Reviews for Dies Irae (2.27)

Dies Irae -- 'Dies Irae?' more like 'Dies Stupidus' ultimately.

Sometimes, the first five minutes of a show, or even its first spoken line, can tell you all you need to know about a show. Sometimes, a show will surprise you, and sometimes it will fake you out by making the first episode non-indicative of what the show is all about. And then there's this, where it took about half the first season before I could start to piece together what the bleeding heck it's about (and what's happening in it) in the first place.

Dies Irae was a fall 2017 anime based upon a visual novel of the same name. The show, as well as its translation into English, is basically a fan-directed affair, based upon a highly successful 2016 Kickstarter (which I did not contribute to). The title is Latin and means 'Day of Wrath', named for a poem that evokes Judgement Day. It's a poem about God's final judgement of Earth, the Armageddon that separates the wheat from the chaff and brings about the end of days and the eternal paradise... But what the hey, it's Japan, so why not use that for a 'story' about Nazis wanting to destroy a Japanese town and only a random high schooler being in the position to stop them.

Dies Stupidus, incidentally, means 'stupid days' in 'I-don't-know-how-to-speak-Latin' Latin. And was named for me deciding that fit this show a fair bit better. It's not the most cutting of insults, I know, but expending any actual wit on mocking this show feels a bit like a waste.

Art & Animation: 3/10 -- The show actually makes a gag out of the fact that two of the leading ladies look almost identical at one point. It feels like it's mocking me, instead of the other way around.

Dies Irae was made on bit of a shoestring budget as these kinds of shows go, so putting my 'objectivity' hat on for a moment it's possible that lack of funds is the main culprit for why this show's lacking graphical department.

Okay, putting the hat off again... This show's art and animation is rather terrible, especially for a 'sword and sorcery' show there fight scenes are important to give a spectacle (because emotional involvement in the characters' well-being sure isn't present here) to make us keep watching. Which makes it such a good thing that the story was so terrible I kept watching it out of morbid curiosity and for the laughs, because Dies Irae certainly doesn't deliver enough good fights to keep that part interesting. The characters look very similar, the outlines look rough and unfinished, the fight scenes vacillate between janky camera cuts, random flashes and the occasional giant skeleton on fire (in a bad way) and off-model fighter do not deliver a very favourable graphical impression. Much like the story it's supposed to illustrate, the framework for the show's graphics are a bit of a jumbled mess, but it's at least functional... Occasionally.

Sound & Music: 2/10 -- When the best audio impression is a random lady singing about guillotines and blood coming out of nowhere, it's possibly we have a problem somewhere... Or the foundation of an incredible musical.

No, seriously, that is the best part of the show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl5K4CDXp2I

And not just in the musical sense, this is the best part of the show, period. Re-watch that, no context (because the show doesn't give any either), and hopefully that will be all the justification you'll need for why I gave this score to the audio... As well as my ensuing score for the story.

Story: 1/10 -- I'm not even sure I can call it a 'story'. It's more like watching someone improvise an 'The Aristocrats' joke after having binge-watched the entire Nasuverse, only to choke halfway through.

Dies Irae's biggest weak point, and I realize that's like pointing out the 'weak point' of a helium balloon, is undoubtedly the progression of events as they happen in linear time as perceived by the audience, or 'story' as it's known in layman's terms. I use this definition because after watching Dies Irae I'm convinced its storyboarding crew and director may have been Tralfamadorians. That's certainly the best explanation I have for this show's pacing, where events do not necessarily follow each other, random scenes with no bearing on the current plot are pasted into the episodes at will and the entire first episode is given over to Nazis fighting each other with no relevance to anything that happens for the first half of the season, and may have made more sense had it been broadcast last as a sort of OVA or 'extras backstory' episode. Like, why does one of the villains need to reveal that he has a sentient tumour that is also his mother, if it changes nothing about the fight he's currently in? (And yes, that actually happens). I don't know. Nobody knows, except those whose sight are unclouded by causality and timelines.

In addition, there's the fact that the story reads a bit like bad Fate/Stay Night fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off, the Fifty Shades of Grey to F/SN's Twilight if you will, where individual elements of the story have been picked apart, removed from their context, and then put together again in a bit of a different combination and hoping we won't notice. Now, Dies Irae and the Nasuverse are of the same genre and every genre has its tropes and cliches. I get that. If you stop and analyse *any* written story that post-dates the Epic of Gilgamesh you'll find *something* that looks familiar (and speaking of which, some of those hunting scenes in Gilgamesh look *mighty* familiar to some of those Neolithic cave paintings, I might add... Freaking Ur writing hacks)... But there's "same genre" and then there's "so there's a Priest of the Grail overlooking an ancient ritual/contest based in a modern-day Japanese city that will summon an otherworldly entity to grant someone's wish/destroy the world, and only this random high school boy and his blonde European pact partner can stop it" as a story. And yes, that is LITERALLY the story as written. Like I said, some pieces pulled apart and put together differently, but boy howdy does the finished jigsaw look familiar.

Oh, and the story cuts off... Halfway? A tenth of the way through? I dunno. It just ends abruptly with no explanation, setup or anything else. If I'm being charitable, it feels like it wanted to save us all from the rest of its story, in case it could get even *worse*... And let's not joke around here, it very probably could.

Character: 2/10 -- More like 'glued together personality traits' from other, better "supernatural swords" shows. Also, Nazis. In case *that*'s your scene.

Similarly to its story, Dies Irae's character gallery is somewhat lacking and mainly in the sense that the characters feel a bit like Frankenstein's monsters sewed together of personality traits and storyline roles we've seen in other, better shows. Putting aside the main character, who is basically as interesting as a plyboard, the show features the usual selection of Love Interests who have their own paths in the VN and basically come down to "brown-haired normal childhood friend who gets mind-controlled and held hostage by enemy mage" (Taiga as a love interest), "foreign pact partner with which the main character battles the bad guys" (Saber/Arcureid), "girl raised by one of the main villains whose bloodline makes her central to bad guys' evil plan" (Sakura, with some elements of Rin) and "purple-haired warrior, ostensibly on the other team, who likes the main character" (Rider). While I must applaud the team's restraint in not naming their main character 'Shirou' -- that name goes to his best friend instead (yes, really) -- you can't help but shake the feeling that, eh, wee bit of a rip-off here. And they're not even particularly interesting characters in their own right, which just makes the comparisons stand out the more. When the characters don't have anything interesting to call their own, that's when I really start noting these things.

Same goes for the villains, incidentally. While not every character directly translates to a Servant or Dead Apostle, there's, wellllll, quite a bit of stiched-together elements and they don't even come together into anything interesting for the most part. Putting *aside* the inherent problems of representing Nazis (and I mean, *literal* Nazis, with swastikas and the main villain being one of the Real-Life architects of the Holocaust) as Anime Stereotypes with blushes and giggling schoolgirls and whatnot, there's just not a lot of character exploration. Or character, period, to any of them. Their motivations and reasons for being the way they are go mainly unexplained, and the show throws them at our misfit protagonists without much consideration for why they're even here in the first place. Again, like the story, it feels like we're missing a whole lot of stuff that possibly gets covered in some of the later storylines... Or some of the earlier ones... And things from there just get stuffed in at random.

Value: 1/10 -- By downloading/streaming this show, you are consuming electricity and hastening the Heat Death of the Universe, therefore bringing us quicker to a blessed state where there will be no more of this show. That counts for something, right?

Putting aside that almost none of the show's plot and character elements haven't been done before, and better, by *some* part of the Fate/Stay Night franchise (or whatever the heck it's called nowadays -- so many fates running around making moes out of frankenstein and Genghis khan and what have you mumblegrumble), there's also the question of who, exactly this is for. I imagine the VN's fans aren't very pleased with their butchering of the source material -- unless this *isn't* a butchering, which is even worse. I mean, is the VN any good? I don't know. I'm in a position to find out I suppose, but after chuckling my way though *this* hot mess I'm fairly sure I don't *want* to. So let that decide its value as an introduction to its franchise.

Enjoyment: 6/10 -- "Ha ha ha ha ha... Oh wait, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!"

Despite my tone up to this point, I actually found this to be an entertaining watch. Not in the way you watch a good show of course, heavens no, but still 'entertaining' in its own way. Like White Album, this show's incompetence on the level of storytelling and character progression is so terrible that you can't help but laugh. One stupid plot element after another gets thrown out of the toybox in random order and the fight scenes are rendered as two random superpowered toys slamming into each other with no context as to who is fighting, and why. And that's before adding into the fact that the fight scenes themselves are entertainingly terribad, with giant burning skeletons and the main character turning into a spider made of swords (no, really, that's not made up). It's like watching MD Geist, or some other low-budget 80ies action OVA again. And best of all, of course, is how *serious* the whole thing seems to want to be. It's like your five-year old niece going "I'm a REAL SUPERHERO!" while wearing a Superman T-shirt, a tablecloth for a cape, your mountain boots and a My Little Pony tiara. Of course you are, dear. Of course you are.

Total: 2.5/10 -- I despise it, but I can't dislike it. It's so bad, it's so terribly terribly bad, but it's also so terribly terribly funny because it's so bad.

In the end, the fact that I had a blast watching it does not redeem Dies Irae from being a terrible terrible show. And don't get me wrong, it *is* a terrible terrible show. The storyline is near incomprehensible and goes nowhere, the pacing is dreadful, and while the animation of the fight scenes is occasionally functional it's practically the only thing that is. Dies Irae is still better than Hand Shakers, so it can't even place better than 'participant' in my 'worst anime of 2017' competition, and its 'so bad it's entertaining' factor rescues it from sticking out worse in my memory than things like Guilty Crown so it's got that going for it for now.

Apparently, this show is going to get six additional OVAs to finish its shambolic mess of a storyline this summer, though, so, hey, maybe it can just redeem itself (that is to say, get even *worse* somehow) in those categories by the time 2018 has come to a close. I'm certainly not expecting much, that's for sure.

We begin with badly stitched together scenes of psychotic Nazis killing and blowing up shit while reciting emo poetry about destroying the world. And if you ask me what their motivation is, they are bored, they have too much angst, so everyone has to die.

Then we see the main character fighting his obligatory rival. We are never shown why they are fighting, which comes off as silly since you know nothing about them and yet this is the only characterization they begin with. But I guess if Black Clover, the king of shonen anime, does it as well, that means its great writing.

Then we are introduced to the platonic girlfriend during a horribly written dialogue where everything they say is a lazy infodump of what they were doing all day. It’s as if they are reading their diaries out loud. True to its origin as a porn game, the platonic girlfriend goes inside the protagonist’s room through a hole on the wall. Because their rooms are next to each other and this way she can sneak inside while he is masturbating or wants a quick fuck, without anyone noticing it. Did I mention they are siblings? But it’s ok because they are not blood related, so incest if fine.

Then the protagonist goes to a high school, because where else could he go, and has a discussion about breast sizes with the second harem bimbo. That’s the first thing we learn about her by the way, her breast size. Characterization at its finest. And then we get typical misunderstanding jokes that exists as sexual foreplay for when you actually get to bang these bitches later in the story. Because porn games.

The protagonist is revealed to be special with hidden powers, which is something we have never seen before. This by the way is his only characterization. He is special. Talk about self-inserts. The psychotic Nazis conveniently become mysterious transfer students in the same high school. Because that’s the reason schools exist for. What follows is the obligatory overly convoluted explanations of magic, which always boils down to “if you really want something to happen, it happens”. Chuuni at its finest.

The protagonist trains for a couple of hours which is somehow enough to match the experience others gain after decades, and is then challenged by one of the psychotic Nazis. That means, the Nazis train him so they can kill him, instead of simply killing him right away. Porn game logic.

The battle takes place while he is surrounded by tied-up naked women who get butchered to pieces by a one-dimensional manic laughing light novel rapist. This amazing characterization is done so perfectly, even Black Clover, the king of shonen anime, uses it all the time. The protagonist gets all his limbs sliced off, but with the power of Tite Kubo, he sprouts new limbs and unlocks his bankai, thus winning the day with a technique called plot armor.

At this point I need to stress what a retard the platonic girlfriend is. Aside from how she constantly ignores and forgets all the horrible things going on around her, she also constantly hits the protagonist for being close to other girls while befriending them at the same time. It’s almost like this is a porn game where the girls get jealous but don’t hate each other so you can have an orgy down the line.

We also get Elfen Lied level of brilliant writing, where they find a mute naked girl they have never seen before and instead of calling the police, they dress her up and go on a date like it’s the most normal thing ever. Said girl is also cursed with the power to behead anyone who touches her, but that conveniently doesn’t happen when a harem bimbo touches her. The mute girl is not even real. She’s the personification of the protagonist’s bankai and exists only in his hand. Get it? His waifu is in reality his hand. Fap fap fap! Just like all waifus!

Then the big bad appears and summons a gigantic skeleton than blows up a huge bridge. This is quickly disregarded by everyone in the city as a hallucination, since as we all know gas explosions happen all the time and are the explanation behind every unexplainable phenomenon in the history of mankind.

Then a bunch of edgy crap happen, such as dancing in a room made of skulls while people are bleeding out of their eye sockets. It’s subversion. Then dialogue continuity ceases to exist. I mean, when the protagonist says “I haven’t given up yet” like a generic shonen hero, how the hell do you follow this with the bimbo replying “then make love to me, if you want to do something then rape me, then just kill me.” All while you are shown skulls and shit. How does any of that connect? Oh, wait, I know. Gas explosions. This explains everything.

After that, the protagonist goes back to school, because where else could he go, and finds all the students being hypnotized (with gas, obviously) to go there no matter what. I didn’t get this part. Why would you want to hypnotize people into doing that in porn games? It’s the only fucking place they all go to all the time, so what kind of a vapid explanation is this? … Oh, gas explosion, now I understand, carry on.

Then the Nazis kill more innocent people in gory ways. And by gory, I mean using the paintbrush tool for sprinkling some red color over their heads. It’s really amazing to see how far special effects have gone thanks to technology. Remember how it was all practical and took a lot of effort, instead of three seconds on Photoshop?

After this the Nazis show their past in flashbacks, which predictably is full of edge and makes absolutely no sense. Did that manage to make them sympathetic or memorable? Hell no! At this point nobody cares about characters or plot anymore, since their masterplan comes down to killing enough people for a huge swastika to form, with which they will kill even more people.

Then the rival is killed, but he doesn’t die because he has a weird power that lets him come back to life, because plot said so. We get a flashback where he stabs to death the father of the protagonist, who turns out to be another one-dimensional evil rapist. Then he comes back to life by bursting out of the belly of a psychotic Nazi, and that makes complete sense because gas explosions. Then the rival goes on to fight another psychotic Nazi, who for some reason he is fused with his own sister, who is also his mother. How is that possible you might ask? Because porn games.

Then another psychotic Nazi appears who loves to torture to death the people he loves. His personality is very deep and complex, and if you don’t see that you are a hater of this critically acclaimed masterpiece. And then the show ends in the middle of nowhere, telling you to go fuck yourself and play the porn game, which as you can see from the statistics most people gave it a 9. That can only mean it’s a masterpiece and you are wrong for not liking it.

Abrupt ending of review.

Simply put, this show can be described as overdramatic nonsensical pretentious drivel. Perhaps you need a thorough background in what the story is about via its original source (game) in order to enjoy it, but at no point am I made to care about the characters' motives at all. Episode 0, perhaps attempted to set the stage but only achieve the confound. A few worthwhile moments do occur in the show however, but these are few and far between and the investment in time just to see them with 'context' is not worth the effort. The soundtrack is perhaps the only positive of the show (that is stretching it - the illusion of it being better that it really is since everything else is a disaster), and some characters are 'likable' both in design and...I hesitate to say 'development'.

In summary, there is a story in this show...somewhere, but its atrocious delivery killed it repeatedly. If you must know what Dies Irae is about, then time is better spent playing the game instead.

Note that the original run is ep0-11, which for some reason ends in mid-story. The conclusion is presented in eps12-17, released about a half a year later.