Recap: Everything is absolutely stupid, but fails in being anywhere near entertaining.

I’m going to make this short. I absolutely hated this episode. It was like I had stumbled into an entirely different show where things ran on manly(or I guess womanly?) spirit and grit instead of any kind of science, pseudo or otherwise. This was just such a departure from everything we’ve seen from Arpeggio so far that it was incredibly disappointing. The ending was so convenient and stupid that I was actually kind of angry by its finish. I wasn’t expecting this show to be fantastic but I just felt so betrayed by this ending that I could barely stand to finish it. Nothing made sense. Everything was ridiculously stupid. I’m glad it’s over.

Final Impressions

I was initially going to write off Arpeggio. The first episode did a very bad job of getting you to want to learn about this world, and the animation was doing a very poor job of showing what 3d models could be capable of. If it wasn’t for my two episode policy, I would have left it dead in the water. When I went back to watch that second fight, it changed my entire mind. While the characters still looked stiff, naval battles were exciting, and looked wholly at home in the 3d medium.

It seems strange that the 3d was even such a problem in the first episode. It’s like they knew they weren’t getting much mileage out of the crew of the I-401, and so they didn’t pay much attention to their designs. To be fair, they really don’t get much screen time outside of taking orders in a battle, but those first few episodes they’re the majority of who we see, so having them look so off really hurt the show. In comparison, the mental models are all expertly crafted. All the ways that bad lighting tends to make for bad 3d were absent with them, and it just seemed that the natural curves of the female form was just suited to this style.

The story was competent for your typical shounen. The world is in danger, and our heroes are the only ones who can stop it. I liked the idea of this world that was not dead, but just desperate to return to the way it once was nomatter the cost. The fights didn’t have a whole lot in the way of substance, but the tactics shown were always smart and the action was always really enjoyable. The mental models themselves, are a bit of a different story. Billed as the selling point of the show, I never really felt a huge connection with any of them outside of Iona. It may be we just didn’t get enough time to develop them, but they all just seemed like hollow caricatures. It was around when we met Hyuuga that I realized just how bad the characterization had gotten. While their stilted personalities were fine when they were still in the Fog, the idea of the show was that by having contact with Iona they were supposed to become more human. Instead, it seemed like either their personalities drastically swung to another extreme or stayed exactly the same.

I was most disappointed by the way things went towards the end. it seemed like every convention was being thrown out just so they could make a scene look cool. The very last episode is the most egregious example of this, and it really shows how far the show started to deviate from the manga that everything about that finale felt wrong. Things that were impossible for the I-401 suddenly became possible, and all these stupid ideas replaced the smart tactics that had once drawn me to the show in the first place.