Forum - View topicREVIEW: Megalobox Limited Edition Blu-ray
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GoldCrusader
Posts: 1023 |
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While I agree the anime looked cool, animation wise it was really disappointing. None of the fight ever really delivered on their hype. Like which fight actually had cool animation? None.
Also I felt Jo was the show's biggest shortcoming. The show never really try to make you feel for him. He stays the same from start to finish mostly. Sachio and Nanbu where the show's best part. I'd consider it a B tier show. Fun but with lots of issues. I feel like it is not what I would call a classic either. Is it even still remembered these days? |
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tintor2
 Posts: 2214 |
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Yeah the whole underdog thing also happened to ashita no joe but here it was worse because this Joe was beaten up by guys with metallic arms which could kill anybody
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Kicksville
 Posts: 1264 |
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Good show. I suppose there were two things that kind of bothered me about it.
1. It felt weird we'd have all the stuff about Gears and then spoiler[the show would be all about not using them. Sure, it made sense, but it almost felt like a bit of a tease.] And 2. spoiler[Speaking of teasing, for anyone with passing familiarity with Ashita no Joe, it was pretty apparent they were toying with you on how the show would end. When it turned out to be a pretty much unabashed hero-wins-everything's-good ending, my reaction was like..."Oh". Like, it was nice and all, but I couldn't help but feel like it didn't make much of an impact. (I almost feel like a jerk for saying so!)] All this ultimately feels somewhat nitpicky though, as it's still very good, and I'd recommend it to just about anyone. It's quite nice to once again have relatively new anime to do that with. |
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LegitPancake
 Posts: 1311 Location: Texas, USA |
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Really disappointing that there's no legal way to stream the dub right now, not even if you have cable. Wtf Viz/Adult Swim
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meiam
Posts: 3459 |
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Megalobox is definitely good at visual and music, but I've found the rest pretty disappointing.
Biggest problem in my mind is how uninteresting the fight are once you get past the nice visual. It's pretty clear nobody on the team had any interest in boxing, I doubt most people who worked on it even knew anything beyond "box is the sport where people punch each other in face, right?". There's never any mention of strategy or tactics, in fact I can't even remember if at any point the word "jab" or "hook" are even used (although that could be the translation fault). Nor are there any mention of scoring point/judge, how long the match are and I don't think a ref ever even interfere in a match. Later on someone point out that training your lower body can lead to stronger punch and this is genuinely treated as some sort of secret arts, it completely blindsight Joe's coach. Almost every match follow this exact pattern: 1) Joe get the crap beat out of him and can't land any punch 2) Joe has a variation of this conversation with his coaches: "Joe: I can't punch him and I keep getting punch. Coach: Well have you tried punching him harder and avoiding his punch? Joe: Man, that's so true." 3) Joe punch his opponent and win (often in a single punch) Then there's Joe character, or really lack of one. His only trait is confidence, and he never gain any, he certainly doesn't have a character arc. When he screw up, other people pick the tab for him, and then he just goes on screwing up some more. Most character he fight against are both more developed and far harder worker than he is, either coming from far harsher situation than him or having to master multiple skill to compete in boxing. This is problematic when considering the theme of inequality that pervade the show, slight spoiler for about 1/3 of the way into the show. spoiler[Joe win his fight because he has supernatural strength and endurance, he can somehow punch harder than people with mechanical enhancement and can withstand more enhanced punch than anyone without them even affecting him. This is a deeply unequal situation, where his opponent have already lost the second they get into the ring because they weren't born with Joe physical attribute. Joe isn't a symbol of fighting against inequality, he is inequality taken physical form. It doesn't matter how much his opponent do to try and bridge the physical gap, even mechanical enhancement cannot help them (this get incredibly awkward when Joe is beating up a disabled person). This could be an interesting situation if the show was aware of this and exploited it, with some sort of message along the line of "people don't hate inequality, they hate not being at the top", but it doesn't and simply continue raging against something while at the same time wholesale supporting it.] Oh there's also some sub-subplot about the military trying to use gear for weapon development. But that's just embarrassing since it's the exact opposite of how things work, especially in the case of the real world analogue to gears, which are heavily funded by the military to be used for wounded war veteran (and disabled civilian as side bonus). But the show again can't realize this to rise above the high school level thinking of "military=bad, m'kay". The show also drop plenty of plot along the way, one fighter is said to beat his opponent almost to death every match, but this is quickly forgotten when he has to be considered sympathetic. |
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harminia
 Posts: 2064 Location: australia |
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I'm not the right audience for this show in the first place, so it's not really a surprise I didn't enjoy it. But after all the hype about it, even knowing it wasn't my kind of thing, I was pretty disappointed with it.
The plot was generic, which would be okay if the character's were at least a little interesting, but I didn't care about any of them. The only one with any development was the coach, everyone else was one note. Joe was such a nothing character. There was one point where it looked like they were gonna develop his character, when he has his first(? I think?) proper match and he's really nervous. But then he just gets over it and that's that. I think there was some plot about Sachio and his parents and but I feel like it never got very far either. I didn't feel there was any tension because you knew Joe would win every much. I got so sick of seeing him fall, and then get up as they count to 9 that my eyes were nearly rolling out of their sockets every fight. I know it's meant to add tension but when it happens every single fight, it's just boring to watch. Oh, Joe looks like he's losing again? He's down for 9 counts but picks himself up just in time again? And now he's won the match is one punch. Again. Every time. The world felt underdeveloped. They seemed to have some cool ideas and almost seemed to want to say something about rich vs poor but nothing came of it. The show ended with me learning basically nothing about the world. The animation was okay. I did like the style, and there were some nicely animated scenes, but I was expecting more based on how people were talking. And for a show on boxing I felt there would've been more to the fights than just... grabbing and then a punch to the face. I don't box and I don't watch it (tbh I find the sport pretty disgusting as a concept) but I'm pretty sure there's more to it than that. I liked the music well enough. It had a funky style and was probably one of the highlights of the series. Ultimately the show was just a disappointment. I saw it much later than everyone else (I watched it like last month and you can see how much I've already forgotten because it left so little an impression on me), so I'd seen the hype and people saying how great it was, and came in expecting something... good. Instead I just got a super generic, middling show with a nice soundtrack and slightly refreshing art. Also, I heard a little bit of the dub and thought it wasn't great. Maybe it was the scriptwriters and not the voice actors but no one really seemed to fit. Joe sounded too formal. I feel like the dub should've been more rough, like, with slang or a dialect that differed the slum characters from the rich. Instead everyone just sort of sounded too formal and not casual at all. (To be fair, I wasn't big on Hosoyan's work as Joe, and I'm generally a Hosoyan fan.) Plus the coach (Nando? Nambo? Nanbo?) reminded me of the awkward sounding performances in 90's dubs. I know a lot of people found this anime good but for me it's just another forgettable sports anime, where the only part of it is worth remembering is the soundtrack. whew sorry for TL;DR I've been thinking about the show a lot (because of having watched it recently and seeing people say how much they like it, and me feeling like the only one who doesn't like it. Happy to see meiam has a similar opinion of it to me), so I needed to, like, opinion dump SOMEWHERE. |
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Scion Drake
Posts: 959 |
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The only fighter you could say that comes from a harsher situation than Joe is Aragaki. All of Joe’s other opponents are far more privileged than him especially Mikio & Yuri who have the resources of a massive company backing them in their pursuits. And none of them are shown mastering anymore skills than Joe does. Hell Mikio is a straight-up cheater due to being solely reliant on actual aim-boxing gear. As well I don’t recall instances of Joe constantly screwing up & then having to be saved by others. That seems like over-exaggeration.
You can ever be the only person who likes or dislikes soemthing. Human free will entails that at least a few people will think similarly to you. Though it’s nice to know that most people in general like the show for the most part. |
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meiam
Posts: 3459 |
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spoiler[iirc, mikio made his gear and programmed the AI plus learning how to box, that's 3 very different skill set (programmer, engineer, boxer), he's clearly a far harder worker than Joe ever is.]
spoiler[Joe win a rigged match, when this happen he immediately... tell his coach to deal with it while he just sit in a couch and does nothing. His coach manage to get a deal where they don't both get killed in exchange for throwing a match in the tournament. So when the time come you'd think Joe would have learned his lesson and either go along with the plan or at the very least prepare something so the coach isn't the one paying the price... but nope, Joe once again does nothing while the coach pick the tab.] |
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Angel M Cazares
 Posts: 5519 Location: Iscandar |
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I am so glad that Viz did not take long to release the best anime series from 2018. Megalobox is such a cool and smart anime.
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1261 |
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I managed to watch Megalo Box earlier this year when it arrived to Netflix latin america, it's one of the few non-Netflix original anime with a spanish dub which didn't debut on regular TV first.
I've never watched the original Ashita no Joe, but I had some knowledge about its plot but it seems that this reimagining took some liberties. Joe wasn't my favourite character, I didn't dislike him but I found Nambu and Yuri to be more interesting, and as for episodes I really like the match between Joe and Tatsumi for the latter character backstory. I remember hearing people saying that the animation was really creative for trying to look more like a 90s by downgrading the visuals on purpose, and although the show is really well animated I didn't notice any major improvements. The soundtrack was really cool, and weirdly enough they translated the background songs in the spanish dub, which is pretty rare these days, but they made a good job. My only complaint is that the spanish dub added a lot of profanity in some scenes, even some violent shows used to have clean language, only now that shows are on Netflix they started to add swear words, but here they used very strong words, and it was weird hearing them coming from Nambu, cause his voice actor also voices Winnie Pooh and Homer Simpson  Is not that I'm against swearing, but some times it looks like they're trying to sound mature but instead they sound "edgy".
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Aura Ichadora
 Posts: 2307 Location: In front of my computer |
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Scion Drake
Posts: 959 |
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Mikio may have been a good scientist but he was never the better boxer, the fact he was so reliant on the aim-assist gear to get as far as he did shows he never deserved to take top place. He wasn’t the real deal. And Nanbu never told Joe the entirety of the deal until the penultimate match. He kept it hidden & more or less lied to him that he was gonna make it to the final fight when that was never apart of the plan. He has no right to suddenly ask Joe to give up his dream & suddenly go along with the deal in the end. |
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