Sasami has the powers of a god but doesn’t want to get out of bed.
I don’t really know what this was supposed to be about. I guess in essence it’s a story about a girl making friends. Whoop-dee-doo. Plus a ton of Shinto mumbo-jumbo and robots shooting missiles. And please don’t tell me that if I knew more about Shinto I would appreciate this series more. No. Even if I understood more of the jargon I doubt this would make that much sense, much less be a logical story, much less be a story that I gave a crap about.
- Storytelling – F – Incoherent, solely an excuse for Shinbo’s visual porn.
- Voice – C – I do kind of like the setup with the Shinto in a modern setting. Too bad they didn’t use this to tell a decent story.
- Characters – D – Terrible. I liked the teacher’s design but she never did much besides make cool poses. Tama made me want to punch her everytime she appeared. My goodness, I don’t see how you could create such an annoying character if you tried.
- Attention Grab – D – Each episode generally kept my attention, as I tried to figure out what the hell was going on and looked at the pretty explosions. However, I was never particularly anxious to watch the next episode.
- Production – B – I have to admit, it’s pretty.
- Overall – D
Recommendations – If you liked this just go through the rest of Shinbo’s catalog. Not that I would recommend it.
Since the very first episode of Sasami@halfassed I had a feeling that this show is unfortunately nothing more than just a sum of its elements.
It’s possibly less than the sum of its elements.
It’s easy to say something is bad when you don’t understand it… especially if you’re not even trying.
Yeah, just like it’s easy to say that Time Cube is dumb when you don’t understand it… especially if you’re not even trying.
Then I guess it’s fortunate that I dropped this after the first episode, huh?
Definitely.
The plot is shit. Glad I’ve dropped it in episode 1.
You’re a wiser man than I.
I watched three episodes of Sasami-san@Ganbaranai and then dropped it simply because I found it incredibly boring, and I actually understood most of the shinto elements. To me it was simply a series designed to allow Shinbou free reign on his random and lately empty visuals with no real story to speak of. I think that the source material may be partly to blame for the lack of story, but Shinbou adding in all the random visuals certainly didn’t help matters. Overall, just not a particularly enjoyable or engaging series, and from my perspective, knowledge of Shinto and Japanese culture didn’t really help much.
Exactly. I am sick of Shinbo crapping over everything with his style. (still, I imagine this show would have been even worse without his visuals to distract us from the meat of the story)
At the moment Shinbou is a director who can only do visuals, and seems incapable of telling a story. If we look at his earlier works, they have all had interesting stories, but in recent years, we only see Shinbou and his weird, and as I said in the other comment, largely empty visuals. I do agree though, the series may have been even worse without Shinbou, but by that same token, perhaps with a different director and studio it could have been a very interesting series – something we will never know and is pure speculation on my part.
Yeah, Shinbou’s work has been really empty as of late. Let’s hope he gets out of this rut… It could have been better under a different director, but I can’t really see a better director agreeing to direct it in the first place. :/
As someone who generally appreciates Shinbo’s series I’m sorry to say that I have to agree w/ you.
“And please don’t tell me that if I knew more about Shinto I would appreciate this series more. No.” Perhaps there is some large, philosophical theme behind all this; it’s just that I couldn’t discover it. Most likely they just used random Shinto names and themes for a messed up plot w/ no deeper meaning. Most of the time I had no idea what was going on. What a waste, as the visuals were indeed excellent as usual.
Indeed. Even if there is some meaning to the Shinto name dropping I dobut it’s anything worthwhile.