I didn’t blog this series (in spite of having followed Mai Hime), but I did watch it. And what did I think? Brace yourself, because I consider Mai Otome to be a Gundam Seed Destiny-level disappointment. Now perhaps the bad parts of Mai Otome cannot rival the bad parts of GSD, but at least Gundam Seed Destiny had a few good streaks here and there. Mai Otome had maybe the whole Erstin bit, and that’s about it.
It’s not all bad news, and I want to examine the good aspects of Mai Otome first. Let me mention that I like fanwanking just as much as everyone, and there was some great fanwanking in Mai Otome. From a fully condoned ShizNats pairing to the absolutely hilarious Akane-Kazu story to every Miyu scene, the fanwanking was excellent. A+ for sure. Even the characters that bothered me in Mai Hime were less annoying this time, as Mai was pretty blase, and Shiho was turned into some strange running joke.
I also thought that the music was ok, and the animation was generally quite good. Thankfully the production values remained high throughout the series, and there weren’t many reused fight scenes. Sure the fight scenes were generally crappy clash-and-fall affairs, but at least they were unique.
And yet, in spite of all that, I did not like this series. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to like it, and I watched every episode. But damn, every cliche plot twist became more and more ridiculous, and the story was just horrible. Several others have mentioned it, but the promising mystery and conspiracy laid out in the first few episodes was never developed correctly, and eventually the whole story began to collapse like twig-thin legs of a bloated undead-zombie ram. By the time we got to the final episodes, I found myself muttering OMFG every time someone survived a fall or another random character that nobody cared about was introduced. I don’t want to keep harping on it, but it really felt like all the worst aspects of GSD were forcefully injected into the second half of Mai Otome. Yes, even the face contortions. I can’t even say it was a great character-driven series, because the two main female characters were awful, and I bet most people cannot even remember 95% of the new cast.
Finally, I want to make sure to note that I’m not penalizing Mai Otome because Mai Hime was so much better. Mai Hime had a really great tragic story (prior to the reset ending), and an extremely tightly written plot to go along with some great characters. It’s true that Mai Otome pales in comparison to Mai Hime, and it wouldn’t be fair to penalize Mai Otome simply based on Mai Hime’s excellence. However, I cannot even fathom someone enjoying Mai Otome without having first seen Mai Hime. You take out all the amusing cameos and tributes, and what are you left with? A crappy twisted story, and way too many characters, that’s what.
Kabitzin’s Rating: 2/5
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19 Comments
It seems like a lot of reviews that I see of both shows fixate on the second half of both shows, which I think shortchanges both. In My-Otome, the first 1/3 of the show was so so so so good. Up through say maybe, the “beach” episode (I’ll use that as the cutoff because of its “omg omg omg Shizuru is going to fight Midori” vibe), I thought that My-Otome was doing much better than My-Hime had done through the same timespan. The story felt like it was moving somewhere.
Once we got done with the Akane episode, I felt that they couldn’t sustain this any more, though. Each episode seemed to tease that the next one would be where the story really kicks in and we would start to see the second act. We really get next to no second act before we get the third act at the very end.
I completely agree with the review. Mai-Otome just doesn’t compare to Mai-Hime in terms of music/characters/enjoyment
>>clash-and-fall
That definitely nails the essence of those battles.
I still have positive feelings about the show overall, but readily admit that it was a crapfest of epic proportions. It was enjoyable while it lasted, but it’s not something I’d want to watch again. And I’m afraid the whole “it’s funny because it sucks” aspect won’t seem quite so amusing a few months from now. In other words, I don’t think the show will age gracefully.
Like JP, though, I found the first half of the series to be VERY well done. Whether that makes the second half easier to swallow or more difficult to swallow, I can’t say. Depends on my mood.
I’m willing to concede that the first episodes were fun, but when taken as a whole, the series was just not good. If you’re going to suck, just suck from the get-go and don’t waste everyone’s time! I think Jeff made a great point in that it might seem entertaining now, but if you watched this show again in a year with a friend who hadn’t seen the series before… well let’s just say you wouldn’t be leaving that showing with a whole lot of political capital.
“However, I cannot even fathom someone enjoying Mai Otome without having first seen Mai Hime. You take out all the amusing cameos and tributes, and what are you left with? A crappy twisted story, and way too many characters, that’s what.”
Too true. Even Mai Hime had a bit too many characters but Sunrise not only kept most of them but added a dozen more.
I never found Mai Otome to be very good but intially it was enjoyable then it became much worse than even Gundam Seed Destiny (and let’s not go into detail about how much they resemble each other). It has truly awful main characters, story that makes no sense on so many levels and is full of random references to Hime which of course were never explained, just as half of the things in the plot. And the way the characters managed to survive virtually everything, a thousand meters fall included was just the icing on the cake of stupidity. I really wonder what the hell is going on with Sunrise these days.
Actually, it is possible to enjoy this show without having seen Mai Hime. My friend Drew has never seen or even heard of Mai Hime, and I showed him the first 12 episodes of Mai Otome and he liked it. (Eventually, I will be showing him the rest, but the great flaw of post-college life = difficulty of finding time to spend with married friends who are on a leash.)
So the show does not, in fact, require any knowledge of Mai Hime to be enjoyed. (It is also the only thing I have ever seen in my life that actually got Drew to sit still for more than 30 minutes, as he is KING OF ADD. How he manages to get through his job, I have no clue.)
Honestly, it’s my impression that no one who has seen Mai Hime can actually judge this show on its own merits; everyone who says it sucks ends up comparing it to Mai Hime. I haven’t seen anyone who was hugely disappointed with MO who was not a Mai Hime fan.
There’s very few shows that can be judged on their own merits. Comparison is an important key to figuring out where one may have gone wrong or excelled.
But with that said I wasn’t even a huge fan of Mai Hime anyhow, and it’s character abuse was the only thing that really saved the series for me. So naturally when I found myself less than wowed with Otome I was admitidly hoping that they would eventually recycle some of the same gimmicks. Not to say that they couldn’t have succeeded on another tact.. in theory.
Instead they chose(?) a path that that resulted in a lot of fapping about and little entertainment value. Most of which could perhaps have been saved if not for the fact that Otome focused on some truly retarded and unlikeable characters IMO, and there was very little payoff in the end. Actually, Mashiro was really the only storyline I think they delivered on. By the end of it I was really rooting for her, whereas everyone else that wasn’t Natsuki, Shizuru, or Miyu could/should have gotten Ippen Shinde Miru’d for all I cared.
>>There’s very few shows that can be judged on their own merits.
Yup. It’s pretty hard (or impossible) to come up with a review that is totally objective. The shows that we denounce may very well be extremely entertaining to people who aren’t as active on the anime front, perhaps like the aforementioned Drew. Some degree of specificity is required in the review’s target audience, and I’m assuming that Kabitzin is writing for the aniblogger crowd. That said, I’d agree with the 2/5 rating – Mai-Otome stinks something awful in a relative sense. I’d take it over Scooby-Do any day, though.
I think it’s fair to compare Mai-Otome to Mai-HiME, since 1) they have so many common elements, and 2) Otome relied on the popularity of HiME to attract viewers.
Oh, and since Kabitzin mentioned the music, I have to say that, as much as I like Kaijura Yuki, I find her work in both Mai-HiME and Mai-Otome to be awfully dull. It could be the nature of the shows themselves, with both relying so heavily on “mood” music. Kaijura-san is good at that sort of thing, but given her continued reluctance to grow musically, it starts to sound like “same old thing” after awhile. With the exception of “Hoshi ga Kanaderu Monogatari”, the Otome soundtrack is especially forgettable.
I’ll go for a longer review on sunday, but I wouldn’t go quite as hard on Otome. The trick was simple: Enable Bond movie mode. Don’t try to make sense of a story which obviously isn’t willing to answer a quarter of the questions it posed itself. Lean back and enjoy the fireworks. And once you stopped trying to make sense of it and feel disappointment about the broken promises, it was neither boring nor unpleasant – at least to me.
(That, of course, implies that the story in itself was pretty bad overall. I doubt that anyone would seriously contest it).
While I agree with Jeff that the Otome works weren’t among Kajiura’s better products, I still have enough songs which warrant the OST purchase. OST 1 was a bit short, with Materialize probably being the main song, but OST 2 had Omajinasai and especially the extremely strong “Hinageshi no Hana no you ni” and “Sei Otome no Inori”, which reaches Mezame level in my ears.
A famous German literature critic once told me “a good book is one that doesn’t bore me”. I adhere to his wisdom. Many animes are objectively “better”, but did bore me. Otome disappointed me at times, and it even infuriated me on occasion, but I always willingly came back to watch the next installment. Therefore:
3/5 from me.
I’ve already ranted&whined about Mai-Otome quite a lot, so I promised myself to stop bashing upon it ^_^. Anyway, as someone already said (i.e. Crusader), all otakudom should conspire to fill the Mai-Otome scripwriters’ gas tanks with sugar. I must admit, that the 10 sec nekomimi Akane in the end brighted the show a tiny bit in my eyes, the little spark it was.
Otome had Suigintomoe.
Thus Otome was awesome.
I agree with Mentar that it rates 3/5, at the very least. Otome is not as good as HiME, but it was nowhere near as bad as Destiny. Otome neither abused flashback eps the way Destiny did nor profusely recycled stock footage. It also did a much better job introducing the new characters and balancing them out with the older ones.
I found it to be an overall enjoyable series where I could overlook deficincies and enjoy what was done well.
I’d probably rate Otome 3.5/5 actually. It was nowhere near the craptacular trainwreck that was Gundam SEED Destiny, and to say it even approached (and even surpassed in awfulness) that show really does some serious injustice to the show.
Mentar has a point. Turn on Bond movie mode, and it’s pretty fun to watch. This show never pretended to be more than it was really. Sure it had some interesting concepts, but they were just an excuse for MAGIKAL GIRL action, unlike GSD which pretended to have high morals and was actually a ‘I’m the director and I’m going to let my wife write this even though she’s horrible’
About Mai-Otome, ep. 26:
http://www.randomthink.net/pictures/bloom_county/blm870705.gif
^_^ I love these strips…
Personally, i find i must disagree with all the bashing of Mai-Otome thats going on. When you first watched it, did you say to yourself, “Man, i can’t believe they screwed this over so much, its really not good at all”. Or did you sit there and wonder to yourself where this was going. What i’m trying to say, did you dislike it from the start, or did you dislike it when you started thinking too deep into the conclusions they had given you.
I believe it was a pretty decent storyline, and it was made better for all the obscure and humerous references to Mai-HiME they put in there, true, i did preffer Mai-HiME to Mai-Otome, but as other people have said, the best way to deal with it is: Bond Movie Mode. When you watch a bond movie, you’re not in it for the plot, you’re there because you want to see what he’s going to do, what gadgets he’s going to get, blah blah blah. When i watch an anime, i want to be entertained, and for me, Mai-Otome had fights, funny references, and a story that i couldn’t help but finish (26 episodes in 1 and a 1/2 days). You may dislike Mai-Otome, but personally, i think they did a pretty good job, and from the sounds of things they’ll be elaborating on what the hells’ happened to everyone now that everythings over, and maybe give us a bit more interaction between HiME and Otome.
Suppose thats just my two cents though,
- Jannix
I have debating on watching the show or not watching it, and I’ve been reading reviews on several sites and am really deciding against it. (If you’re wondering why I don’t just watch it and decide for myself it’s cause I don’t wanna waste money) Mainly I feel so because I despise any anime where maids are the selling point, from what I’ve heard classes at the academy revolve around cooking, cleaning, etc. I like mai-hime and enjoyed the manga, save for the ecchi-ness, but is this show really as bad as gundam seed destiny? If it is I’ll abandon all hopes for it now. Oh and can someone tell me if the novels and manga are different? Not maid centered or less so?
True. There’s nothing really wrong with fanwanking. Thinking your fans are blithering idiots is another story entirely.
GSD is, by far, the second lowest a company can go in terms of stabbing the casual anime fandom in the back; succeeded by Evangelion. The male lead herein is Shinn Asuka; why did Kira get all the attention? And why did Fukuda say that he’ll focus on Athrun during the OVA specials? Is he still employed by $unrise?
Mai ZHime is not the massive failure that GSD is, but it had done some of us favors they didn’t need to do. The Akane/Kazuya story was not hillarious. I’d pick “They die in each other’s loving embrace (during one of Shiho’s spells)” over “Break up their love-making (via suited Nazies) so Akane can come back wearing a sexy cat outfit” as a subplot.
Plus, $unrise had wasted time introducing more cute girls than spending time on Takumi and Akira.
I didn’t even watch Mai Hime because of its tragic angle and “reset button.” ZHime atleast had some promise. And the show corrected some of GSD’s mistakes: The “Lalah Sune” plot device, Rie Tanaka voicing characters with no personality before Tomoe, the dealing with a large number of characters (before the new ones came in).
Ask me how I feel about the show being licensed for R1 release: About the same way I feel when I found out “Gundam Musou” is basically “Dynasty Warriors” with mobile suits. A complete waste of time.