The Salty Anime Challenge Day 3: Anime with an Over ‘8’ Rating on MAL that You Disliked

Today’s entry was really difficult. I think the worst I get with highly rated shows is disappointed. Salt levels might be low today.

Junjou Romantica might be a big contender if I remembered it enough to talk about it in detail. (Rewatch is imminent because I distinctly remember being quite salty about this show)

Kill La Kill was already done in the previous entry, so I won’t give it this spot. Know that it would’ve won otherwise, though. However, maybe not because I might not feel comfortable giving it this spot considering I never finished it.

Guess I gotta come up with something. If I had to give one, it’d be Attack on Titan.

And I don’t dislike AoT, I was just disappointed with the first season because it seemed drawn out and basically required or demanded a second season because the ending didn’t really resolve anything and ended with a cliffhanger.

I know we have the second season now (haven’t watched it yet) but back then I felt kinda robbed. If we never got additional seasons, I’d be more inclined to be fully salty.

The action is fantastic, some of the best I’ve seen in anime, and I really like the style of series. Armin (Who should be the main character. I have always held that opinion and still do.), Jean and Levi the Ultimate Badass were my favorite characters, but I just felt seriously let down considering how much my friends hyped it up.

However, I didn’t much care for some of characters, particularly Eren. And Mikasa, while being badass, was also kinda irritating because of her near obsessed levels of attachment to Eren when he doesn’t care for her nearly as much.

In addition, the deaths seriously start losing their impact after a while. It quickly gets The Walking Dead syndrome where you’re just waiting for superfluous characters to die. I couldn’t even keep track of their names after the midway point. They appear, they stick around for a little while, they die, we get more. You also start to not want to get attached to characters who seem more important because who knows when they’ll die?

Maybe that last one’s a little petty because, in a post-apocalyptic series like this, the looming fear of death needs to be a staple. But it shouldn’t be so frequent that you basically become numb to it. Maybe that’s part of the point. Maybe in this world, as the characters see so much death, they simultaneously become numb to it to a degree because they can’t let every death hit them too hard, but it’s different to have that feeling in the narrative as opposed to feeling it as a reader.

Again, didn’t hate it or even really dislike it, but I was disappointed in it back when it first came out. I couldn’t even read the manga all the way through what the anime covered because I didn’t care for the art and I felt like Eren was more of an ass in it. I’m definitely watching season two when I get a chance, though. We’ll see about season three after that.

30DAC – Day 22: Favorite Weapon, Gear or Armor Used in Anime

This was neck and neck and….neck between three options; The Punisher, Wolfwood’s weapon from Trigun, Automail from FMA and 3D Maneuver Gear from Attack on Titan.

Automail are incredible prostheses that can be modified in all sorts of ways to add weapons and other capabilities. The problem is the obvious negative to such a device; needing to lose a limb first. Ow. Plus, all the really cool stuff involved with Automail is really just alchemy.

The Punisher very nearly made it because it is truly an incredible device. It’s three weapons in one, a rocket launcher, a machine gun and it contains several fully loaded pistols. Plus it acts as a shield and just looks awesome. The major downside is the sheer size and weight of that thing. I really like it, and I’d love to wield it, but that is a major issue.

So, by the powers of deduction, you can surmise that the 3D maneuver gear won out. This is a device that is not only awesome, but it’s compact, fairly lightweight and is a device meant to make travel more convenient while also providing soldiers in the world of Attack on Titan to stand a fighting chance against beings much larger than they are.

This’ll be sure to win the rhythmic gymnastics competition next week!

For those unfamiliar, maneuver gear is a device placed on the hips of soldiers. Using triggers, they shoot out metal cables with hooks to forcibly latch onto any surface that it can bust through, usually trees, buildings and sometimes even the titans themselves. It’s a web-slinger, to a degree.

The gear also holds the blades that the soldiers use to take down the titans with the triggers for the hooks residing in the hilts of the swords.

The only real drawback to this device is that it runs on fuel which can run out incredibly fast if you don’t moderate it properly. While this is just an inconvenience when training or using them for recreation, this can be a death sentence if titans are around. It’s also obviously useless in open areas. While some may be fairly unimpressed with this choice, it is the option that I would say is the most fun. Falling would suck, but it’d be awesome to just swing around a city or forest like that.

Honorable Mentions: The death note, the borgs from Alien 9.

30DAC: Day 19 – Most Epic Scene Ever

Really starting to pain me huh, Challenge? ‘Epic’ is such an iffy word in this context. There are so many scenes that are epic in anime but in different ways. Epic action, epic impact in visuals, epic in terms of emotion, epic romance, it’s such a difficult area to tread into. It’s also difficult because there’s an entirely different section for a badass scene.

I decided that ‘epic’ in this regard should mean a huge scene, likely a fight, that is just so ridiculously awesome yet over the top and overpowered and just overall fun….And I’m gonna make people mad because this is a scene from Yugioh. Trust me, it surprised even me because I had several fight scenes from awesome anime in mind.

I’m talking about Dragon Master Knight’s debut.

Should really be called ‘Blue Eye Ultimate Dragon Feat. Black Luster Soldier if you squint.’

Assuming you know of YGO, and most people do to some degree, this takes place during the virtual reality arc. Kaiba is trapped in a virtual Duel Monsters game of his creation by his board members called the Big Five. Yugi, Joey and Mokuba go in to save him and eventually (and randomly) see Mai there who decides to help too.

Yugi and the gang join up with Kaiba to take down the Big Five, who have manifested themselves into a giant five-headed multi-elemental dragon called the Mythic Dragon who has 5000 attack points. The group tries to fight the thing to no avail and they start dropping like flies to its power…..Literally. They start getting killed. (Well sorta) It’s down to Yugi and Kaiba who are forced to join forces and create one of the most overpowered and ridiculously difficult to create monsters I’ve ever seen.

Dragon Master Knight or it’s Japanese name Master of Dragon Soldier (is it me or do both of those names just sound like they have horrible grammar?) is created by making Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon, which requires fusing three Blue Eyes together, and creating Black Luster Soldier, which requires pulling off a ritual. After that, you have to fuse those two monsters together. In any other situation, this would be near impossible, but the powers of Yugi and Kaiba’s insane luck as well as the power of the virtual reality game which basically allowed them to make these monsters without going through the proper channels in the first place came through for them. Hooray convenient shortcuts!

But believe it or not, even that ridiculous fusion is not enough to take down the Mythic Dragon. They have equal attack strengths, so they’d only end up destroying each other. Ultimate Dragon (4500 atk) + Black Luster Soldier (3000 atk) = 5000 atk? I know they don’t stack the attack, but a 500 point bump is a little disappointing is all. In hindsight, that’d be fine to have them stalemate as long as they beat the Mythic Dragon, but we have to totally kick its ass.

That’s achieved through its insane special ability that allows it to gain 500 extra attack points for every dragon ever played in the duel, of which there are eight, so Dragon Master Knight gets a point boost to 9000, almost twice as much as the Mythic Dragon.

It ends up killing the Mythic Dragon with the most awesome attack name ever. Not the dumb dub name of ‘Dragon Sabre Blast’, the awesome Japanese name of Galaxy Crusher. Friggin’ Galaxy Crusher!

This entire arc is ridiculous and this battle is so over the top both in both the ‘dramatic’ (and usually unnecessary) deaths, the silly costumes the group has to wear because of the world they’re in, the speeches, the completely insane summoning of an insanely overpowered monster (Hell, Kaiba’s deck is loaded with dragons. Can you imagine how much more powerful that thing would be if he decided to chuck those in there?) it’s just ridiculous and silly epic fun that only one of the weirdest arcs in Yugioh could’ve delivered.

Bonus: For people who don’t like to partake in the silly awesomeness that is Yugioh sometimes, my other choice was going to be Levi’s attack on the female titan from Attack on Titan. I mean, he’s already built up like a titan killing god, but look at this;

 

He is going straight up Sonic the Hedgehog: Saw Edition on the most dangerous titan they’ve encountered so far. My views on Attack on Titan are mixed, but the concept of the maneuver gear and that battles that occur on it is by far one of the most interesting and epic parts the show, and Levi just flaunts it in that scene. That was just awesome.

 

Does that mean Eren’s Tails?