x-men last stand phoenix style and think "what the fuck" Then you'll find out this was based on an eroge and say "fuck the what" And in the end you'll have no more an idea of what this is than when you started. In fact, you'll have less of an idea. It technically has a story, but speaking as someone who watched it fully and payed attention to every second, um... haha i have a vague idea of what it was? There's swastikas and the goal is to kill people to start this big-ass war. Although you can only tell that but listening closely, because this is TV and you can't show swastikas. The powers make no sense and are never explained, just another rock thrown in the muddy pool that is dies irae that makes no sense. They're so weird and off-putting too and it just doesn't work because there's no explaining it. It just is. The animation is deflated and airtight. There's no bumps, it just always is meh. The visual direction destroys any coherence the plot could have had and replaces the narrative structure with toothpicks, and i guarantee the sludge bits aren't coming out no matter how much exposition they do. The dialogue is all so pretentious you can't even tell what they're saying. I know our good buddy Thrawn loves the soundtrack and sound in this show but i'm sorry: NO. The opening is god-awful to me and there's no memorable music that I heard. Oh I almost forgot about the characters! Well, i fully forgot about the characters because I don't remember any of them. I promise I payed attention just, none of them were memorable besides... glasses guy? Overall this was a shitheap with no redeeming qualities, I suggest watching this with someone else just to laugh at how bullshit it is. Other than that, there's no way it could be worth it that I could see.

Nicknames Dec 29, 2017

3.8

Have you ever wondered what happened if someone took the concept of nazis trying to cause the end of the world from Hellsing Ultimate and tried to play it as straight as possible? If you didn’t, then let me tell you this show is a perfect example of how that’d turn out and why is a really, really bad idea. If I had to describe the plot with just one word that'd be "messy". The story is pretty much an incoherent string of ideas that barely make any sense. Why do the nazis nutzis want to open the 8 swastikas that'd lead to the end of the world? No one knows becuase the awful characterization and plot development make their motivations very unclear. In fact, watching the prologue doesn't help much.  The characters aren't much better. As I mentioned before their motivations are unclear, but also they are massively one-dimensional and underdeveloped. The bad dudes are pretty much evil for the sake of being evil. This also affects the development of the characters. They never go beyond the archetypes they are based on, so the show ends up with a main protagonist who beyond bland; the typical childhood friend who’s so annoying you wish you could get inside the show just to punch her; the typical allof girl; and a girl who decapitates anyone who touches her except the main guys (how convenient…). Animation-wise it suffers from some major inconsistency. On one hand the characters are well-designed (I especially like the uniforms of the bad guys) but on the other the action scenes leave a lot to be desired. To make things worse both the CG skulls that appear on the evil dudes and the giant CG skeletons look so bad you couldn't be blamed if you thought they were ripped from a PS2 game. Not everything sucks in this show though. Both the Opening and Ending have decent tracks and the ost fits the mood perfectly. The japanese voice acting was fine, but the english dub sucked so hard it reached that “so awful it’s hilarious” spot a few lucky ones manage to reach. Just take a look at this (I know the clip is from The Dawning Days, but it still applies to the main series) In short, Dies Irae is one of those shows that will keep you wondering what’s going on and make you regret starting it. The plot makes no sense, the characters are poorly developed while others are plain annoying, and the animation is subpar. Its only saving grace is the music, and it makes you wonder how come a good OST ended up being wasted in this mess. This review was made for ALG. Health authorities inform that a prolonged exposure to this show’s nonsense may cause irritability and chronic frustration.