Rate the last anime you watched out of 10

Dead Mount Death Play
Reverse isekai urban dark fantasy isn't a direction you see a lot of anime taking. It has a promising start with a good first episode twist and some interesting setup and conflicts in the early episodes, but it starts to show flaws in key areas as the series progresses. The main problem is structural; for all its attempts to affect the tone of a mature thriller, it's a shonen battle series at heart. Consequently it runs into the problem that afflicts a lot of Jump titles: cast bloat. Any time you think the protagonist's story is going to move forward, we instead cut to a bunch of new characters and focus on them, often for episodes at a time. It's rarely just one new character at a time either. Instead, whole new factions pop up each time. Some of them only link tenuously to existing plot threads within these two seasons. By the end of season 1, the supposed protagonist already feels like a side character in his own story, and it only gets more pronounced in season 2.

This wouldn't be a problem if the stories of this ever increasing cast had a sense of progression, but far too often it falls into the pattern where half a dozen new characters pop up, have their tragic backstories revealed in flashbacks, clash with established characters in an inconclusive manner, and then fade into the background where they just comment on what other people are doing occassionally. It's a structure that manages to be both frantic and lethargic, like the author paced it from the outset with the assumption that the story would run for 20 years. Either that or the author is just making up most of it as they go along, which would explain the messy structure.

By the end of this show's two seasons, a lot has happened and many things have been revealed, but it doesn't feel like the protagonist's overall story has progressed beyond where it was after the first few episodes. It keeps pushing to the brink of advancing or resolving plot threads in a meaningful way, but invariably chickens out at the last minute. This ultimately robs it of the dramatic edge that a story like this should have.

Many of the individual pieces of DMDP work in isolation, but the way they're clumped together and lack the will to push forward in less than 500 episodes makes for a disappointing whole.

6/10
 
Dai said:
Dead Mount Death Play
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Dai said:
This wouldn't be a problem if the stories of this ever increasing cast had a sense of progression, but far too often it falls into the pattern where half a dozen new characters pop up, have their tragic backstories revealed in flashbacks, clash with established characters in an inconclusive manner, and then fade into the background where they just comment on what other people are doing occassionally. It's a structure that manages to be both frantic and lethargic, like the author paced it from the outset with the assumption that the story would run for 20 years. Either that or the author is just making up most of it as they go along, which would explain the messy structure.
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Probably because it's the same author as Durarara and Baccano which have a plethora of characters.
 
Would definitely agree that it had a promising start, but I didn’t make it to the end of that one - so much of it seemed to involve the characters sitting in a largely featureless room and expositing at each other.

I was genuinely surprised it was the same author as Baccano et al. There’s some good ideas in it, but on the whole, it struck me as a bit phoned in compared to their other works, padding out the familiar structure with tropey character beats in an attempt to cash in on what’s currently popular. Even the gratuitous raunchy sex scene (cut from the anime) just seemed borrowed from Chainsaw Man…
 
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Bartender: Glass of God
When a manga receives multiple adaptations, there's always the fear that they will retread the same ground in a redundant way. Thankfully that's not the case here. The 2006 Bartender anime was made partway through the manga's run, but the manga was long finished by the time Glass of God went into production. This is evident in the different approaches the two adaptations take to the source material, both equally valid and interesting.

Bartender 2006 was very episodic. Each episode focused on the life of one customer, what brought them to encounter bartender Ryu's bar, the history of the drinks Ryu serves the customer, and how those specific drinks relate to (and sometimes solve) problems in the customer's life. The titular glass of god refers to Ryu's ability to understand his customers and select exactly the right drink for them at that moment. In the 2006 version, Ryu was a near infallible, Holmes-esque character who could pick up on the subtlest clues about a customer to figure out what troubled them.

Bartender: Glass of God offers a different perspective. It takes us behind the counter to focus on the bartenders themselves, their different approaches to their work, and what compels them to do the job. It follows a series-long story about a hotel owner's attempts to convince Ryu to work at his bar. Ryu, despite his reputation, comes across as less experienced than in the 2006 show. He makes mistakes at times and is haunted by mistakes he made in the past. It all builds into a story arc that fully resolves within this single cour. This pacing generally works, though Ryu's encounter with a particular customer in the final episode (the final boss, essentially) feels rushed and lacking in the tension it needed.

Aside from that, it's a solid show. Where some remakes try to one-up their predecessor, Glass of God seems to frame itself as a companion piece. The few story moments that overlap between them are handled quite differently, and on the whole the shows offer two distinct flavours that complement each other.

7/10
 
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