The return of horribly TL;DR reviews
Aug. 8th, 2012 11:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oudeteronWell, I've been obsessed with the Sengoku/Warring States era lately. My obsessions usually involve consuming and comparing lots of media. I'd like to review my favourites properly sometime because I usually don't bother enumerating why I like something if I like it, but first, I think I'll launch into some criticism. There's this popular game/anime series, Sengoku Basara. I wanted to find out what exactly makes it so popular, so I plunged right in some time ago.
Basara is...oh dear. I went into it fully prepared to accept an alternate interpretation, but nothing could have prepared me for what it actually was like. It may seem weird it's me saying that, when I'm usually the person who is all about reinterpretation (it'd be hypocritical to pretend my favourite series of the moment, Samurai Warriors, doesn't involve reinterpretation on some pretty major levels). Why the problem with Basara?
Because they've reinterpreted everything so much there's nothing left. And it is not done in the kind of brilliant way that would make that sort of thing not only workable, but awesome. I was going to write a huge paragraph of examples, but actually...let me just elaborate on the biggest ones and then assure you that there's a lot more where these came from. This is all from the first season of the anime. I'll rephrase that: this is all from twelve episodes, which is probably how I managed to plough through them all. Well, me and the unwitting victim of my suggestion to watch this, Che. I would like to publicly apologize for making her go through all this with me and for being such an annoying bastard about it. (I'd also like to direct you to her own totally awesome review.)
And now. Some of my issues with this series, illustrated:
Exhibit 1: Honda Tadakatsu. He's a giant robot. Yes, I know the height in weaponry at that time was rifles, but Basara routinely shows machineguns and robots. Like, seriously. Our authentic reaction here:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
cherrytruck: OK SERIOUSLYcherrytruck: SERIOUSLY AM I WATCHING FEUDAL JAPAN WITHoudeteron: ...OKAY THAT'S OOCcherrytruck: ROCKET ENGINESoudeteron: LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLoudeteron: I LOVE HOW WE'RE LIKEcherrytruck: WHAT THEoudeteron: YOU: ROCKET FUCKING ENGINES
ME: Well that's OOCcherrytruck: I MEAN COME ON I CAN HANDLE A LOT OF RIDICULOUS, LOOK AT SWcherrytruck: AND DWcherrytruck: BUT THIS XDoudeteron: BUT SW IS LIKEoudeteron: ACADEMIC COMPARED TO THIScherrytruck: FFFFFFFFFFF SORRY I CANNOT GET OVER THE HI TECH TRANSFORMER HONDA XDcherrytruck: SDFJKSHDFSDFoudeteron: THAT DRILLcherrytruck: AHAHAcherrytruck: AT LEAST IT'S NOT...*THE* DRILL SDFJK
*The Drill from Neon Genesis Evangelion. DON'T ASK.
[...]oudeteron: IS THAT A FUCKING MACHINE GUNoudeteron: I MEAN NOT THAT NO [Nouhime] WOULDN'T BE BADASS WIELDING ONE BUT OH GODcherrytruck: HAHAHAHA SERIOUSLYcherrytruck: I'M TORN BETWEEN "WOO BADASS" AND "WHAT THE HECK IS A MACHINE GUN DOING IN FEUDAL JAPAN"oudeteron: SDJKFGSJKDGSDGJKoudeteron: MACHINE GUN? HOW ABOUT A FREAKING ROCKET LAUNCHERcherrytruck: LOL SERIOUSLYoudeteron: NUKES?!!1cherrytruck: Also what's with No attacking Ieyasu and Honda, I thought they were like buddies xDoudeteron: Yeah, I dunno XDcherrytruck: WELL IN THIS ANIME I DO NOT KNOW ANYTHINGcherrytruck: STILL, I'D TAKE NO WITH A MACHINE GUN OVER TRANSFORMER HONDAoudeteron: AT LEAST SHE'S STILL HUMANcherrytruck: I CAN NEVER GET OVER TRANSFORMER HONDA XDoudeteron: AND LITERAL DEMON ODAoudeteron: ACTUALLY THOUGHoudeteron: LET'S CALL THIS SERIES HONDAM WING
[...]cherrytruck: IS THIS GONNA DERAIL INTO COMPLETE HISTORICAL INACCURACY? XDoudeteron: PFFF I MARKED THAT MOMENT WHEN ROCKET ENGINES APPEAREDoudeteron: LOLOL Icherrytruck: WELL OKAY THAT TOO BUT XDoudeteron: I DIDN'T REALIZE THEY WERE BEING LITERAL IN THE INTROoudeteron: IT SAYS THE COMBUSTION ENGINE ROARScherrytruck: LOLoudeteron: EXCEPT THAT ONE SEEMED NUCLEARcherrytruck: THIS IS SOMEHOW MORE RIDICULOUS THAN GUO HUAI CARRYING A MACHINE GUN IN ANCIENT CHINA
[...]oudeteron: POKEBALLS MAKE MORE SENSE THAN THIS
[...]oudeteron: THIS GUY IS JESUSoudeteron: ...THEY'RE ALL JESUS
Back to Honda in this series: how can you take a general so bone-chillingly awesome that he's said to never have sustained a single injury in combat, who had a spear that halved dragonflies for merely sitting on it, turn him into a giant robot, and have the end result be LESS badass than the original? I mean, like, come again??? Being a giant chronologically-impossible robot could have been used to "explain" the fact that he was never injured in battle, but when you blow up that robot twice, then it just serves no purpose to write him that way in the first place, does it? Aside from shooting everyone's suspension of disbelief to the moon.
Exhibit 2: Oda Nobunaga. He is introduced as evil. Then he stays evil. Then the series finishes and he's going on about evil. In-your-face evil, shoot-sister-on-sight evil, mass murder evil, ominous music plays evil (the music isn't that bad by itself), can't-talk-without-an-evil-growling-drawl evil, drinking-from-skulls evil (which IRL he did but some accounts say it was "out of respect", which I admit is pretty idiosyncratic but at least it's not one-dimensional villainy, which is all Basara ever delivers). It's clear the people who made this series thought that driving the point home repeatedly would make it stick and we'd all think "oooh, he's so evil". But, newsflash: it was plain overdone to me. Basing an entire character on how evil he is and simplifying him down to that does one thing: it makes any character development impossible. It makes tension impossible (unless it's the tension of "who he's gonna kill off next"). To a huge extent, to me, it makes giving a crap about the character impossible, because when someone's this flat and boring, it's not engaging at all. He had one funny moment where he punishes Mitsuhide by pouring sake on his head and another where it looks like Mitsuhide's boosting his morale, but those were one-off scenes and that was that. Almost at the end of the season, Yukimura informs us that Oda is pure evil. Dude, you don't say, we didn't notice! It's not like that's the fucking extent of his character here or anything!cherrytruck: SERIOUSLY IT'S LIKEcherrytruck: THEY MADE HIM SATANoudeteron: LOOOOOLoudeteron: EXCEPT HE'S FROM HEAVENoudeteron: NOW HOW DOES THAT WORKcherrytruck: LUCIFER?!oudeteron: ...YEAH XDoudeteron: WELL BUGGERoudeteron: TL;DR THEY'VE MADE HIM BADoudeteron: THEY MADE HIM WORSE THAN THE BAD ROMAN EMPERORS SONG
[...]oudeteron: AH WELLoudeteron: LET'S RENAME THIS SERIESoudeteron: TO "SENGOKU DEVIL ODA WEARS PRADA"
[...]cherrytruck: OUR ODA IS LIKEcherrytruck: LIU BEI COMPARED TO BASARA!ODA
[...]oudeteron: BUT REALLY YOU KNOW WHAT I MEANToudeteron: IN THIS [Samurai Warriors] THEY CALL ODA A DEMON BECAUSE HE'S SUCH AN ASSHOLEoudeteron: AND HE REMAINS AN ASSHOLE TO THEMoudeteron: WHILE ALSO REVEALING HIS HUMANITYcherrytruck: YEAH XDoudeteron: THAT'S WHAT MAKES IT POWERFUL ;A;cherrytruck: PLOT TWIST: ODA'S ALSO HUMAN!1!!1!oudeteron: XDDDDoudeteron: OH GEEZ IN BASARA HE'LL PROBABLY BE KILLED WITH A SILVER BULLET ON A PIKEcherrytruck: IS THAT SO
Exhibit 3: Characterization in general. It's kind of one-size-fits-all. Everyone (or almost) yells. All the time. About everything. Sometimes it's done in a way that works - for example, while I'm not entirely sure about Shingen yelling all the time, at least his friendly shouting-matches with Yukimura are cute. But most of the time, it's gratuitous and just screams laziness instead of giving the characters distinct voices. Let's use a comparison with my fave, SW2, which has pretty cheesy voice acting a lot of the time, but all the characters sound like themselves. You don't confuse them with one another, because they're not all given generic tough guy shouty voices. (You know what happens when you're operating in overdrive non-stop? People forget that it's supposed to be overdrive.) For instance, Kanetsugu is very soft-spoken in SW2, and I think he raises his voice during one fairly late stage in the whole game. That's what makes it stand out, that's how you can tell shit just got real. In Basara, he appears once, generically yells, then displays a flurry of incompetence and disappears. The exact same treatment is given to Kotaro as well. Later on, Yoshihiro just gets killed off in about three seconds, and that's his first appearance. That is a lot of overly-fast doing away with characters who should be interesting, memorable, and competent.
Exhibit 4: Mori Ranmaru. Not only do they make him nonsensically young in the year Honnoji happened, they don't even hint at any sort of relationship between him and Oda ever. Which, you know, I don't particularly want to ponder at that ridiculously young age they gave him, fair enough. The problem is, they shouldn't have made him that young. And another thing? They gave him a freaking Hollywood ending.oudeteron: IT'S WHAT YOU NEED IF YOU SERVE LORD SKULLDRINKERcherrytruck: OBVIOUSLY XDcherrytruck: I'm interested to see how he treats Ranmaru though xDoudeteron: FFF THAT BOMB XDoudeteron: And is Ranmaru even in this XD*oudeteron: ..........oudeteron: I READ THAT AS "SHIRTLESS"oudeteron: THE SHIRTLESS ARMOUR OF TAKEDA
*He was, and then we wished he hadn't been.
There are no Hanzo, Sakon, or...well, you get the picture. People who should enter into it sooner or later are inexplicably missing. But on the other hand, Basara invents characters. Oh, how it invents them.
Exhibit 5: Kasuga. Now, I'm not claiming that a character having boobs is bad. Actually, I'm not even going to say fanservice as such is bad. It can shine when it, you know, makes sense for the character. When it's someone who loves showing off their body, like Kaz in MGSPW, it's not even ridiculous when you're taking close-ups of their speedo-clad crotches. Because you can tell the attention is enjoyed. Or to use an anime example, Neon Genesis Evangelion comes to mind where the boob-service is mostly limited to Misato, who is 1) older than the main trio, 2) unfazed by people ogling her, and 3) still a full-fledged character with a personality and so on. But, unsurprisingly, when you make up a character with the sole purpose of 1) pointing out that she has big boobs, 2) accentuating said boobs with a historically-impossible latex suit, 3) literally making her jizz from being talked to every other episode, and 4) giving her a token het romance with the resident god of war, I think it's safe to say you're being supremely fucking lazy.
(There's an awesome thing about Kenshin in this series: they didn't shy away from making him look beautiful, as he supposedly was, instead of macho. They even gave him a fairly androgynous voice, and to be fair he seems like he doesn't uncritically return the Token Het Romance [but then again, we all know not everything has to happen on screen, so moot point]. I love the fact that they actually did use his possible gender nonconformity. This is what got the series the three stars I gave it, and it's a testament to how disappointing the rest of it was that this didn't catapult it to an instant favourite with me.)
Anyway. The audience is hammered with the fact that Kasuga's only purpose in this story is to look like sex on legs repeatedly. Even her sparsely distributed badass moments are immediately countered with moments of comic relief and/or disaster, informing us over and over again that klutzy, high-strung eye candy no one really takes seriously is all her character was created for. She's talking? Look at boobs. Kenshin's talking to her? Look at boobs almost falling out of the physically impossible suit. She's fallen to the ground? Look at boobs/ass. She's crying or actually for once allowed five seconds of introspection? Hey, look at that ass conveniently placed right in focus instead of something boring like her face!
If I were the editor for the writers of this series, I'd take a red pen and write "space out the gratuitous boob/crotch/ass shots and at least make them fucking contextual. Let her do something now and then." Especially with how she's coded as a somewhat shy, too-clumsy-for-a-ninja character, the constant in-your-face fetishization crosses right over to creepy. There's an ever better way to exemplify all that's trainwrecked about this character: all the other ninjas are dressed somewhat like you'd imagine a ninja to be. She's a ninja and you wonder how she can move. The guys wear clothes primarily designed to do shit in; Kasuga wears clothes primarily designed to look at (even though they're historically impossible). Ponder that for a minute.
Exhibit I-lost-count: Takeda Shingen. He's one of the few characters in this who didn't come off as one-dimensional, but that doesn't help much when he had almost no rivalry with Kenshin. Like, seriously, it was barely hinted at, and it should have been important. His relationship with Yukimura was nice, but yeah.oudeteron: LOL SHINGEN YOU CREEPcherrytruck: LOLoudeteron: SAY IT YUKIMURA, SAY ITcherrytruck: JIHJKHASDFDF
I could've dealt with some of these drawbacks if the story had been genuinely compelling. But as things went, I was just sitting there going "it has to get good now...now...NOW?" and it never did. There are a few bright moments, but that's it. I've even checked out some footage of the game, in case the anime was seriously misinterpreting it and I was looking in the wrong place, but then I saw Mitsunari also yelling and being a murder machine and...yeah. I should stop expecting so much.
So, I watched Basara to find out why it seems to be more popular than SW. The result of this experiment is...I still don't understand. Most of the characters are more on the side of caricature, but they're too similar to one another for it to be much fun. There are a few moments that stand out to me, e.g. I LOL'd endlessly at that scene where Mitsuhide gets sake poured over his head from a skull. He licks it up gladly; they didn't even play up his abstaining habits. Because that would be characterization. (SW devotes several separate convos to him being a teetotaler and how it makes him interact with characters who drink/ask him to drink, but such petty details are beneath Basara.) I'm sort of glad I watched it for the trainwreck and the lulz, but I don't think I'm even going to follow the second season unless I'm feeling super masochistic. Even then, though, I might as well cover myself in bees if I want to feel pain that bad.
I wanted to include more Sengoku-related reviews here, some of them being of things I actually like, but Che bullied me into posting this one separately, so enjoy this giant grudgepost. On the other hand, we saw this in June or something, so it may be for the best I finally wrote it down. M'BAD. I'll still do the others as well; it might just take some time.
...I might have forgotten something.