Shuumatsu no Walküre

[No Spoilers] If I'm going to be honest... I'm disappointed. I heard quite a few good things about this manga before the anime came out and now I doubt manga readers will be happy with the quality of this anime. This anime simply doesn't hold up to others like Baki or Kengen Ashura which fill the same category but remain better in everyway, now lets get into why. (1/10 scale) Story: 4 The story of Record of Ragnarok is not very deep at all. The story is about 13 Valkyries and 13 of histories strongest humans teaming up to beat the gods in a tournament to savehumanity. The story is basic but since most fighting anime like this have basic stories I gave its a higher score then it would get otherwise. Art: 3 It looks like a slideshow... The actual characters and certain moments look pretty cool but overall the animation is sloppy and trash, giving it a 3 for art. Sound: 3 Nothing stood out to me. The punches didn't have a lot of sound and the impact was lackluster. Only gets a 3 because a lot of anime do this poorly. Character: 2 Awful. After watching the first 12 episodes none of the characters left an impact. All the characters treat this massive death battle like a chill game of football or they comedically overreact, only 1 character showed real emotion and it lasted for no more then 10 seconds before going back to normal. Easily the worst part of this show for me. Enjoyment: 3.5 A more reasonable rating would be a 2-3 but I'll give it a 3.5 since I watched all of it and it passed the time. I only watched it since I just came out and I only finished it by skipping past a lot of flashbacks and through some episodes. I will forget about it in a week. Overall: 3 Should you watch it? No. The only person I would recommend this to is someone whos favorite anime is Baki, and I still worry it might be a waste of time. Record of Ragnarok is easily the most disappointing anime for me this season. Shame.

It's an anime made to show incredible fights. Its story is different, although it doesn't present any kind of complexity, it's direct and it does what it promises. The art and animation are decent, although they slack from time to time, it also has moments where they get amazing. As far as sound is concerned, it's very good, a fantastic opening and the atmosphere that is achieved in certain scenes is of a high level. The characters are interesting and endearing, since they start from existing characters and make small changes to them can achieve a great construction, although, of course, they lack originality. Adamis by far the best character it has, the philosophy he has is very well represented, and he is, even without being created from scratch, a very unique and particular character. It's enjoyable depending on what you expect to see, the constant flashbacks and some scenes cut the continuity of the fight, so it can often be tedious to watch. In general, it is an anime that is not surprising, although it's at the level of any average anime, I consider that it didn't measure up to the manga. I expected the fights to be a visual delight but it was certainly disappointing.

It's now 2022 and while many things change, my shitty anime taste apparently remains the same. I am honestly baffled why so many people have this on their lists for worst anime of 2021. It's honest to God not that bad. I was consistently entertained for 12 episodes and binged the entire show in 2 days. Record of Ragnarok takes place in a world in which all the gods of all the various mythologies are real and Zeus from Greek mythology is the father of all gods and is also the God from the Abrahamic religions. The gods decide that humanity needs to be wiped outbecause the gods are capricious assholes, which is certainly accurate to Greek mythology. However, a Valkyrie from Norse mythology says that mankind should be given a fighting chance and arranges a tournament in which 13 gods fight against 13 of the strongest humans chosen from throughout history. Whoever reaches 7 wins first is declared the winner and if humanity wins then they get to live another 1000 years. The plot is inspired by classic shonen tournament arcs and this show is filled to the brim with big dumb macho moments and "so stupid it's awesome" bullshit. It definitely takes a lot of inspiration from Baki, early Jojo, and Fist of the North Star. However, it also takes inspiration from rage fueled geek arguments online about which god would beat which in a fight. So, Ragnarök is basically like Baki the Grappler meets the Youtube show Death Battle. Allow me to give you an example of how stupid this show is. The second fight is a boxing match between Adam from the Old Testament and Zeus! Zeus hulks out and then decides to use Za Warudo for...some reason. However, Adam catches him with the cross counter from Ashita no Joe while wearing a brass knuckle made from the soul of a valkyrie. Everyone thinks Zeus is dead, but then he pops back up and says "This isn't even my final form!" Then he grows weird facial hair so he looks like Dr Eggman/Robotnik for absolutely no reason. That's the kind of anime we're dealing with. The sad part is that despite how unbelievably stupid this anime is, it would have a Godlike MAL rating if the manga readers got their wish and it had been adapted by Madhouse or Ufotable. If everything was the same and it looked just slightly better, the series would get positive ratings and then the same whiners in the Gogoanime comments saying "This is so stupid! Why is Adam boxing Zeus?!" would either mysteriously shut up or start defending the show as secretly brilliant. After all, if a show has good ratings then it MUST be good right? I will fully admit that the CGI doesn't look that great and can look really janky at times. However, to an animation purist like me who hates CGI anime anyways, this doesn't look THAT much worse than Beastars or Houseki no Kuni to me. Ragnarok and Houseki certainly look a lot closer to each other than either look to Gunsmith Cats. What Ragnarok really reminds me of though is Netflix Baki, which makes sense since this is indeed a Netflix anime. I've covered the fact the animation is kind of bad, but another reason people complained is the pacing. The fights all take 4 episodes and there are flashbacks! So what? That's what shonen anime used to be like! Not everything has to be Demon Slayer and have every fight be 15 minutes of non-stop sakuga. My first anime was DBZ, where Goku fights Freeza for 19 straight episodes! The previous 8 episodes were the rest of the cast fighting Freeza. So, they spend 27 consecutive episodes fighting this one bad guy and nothing else. Every single one of those episodes is pretty poorly animated and filled to the brim with still shots and filler dialogue, so only a few impressive blows land each episode. There are constant scaling errors where Freeza's height is never consistent. They forget half the time that Freeza fully regenerated his tail in is final form and he'll have his stubby tail again at random intervals. At one point, Krillin flies into the air while wearing his Saiyan battle armor and then he just poofs directly into his red turtle school gi, because one animation team went to lunch and the director forgot to tell the new animators what they were drawing. NONE of that mattered! We still thought DBZ was cool as shit because it had 1 or 2 super hype moments each episode and that's what Ragnarok delivers! I know I'm going full "old man" but how spoiled are younger fans when they complain about a 4 episode fight with limited animation and a couple flashbacks? It's as if people are so butthurt this didn't get a Madhouse adaptation that now they're complaining that a shonen fighting anime is a shonen fighting anime. The last reason people hate this anime is because it offended a lot of people. Why is that a bad thing? Mushoku offending the shit out of SJWs is legitimately half the reason for its popularity. While Moshuku actually made a brilliant strategic move in today's divided political climate, Ragnarok is a stupid show made by idiots. So of course, they offended the wrong people. Ragnarok for some reason absolutely shits on the Hindu pantheon and presents them as younger, sub-servient gods to the Greek pantheon. This is REALLY stupid for a number of reasons. Firstly, the Gods of the Vedas are the oldest recorded versions of the gods spread by Indo-European speaking peoples. While the oldest recorded evidence of Zeus dates to 800 BC, his Hindu counterpart Indra is over 700 years older. Zeus is basically just a rip-off of Indra who also for some reason happens to be a rapist and really into golden showers and swan sex. Secondly, Hinduism is an actual living religion practiced seriously by hundreds of millions of people. Nobody is still worshipping Zeus! Lastly, South Asian anime fans by 2025 will outnumber both Japanese anime fans and white anime fans. The only thing dumber than randomly insulting all the Indian fans, would be to insult the Chinese market and make the Chinese hero Lu Bu into a complete jobber who lands 1 blow before getting buried. Then immediately follow that up by having a C tier Japanese hero who gaijin haven't even heard of easily whoop his god opponent's ass. That's of course exactly what Ragnarok does...because this is a stupid show made by fucking idiots. I can understand people getting a little offended by Ragnarok, but to get too offended you have to take it seriously. I'm sure somebody got offended by Adam and Eve, stated in Ragnarok to be the ancestors of all Mankind, having blonde hair and blue eyes. After all, blue eyes are a very recent mutation dating back only 7,000 years while modern humans are 300,000 years old. Then you remember, Adam is fighting Zeus in a boxing match using magical knuckle dusters. This anime is WAY too stupid to get offended by. Should you watch Ragnarok? Hell yes! I lost count of the amount of times I either laughed my ass off or pumped my fist in excitement. This was an absolute blast for 12 idiotic episodes! Next year it's coming back and Hercules is fighting Jack the Ripper. You read that last sentence correctly. That's actually going to happen and I'm going to watch it the day it drops!

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