Anime Review: Rokka no Yuusha

Rokka is the best anime of summer of 2015. Which means absolutely nothing since that season was the worst in decades, and even on its own it isn’t a good show to begin with. Everything about it is constantly giving you excuses to drop it, unless you have a really bad taste. Here are 10 reasons for why you should drop it too.

1. Mediocre production values. The CGI is weak, and most movements are messy. Really great work coming from the studio that blessed us with Rail Wars.

2. Mediocre premise. It’s just about some heroes going to beat some lame looking CGI monsters.

3. The character designs are lame, so you can’t take anyone seriously. They look like they belong in a circus, or a brothel.

4. The twist in the otherwise mediocre premise (that is, one of them being a traitor) is revealed in the very description of the show, thus it is not a twist at all.

5. The plot is not slow; it is not going anywhere. It comes to a halt after the twist we all knew about right away, and the rest of the show is wasted on going in circles until the issue is resolved.

6. Theory crafting about who is the traitor, is not a positive trait, since you are imagining stuff that do not exist within the show, with the actual show being empty of content.

7. You are not allowed to like any of the characters, because the show refuses to reveal much about them. Since you are not supposed to know who the traitor is, close to no information becomes public, and you spend the whole show not trusting them instead of feeling sympathy towards them. No matter what happens to them is not tragic or funny, because you constantly suspect everybody to be doing stuff for the sake of fooling you into not suspecting them.

8. Whatever crumbs of information you are allowed to know, come in the form of lazy expotalk. They say how they feel or what they did, instead of showing it.

9. When the issue is finally resolved, we do not get to see the continuation of their generic adventure to go beat some monsters. The show ends right there, with no closure.

10. Even if a sequel gets to be made, we will still get no actual continuation or closure; because the first season ends by essentially repeating the exact same issue (turns out another one of them is a traitor). Thus the sequel will also be wasted on repeating the exact same stuff, all over again, without going anywhere.

And since I am spoiled by the light novel readers of what happens next, the second traitor will not be revealed before episode 60, at which point nobody would give a damn anymore, and the logic behind the whole thing is nonsense anyways. Yeah, I am pretty sure the light novel readers will be calling it amazing, but then again we are talking about people who consider Sword Art Online and Mahouka to be masterpieces.

And that is why despite the seemingly positive feedback it got from those who followed it to the end, it is not good and the sooner we let it behind us, the better we can focus on titles that actually deserve our attention.