Normally in a review I give a brief summary of the show. Here I’m not going to bother trying, because Horizon is utterly incomprehensible. Apparently the light novel series even has a thousand page prequel, which couldn’t be covered in the anime.
I read a lot of people saying that this means Horizon has a great setting, with a ton of detail. But they have it completely backwards. This means that Horizon has a terrible setting, that takes a thousand pages to understand! We could compare Horizon’s setting to Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien also wrote thousands of pages of background material for. The difference is that to read the Hobbit, you don’t need to be fluent in Elvish or understand Middle Earth’s cosmology. This is what Horizon seems to expect from its viewers in order for them to achieve the barest minimum of understanding.
Horizon is boring, too. Three quarters of the show consists of people shouting gibberish at each other. I have no idea who these people are, either. There were probably fifty characters in this show. I can name two of them.
The rest of the show’s time is spent having the main character grope breasts. Here I can go into more detail, because despite the enormous cast, there were only two types of breasts. Half of them were disgustingly enormous, bigger than the characters’ heads, while the other half were non-existent. These were, of course, also groped.
I’ll end on a positive note. The show was a trainwreck, but it was the kind of trainwreck that you can’t peel your eyes off of as you watch it derail and blow to smithereens.
- Plot / Script – F – Incomprehensible.
- Characters – F – Too many, and I didn’t care about any of them.
- Production – C – It looked decent, I guess.
- Overall – F
Recommendations – Anything Else
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Didn’t watch it, but it sounds like Freezing from earlier this year. It had an overly complex sci-fi backdrop, but it was just about boobs.
Kind of, but Freezing was really just about boobs. This was partially about boobs, but there was some story that was actually supposed to matter but didn’t make any sense.
I am so glad I didn’t stick with this show. I tried the first two episodes and didn’t think it made any sense. Nevertheless I thought I would check the post-season review to see whether it pulled together at some point. I really don’t think I would have had the patience to sit through this one.
It was amusing to watch just to see how ridiculous it could get. 🙂
I watched the whole thing and I am still confused….yeah I know it is based off a massive novel! But holy crap I have no idea…the first episode was awesome, and then the rest was ZZZZZZZZZ and more ZZZZZZZ I guess I did enjoy the three but that is about all.
To many characters- YES! MY GOD, they do not need a cast that huge it was like watching a marvel versus capcom roster 30+ Characters is overkill…
I kind of want the OST the music was great but if you noticed 90% of it was out of place, such as doing a talking scene random techno music plays…wtf…
However the mindless fights were great, where else could I see a maid fight a giant robot?
err I enjoyed the last three episodes >.<
Yeah, the music wasn’t half bad, but it had terrible timing. They’d be standing there talking and some battle music would go off.
The mindless fights were entertaining (in the haha, this is ridiculous category) but I had no idea who was fighting or why. With that maid fight for example: that maid was that big dude’s wife? And she was fighting to stop that guy from blowing up the country? I had no idea who that big dude was though or what sequence of moves in thirteen dimensional chess led him to blow up the country though.
I find it funny that everything that I’ve heard about this show is that no one knows what this show is about.
Well, that pretty much sums it up.
Yep, without proper knowledge of japanese history and language is pretty much a lost fight to try and watch it.
Fortunately in Japan people seems to be unaffected at the moment as Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon is the most sold DVD/BD of the whole season judging from the preorders on Amazon. ;D
http://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/bestsellers/dvd/562020/ref=zg_bs_nav_d_1_d
http://yaraon.blog109.fc2.com/blog-entry-6204.html Watching the full sales figures of the first disc its well over the “safe sale zone” in third place. A bit surprised about Persona 4 pwning everything else though…:D
In what era of Japanese history does Japan battle the Pope?
I would attribute the DVD sales to the breasts, not the plot.
I was talking more about the debate stuff, the whole names and actions of the characters, etc…
Did you notice that most of the characters are modelled around famous old people from the past Japan? Obviously with more boobs, that’s the trick! 😀
Anyway I was joking, the DVD sales were all addicted to the massive fanbase the LN have. They have sold more than 200K copies of the LN…:P
I did realize the whole world was modeled after the past, but yeah, I don’t know enough Japanese history to get anything out of it. :/
I can only assume that the story of the light novels was better told than that of the anime…
From what I heard the anime followed pretty closely the first volume the LN, but with obvious less detail. Especially if you think the first LN volume was like 1000+ pages or something…:D
I didn’t understand anything. And I loved it. I’m motivated to someday read all the LNs in the franchise, that’s how much I liked it.
This post made me realize one thing – the “setting” score is probably the most subjective way to rate a series, because what some value about a certain worldbuilding style is often abhorred by others. Is a familiar setting a good thing? I’ve seen many claim that it is, yet I find anything traditional to be boring and to show no effort. I wonder if the setting score should even be assigned to most shows, as, can the setting of a non-fantasy show even be rated? How would one rate the setting of, say, Toradora, on what points, and how would it be different from, say, School Days or Kaiji? Should they be scored based on what areas of the real world they occupy, with points being deducted for using the cliched highschool? You claim that having a setting that takes a thousand pages to understand is terrible. I’d love any show or fantasy world that is built to be complex and unique enough to take a thousand pages to describe. Same about the characters.
That’s a good point: the value of a setting is entirely subjective. I should clarify, though, that I don’t think you should be able to understand the entirety of the setting immediately. But you should be able to understand the setting enough to have some idea of what happened after the show is over!
Take for example Tolkien again. After a thousand pages or whatever of Lord of the Rings, I definitely don’t know everything about the setting. It has a ton of detail and it’s deep. But I do know enough to understand everything that happened in the book. At every point in the story, I knew enough to understand what was happening at the time. In the beginning, I quickly became familiar with the world of the Shire. Then our view gradually expanded to the outside world as we encountered the Nazgul and learned more of the ring. At every point we knew enough of the setting to understand Frodo’s journey, even if we didn’t understand everything.
But in Horizon, I never understood enough of the setting to figure out what was going on. They started by throwing the whole universe at us at once, and the viewers had no way to understand it. There is no smooth journey from the familiar Shire to the wider world. It doesn’t help that the world of Horizon doesn’t even seem to obey the physical laws of our everyday universe. There was no journey of understanding the world: they just kept going as if we already understood everything, and it felt like the creators were pulling crap out of their assess.
If you don’t mind my two cents, then rating the setting by how well it’s used (ie, almost like another character) is usually more effective than basing it entirely on subjective likes/dislikes.
For example, Fireball’s simple setting is a major part of the show that adds depth to it’s characters and a lot of punch to it’s comedy, without ever overshadowing it’s comedian’s performances.
But Horizon’s (for the 5 episodes I watched) felt like the promising matinee you came to see, but walked out of the theater because of the endless parade of bullshit trailers to films no one wanted to see anyway.
That’s a good way to look at the setting, as another character. Horizon’s setting is kind of like a girl dressed up in glitter and feathers and fancy clothing, but she’s just a background character that you never get to meet.
Interesting points. I wouldn’t give a score to setting, because it doesn’t even matter without the plot/script/characters. If the Kaiji series just had Kaiji groping boobs and stuff like that, then the unique setting is useless.
I haven’t seen Horizon, but if it’s mostly generic school shenanigans, it doesn’t matter where the setting is. It could be on Mars or underwater…still the same thing.
Horizon isn’t exactly generic school shenanigans… it is unique, I’ll give it that. It just makes no sense.
Aand again I submitted the post without proofreading. The characters bit was meant to say that I like having more characters than I can keep track of, as they create a breathing world. I’m still in the middle of the last episode, but for example, the pipe-smoking guy who fought the spearman during the sinking of Musashi keeps appearing and he never seemed to involve himself with the events surrounding Toori, just going around doing his own shit.
Just realized that they actually sank Mikkawa. And that the spearman was fighting the Italian guy..I think. Yeah, it appears that it’s hard to remember things when they don’t make sense.
The pipe-smoking guy I was referring to is this one(apparently the president of the academy?): http://i.imgur.com/UnL8S.jpg
I love it how even the people who liked this show don’t think it makes sense. 🙂
I often like shows that have a ton of characters too. One good example that comes to mind is Baccano. The difference, I felt, was that Baccano used its characters frequently and I came to care about them. Horizon tends to have a character star in half an episode and then disappear, and some of them just sit in the background the entire time. The only characters I thought I kind of came to know were Toori and the vice-president(?) (the green-haired, breastless girl).
I didn’t even notice you compared this to Lord of the Rings! That’s good for a laugh.
It’s the first example I could think of when I considered an overwhelming amount of detail on the setting.
It’s time we all tell that nonsense excuse of a show. You’re no superhero, you’re nothing but a “Super Zero.” Kyoukai senjou no horizon really is in the middle of nowhere. Lamest anime show I have ever seen. Furthermore what’s with the school uniform for the female students. It’s undoubtedly sexually provocative.
I totally agree.
just do us all a favor and end the show in tragedy. I don’t give a damn about the show, I want it to be destroyed, locked up and never ever to be released again.
Yes please.
So… I think I am the only person who actually enjoyed the anime? To the extent that I would say it was actually my favorite anime that season?
A couple of the other commenters seemed to like it as well, and apparently it was popular in Japan so I don’t think you’re alone. I didn’t get it, but if you managed to enjoy it, more power to you.