In my review on the anime, I promised to make a spoiler free review. For this blogpost, however, I will include spoilers. The main thing is that I just wanted to talk about how the anime could've been improved because I really liked the concept but seriously disliked how the ending was executed. I was tempted to rate the anime a 6 but didn't because the first 8 episodes were actually very exciting. I do not wish to repeat information so before you read this blogpost, I recommend you check out my first review of Mayoiga.
With that out of the way, the reason this anime had no tension anymore was when the anime revealed that basically nobody died. Jack was still alive, Yottsun was still alive, and the guy who screams a lot was still alive. At this point, I couldn't take the Nanaki seriously anymore because I knew it couldn't kill anyone. At first I liked that the anime writers didn't just have everyone die. That's a major reason why I wasn't a big fan of Umineko. Too many deaths happened too quickly. Mayoiga has the opposite problem though. A horror anime is supposed to have a strong element of danger and watching the characters be put in dangerous situations adds to the thrilling nature of the show. However, when the anime gives plot armor to a random ass rapper that nobody cared about anyway, that's when you realize the writers were not willing to kill anybody, even the people we dislike or don't care about.
Once you realize this, the journey no longer matters. There's nothing thrilling about seeing the characters be chased by the monster. Now you just want to see what happens and that's it.
The writers in this situation really should have just let the rapper die, and they should have killed a couple other characters too. I also think a couple characters being killed by the other humans would have shown just how paranoid and prone to mob mentality people can become once placed in stressful situations. At this point, the viewer would be scared of the monster which had a real ability to kill as well as the other humans who we see are losing their minds.
The other major thing the anime really needed improvement on was developing the romances better. A lot of animes have this problem of having romances progress too slowly which is a problem because we don't come to care about their bond or recognize that there is a deep one forming to begin with. The romance between Masaki and Mitsumono could've become a device to increase the tension as we fear their happiness being destroyed by the events occurring around them. What happens in the anime, however, is Mitsumono having what amounts to a grade school crush on a girl that pretty much goes nowhere and we see no evidence that Masaki even likes him back.
Overall, while most TV shows, movies, and such suffer from being overly dramatic to the point of numbing the audience to extreme events. I felt that this anime had the opposite problem. Things were not dramatic enough. Because of this, the tension was gone, and I stopped enjoying the show.
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