Anime: E`s Otherwise

A bad imitation of Scryed meets X-Men.

It's a shame they had to develop the series this way, otherwise it would have been a heck of a series. I know, I would rather not use this weak pun, but the series had quite some potential and they kind of ruined it by not doing anything with it. But let's not come to a conclusion right away and take this series apart bit by bit ...

Animation: Simple, but it does the trick.

The animation looks okay. It is kind of simple, compared to other series and there isn't much detail (and if there is, it's hidden so well that you don't notice it). The animationstyle does fit the series. While simple, it might be mistaken for childish, but that's just the style. And the style looks okay, without too much problems.
They do use a few reused frames at times, but that's merely because the animation costs were cheap and that's visible at times. There are no huge problems, but it just feels like they didn't spend too much time on the animation.

Sound[/u]: Nothing remarkable.

The songs they used for the OP and ED are enjoyable, although the OP has more impact because of the pace. Both of them become pretty boring after awhile though, so once you marathon it, you might start to skip them after watching 15-20 episodes in a row.
The voices are mostly all done pretty well, but there is nothing really remarkable. The only problem this series has, is that there are a few female characters which have voices which might become annoying after some time. A good example is the little girl with the Christmas hat, whose voice tends to be a tad higher than you'd like to hear them.

Story: Starts off good, but screws up on every single turn.

The story starts off pretty well, but the further the story progresses, the less sense there is being made. The best example would be the main character who cares a lot about his sister and considers his sister the most important person in the world and will do everything for her, but in the entire series, he only remembers her whenever someone else reminds him of her. And even that happens only once or twice in 26 episodes.
Another bad thing is how they keep the storyline at bay for a long time and suddenly try to resolve everything in a few episodes - which doesn't even resolve all questions. Hence, the conclusion doesn't reach the conclusion one waits for, which makes the ending quite less good.
So, the story starts off with quite some potential, but the small details they completely forget about and the ending which doesn't solve all the questions they raised (without trying to go for an open ending) ruin the series.

Characters[/u]: Decent to quite bad.

The characters are pretty good at first sight, but the longer you watch, the more flaws you notice. Kai=Kudou for instance, tends to be as dense as possible. While everything is really clear, he still doesn't get the point. This usually results in useless fights, stupid misunderstandings and tiresome explanations which spoil both the mood as the story.
Asuka is another character which is ultra dense. She might be still a kid, but even 5 year old kids are quicker to catch up with things. Asuka doesn't seem to realize that weapons hurt, that people can be bad, that rules exist to follow and the most important thing of all - she doesn't realize that a red hat with a white knot on the end should be used on the head by Christmas, not every single day. That annoyed me quite a bit, that she was dressed half of the series in that Christmas-outfit.
Hitomi is also a character which plays an important role in the progress of the story, but they hardly ever give her screentime. This only shows that they never finished the story.

Rewatchability[/u]: Seen it once, seen it twice.

E's Otherwise really doesn't have much rewatch value. Once you have seen the series, the series doesn't stay interesting enough to watch a second time. In fact, the story is often so predictable that it's hardly even worth watching it the first time.
For the people who can live with shallow characters, flaws in the plot and predictable story, this series is pretty okay. For people who have a hard time with any of the above, this series isn't such a good thing to watch.
The series isn't actually that bad, but it has so little to offer that it's not recommended to watch.

Note: yes, some (marked) spoilers in here. But I somehow -had- to illustrate the shortcomings of this show... nothing bad though, as E's doesn't care much about plot anyway.

This is exactly what happens when a basically interesting universe doesn't get a proper long-term roadmap from the creator. Looking at EsOtherwise, one cannot fight the impression that all the producers had prepared beforehand was a nice start and maybe a fuzzy idea for a final - with a HUGE gap inbetween.

And thus, lacking a properly predefined background story-arc, the episode authors seem to have repeatedly taken a "Wouldn't it be cool...?" approach, instead - which led to a series whose elements dearly lack homogenity, be it the story, the atmosphere or the even just the logic.

Plot Synopsis:
In the not-so-far future, huge companies rule the world rather than governments. In this scenario, a new type of human appears. Those Psionics or "Espers" have quite some astonishing powers at their disposal, ranging from psionic attacks and shieldings to psychokinesis, levitation and even small-scale teleportation. And so it is no wonder that the rest of humanity fears and discriminates them...

Genre: Drama/Action (?)
The problem about classifying this one might be that although it offers a little bit of everything, all is strung together in a too haphazard manner. So that no aspect of it can really shine in the end. Also, the series totally ignores a good deal of potentially interesting situations and possibilities.

To give an example: (funny enough: only a -minor- spoiler) in Ep3, a girl teammember dies because the hero went off on his own. Of course such a moment would be THE golden opportunity for some drama. Even so, this series almost doesn't adress this fact at all - the hero just stares at the (briefly shown and fairly clean) corpse for a while and then the story moves on as if nothing happened. No anime-pseudo-lightning strikes his mind, noone criticizes him or screams at him in tears (not even later). In short: no drama at all.

Characters:
Not that much to say here. An average bishonen/bishojo crowd, offering the "kind hero" just like the "brooding baddie" and other archetypes. The problem is that many of the sidecast characters seem to lack proper "behavior charts" or even just visible motivations for what they do. (see "finishing line" for the reasons why)

Animation/Design:
While the facial designs are unusually acute and detailed for a 26-episode broadcast, the actual animation falls somewhat short. There is not much motion in many scenes and even the battles often feel somehow stale and lack vigor. Sure, plasmabolts are thrown around and stuff is blown up - but the implementation is simply too bleak most of the time.
Especially the pyrotechnics look fairly cheap and unimaginative, and thus fail to convey that "woah" feeling that such battles usually would invoke.


Finishing Line:
One might argue that beginning and end of the series show a certain promise, but even then everything else is still botched... since the pacing inbetween isn't slow, it's entirely frozen.

Once the stage was set (Ep01-03), the writers apparently were at a total loss how to kill the time until the conclusive conflict finally would kick in. And so they desperately tried to close the gap with hackneyed filler episodes, pointless fights and the introduction of equally pointless sidecast charas. Moreover, they deliberately avoided making any definite moves that could hinder future episodes.

A good example for this would be a certain fight between the hero and his personal power-rival later in the series: (spoiler) The pitched battle ends with a typical cataclysmic fade-to-white explosion that wrecks several city blocks, and then you see the hero walk away.
The thing is, you have no idea what happened to his opponent in that blast. Neither do you get to see any corpse, nor do you see him stagger away beaten and bruised. The anime-intuitive thing to assume in such a case would be that he was evaporated (and is thus dead). Nonetheless, he happily appears again a few episodes later, so he obviously survived.

Another things is that even basic story elements tend to be ignored during that middle part.
Painful example: while the hero's strong urge to protect his sickly little sister is presented as a defining personality trait during the first episodes, he soon after "runs off" and spends almost the entire series separated from her without worrying much - even though he knows that the organisation where she is kept is not exactly a gathering of do-gooders.

The funny thing is that even while they were obviously killing time all the way up to ep22, the ending is still badly rushed and one of the worst narrative blunders that I ever came across in my long anime career.
Not only does it explain little and scream for a second season, it also unaskedly buries the viewer beneath a heap of entirely new controversial information.

Who knows, had the series been only 13 episodes long, it might have been great - but the way it is now, the endless and illogical middle part swallows most of the enjoyment, with the rushed ending putting a final headshot to it.

This Anime shows a lot of potential almost in every single part, but sadly this potential isn't expressed as it should be. It remains enough good to be seen, but it could have been a must instead.

Animation is one of the points where the anime shows its potential without expressing it well: there are a lot of colors, and I must say they are really well used; characters are well drawn, even if sometimes the drawing felt a bit "strange". Backgrounds are good, but not beautiful. All this should point to a good vote, perhaps even a very good one, but the animation of the images in itself is something wrong: first, there isn't a real animation at all, all goes very slow; battles are usually very statical, with large beams of light going up and down but with the characters that stay pretty much in the same position all the time. From time to time (but rarely) we can see some very good action scenes, but these are so few that really you'll have problems remembering them. Even when the characters try to "dodge" enemies' attacks, they disappear from a position only to reshow in a different location. Even the slow animation in itself gave me a feeling of lacking of frames, I don't know if this was caused by the encoding, but I really didn't like it.

Sound represents again what could be and isn't this anime: opening and ending themes are pretty enjoynable, nothing to be remembered in the future but sometimes you'll not skip them only to get in action ASAP. Background music tend to be absolutly well done, very interesting, but it has a major drawback: it is almost always OFF with what is happening on the screen: calm themes when the show try to reach some climax, happy themes when something not so happy is happening just now; it disturbed me a lot.

Voice acting is good, but surely not impressive:
Kobayashi Sanae was Touya Akira in Hikaru no Go; Hiramatsu Akiko was Miyabi in Ai yori aoshi; Tachiki Fumihiko was Ikari Gendou in Evangelion; Watanabe Akino was Fuko in I My me strawberry eggs: all people that did a good work in their previous anime, and still do it inE's Otherwise, but I think noone of them shined in their previous works, and if you see the characters they interpreted, they are almost all people usually emotionless. In E's Otherwise they try to express more feelings, but I don't think they always managed to do it. My loved voice actress Kawasumi Ayako was going to do as always a great job, too bad her character dies really soon in the anime (I'll not say who she is -_^).

The story is good, with interesting personal dilemmas for almost all the characters. It starts off really good, hinting that there will be a great plot, and surely it goes really near to his target, but.... the anime is extremely slow paced during the first half, with episodes we could say are useful to present the characters, but actually they do almost nothing to the plot. Near the end they really did a boost to the plot, and the end itself left me really insatisfied. I like the idea of espers and their problems with the rest of the humanity, not being accepted and all the rest, but what started to be simple telekinesis, telepathy and something like this went really soon in a dragonball-ish direction, with fireballs and auras showoffs that really didn't suit what I thought at first was E's Otherwise.

Characters are really well made: the majority of them doesn't have a good background, but this isn't a draw back and you'll discover why if you watch the anime. All are very well personificated, but from time to time they took irrational decisions. They develop, in their personal feelings and in their interaction with others, but again this developmente sometimes feels a bit "artificial".

Really low rewatch value for me: the slow paced story, the main character having his ass kicked almost all the time, and the sound so good but so incompatible with the show are really things that will keep me away from this anime.

This show really interested me during the first 3/4 episodes, stimulating my curiosity. But what started off so well slowly became a mediocre product, and to arrive at the end was a bit difficult. The end itself, as I said, doesn't leave you with a good sensation, but perhaps we could say it was the coupe-de-grace for an anime already mediocre.