Sacred Seven

For sheer ridiculousness this summer, go no further than Sacred Seven, which appears to have been written as part of a Mad Libs challenge. Not content to just be a cookie-cutter show about Some Guy who discovers his Amazing Hidden Powers, this one takes all the cookie-cutter shapes available and melts them into a head-spinning mess. Our hero is Alma Tandoji, an orphaned high schooler who looks angry and supposedly beat up 18 kids a few years back, but is actually a sensitive soul who only fights out of a sense of justice. (Come on, girls! He's a tortured bad boy with a kind heart!) After Alma witnesses a ship exploding on the bay, he forgets the shocking incident until a young girl named Ruri—equipped with a magical amulet and a talking ancient artifact, naturally—comes to his door and asks him to utilize his Amazing Hidden Powers.

Of course, Alma refuses to believe in such supernatural nonsense, until he learns that a re-animated statue from the capsized ship is terrorizing the town and shooting lasers at everything. Yes, that is correct: this show has a Laser-Shooting Zombie Statue. Alma, noble soul that he is, heads out to protect a vulnerable classmate of his, and in doing so transforms into a character from Tiger and Bunny. No, actually, his powers awaken, resulting in animated pyrotechnics that make absolutely no sense to the untrained eye.

Although packed to the gills with striking visual designs (Mobile suit mechs! Bionic exo-armor! Explosions! Magic!), as well as constantly dramatic music, the overwhelming impression of Sacred Seven is how incoherent it is. It's as if a whole class of delusional eighth-grade geeks teamed up and said, "I like maids!" "Well, I like robots!" "I like superhero suits!" "I like ancient historical magic!" and for lack of creative direction, just chucked it all together. The high-octane set pieces may provide a quick thrill, but if this series continues to thrash about aimlessly, it'll soon land in the pile of action anime that no one cares about after a few months.

Baka to Test to Shōkanjū Ni!

In the first season of this goofy high school comedy, we met the members of class F— the lowest-rated class in their high school —who were trying to fight their way to the top rank, which would afford their class a better room and other resources. Literally; the twist that sets Baka and Test apart from other high school comedies (kinda) is that the school in which it's set features, for undisclosed reasons, a videogame-esque challenging system to allow an underdog class to compete with the spoiiled intelligencia.

Steins;Gate

Still confused by the opening stanzas ofSteins;Gate? Well then, try wrapping your head around this next sequence of events: pseudo-scientist Rintarou Okabe continues to be freaked out by what happened (or didn't happen?) to him recently. The girl whose bloody corpse he discovered is, in fact, alive and well, and adding to the confusion is that she's now giving a lecture on time travel, rather than the professor who claimed to have mastered it last episode. Hopelessly mind-boggled by all this, Okabe hops online to look up time-traveling urban legend John Titor ... only to find that Titor's sensational visit to the year 2000 has been scrubbed off the internet. Has Okabe entered a reality where the Titor thing never happened? And what to make of his experiment at the Future Gadget Lab, where an attempt to microwave a banana seemingly sends it back in time?

By clarifying which events have happened and which didn't, this episode provides a more coherent follow-up to the first, while still spinning the wheel of mystery as to whether Okabe dreamed it, or time-slipped, or something else entirely. Certainly, it's more balanced than the maddening quick-cuts and non-sequiturs of Episode 1—although some running time is still wasted on pointless events like Okabe stopping by a shrine to chat with friends, and a run-in with a passer-by looking for an antique PC. Who knows, maybe that stuff does become important later, but it lacks the suspense needed to hold one's attention.

Regardless of the plot's hits and misses, however, the overall atmosphere of the series keeps everything afloat, with visuals and audio conspiring to form a unified artistic whole. Muted colors and hazy lighting establish a strange, intriguing vision of Akihabara in midsummer, and even ambient sounds (cicadas chirping, cars whizzing by) seem to echo the detached paranoia of Okabe's world. If Episode 1 was the act of throwing all the jigsaw pieces on the floor in mad confusion, then here begins the riveting process of putting them together.

Originally posted by Carlos Santos of animenewsnetwork.com

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