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Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Platinum End
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andramus
 Posts: 192 |
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I haven't read the manga so I was hoping to experience this series with a shared fresh set of eyes with the reviewer. It's a little disappointing but oh well.
From the first episode I noticed the obvious similarities with Death Note but I feel like there are enough differences so far to allow this series to stand apart. Things can be very similar yet unique in their own way at the same time such as Squid Game, Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, As the Gods Will etc. If there's one thing that sets this series apart from Death Note it's that Mirai is nowhere near as Big Brain™ as Light or L. I actually like the difference of having a protagonist who hasn't mapped everything out 20 moves ahead. So far I'm enjoying this series. Is it fantastic? No. At this stage I don't find it anywhere as near as bad as other people are saying it is. |
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JR-1
Posts: 70 Location: Southeast Asia |
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The duo may have fallen from grace but they're still solid enough to make a decent page turner. Still, if it were anyone else the series would probably wouldn't run as long as it did. I agree with the review that Ohba not really making the main character understandable is the biggest heel.
Even when actively not trying to apply my critical lens though, a lot of Ohba's abhorrent, at best adult-still-having-that-edgy-teen-phase, views seep through. Perhaps Death Note was as decent as it was because they were still a new author and have to be more restrained in their soapboxing. |
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Kirki
Posts: 296 |
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Ah... Ohba. The person that can't write romance even if Cupid himself emptied the entire arrow factory on him - where he ironically gets the idea of red arrows in this series, even. People often misunderstand him as being unable to write female characters, but he has written good enough female characters in both Death Note and Bakuman - as long as they're not romantic interests. This person just has exactly zero ability in communicating relatable romanticism in any way, shape or form through his writing, and for some reason, he keeps going at it. Won't somebody please think of the children and stop him already?
Death Note was good because a) it was their first idea so it went under way more scrutiny before it came out, and b) it didn't have romance. Yes, Misa was... what she was, but at least she was entertaining and what she had with Light was never intended to be romantic. But Bakuman? I've seen so many series and yet not one was able to top the infuriating and illogical corniness of what consisted this series main "romance". Now take that exact same mood and make it the center of your next story, slapping it onto some sentai death game, and you have Platinum End. And the main idea is still good. Death games will always be interesting (at least to me) because is the clearest and most immediate way to toss a bunch of characters into a pot and push them to their extremes while keeping the stakes as high as possible. The power system with white, red arrows and wings is simple to understand and allows for amazing mind games and character studies. Throwing the sentai aesthetic on top of it is a catchy twist - basically, what if your favorite power rangers decided to Battle Royale each other? It's cool, no matter how you look at it. If this is enough to keep you engaged and you can ignore the stale cheese pizza romance, Platinum End will be a good enough watch. |
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all-tsun-and-no-dere
ANN Reviewer
Posts: 653 |
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Oh I would love to hear more about this. |
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Sven Viking
Posts: 1041 |
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I think it’s not so much that it’s warranted by the final work as that “From the creators of Death Note” is enough to sell this to a new batch of suckers who don’t yet realise what they’re in for. |
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NeverConvex
 Subscriber Posts: 2517 |
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I was kind of hoping this show would be a fun mess, but I'm sort of getting the feeling from how many times I paused the latest episode to do something else entirely that it's going to be more of a hard-to-watch mess. The writing feels really .. uh, kind of contrived, I guess, and sort of full of itself? Like, in every scene some character rattles off a line the show seems to expect me to buy into as deep or clever, but it always just feels very superficial and bizarre.
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Sven Viking
Posts: 1041 |
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Yeah, frequently contrived, pretentious, and often just surprisingly… sort of… naive? Like it’s written by someone who’s barely met humans before and has an unusually shallow and warped view of what they think or why. I mean, I’m not saying it’s all bad — I found some parts interesting — but I was frequently surprised by how bad it was overall (and didn’t quite complete it so wasn’t influenced by the ending). I liked Death Note and didn’t dislike Bakuman. I can see some of the common weaknesses between the works but still don’t really understand how things could have come to this. My best guess would be that Ohba was previously taking advice from someone (e.g. an editor or family member) who had a major positive/mitigating influence on his work, but that’s no longer the case for whatever reason. |
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09jcg
Posts: 536 |
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[quote="Sven Viking"]
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Kirki
Posts: 296 |
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Naomi in Death Note and Aoki in Bakuman are both very well written characters and hold their own ground equally to other male characters in the series. Even if there are romantic subplots for both of them, it's not the central focus of their character ark. For Naomi it's a motive and for Aoki it just happened in the end. Light's battle of wits with Naomi, even if it ended too soon, is even more appreciated by fans than his battle against Near. Even Misa is not as bad as people make her out to be; sure we lost the opportunity for a girl boss fighting with Light for godhood, but she was always planned to be more like Harley Quinn. Aoki in Bakuman is a very decent study of a woman struggling to have a hit in a shounen magazine. The thing with Ohba and Obata is that they trap themselves in preconceptions before they even begin. A lot of WSJ do that, but since Ohba can't write romance, it's especially bad here. E.g., heroine = the hero's love interest and nothing more. Harley Quinn has been studied and expanded a lot in her universe through multiple stories, but what could poor Misa do in the span of 36 episodes other than showing the audience that the most prominent female character of the series is a willing slave to the protagonist's wishes. And things get even worse in Bakuman with Miho, where she basically exists as a goddess and a reward for the protagonist if he does his job right. She had a dream of her own and I understand their willingness to give each other motivation, but romantic relationships don't work the same way professional relationships do and overall it was a very bad and borderline dangerous message to give to romantic teenagers. To sum it up, Ohba will never write a good heroine or a good romance, because in his mind, his idea of a heroine is that she must be willing to give herself to the protagonist unconditionally. You don't need to have read the manga of Platinum End further in order to guess that Saki will not amount in much else other than being the object of Mirai's happiness. She won't act outside of his sphere of influence and I don't even remember seeing her away from him - she is solely defined by her romantic relationship with him. Ohba objectifies the concept of a heroine too much and that's his Achilles heel. |
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Sven Viking
Posts: 1041 |
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I liked Death Stranding, but yeah, I get what you mean. In my opinion M. Night Shyamalan is an extreme example of a descent into incompetence seemingly through success causing a loss of perspective and unwillingness to consider criticism. Lady in the Water saw him go from brief cameos in his own films to playing a Christ-like writer whose under-appreciated work was prophesied to usher in a new era of world peace after his death, while a disgusting critic was deservedly eviscerated by a monster. (It still had a few good ideas imho, but he really bottomed out after that.) |
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Casval Rem Deikun
 Posts: 270 |
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I know the anime does not seem to be going well but I can tell you the manga is just as disappointing, sadly.
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jdnation
Posts: 2110 |
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Death Stranding was great! Sure there are things that work and don't, but as a whole it was one of the most unique things in gaming we'll get.
I like the Platinum End manga so far, one more English volume left to go at least. Yeah, it's primarily talky-talky, so it's really not your average shonen thing and seems more like a debate of philosophies than a battle of wits, though there is some of that there, but it takes a back seat for awhile... The exciting stuff and the more action-y things happen fairly early. But yeah, I can see why anyone who reads the first half of the manga loses interest by the second half. I feel the anime is still doing the source material a disservice, which is odd because it's been quite copy/paste so far, and I think that's it's problem. The Death Note anime had a good director who really knew how to adapt the manga into some amazing scenes and sequences, even with all of Light and L's talky-talky wittery going back and forth and checking each other. There was tension created using color, music and good visuals... all of which is missing in Platinum End's adaptation. So far this seems like a lazier copy manga panel into animation gig. It's visually boring, and the tense moments come off more comically slapdash, or rather feels that the production just wants to get past things at a much quicker pace, so you don't get time to really slow down and digest the strategy and concepts or the mood of the scene or characters, we're just moving from one thing to the next. If these early episodes are any indication, then I don't think this is going to turn out well... |
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Sven Viking
Posts: 1041 |
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My thoughts exactly on Death Stranding.
I like the idea of the philosophical battle and like a lot of other talky series but in this case too many things in the philosophy and elsewhere just struck me as kind of implausible, ridiculous or irritating unfortunately. |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5935 Location: Virginia, United States |
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I loved the art in the manga, but it just couldn't sustain my interest in it. It has been so long since I last read the manga, that I can't even remember why. Which is really the worst indictment for any story.
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Leviathonlx
Posts: 84 |
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I couldn't help but lol when I looked up the ending. |
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