Reviews for Dies Irae (2.27)
grudgeal
Fukuyo Takaaki
Kudou Susumu
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 n...
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- Unrated
06.01.2018 17:25 - direct link
(rs10249)
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.
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.
