Jun 16, 2012
Another Review
The creators of Blood-C give us another chance to look at the horrible
Horror of people dying gruesomely. Another with the most stupid title any sane
person can come up with shows how important the atmosphere in a plot is. When I
think about this series I don’t remember any characters, the story or the fact
that Ali Project delivered performance #1034 of the same frigging song and
called it new, no, what I will think of the creepy soundtrack played in the
background of people doing normal stuff.
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| This will be used to do some Damage |
This series is about the constant danger that anyone in this class could
die in any minute. And the solution to this “phenomena” is also a nice
development following that notion and raising the bar for the finale. But what
this means is that this series should tell you that the characters are always
in danger. To that effect some person decided to let the soundtrack tell us
exactly that – all the time. I know that people can die eating peanut-butter in
the kitchen but that’s not really a setup for a gruesome death, isn’t it?
That’s a comedy! That’s what it is! Danger unseen and seen has to be present as
part of the scene and not as a contradiction to the general impression of it.
If I see a peaceful scene and the BGM signals suspense then that’s just silly.
Although I have to admit that at least this time I cared about some of the
characters compared to Blood-C. What Another is really good at is showing the
characters under pressure. The drastic influence of constant danger can be felt
when confronted with the class’ behavior, especially in the beginning when
there’s the contrast between the main-character’s ignorance (following the
new-comer-stereotype) and the big unknown that is the mystery at that point.
Misaki is also a very interesting character whose soulless character actually
has some surprising depth considering how usually it’s just a forced “Look how
weird I am!”-characterization is. Her actions seem rather mysterious at first
which is one of the issues I will talk about later but her character is consistent
throughout the story so that makes her mysterious appearance actually
interesting instead of generic. And in contrast to the ever-present haunting
soundtrack her actions are a far better demonstration of the weirdness of the
place. The classmates are okay in their presentation as side-characters but
never get any chance to become particular deep like the story did with Misaki.
Rather the story wants to concentrate on Misaki’s character which is a strange
choice for a mystery-driven plot like this one.
Now the main-character is the worst character of the bunch but not really
characterization-wise. He’s not obnoxious or anything. My problem with him is
connected to the pacing of the story. His actions have a rather plot-convenient
feeling to it. It’s a mystery-driven story so you’d expect someone to play
Sherlock and solve the mystery, right? Naturally there’s the main-chara
investigating with support from other characters and there are some antagonists
trying to stop him. It’s the usual picture of a force trying to overcome some
form of resistance so that the truth can be revealed. I already said that the
atmosphere of the series fails at portraying the danger or rather it’s
overdoing the whole thing so that it becomes stupid. So one is sitting there and
the series tries to force its horror-notions on you. Even the last idiot will
realize something’s not right and something has to be done against it. But the
main-character…? He doesn’t do much. Like a snail he slowly crawls towards the
point where he starts asking the hard questions. And all the way towards that
point I had already asked the hard questions a hundred times and wondered how
long the main-characters would stay dumb. Like that the series has a rather
slow pacing that in a rather unconvincing way stretches the story until the
point when it meant business.
And therefore the second half of the series is far better than the first
half. The developments and the revelations about the central mystery of the
series are really worth sitting through this stupid first half. The characters
aren’t very endearing so it might be difficult to relate to the plot in some
ways but the strangeness and absurdity of the plot is more than enough to make
it entertaining, I think. It also comes together very nicely in the end (the
stupidity of the slow pacing excluded) which is the kind of reward you like to
see in a mystery-series.
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| This Dolls Get To you |
Another is a solid mystery-series with strong (or obnoxious, one might say)
horror-overtones. As solid as the overall impression is it’s rather unlikely
that the characters will leave any impression at all. With a good
thought-through mystery at its core, though, this flaw doesn’t really matter.
The flaw that really matters in the end is the atrocious pacing which turns the
first half into a dull “Let’s wait and see”-scenario which keeps
plot-development forcefully to a minimum. But everyone who loves a good
mystery-series should suffer through that because the ending is good enough to
make this a worthwhile series despite its flaws.
