Schwarzesmarken

The reason I'm writing this review, despite there being several positive others, is to attempt to correct what I feel is an underrating. Schwarzesmarken seems to be a generic mecha v monster anime (Muv-Luv, Gunparade March, and so on) but it is far more than that. Schwarzesmarken is an entry in the Muv-Luv universe, but it cuts out some of the romance and focuses on the setting and story, which in my opinion helps it go above and beyond others of it's kind. It tells the story of the BETA invasion into Europe, focusing on East Germany during the (BETA are strange-ass aliens who invaded Earth,for those who haven't seen Muv-Luv) and simultaneously delivers a commentary on the global political scenario present during the 1980's and the aftereffects of the Cold War. This, while incorporating drama and plot-twists, as well as good ol' mecha action. Too much? No. Story 8.5/10 : I don't believe in generous marking personally, but Schwarzesmarken merits an 8.5. As said before, it successfully incorporates drama, idealism, a little romance, and pretty good action into one show, without individually detracting from any of them. The idealism might make you wince at times, but the tale told about the 666th Squadron's fight against both the BETA and human foes is an enthralling one. Art 8/10: The art is good, but nothing to write home about. The action sequences are well animated, and the backgrounds and character designs suit the grittiness of the narrative. Some of the mech CGI sequences are a little iffy, but when isn't CGI iffy? Sound 7/10: The sound did it's job, but again, nothing special. The OP sets the scene well, while the ED is average. The BGM complements the show well, however. Characters 9/10: Now, this is where Schwarzesmarken shines. The main characters have detailed and comprehensive backstories, and for a 12-episode anime the character development is phenomenal, if a little focused. The interactions between the squad, and our protagonist's ideological leaps and emotional growth are a pleasure to watch. The supporting cast could have done with a little more time, but we can't have everything. The cast also, surprisingly, seems to avoid falling into the tropes and character archetypes that haunt anime for the most part, which in itself is intriguing. (Well, not the idealistic I-wanna-save-the-world loli, but she doesn't really ruin it.) Enjoyment 9/10: If the message hasn't gotten across, THIS SHOW IS WORTH YOUR TIME. The first few episodes are a little dull, and full of cliches, which might be why people don't like the anime, but if you stick it out, you'll certainly conclude this anime with satisfaction, and perhaps, a little wistfulness. It is perhaps not a masterpiece, but it's certainly better than most anime out there, and has a little something to suit every viewer's tastes. Every week when the episodes came out, I prioritized Schwarzesmarken over Grimgar or KonoSuba, which says something. :p If you're looking for something to watch, Schwarzesmarken is it.

Overall (7/10) Right of the bat, I'm gonna say it's not a great anime, it really isn't. High Average at best, but cut it some slack. The 12 episodes given as screen time was just *way* too short to give the whole story justice. It's dark, but the nitty gritty details of the whole thing aren't really highlighted, they give you a few shots just to get the general idea. I'd say that they actually conveyed the main points and prompt pretty well, but as a lore enthusiast, I can't help but be disappointing with the lack of content. So much potential down the drainprobably thanks to them having to cut a lot of the content out due to this restriction. It would have felt better if they gave it 25 episodes. Pity However, as a follower of the Muv-Luv series, I couldn't help but watch the whole thing until the end. It was refreshing to see and there haven't been too many mecha animes recently (relatively speaking) that i can recall. STORY (6/10) It tickles the history nerd in me to see someones take on a crazy question: "What if very anti-human aliens decided to visit Earth during the Cold War?" An already unstable period becoming even more unstable! Perfect, what more could you want? The world has just 'recovered' from WWII and everyone should be good with things, but humans aren't a peaceful bunch. Queue the Cold War! Red Vs Blue! But wait, the BETA appear, maybe people can finally get together, trust each other, and work as a cohesive group. Nah, screw that, who needs that when you can get all the power you want? The Black Marks portrays the bad side of people and how dark politics and war can really get. Forget the romanticizing, if you're new to dark anime and you want to get a teaser of what the dark side is like, this series is a good introduction. See how humans are just as much a problem as aliens are! I personally like stories like this, which is why i watched the thing in the first place. I find that Despair and Hope (especially in the middle of a war) are very exciting themes to any anime, and the onset of an seemingly unending alien force that wants to annihilate you, your family, your cow and every one else to be a good prompt for even more themes. There are a *few* plot holes that i wish they filled out properly. Nothing major, but they did add one too many spoons of Deus Ex Machina for my taste. Then again, I could just be negative like that. Entertainment like this wouldn't be entertainment if it was completely realistic, so i think it went down fairly smoothly Art and Sound (6.5/10) The OP and ED aren't bad, but they aren't the best. I'm sure they can get some peoples blood up, for sure, but I'm just not the type to look at the music of an anime into that much detail. It's SFX where quite nice. It sounded quite typical for a mecha/war anime, but not cheesy or corny. The art seems like it's new-gen art on a budget. It fills out the basic ideas of many of the images, but some details were not given any effort, such as the deck of the battleships in one of the scenes, or the uniform details on some of the characters. The art isn't stiff, however, and most (if not all) of the parts fitted well into the whole Character (7/10) I actually liked the characters in this one. I'm biased, deal with it. Most didn't lack substance, considering the time of the anime and most of the 666th squad seemed to build on something at least. The members were given equal attention which made them fairly emotionally invest-able to the watcher. There were some lines, however, that didn't seem to fit and felt like they were put there just to give weight to the current event or character for that one single moment, so it was a little shallow. Enjoyment (9/10) (Slight Spoilers) I gave it a Nine for a few reasons: -It's a dark anime. I like dark anime -Mechas! -Cold War Era + Mechas! Aww yeahh. -Politics, an old time favorite of mine, grinds my gears cause it's a real and valid thing that happens. Always nice to see how the story ends. -People actually die in the squad, It's kinda realistic! -They continued Muv-Luv! Yussssss, i thought it was a dead series.

So let me start off by saying "I F**KING HATE THIS SHOW." Really I do. And yet, I can't find myself giving this show any less than a 10. However, the reason I hate this show is because the writers are dicks and they know it. So this whole show revolves around the Cold War Era. Much like in the U.S. with the Red Scare, there was a struggle in Eastern Germany about loyalty. People selling out their own friends and family for self-preservation. This is the shows main focus. The Mechas and Aliens are really second to the situation. Well in the first few episodeswe met X-Chan. There is serious suspicion about this character whether X-Chan is a traitor or not. There is one scene in I believe the third episode where they show X-Chan's "evil smile"... and that is it. That is all we have to work on to determine whether or not X-Chan is truly a traitor or a Red Herring. This is why this show is truly brilliant . As I kept watching I was searching for something, anything, to whether to trust our suspect or not. I kept playing all possible scenarios in my head, searched for something I missed, but to no avail because there was nothing there. There was nothing I could decrypt. All I could do is watch the events unfold. We don't even find out the truth till almost the very end. This isn't an accident. The writers want you to squirm. They want you to wrench and search to try to figure it out knowing very well you can't. They want you to question everything and create evidence in your head that you believe true that probably is non-existent. This very well replicates the Red Scare in America. There was no way to truly tell if you could trust someone. There wasn't magical signals to tell. All you do is hope that you didn't get accused. This show is probably one of the deepest anime out there. This whole show is a deconstruction of the mystery genre. There are no clues out there for you to find. All you can do is wait for something to happen even though every second you will try to figure it out. You will assure your self that you know the truth when you don't. It almost doesn't matter whether X-Chan is a traitor or not. What matters is they are implanting that idea in your head. And that seed will sprout. The fact that the average is a 7 is almost a joke to me. If I had to recommend a show to anyone I think this would have to be one of the first ones YOU MUST WATCH.

There are two kinds of people that might watch Schwarzesmarken: those who have played the Muv-Luv trilogy and those who haven't. And depending on which side you fall on, your view on this anime will be quite different, although both sides will have their own problems with it, albeit totally different ones. So before I get into this, there are a couple things I'd like to clarify for those who are unaware. Muv-Luv is a 3-part visual novel series released between 2002 and 2006, the last part of which, Muv-Luv Alternative, is widely considered to be one of the greatest visual novels ever made. However, eversince its release now 10 years ago, the company behind it, Age, have done literally nothing other than create a myriad of side stories, spinoffs and fandiscs based on the Muv-Luv universe. They've never even tried to come up with a new franchise for a whole decade now, instead they've decided to just keep milking their one and only masterpiece until it can be milked no more, which is... understandable I guess, but still pretty saddening. In any case, the Muv-Luv trilogy has never gotten an anime adaptation and perhaps never will, but in 2012 there was actually an anime release... based on one of its countless spinoffs called Total Eclipse. Not only was this a rather strange decision since any anime-only viewers would miss out on tons of plot elements due to being unfamiliar with the main series, but also Total Eclipse turned out to be an incredibly mediocre anime in and of itself, focusing just as much on fanservice as actual story progression, if not more. And now, 4 years later, history repeats itself, as yet another one of the franchise's spinoffs has gotten adapted, namely Schwarzesmarken. But of course for any anime-only viewers, the exact same problems as last time still remain. The good news however is that the story of Schwarzesmarken is largely separate from the one of the main story of Muv-Luv. This is because a) it's a prequel, taking place almost 20 years before the events of Alternative, b) the character cast is completely different, and c) it plays out on the other side of the planet, in Germany instead of Japan. So in that sense it works out fairly well as a standalone anime... but far from perfectly. This is because Schwarzesmarken intentionally leaves out just about all initial exposition about the state of the world itself, any detailed information about the BETA's functionalities and tendencies, as well as a lot of the planet's history ever since the BETA's initial sightings on Mars in 1958 and their eventual invasion of Earth in 1973. And this is all simply because the anime assumes that you already know all that from playing through Alternative. So it's not that the story won't make sense for anime-only viewers (it will), but you'll miss out on a lot of depth and detail. It also works the other way around as you'll be able to relate a lot more to events which have previously only been mentioned briefly in Alternative as it plays out in real time here instead of something which just happened far away and almost 20 years prior from the game's perspective. Overall though, Schwarzesmarken is still a pretty big improvement over Total Eclipse at the very least. The tone is a lot more on point with what Muv-Luv is supposed to feel like, with a lot of death, drama, politics and tragic events (though not as much sci-fi). There is also pretty much no fanservice at all this time around which I'm very thankful for. So atmosphere-wise Schwarzesmarken is a lot more similar to the main series, but there are still some clear differences. The most notable one would probably be the direction the plot goes in, and specifically who the real enemies in the story are. In the main series, it's naturally the BETA that everyone is fighting since humanity's mere existence is on the line, but in Schwarzesmarken they almost feel like the secondary threat a lot of the time. Of course there are still a lot of battles between the human TSF squadrons and their alien invaders, but in this case there seems to be just as much internal conflict as external. This is because this takes place in Germany in the early 1980s, which of course means that it's in the middle of the country's split in two, I.E: West Germany and East Germany. The squadron the story primarily follows is the East German Army's 666th TSF Squadron, a.k.a. the "Schwarzesmarken". They do their part in fighting the BETA on a daily basis, but they see their western neighbors as just as much of a potential threat as the aliens themselves, and the west is of a similar mindset. It's almost like a three-way war going on, except that the two human sides are having more of a cold war standoff and throwing insults at each other most of the time, but occasionally end up clashing head-on as well. This is unsurprisingly also used as a consistent and reliable method for generating drama, as some characters find themselves on different political sides despite caring for each other on a personal level. And on top of that there's also the good old truth that killing off main characters is not exactly something Muv-Luv has ever been afraid to do, and although it might not exactly be on the level of the main series, Schwarzesmarken is still not afraid to do the same. It gives the post-apocalyptic story a much greater sense of realism and intensity that way, and it definitely pays off. Schwarzesmarken is definitely not a bad anime by any means, but I still find it a bit difficult to actually recommend it to people. Because if you haven't played through the Muv-Luv trilogy prior to it, then you should definitely go do that first, and if you have played through it then try as you might but you'll find that it's almost impossible to not end up subconsciously comparing Schwarzesmarken to the main series as you're watching it. There will constantly be this nagging voice in the back of your head saying "I wish I was just replaying the real game instead". Schwarzesmarken isn't bad, but just by being part of the Muv-Luv universe the expectations on it will be so much higher than it ever has a chance of living up to, and Alternative is just such an incredible work of art that Schwarzesmarken ends up looking a lot worse than it actually is simply by being compared to something so unreasonable. I think the only way you can truly see Schwarzesmarken for what it is is by first playing through the visual novels and then literally forcing yourself to go into the anime with the lowest expectations possible. If you tell yourself prematurely that it's probably going to suck, then you might be positively surprised. But if you don't, you'll probably just be disappointed. Though pretty much all these problems would be solved if Age just decided to actually adapt the real Muv-Luv series already... which I've actually heard some rumors as of late that it might happen in the future after Alternative's localization Kickstarter project turned out to be such a huge success a few months ago. Maybe in another 5-10 years, who knows. One can only hope.

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