Platinum End

Episode 16

So far, I haven't said much about the actual visuals of Platinum End, and that's for a simple reason: there hasn't been much to talk about. The show has routinely dipped into stiff and awkward animation, but it's a two-cour production being made entirely within a global pandemic, so of course there are going to be some unpolished moments. Otherwise this anime has managed tread water in the realm of functional mediocrity, getting by on the fact that its fights are 90% people talking, and utilizing 3DCG rigs whenever something needs to move.

But there are some interesting aspects to Platinum End as an anime, not least of which being that, at some point after its staff was originally announced, it was revealed that two separate directors would be handling the series, with Hideya Takahashi handling the vaguely defined “first series” and Kazuchika Kise overseeing the “second.” It's an odd structure that hints at the sheer overbooking that's happening across the entire industry.

Not that the show looks dramatically different—this isn't Sparrow's Hotel if anyone remembers that weird little show—but subtle differences do stick out, and they're largely for the worse. First is the color palette, which has been washed out with a sickly gray undercurrent, making nearly every shot in this already stiffly storyboarded show look even more lifeless. Then there are the little decisions that draw your attention in ways they shouldn't, like reusing a shot of Mirai and Saki looking at a screen just one too many times to feel natural. Or the ways character faces will shift or melt slightly when turning their heads. Or how nobody seems sure how to draw new character Hoshi's face, so every shot makes him look like a LEGO figure with the hair and glasses put on wrong. None of these on their own are backbreakers, but in aggregate they serve to make this episode noticeably harder to sit through, and that's not a good sign for this already struggling story.

As for the story itself, there's not really much to talk about. Making the God Candidate situation public is still a potentially interesting move, but we've yet to reach anything particularly exciting. Mirai and Saki get picked up by a pair of police officers who want to help protect them from various world governments, but that's not so much as shakeup as it is a replacement for Mukaido's role in the story. Yuri, the Candidate we saw relaxing on a beach last episode, is captured by the Japanese government, but we don't know anything about her so it's not exactly a pressing revelation. There's mention of governments wanting to turn Candidates into assassins capable of killing without contact and teleport without detection, but that's just a hypothetical employed to give Mirai a reason to trust Hoshi.

There are, I guess, a couple moments that could theoretically be important later, if only because they go out of their way to establish things you otherwise wouldn't bother considering. Like we learn that if all the God Candidates pick one of them to become God, that person still has to consent—but also they can be threatened into accepting. Which seems like a bad idea, but I wouldn't put it past some of the brain geniuses in this show. But again, that's just me guessing at what might become relevant later.

In all, this is just a lot of place setting, moving pieces around as we enter this new story arc, but not doing much of interest in and of itself. It's mostly brought down by the visual downgrade, and I'm hoping that whatever Platinum End has planned next, it gets to it sooner rather than later.

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Platinum End is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.