Hoo boy, marathoning two anime in two weeks is quite the trip, but it will be something to look forward to as I blast through my backlog in the coming weeks as I try to focus on getting out of the debt hole.
Hellsing Ultimate was fine. Not quite as good as I was expecting. It's over the top to be sure, but it would've been nice if it the actual drawings weren't getting shat all over by the CGI that, especially in the final episodes where you have a lot of badass, gory, and scary shit happening, highlights its OVA-nature and kind of looks like some of the demons in the PS2 SMT games, which I find to be especially baffling considering that these episodes were apparently released once a year from the late 2000's-early 2010's (I think). It's especially disappointing considering that Berserk, from what I saw of the ending, didn't resort to PS2-grade CGI back in the 90's! And while these episodes were being made, you had anime like Fate Zero that used more than just whatever Berserk did back then, and yet it ended up looking far more visually cohesive than this adaptation that is apparently supposed to be accurate to the manga (which took over 10 years for the guy to finish because I guess you can be that lazy in getting things done) than the OG anime was (which I heard didn't had a pretty terribad ending). The dub was good, with Alucard owning every scene he was in, and characters actually having accents as opposed to just speaking regular English.
And then, Steins;Gate. I sort of am just like throwing a dart to whatever I want to watch atm, and I had heard good things about this one. As in, like, one of the best anime ever made, good iirc. While I don't think it's certainly the best, and as someone who really doesn't like time travel stories, I guess this one's not too bad. I just got through marathoning this one and...yeah, don't do that with this one.
Not because of the technobabble that they try to use to explain things that have turned me off from the idea of time travel stories in general. At its worst, it can be a gigantic mess of inconsistencies like with MK11, when mixed with MK9 and the original trilogy, etc.. At its best, it can be like Chrono Trigger, where how things play out can be inferred easily, and it doesn't go into the insanity that Chrono Cross introduces iirc. Where I started to check out on the whole time travel thing is when they get all Parasite Eve with it, where they try to explain all of the intricacies of timeline A and B and I'm just going over here like, "dude, I don't care if this thing or that thing or whatever thing happens that might "prove" that time travel is "real," you're still a work of fiction!" in the meta sense from my perspective as I'm watching it. Like, with Resident Evil, it never goes into how cells replicate and whether they're eukaryotes or prokaryotes and shit like that. It usually goes scientific enough to sound scientific, but never to the point where it feels like I'm reading a transcript to a college lecture (which this post is getting long enough to become at this point, but I created this topic, and I feel like some discussion of this and that would make for some good fun to take my mind off of the many scary things in the real world).
No, if anything, the problem I have with Steins;Gate...is that it takes too long to get to the point. I get it, they have to introduce new characters, something I'd be fine with...if they didn't have repeat interactions in every episode of the dub. Like, you have Kurisu (who, if you changed her hair to orange, would look like Elly from Xenogears) acting all tsundere and...considering that this is based on a VN, I think you can see where that goes, along with Mayuri being the Genki Girl, the nerd that's supposed to probably be a parody of those playing the VN and otaku culture in general, and other tropes that seasoned anime watchers will have become familiar with. Okari is fun and has a lot of presence, even if he reminds me of a certain other VN protagonist obsessed with saving everyone *coughs in Emiya Shirou*. Like, I think that you could have cut out, I want to say, maybe 4 episodes at the most and you would have had a complete story. Sure, you might have to edit things down a bit, but what masterpiece hasn't been through that process to help things flow better?
But, I had my fun with it, and as tropey as the characters were, their interactions in the dub were good. Speaking of the dub, I'd have to say that this one was great.
I don't score things numerically myself. I think that reducing things down to a number can induce arguments that really don't pay attention to what's actually being said. I had a fun time with both of the anime I gave my thoughts on. I'm mostly focusing on the things that I don't think others would say or have said, as the praises that have been said of each show have already been given by others, IMHO, and I'm pretty confident they're better at expressing themselves than I can be atm!
