First Impressions: Summer 2014 – Akame ga Kill, Space Dandy 2 and DRAMAtical Murder

Okay time for some terribly overblown violence, inept alien hunting and BL video games – Akame ga Kill, Space Dandy 2 and DRAMAtical Murder.

Akame ga Kill

Can’t say I’m too impressed by Akame ga Kill.  It could have been one of those stylish, pulpy, hyper-violent shows that I enjoy every now and then, but it just doesn’t fully commit to the idea and instead takes a rather pedestrian approach and tries to inject random comedy.  It kind of ruins the drama of having MC-kun’s childhood friend die in his arms if you’re going to then go all SD lulz immediately after.  Akame ga Kill wants to be cool and it has a lot of the elements right, but nothing really meshes together right and it just ends up feeling rather slap-dash and hilariously OTT.  I get that they wanted to pull an abrupt tonal shift with the reveal that the seemingly kind-hearted family were really a bunch of torturing murderers, but the manner in which it was done just made me laugh instead of feeling shocked.  When I’m giggling at your hamfisted attempts to be serious, you’re doing something wrong.

The rather lacklustre production values don’t really help matters.  There isn’t enough directorial flair to really make the show stand out from the crowd and the character designs are disappointingly generic.  Overall there just isn’t much to get excited about with Akame ga Kill – it’s probably fairly watchable in a turn-your-brain-off way, but I don’t really have the time for it.  Dropped.

Space Dandy 2

Yay! Space Dandy is back~!  Basically it is more of the same, the show just took a season off and continued on – it even has the same OP & ED.  There is no over arching plot in Space Dandy, each episode exists in its own little universe, so it is just pure entertainment.

This episode had a lot of fun with alternate dimensions – so many different incarnations of our central trio!  It was pretty fun and a nice way to get back into the swing of the show.  Great to have the series back.

DRAMAtical Murder

I’m not really a big fan of these first episodes that basically have the main character wander around town bumping into harmettes – I don’t really pay attention to half of the characters being introduced.  It feels really unnatural and gives away the series’ game source material.  Nothing really happens in this episode until the very end when Aoba is trapped in a game and forced to fight – but even that has very little impact because we know so little about the world this is set in or our main character’s history.  There are some interesting details, but not enough effort is put into making this world exciting.

Production is pretty rubbish, clearly not the biggest budget in the world and the majority of the character designs are pretty ugly……think it is mainly the horrendous clothing choices.

I’m going to give the show another few episodes, just to see if they completely strip out the BL aspect like I think they’re going to.  If it is removed I don’t really see much point in keeping DRAMAtical Murder on.