Spectral Force

Story 3/10 So, from what I saw, the story seems to be that humans and demons are at war. It is now up to Hiro, a half-demon, half-human princess to put an end to the war. Now, when you read the synopsis looks like a cool story right? Except that it is just poorly executed. I'm like ok so you got that story except that now you're confusing your audience 'cause you're putting these events that have close to nothing to do with the story. Overall, it seemed like a great story and I was intrigued by it. I thought it was a cool concept, just really poorlyexecuted. Art 1/10 This has to be one of the worst animations I've ever seen, along with Superkids. In the second OVA, some scenes were improved, but it's still bad. Character 3/10 There were some characters that seemed to be good, but like the story, I think the character development was poorly executed. Enjoyment 2/10 It's just bad. I didn't enjoy the anime, but I was intrigued by the story that I kept going and it was not worth it. Overall 2/10 Yeah, not worth your time. The animation is just awful. The story and characters were poorly executed. It's a shame 'cause the anime had potential, but everything is just really poorly executed. I would not recommend this. Thanks for reading. Let me know your thoughts on this review and any feedback you may have for me. Until next time!

I'm going through all the Idea Factory OVAs (all more or less promotional pieces for their visual novels and RPGs) and trying to make sense of them, without much success. What doesn't help, is that while the stories are generally meh, they also sometimes fall straight into incomprehensible – the first episode of Spectral Force is a great example. We start by seeing an angel(demon?) lady being fuckin' crucified and bleeding a lot of vividly pink raspberry sauce. Wow, edgy! Early Idea Factory generally seemed pretty fond of inserting random christian symbolism and over-the-top violence to this "Neverland" setting. How it ties into the storyproper? Weeeeell... It doesn't, really. Then we are treated to absolute visual clusterf***, with awful CGI, incomprehensible cuts and the anime generally ignoring its tiny runtime and taking its sweet time before getting to the point. The second episode finally focuses properly on the demon princess and her quest to defend what's left of her domain, but I can't say it made me super-interested in how the story continues in the RPGs. It's just all bland, disjoined and generic, with whatever nice stylistic choices that could've been ruined by hideous CGI environments and incredibly cheap 2D animation. The first episode is actually pretty funny with how poorly constructed and cheesy it is, although the second one is mostly just boring. It's a decent "so bad it's good" kind of watch, but nothing more than that – if you're sober and respect your time, you should probably avoid it.

"there's something wrong here" mercenary. "Why are you floating?" Hiro. Story/Character: Spectral Force hints at large world building of a generic fantasy multi racial war. Watch Nanatsu no Taizai for proper art & story, or Shingeki no Bahamut for epic multi racial battles. But this story isn't as terrible as the synopsis. Here demons aren't typical villains. Demon lord Janus wanted to sacrifice himself by sealing some op excalibur (called "this" by the purple hero) with his body. By removing the op sword he hoped the world becomes peaceful. Hiro is the half daughter who hates humans but somehow has human mercenaries serving her. She's left with herfather's mess. Somehow both demons & humans like to attack her. Shirou/Harry Potter, a tiny mercenary becomes important to the plot. Everyone has natural or funny dubs, but his is the most hilarious. [spoiler] He later becomes a manslave for a noble cause. Besides the dry war conflicts. Dialogue among mercenaries, Hiro & other races can be funny. And the strained family relations is somewhat interesting among Hiro, her oneesan, Janus, brother who was banished by Janus, which includes power struggle for the demon clan heir after Janus. Art: ok. There's a few short combat shots with smooth animation. Sound: ED & osts are fine, maybe the best part of this (dub the 2nd best). There's even some epic pipe organ. You can watch Spectral Force Chronicle Divergence for more about the world with better art, but less animation. It seems a remake with similar scenes, but more boring plot cards, dry with no osts & no English subs now. If you'd like something blander, then Chronicle Divergence is the answer.

If you've fallen as far down the anime rabbit hole as I have over the years, you would know about some really bad anime. Two anime largely considered to be the worst of them all are a pair of OVAs known as "Mars of Destruction" and "Tenkuu Danzai Skelter Heaven". Personally, I still think "Kono Aozora ni Yakusoku wo" is worse than both of them, but I can't deny how incomprehensibly bad both are. Before those two bad anime could run, however, Spectral Force had to walk. Like Mars of Destruction and Tenkuu Danzai Skelter Heaven, Spectral Force is based on a game from thevideo game company Idea Factory, and like the idiot I am, I decided to watch this as punishment for incorrectly guessing that the upcoming "Haite Kudasai, Takamine-san" would be streaming on HIDIVE. I don't even know how to begin with this one, though; it's just that incomprehensible. Spectral Force takes place in Neverland (not related to Peter Pan or The Promised Neverland), a once peaceful land now caught up in a power struggle between humans, demons, and gods. Although it seems like the demons are winning, things take a turn when a hero named Chiffon finds a sword called the Tenmaken, which he uses to kill the Demon Lord and give humans an edge in the war. Right before this, our main heroine, the half-demon and half-human princess Hiro, is sent away with a bunch of mercenaries, and right when they come back is when her father is killed. Now, it's up to her to avenge her father and end the war, and during that process, she somehow comes to trust humans, who she hates due to an incident in her past. At least, that was what I interpreted the plot to be. I apologize if I summarized this anime wrong, but can you blame me? The story isn't that easy to follow in terms of how it's structured and in how entertaining it is. Throughout the entire thing, I was either bored, confused, or some weird combination of both. The characters don't help make the story any interesting, either; they're all typical fantasy series characters with no real characteristics that could make them stand out from one another. Not even our leading lady, Hiro, is all that interesting; her whole thing of being a not-entirely-human who hates humans has been done multiple times before in more interesting ways, and the way she eventually comes to trust humans doesn't feel organic, either. I'm sure the story and characters are expanded on better in the original Spectral Force game, but whether it has an English translation or not (seems like it doesn't, despite the fact that the third game did get an English release in 2008), I can't be bothered to play it and know for sure. For the first six minutes or so, I was watching Spectral Force in Japanese with English subtitles, and the voice actors for the Japanese version didn't sound too engaged in their roles. However, due to some circumstances that I don't feel like explaining, I was forced to switch to the English dub for the rest of the series. On that note, I just want to question ADV Films's choice to even give Spectral Force an English dub really quick. I can't imagine the original OVA earned a lot of money when it was released in Japan, and it's very easy to see why; why in the world did ADV Films decide that something like this - something that would very likely cause them to not make any of the money they must have spent on licensing, dubbing, and producing the DVDs back - was a good anime to dub into English?! The quality of the dub certainly didn't help matters; perhaps it was due to having little experience with voice acting at the time, but it saddens me to hear English dub voice actors who have shown incredible talent such as Chris Patton and Jessica Calvello give such lackluster performances. Well, at least the background music and ending theme were okay; they fit the fantasy vibe of the series well. The worst part of Spectral Force is, without question, the animation. To be fair, this is the first Idea Factory anime that ever came out - God help us all for what was to come after - so the animators probably weren't entirely sure of how to animate at the time. With that being the case, however, they could have gotten some more experienced animators to help them along so that the end product didn't end up being as much of a mess as it is. There is a lot of ugly-looking CGI animation in the first episode that I'm sure nearly made my eyes bleed, but luckily, there isn't as much of it in the second episode. The 2-D animation, however, is consistently bad throughout both episodes. From characters seemingly glitching out in the middle of a walk cycle animation to lips not moving when they're supposed to and even one scene in the second episode where a soldier literally slid into frame, everything about Spectral Force's animation should be the subject of a study on animation disasters. Well, at least they were able to improve on this terrible animation with Mars of Destruction and Tenkuu Danzai Skelter Heaven, right? (It's been over a decade since I've watched either of them, and I'm not going to rewatch either of them just to answer my own question.) Overall, Spectral Force is a terrible anime, and I implore you to not watch it. If you did, you would have to suffer longer than you would having to watch both Mars of Destruction and Tenkuu Danzai Skelter Heaven. Question is, though, is it worse than "Kono Aozora ni Yakusoku wo"? I'd say it's not, because I can confidently say this about Spectral Force and not the other one with a long title; even though I don't do drugs, I can see people enjoying this if they got really, really high and watched it with equally high friends. I would prefer it if people didn't do non-prescribed drugs, though, so....yeah. Don't watch this.

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