Forum - View topicREVIEW: sole penetra le illusioni ~ Day Break Illusion 7 - 13 streaming
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MadMan400096
 Posts: 266 Location: Chicopee, MA |
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I'll admit, this wasn't bat, but it wasn't my personal favorite show of the season. I personally preferred Watamote and (get your hate mail ready) Dog & Scissors, though my comedy bias helped. I do agree that the show felt rather rushed in some departments, though I'm surprised I didn't see anything about the insultingly lazy explanation for spoiler[Ginka's revival]. That was one of my biggest complaints, since it was practically made for the sake of reviving a character and made no effing sense.
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belvadeer
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I can honestly say I didn't waste my time with this one. One of my favorite shows of the previous season. I admit some parts could have been done better, but it wasn't disappointing. The final boss Daemonia's design is also badass. :)
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leatherhead333
 Posts: 1187 Location: Kansas |
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When i saw the first episode of this series i almost thought for sure it would have been one of the best shows of the season. It had so much potential with it's opening episode. But sadly this anime never quite figured out what it wanted to be.
The first 6 episodes are pretty much just a "bad guy of the week" kind of formula. We get a little sob story about a random character we know nothing about, they turn into a monster, one of the characters has a hard time dealing with them and then thanks to Akira they are able to come to terms with killing them. This concept isn't necessarily bad but it overstays it's welcome and it just makes things WAY to predictable. The second half is definitely better from a story standpoint but the execution is still very much lacking. For example i think the introduction of the "negative" version of the tarot card users made no sense at all. Why weren't they deployed from the get go? Not to mention their role in the show suddenly disappears after like 2 episodes for NO reason. The only negative version of the tarot card users that was ever defeated was Ginka's so why did they just suddenly stop showing up? The anime never explains this which i had a big problem with. I had got the feeling that this show was trying to be dark and edgy but it turns out that was never the case. None of the characters really pay for the decisions they make. Because all their major problems end up getting solved ruining any sense of tragedy. The only one who this doesn't apply to is Akira when she killed her cousin as it haunted her throughout the series. But other than that any attempts to make me feel for the characters suffering ultimately ended up on a flat note because of poor execution. Complaints aside i really liked both the character design and soundtrack for this anime. Tatsuya doesn't normally go full orchestral so it's always a treat to listen to his music without the electronic sound he usually employs. He composed for 3 different shows last season and this score had to be my favorite of them all. The animation was VERY nice as well. I'd say it was one of the best from last season actually. It was especially prevalent during fights of course which provides some excellent eye candy. I'm not going to say this series was complete crap because i still enjoyed parts of it. Still this is the risk with anime original shows. They might start off strong but since they have no source material to go off of the execution can easily start to fall apart (which is disappointing as i had high hopes for this series). |
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Princess_Irene
ANN Associate Editor
 Posts: 2656 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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I really wanted to put something about that in, but every time I tried, it came off as a big ol' spoiler.  But yes, that was one of the things that bothered me the most.
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Fencedude5609
 Posts: 5088 |
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The show ended up being less than it could have been, but all in all I enjoyed it.
Would have liked to have seen a proper resolution with Luna's feelings for Akari, but at least the show didn't shy away from acknowledging them. |
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ChibiKangaroo
 Posts: 2941 |
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I can certainly agree that the explanation for spoiler[Ginka's return] was lazy. I do think it was a sacrifice that was made due to the limitations of the 13 episode format. However, it is a negative mark for the show. That being said, it was really one of the very few negative marks that I saw in this show.
I have written at length about how much I loved various aspects of this show (in the series discussion thread) so I won't regurgitate ALL of that. However, I can summarize some of that. The art in this show was fantastic for me. Colors popped. Battle scenes were truly magical. Whenever the girls were manifesting their powers, it was like a fireworks show. And, the show even went through the trouble of varying the girl's magical attacks so that we didn't just have the same attacks/powers being recycled over and over again. It seemed like every battle, each girl utilized some new twist on her powers. That was such a nice touch and shouldn't be ignored. Also, the artistic merits during the "slow" scenes were often smart and carefully directed to create very specific effects. For example, in one scene where the artist girl is going down the dark path to becoming a daemonia she angrily splashes her paints against the wall. Then, there is this sequence where the visual of the paints splashed on the wall gradually transitions to neon lights and street lights in the next scene which shows people walking down the street on a dreary night. Someone really thought that through and made that extra effort to bridge the anger of the paint splash to the melancholy of the night-time street. I thought it was a wonderful effect. There were countless other instances where the show would utilize visual effects and music to create atmosphere, rather than relying on narration or character monlogues as most shows would probably do. Often times I remember watching scenes where Akari and Luna, or some other character would just be sitting or laying somewhere silently, looking out a window or deep in thought. There would be no dialogue, just self-reflection. Again, most shows would ruin the moment with useless monologue. Often times Day Break Illusion would just let us, the audience, soak it in with the characters. It was so effective. (Also, I just loved the music in general of this show. It almost never seemed out of place, always helping to convey the feelings of the characters or the tone of the situation.) I enjoyed each of the characters. They were all fairly complex. They had well thought out strengths and weaknesses. Each of them had a distinct flaw which was masterfully manipulated by the evil guy. (more on him in a bit). Akari and Luna were probably the two most interesting, although they weren't too far ahead of their comrades. They also probably changed the most, and that wasn't only reflected in their personalities. I thought it was very smart how, for example, Luna's fighting style changed in the last 3rd of the show after she went through her transformation. In her case, her character arc was not the traditional one in a magical girl show where her character type goes to the dark side and then comes back just as she was. Instead, she goes to the dark side and then returns a changed person. Stronger. More confident and in control of herself. Of course, Akari went through the most change. Despite the fact that people weren't happy with how jarring it was in the first episode for her to slaughter her cousin, and a lot of people said that it was a throwaway act and was just a cheap attempt to make the show "dark," I felt like the show's creators wouldn't be so crude. After just a few episodes, it became obvious though that they were using that initial tragedy to set up all of Akari's character development. We watched her for 12 episodes suffering internally with what she had done. Every episode, she tried to find some new way to fix it. She tried to help the people who turned into daemonia, and she failed. She told her mentors that she would refuse slaughtering people any more, and she failed at that too. (I am still so amazed that they locked her in the dungeon for that. When was the last time you saw a magical girl's mentors lock her in a dungeon because she refused to kill? That was amazing from a psychological standpoint.) Then, she hoped that by listening to the daemonia, she could at least somehow atone for her sin, but she never got relief from that either. Others did occasionally, but she continued to suffer. Despite all that suffering, Akari never became a burden on the audience. She never became whiny. She was constantly trying to figure things out, even when she lost the will to fight. Her final scenes with Fuyuna brought all of that full circle. She continued to try and fix things with Fuyuna all the way up until the end, when she realized that her attempts to fix other people was her flaw from the beginning. It wasn't the reason Fuyuna was dead though. The show was smart enough not to insult our intelligence and make it seem like the moral of the story is "don't meddle." It was still clear that Fuyuna's death was more her own fault than Akari's. However, Akari's flaw contributed to their tension, and it was what was preventing Akari from finding peace. When she accepted that, she finally was able to find peace, and when she killed Fuyuna for the last time, I felt something. It was such a smart way to emotionally end that cycle. Before I go on forever, I'll just say something quick about the familiars and the bad guy. Although the familiars in this show were not nearly as epic as, say, a Kyubey, I failed to realize at first the significance of their names. (Schrodinger and Laplace). I go over it in detail in the series discussion thread so I won't repeat it here, but I found the significance of their names to be quite interesting after I thought about it. As for the bad guy, he is similarly not the best bad guy I have seen in a show, but I did think he was used to great effect when it came to the people turning into daemonia and the girls themselves. In a lot of shows, the bad guy might just cast some kind of spell on people to make them into evil pawns. However, he always had to get into their head and heart, and manipulate the darkness that was already within them. I think that theme is really kind of relevant to the real world. Just what does it take for a good person to turn bad? We see it all the time in our daily lives. I have always thought that was an interesting topic - people dealing with and triumphing over their inner demons, which is essentially what our heroines do by the end of this show. |
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Spotlesseden
Posts: 3514 Location: earth |
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ok anime. It tried to copy too many idea form different anime. If they make this 5-6 years ago, it would be very popular.
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