Chaos;Head anime adaptation antics
By Moogy | October 14, 2008
I finished the Chaos;Head game earlier tonight. I’m not really in a proper state of mind to write a review of it at the moment, but I will later.
Anyway, I then watched the first episode of the anime adaptation. It does some rather silly things, which I will discuss in this post.
By the way, this has immense spoilers for the game, so I don’t recommend reading this post unless you’ve played the game already.
First and foremost, the OP is bad. Seriously. Not to mention that it doesn’t fit Chaos;Head in any way, shape, or form. If they were going to change the OP, couldn’t they have just used a new version of Find the blue? It fits C;H perfectly, you know? Ah well.
The OP animation also contains some pretty great spoilers. I think I saw Rimi and Sena fighting in there? The identities of all of the Giga-lo-maniacs are revealed, of course… though the original game OP has that problem too, I suppose. It’s a bit more blatant in the anime OP, though. There’s also a great shot of Hazuki and Suwa looking pretty menacing together. I really don’t think they should have put that in the OP… There’s also Hatano, holding a sono me(ry sign, which he doesn’t in the game… oh well.
The actual episode starts off with a rather amusing change – Seira-tan is now a life-sized being who hangs around in Takumi’s room and talks to him and shit. This is honestly probably the best way to represent her role from the game, so I don’t have a problem with this at all. It’s actually quite funny.
Speaking of which, Seira-tan’s nipples were removed. Worst adaptation ever.
Takumi’s figures were all replaced with Seira-tan variants and some other generic figures, too, by the way. He also has an LCD for Ensue now, and his main monitor is fucking huge.
Anyway, stuff that matters. For some reason, the atmosphere feels off. Takumi doesn’t come off as as much of a failure at life as he does in the game… It’s like, when Misumi is talking to him, the feeling I got from Takumi was “This guy annoys me,” not “Dear god I can’t cope with any form of social interaction.” This probably has something to do with the strange pacing of the episode… It’s like, the scenes themselves fly by, but they included enough stuff (including some irrelevant scenes that are actually made up) that the overall pacing of the episode is very slow. I mean… they don’t even get through chapter 1 in the first episode. I really don’t think chapters 8-10 can be done in less than three episodes each, so I’m not really holding out hope for this 12 episode adaptation, you know?
Speaking of the scenes they added… they involve the adorable Nana-chan. The first one is her playing tennis and finishing things off with a NANAMI SMASH, which I found quite excellent. Strangely, Yua then proceeds to enter the stage and have a short interaction with Nana. Now, the game mentions in chapter 10 that Yua only knew of Rimi and Nana from her investigations into Takumi; she had never actually met them personally. Dunno what they’re really trying to do here.
The other scene is just Nana talking to her friends at McDonald’s. Or whatever name they used for it this time. A bit of a pointless scene, but whatever, it’s Nana-chan.
By the way, can you tell who my favorite character is?
Hmm. Another strange change would be Yua’s swimsuit. It’s now a Seira-tan cosplay bikini. For some reason.
Anyway, the most fucked up (and hilarious) change comes at the end of the episode. At this point, we’ve just gotten past Yua asking Takumi to take her to preorder a Post-Awakening Seira-tan. So, Taku goes to school the next day… and Rimi shows up. What the fuck? She shows up at school for the first time in chapter 3, guys. I really don’t know where they’re going to go from here, since merging random chapters together doesn’t strike me as a particularly great idea!
Also, the ED is even more unfitting than the OP. And all of the girls have angel wings. How very passe.
But yeah I’m really having doubts about where this is going, thanks to the ending of the episode and the whole 12 episode thing. Good thing it doesn’t matter since I already played the game!
Topics: Anime, Chaos;Head | 3 Comments »
October 15th, 2008 at 2:32 am
Wasn’t his Ensue monitor an LCD, but his main one was a huge CRT?
Anyway, yeah. He gives off a less trashy aura in the show, which, actually could make me hate this version less. OP was meh compared to find the blue, and the animation in it felt like QUALITY. ED is well, totally off the mood. And now that you mention it, yeah, the pacing was pretty messed up. Some important stuff gets cut, pointless stuff added, and then mishmashing the chapters together. But seriously, 12 episodes? I thought this was going for a full season.
Now I’m having even more doubts now about the show. I don’t want this to turn into another Tsukihime anime (pretend it exists).
October 15th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
[...] main protagonist (who’s a hikikomori/otaku)experiences delusions, similar to NHK ni Yokoso, and according to some the anime itself has been FUBAR-ed in the transition from game to [...]
October 26th, 2008 at 9:50 pm
[...] main protagonist (who’s a hikikomori/otaku)experiences delusions, similar to NHK ni Yokoso, and according to some the anime itself has been FUBAR-ed in the transition from game to [...]