Chrome Shelled Regios
Apr 28, 2012Oh, such joy and wonder, I found myself an anime that has all I ever like in fiction. Monsters, action, some romance, some mystery, some smart scenario ideas. So I sit down ready to watch what I like most. Ten minutes later … WHAT IS THIS SHIT?
Boy, talk about fail squared. Anime usually aim to have some good initial episodes before reverting back to whatever mediocrity they were meant to be. Regios managed to be uninteresting since the very beginning. I guess that is a talent too.
Let’s get down to business. Regios is animated by studio Zexcs, which has never produced a high-budget show, or even an above average one. It has mostly made shitty fan service anime and a few mediocrities everybody forgot in a few months. Just to make you understand how bad they are, their best production was the completely mediocre Legend of Legendary Heroes.
The premise of the story is very interesting and offers a complicating post-apocalyptic setting full of mobile cities in a grim future, fighting amongst them for survival, while repelling invasions by super powerful insects. But to no surprise they did very little with all that and soon the plot was nothing more than a guy and his harem. The premise reminded me a lot of Blue Gender, a good dark science fiction anime of the 90’s whose greatest flaw was the dull plot. While Regios fixes this by having a lot more action and variety, at the same time it failed completely to build atmosphere and immersion with the story and the characters. It did a very poor job at fleshing them out. Here is a list.
1) The action scenes are completely random and chaotic. There was no way to feel a battle was done properly as magic gizmos were pretty much running the show as the directors wanted. Anything could happen, any way the they wanted it, as fast or as dramatic, successful or failed. You could see a rain of rabbits followed by a rock shaped as Lincoln for all it matters and the outcome of such spells would be whatever the plot required. And forget about proper transition from one scene to another. There is NO TRANSITION. No choreography exists to make the action appealing and thus I hated it.
2) There is very little actual animation. For a semi-action series, the characters were terribly frozen. Too much still panels going around to feel anything good about it.
3) Unappealing character figures. What kind of random accessories was everybody wearing during battles? And what’s with the weird facial structure? Totally hilarious to the point I wasn’t even looking at the constant cleavages.
4) The background music is horrible. The main battle them is making your ears bleed with its terrible tune and most other BGMs are way too loud and noisy. To get an idea, just try to imagine this tune playing in all the battles -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhwmwxnBU_k
AM I SUPPOSED TO FEEL EXCITEMENT WHEN THIS SHIT IS PLAYING? As for the opening and ending songs, they are completely average pop trash I have forgotten completely.
5) The setting remains unexplained. What is going on with the world and why are things like that? You are given no info regarding the backdrop story of the world and thus the whole setting remains nothing but an intriguing background scenery.
6) The directing has absolutely no uniformity. One moment they are fighting for the survival of the human race, the immediate next they are taking part in a typical romantic school comedy trip. You get futuristic cities full of weird machinery, next to nobles clothed as if it’s still the 18th century, next to a cosplay party called the main characters. Consistency is nice! And maybe it would make sense if they had fleshed out the setting but since they didn’t this is all random nonsense.
7) The cast remains terribly generic. What is going on with them? You hardly get to know most of them. The lead is the typical harem dork, with a broken power, hoarding all the girls to himself, and does nothing with them. Most girls are defined by their sexual frustration syndromes. Most males are defined by their ridiculous costumes and signature moves. Everybody is a stereotype 101. And nobody is memorable for any given reason.
8 ) Engrish! Jesus Christ, when will they ever hire real Americans to do the English lines? And it’s not like they even needed to have English speakers in the first place; all the scenes regarding them are completely useless to the plot.
9) The ending is not an ending. Major bummer. Expected when they try to adapt a series of light novels which are still on-going.
So from all the above reasons, you can easily tell how Regios uses a mediocre action superpower formula, mixed with a mediocre romantic school comedy formula, with random ideas such as mobile cities and fairies and bugs in the background. It hardly makes good use of any of its elements and ends up being a completely average work.
Before you dismiss my harsh judgment because of the nature of the setting, please consider this. Mixing teenagers fighting huge monsters before going to school and getting to all sorts of sexual frustrations can be as bad as Gunparade March or as good as Neon Genesis. And Regios is no Neon Genesis. In fact, it doesn’t even know what it is; there are no connecting points between the genres it tries unsuccessfully to blend. Think how many stuff Escaflowne mixed in the same bowl and how uniformed they felt. This was a random hill of irrelevant ideas with lifeless animation and poor storytelling.
Sorry, I prefer Blue Gender and Neon Genesis over this one. I don’t even consider it a worthy watch. In fact, I don’t consider it as anything other as a good example of a badly made anime.
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Thanks for the review Roriconfan, and having just finished watching this one I think your review covers the multiple failings of this show very well. The only memory (that won't last long) I will take from this show is that of a total mess. Since pretty much nothing was explained, either while it was happening or after the event. Although I do give the show credit for the rate at which the plot disintegrated into nonsense from around the halfway point, and for maintaining that rate of decay until the end.
Things got so bad that at one point I had to stop watching and check the episodes I had against several databases to see if I was missing any, because when Zuellni encountered Myath and were about to have an automatic (forced?) intermunicipal battle, I was convinced I must have missed a chunk of episodes that explained why this was about to happen (and how/why these walking cities came to be and how/why they function as they do is of course left to the viewer to decide. Since giant walking cities are such a staple feature in most animes after all).
So anyway...Huh? Why are these two cities about to battle I asked myself? The only previous such battle referenced earlier in the show was for control over a sernium mine. What the fuck sernium is and why it's worth fighting over is again left to the viewer’s imagination. But ok I'll accept that two walking cities coming across a mine in the wilderness would have a battle over ownership if the mine produced something of high value. That makes sense and it doesn't trip any of the warning signals attached to my sense of disbelief. But two cities randomly fighting for no reason other than "coming close to each other", no sorry, that shorts out several of my logic circuits I'm afraid.
It was only a few episodes later when Glendan turned up that I pieced together that apparently these sernium mines are in the cities themselves and the winner gets to take said mine from the loser at the end of a battle. Now how a mine, or at least all concepts of a "mine" that I'm familiar with, can be transported from anywhere to anywhere given that they are, I assume, attached to the ground in some way. Let alone transported from one walking city to another walking city in a giant killer-bug infested world, is a logistical problem left up to the viewer to answer because the show managed to avoid answering that puzzler because Glendan's sudden arrival meant the intermunicipal battle with Myath was off, and there wouldn't be such a battle with Glendan because of the treaty.
Treaty?!? What fucking treaty? Where the fuck did this "treaty" come from all of a sudden? And a treaty made out to be so sacred that Glendan, being a regular (military?) city, wouldn't possible break it by attacking Zuellni, which is an academic city. Again who or what decides/dictates how a city is classified is just another thing to add to the unexplained list.
But this did force me to ask the question that if there is a binding treaty between all these walking cities that dictates such things as under what conditions one city is allowed to attack another, then didn't anyone with half a brain cell think it might be a good idea, you know like, given that there are a seemingly endless number of giant nigh-on-indestructible killer bugs attempting to wipe out humankind, to suggest that humankind should concentrate on wiping out said bugs instead, thereby saving humankind, as opposed to having retarded intermunicipal battles amongst themselves? Since that achieves nothing apart from making the bugs job easier for them.
Or maybe it's simply that nobody ever managed to come up a suggestion that complex, since a single species uniting against a common enemy is a pretty “whacked-out” idea after all, and nowhere near as staple as how giant walking cities work, which needs absolutely no explaination. Sigh.... Out of all the things the show failed to explain, why the cities are attacking each other and not uniting against the bugs was one of the most glaring omissions for me.
So it was around this point I pretty much lost the battle with my sense of disbelief as it became impossible to suspend it any longer in regards trying to make any sense of the story, and with it also went any further attempts to find plausible ways to fill the ever increasing number of plot holes. I was close enough to the end by then though to see it out, although that was likely a mistake in hindsight given that by the end the number of things left unexplained had pretty much doubled from the point I stopped caring, which did nothing except increase my level of annoyance with the show by the end.
Wait, did I just use the word "end" there? And earlier on as well? Total mistake on my part that because there was no "end" of any sort, as the most accurate way of describing it is "a point in the show was reached when there wasn't another episode". Yes, that's a more accurate definition of how the show finishes I feel.
Anyway, thanks again for the review and apologies for turning the comment section into a mini-rant about the show. I probably should have gathered my thoughts together properly and written a review for it really, but that's way too much effort for a show I will have forgotten by morning.
I don't agree with you at all, it was nice anime having decent story. Start of this was ordinary but gradually anime became more and more interesting. I guess your taste is different but that does not mean that this anime is not worth watching for others also.