Plunderer

Writer James Beckett of AnimeNewsNetwork once said, speaking on the anime “Fire Force”, that it felt like it was written by “two middle-schoolers stacked on top of each other wearing a thick trench coat.” Sorry if I didn’t get that exactly right, James. Can I say the same applies to “Plunderer”? Well, as someone who was once a middle schooler thumping my feet to Slipknot and Green Day as I scrawled in the margins of my homework, I’d like to think my capacity to conjure a competent narrative was at least marginally better than whatever...the fuck I just saw. I’m going to keep this reviewof Plunderer as brief as possible because I’d rather it vacate the mental real-estate it has occupied in my head-space now that it has finished airing. You think of anime like “One Punch Man” and “Attack on Titan” where absolutely every aspect of production had to fall perfectly into place in order for the celluloid to properly translate to screen, in other words, lightning in a bottle. Plunderer is like the inverse of that, imagine, if you would, a 2-liter bottle of shit filled to its absolute brim over the course of 24 weeks until...well...you get the idea. Plunderer is the type of legendarily bad anime that you only get once in a decade because anything that can go wrong with an anime during its syndication absolutely did go wrong. Plunderer is juvenile, it seems to be under the impression that a good story is predicated on otherworldly plot-twists, tragic heroes, and romance, but that’s just not the case. At the core of Plunderer’s story is a horribly unlikeable protagonist, Licht Bach. Licht checks just about every box for how not to write a compelling protagonist. He sexually assaults any woman in sight, has a happy-go-lucky attitude about it, and hides behind a shield of tragedy to force some degree of emotion out of the audience. I’m an unrepentantly perverse and salacious bastard, the furthest thing from a prude, but even I have to draw the line somewhere. For a character like Licht Bach to have as many love interests as your run of the mill harem protagonist is nothing short of insulting. The number of women queued up to swing their legs open for this dude is staggering, it gets to a point where they are actively embracing being sexually assaulted just to have this man’s dick. I don’t normally allow my convictions to bleed into anime, because applying real-world logic to a cartoon can have varying results. But in Plunderer’s case, I just can’t ignore how these female characters are presented, because it’s nothing short of reductive and dangerously exaggerated. Is the story at least good enough to distract from the chaos of its forced character relations? Well...no, not really. Trying to explain the story of Plunderer would be like asking Charlie Day to expound on the modalities of Pepe Silvia. It’s mired in minutiae and messy plotting, so for the sake of it, I’ll highlight some of the essential bullet-points. Licht Bach is some kind of super-soldier from the past that was forced to kowtow to his superiors to spare his peers, he bastardized his ideals when he was forced to kill others even though he was in a fucking military academy, and now in the present when the world is virtually unrecognizable he’s seen as a pariah known as the “Legendary Ace”, also there are aliens involved? One of my absolute favorite scenes in Plunderer is when the main cast is forced to visit the past and during the school’s opening ceremony, the Commander straight up pops 3 punks in the crowd. It was jaw-dropping, to say the least, but it’s not until after the back and forth with Licht does he reveal that he actually shot them with a paint gun...even though they acted like they were dead the entire time. Like “Oh yeah, golly, I’m not dead!” Seriously, I checked out from this anime when I saw an attack-helicopter slowly rise from the smoke of the abyss. The music is terribly anachronistic, mundane, and poorly integrated from scene to scene due to poor directing. The animation doesn’t even have to be spoken for in this case, but for the sake of it, I’ll say that Plunderer is so poorly animated that you can count the number of smear-frames per episode on your fingers. The coloring and linework is incredibly flat to the point where this show looks and feels like it was released over a decade ago. Plunderer is…awful, irredeemably so. But it was never boring, far from it. With a bit of grandad’s cough medicine coursing through my system, it was actually raucous fun. Can I recommend it? Well honestly, that’s for you to decide whether or not I want the rest of you curious viewers at large to...share in my pain.

I was glad to see that the manga I enjoyed was getting an anime adaptation. I was kinda worried it would be mediocre, or maybe it would be just a small 12 episode "prologue" arc or something, but I didn't expect it to be THAT terrible. It really takes some skill to turn a pretty solid manga into this abomination. So here is the list of problems: 1. Visuals. Here it feels exactly as it did with the latest season of Seven Deadly Sins: face animation and emotions are almost non-existant, all cool fights with great moves are a static image + some blinking "special effects"(and don't forget screaming AAAAAA for the whole fight). I swear, I have seen gifs with better animation, and to add insult to injury - even manga had better drawn static panels and frames for that exact fights. Why didn't you just colorise it if you didn't want to bother with actual animation? I have no idea. And outside of fights all charachers either barely move or it is animated "on budget" by two-three students who just did a part time job to get some food. It is trully terrible. 2. Sound. There are only 2 types of sound here: so dull you forget it at once and so irritating it makes your ears bleed. First category consists of openings and endings, second - of all the bgm. Military theme was so bad that I nearly skipped all the scenes where it was playing. If visuals were drawn by students, the sound was more likely made by a hobo for a bottle of cheap wine. I think even if you took a cat and pulled its tail - it would still be a better "music". 3. Pacing/story. Boy oh boy, THIS is the problem. The real one. While I have some degree of tolerance to bad looks/sounds, pacing just kills the source completely. Imagine a perfectly normal source, with nice fights, good plot turns and some ecchi jokes. Now take all the ecchi jokes, that take a panel or a page at most (with chapter being about 50) and stretch it to be 5 minutes long in a 20-minute episode. And now tell me, how can any joke keep up if you make it from a 2% time gag to a 25%? The answer is: you should not even try to do it, as this joke will become way too annoying and way too pushy and it simply will not be funny. And it is EXACTLY what they have done. All jokes - stretched, like they wanted to make it a full-time hentai but chickend out after prelude, all worldbuilding - infodumped in a few seconds, all battles consist out of 2-3 "moves", as heroes just repeat some 2-frame animation. Also there are a lot of lost moments, that may not feel like anything but a filler, but later it actually adds some lost elements to puzzle, as some characters did stuff that is really hard to justify without those small elements. I think I didn't mention a number of smaller issues, but to be honest after mentioned 3 big problems I have already critisized 90% of the anime, at this point any more criticism will be just beating a corpse. TL;DR: this anime is a horrible adaptation. The only reason I didn't give it the worst score is as a token of appreciation to the source material, wich is good, but this whoole anime is a waste of time, efford (although not much of it) and potential.

Plunderer is a show that’s not for everyone. The first half of the show features a tremendous amount of fan service and If you don’t enjoy those types of things, this will be a very hard watch for you. However, if like me, you don’t mind such tropes you will be treated to one of the most under appreciated and interesting stories of the year. Plunderer takes place in a world where everyone has a “count” which can go up or down depending on your actions in life. Once you hit 0, you will be sent to the abyss. A mysterious world from which nothing hasever returned. The concept of the count was very interesting to me and the dynamic of the world managed to keep me engaged consistently. On a weekly basis, this was always the show I looked forward to the most simply because I found the mysteries of the show and the characters to be great. The story takes a while to get going, so if you’re someone who likes instant return on investment, you won’t find that here. But, I can promise you that if you stick around, the second half of the show has some fantastic storytelling and development. For many people, having to wait for a show to “get good” would be a reason to rate it lowly or drop it. For me, I think those lighthearted/fluff moments you get at the beginning of a show take on more weight once a twist or major tonal shift occurs. They allow you to form a connection with characters and emphasise with them during emotional sequences. To that end, I believe the fan-service and light hearted moments during the first part of the show were actually very important to the overall story and added to my enjoyment. The one are where I feel Plunderer was weak, was animation. The art is really bright and character models are solid. But, during fight scenes, I just didn’t ever notice a real “umph” factor and motion felt bland. For a series with a lot of fights, I would have liked to have seen a little more in that department, but it didn’t hamper my enjoyment too much. In conclusion, Plunderer is a show that will reward you for sticking with it. It features likeable characters and a genuinely interesting story and world. It was a very enjoyable watch for me that got me reading the manga, and remains one of my favourite anime of the year. Plunderer gets 8 counts out of 10 from me.

RULE #1 A writer of fantasy fiction only has to follow whatever rules he or she makes up for him- or herself. RULE #2 There are no other rules. RULE #3 But you really really *really* need to follow rule #1! ---The creators of this show chose to ignore these rules completely, and that's the reason the result of their efforts belongs in the giant heap of trash anime that provides too little return on the viewer's time investment to be worth watching. The author's just made up shit as they went, and didn't care about following any kind of plot logic. When there is no logic there is no plot to spoil and no suspense to sabotage, so I won't ruin anything for you by giving a simple example: Someone gets shot right in the chest and is left for dead lying motionless on the ground in a rapidly expanding pool of blood. But no worries, this character will be back up and fighting in a couple of scenes! No explanation is offered. Not even "magic". How lazy must an author be to not even bother to pull the "magic" card to excuse the worst plot holes? That's just one isolated example, the entire show is like that. Apart from not making a lick of logical sense, this show also has a bad habit of spending a lot of time in "comical" scenes with an ugly blob art style, to save money I guess. These blob scenes aren't the least funny, they're mostly just pervy nonsense that undermines any respect the viewer might have managed to develop for the characters. I award five stars because all shows I manage to sit through get at least that. But bear in mind that I might not have pulled through if I didn't also practice my guitar while watching it.

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