Azur Lane

Perhaps the theme of ship girls isn’t an overly saturated idea in the anime medium. We’ve only had a handful of anime about ship girls in these recent years. Azur Lane does gleefully feel similar to Kantai Collection, a franchise that it drew influences from. Back in 2015, Kantai Collection presented itself as a love letter to fans of the game. Azur Lane follows a similar path and by that, it tries to please the fans. But as an anime original viewer, Azur Lane presented itself to me as a fan disservice of naval storytelling. The plot deals with nations fighting against the mysterious alien forceknown as the “Sirens”. Azur Lane is a military alliance established to counter the threat that consist of the Eagle Union, Sakura Empire, Royal Navy, and Ironblood. However, these nations develop ideal clashes that breeds internal problems within the alliance. Let me tell you this right now and that is, you should not expect much character development for the oversaturated cast of characters. Besides a few of the more prominent characters such as Enterprise, Akagi, Unicorn, Javelin, Belfast, and Kaga, there’s far too many to count or worth investing time into. It’s a flaw of the anime with viewers being easily lost within its sea of characters and even the plot. Azur Lane seems to be the type of anime that’s aimed for an audience already familiar with the franchise. That being said, the anime isn’t completely unwatchable. Naval warfare takes shape with a war drama story that isn’t difficult to understand. The main question is how much you feel attached to the story it tells us. The main plot deals with how each nation operates by using its arsenal and military units in the conflict against the Sirens. When it doesn’t engage in war, we do have the so called “breather episodes” to give the characters time to relax. The first half of the series even had a particular beach episode to give time off for the ship girls. Other times, it brings together characters from different nations and their ideals. One of the most prominent character is Enterprise, an ace renowned for her skills and her experience. Throughout the anime, she faces her own personal demons including dealing with the incident of her sister, Yorktown. While the anime doesn’t pull the trigger on most of the cast, Yorktown does become a victim of warfare and in respect, Enterprise feels responsible. In a sensible topic, war can be a life altering experience. Azur Lane seeks to promote character assassination on occasions despite the highly fictional content. As I mentioned before, Azur Lane seems like type of anime targeted to fans who are already familiar with the franchise. There’s far too many cast and as result, many of the characters gets demoted to background extras or even omitted. A primary example is the limited focus on Ironblood and its members. The anime attempts to remedy this by having groups of characters appearing but it doesn’t really leave a good taste. On the other hand, it’s easy to see that some character relationships to be intimate than others. No, this is not a shoujo-ai. But sometimes, you do get a ship tease between characters such as Akagi and Kaga. Unfortunately, the relationships in this anime is eye catchy at best but filled with utter nonsense. Watching Azur Lane made me feel like a kid who got a flashy new toy but gets bored the very next day. Characters such as Unicorn serves as mascots that brings little value to the storytelling. If you’re seeking for a concrete plot, seriously look elsewhere. This isn’t an anime that will make you quote lines from what it’s selling. On the technical elements, Azur Lane became a victim of for its visual quality and animation. There's obvious problems with the production values when the producers decided to delay the series' final two episodes by 3 months. While character designs doesn't suffer from CGI, some of them looks inconsistent in background scenes. Most of the time, the characters looks scripted on set and the battle chereography seems like it's a live slideshow. There's no easy way to say it but Azur Lane takes a big fall on its animation front. Ah, Azur Lane. Somehow, I got the impression the producers wanted to throw all this together to get the audience's favor into the game. Honestly, the plot is so poorly written that you may have to look up a wiki to understand the full gest. Without playing the game, this show won’t be much of an enjoyable experience. It's not even an eye pleaser with the atrocious animation. You will certainly not come out of this show remembering a memorable quote or two. And it’s a shame really. It's 2020 and we haven’t received a decent anime about ship girls in ages.

AHHH...Azur Lane, how we missed ya then and back, and now out again. The promise that we'd have a decent game adaptation with an original storyline that subsequently went to shit as it progresses, not to mention the many warship waifus and the mediocre animation that accompanies this dreaded show. Based on the gacha game of the same name (that was insanely popular at the time), Azur Lane features anthropomorphic World War 2 waifu ships that we have the joy of the love-hate relationships between its insanely big cast of allies and enemies to develop their growth overtime as we please and experience some of thevery best mobile games have to offer. And of course, the anime adaptation was a sure-fire thing back when it got massively popular back in 2017. But what we got instead was a production so haphazard, it's like the production staff at Bibury Animation Studios knew what they were doing under the tutelage of the studio's owner and director Tensho (Grisaia, Rewrite series) and on Jin Haganeya (Guilty Crown, Demonbane) being series composer (at the recommendation of publisher Shanghai Yostar's president Li Hengda, with Demonbane being one of his favourite shows), even all of that went to naught with this show. Starting with the story, it's your standard run-of-the-mill "heroes vs. villains" cliche archetype with the impending "ideals vs. realism"-sake type of story with the central huge cast of characters. Of course, they're already known by which group they belong to (if you played the mobile game). This setting isn't bad, but it's one that has been done a thousand times over and over again to the point of boredom. If you'd refer back to my earlier "name-notables" with Jin Haganeya, he's a pretty mediocre writer, with Guilty Crown being the easiest victim to blame for (since Despite the recommendation for him to be writing the storyboard for this show, I found it to be pretty much nonsensical, or at worse times non-existent even with a decent storyline, other than the waifu ships which have garnered lots of love the way before the anime started, and those same feelings are endorsed here. Character-wise, what's there not to love about the character cast? From Azur Lane's seasoned leader "Grey Ghost" Enterprise with her assistant Belfast, Eagle Union's loli warships Javelin, Laffey and Unicorn to former comrade-turned-spy Red Axis's Ayanami and Sakura Empire's Akagi, they're pretty much the standard bogfare and the core foundation of the series to date, and I am happy to say that they absolutely have no faults (well, except how they're utilized in the story). The elephant in the room has got to be Tensho's Bibury Animation Studios, who came out of the deal with doing second-rate in-between animation, and then split out to produce the Grisaia: Phantom Trigger movie to decent results. And now, with this show being it's very first TV series, the same feelings that can be said on the Grisaia movie sadly shares the same with Azur Lane here. Don't get me wrong, the visuals are all done nicely...for the first few episodes. And then they just seemingly went with the flow of sacrificing quality for quantity when it comes to the bombastic action scenes (that are supposed to be as good as the game itself, mind you) of which Azur Lane (the game) is no stranger to such good animation and lets the gamers feel fulfilled (after tanking hours of gameplay). Even the CGI scenes which were meant to be flashy, ended up as wack and we're all left wondering if that was actually incorporated at the very last minute or the lack of skill to make even such scenes stand out. Needless to say, all of that didn't translate well to the anime despite the popularity over in Japan when it was first launched there to successful results. Another wacky area is always with the music. Other than a forgetful OP (of which May'n is producing decent to mediocre songs nowadays) and the nice ED by Kano, I honestly don't remember any good tunes, even after the 3-months gap due to production issues. Other than that, it's only the fanservice that gets us feeling good that is the best part of this show. When all is said and done, what happened with Azur Lane: The Animation, it's all the same as selling merchandise: this show is meant to be a cash-cow adding onto the popularity of the series in its many mediums. The same with the subgenre with shows like Girls und Panzer, Kantai Collection, they have their own niches and I can't complain about that. Stick with the games and forbade on the anime, your experience will vary on the better side than to side with the show, which is a +1 to the many mediocre game adaptations of recent years. This show HAD the potential to be good (and us the audience are honestly in for it), and it was horrendously wasted to trash.

You know, I learned one thing about adaptation of video games: they are almost never good. Azur Lane had it even worse being a gacha game for phones, so it could not rely on having a good story that can be comfortably put into 12 episodes. So instead of a plot we are overflowed with fanservice (and I think people watching this anime came for it), wich is not bad on its own, the problem lies more in budget and amount of work invested into the title. And let me tell you - neither is really impressive. Yes, fanservice part is okayish, but it isnot really a hard thing to do when you have an already massive amount of reference material of varying lewdness. However, animation showed itself worse in "action" scenes. Correct me if I am wrong, but the beauty of naval warfare comes from the scale: massive ships with giant guns shell at each other making water around them explode with missed shots. But if you turn your ships into cute girls, your weapons get scaled down to the same degree, so instead of epic naval battle you watch a few anime girls with handguns, blades, bows and such staying in the open (it is an ocean, you know, there is no cover there) and shooting at each other with abysmal 2-3 frame animations. Same goes for characters, being a gacha game Azur Lane has way too many characters, and while anime included many of them, none of them had any reall substance, they are just there to show their skimpy clothers. But you know, the biggest problem in my opinion is that after watching all 12 episodes I don't have much to say about it. There are good shows that you like and write reviews of how great it is. There are bad ones that you hate with passion. Azur Lane was just "a" show, one that I watched and that I will forget a few minutes after finishing this review. It is not bad, it is not good, it is just way too shallow and empty to be anything but a quick doze of fanservice.

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