In the spirit of Halloween here on Desu Ex Machina, I’m going to be revisiting and reviewing some of the worst anime I’ve ever seen. Join me for this journey though the frightful forests full of incoherent plots, nonsensical characters, skewered art, and pointless dialogue! Hundreds of new reasons to go “Boo!!!”

Initially, I planned to have three or four reviews, with the last one posted on Halloween itself. I was determined to get a post written yesterday, but I had to accompany my friend to the mall, which took all day and afterward, in the spirit of All Hallow’s Eve, we got our hands on certain kinds of beverages and next thing I know, my room is full of desolate cans, plastic cups, and empty bottles Smirnoff. Oh snap, there’s some left in this one. Score!

In conclusion, excuse me for the abridged series, but I have the right to have a good time on Halloween, too. Enjoy.

Zero Stars (out of 4)

Review: Tenkuu Danzato Skelter Heaven

There are bad anime in this world, and then there are anime like Tenkuu Danzato Skelter Heaven. We all know about shows like “Akikan” and “Basquash” or whatever that are less than what we usually expect from anime, but they at least show some level of competency in production. Tenkuu Danzato Skelter Heaven looks more like something mashed together in a bored afternoon in July using nothing but Windows Movie Maker. Its only redeeming quality is that it’s mercifully short, but 20 minutes has still never felt this long.

Some time in the distant future, Phoenix Wright walks determinedly down the hall to respond to a threat over the city of Tokyo. Apparently, a giant squid has appeared over the city and it’s… well it’s not doing anything, yet. But you know how it is if you just leave squid floating over your city.

So then they call upon their elite division of female mech pilots to come save the day. That’s because male mech pilots are boring. And… well, that’s it. That’s all I basically understood was the “plot” when watching the anime. For a show that totals just under 20 minutes, Tenkuu Danzato Skelter Heaven sure takes its time. The OP and ED are full length and horrible. And while useless (and easily animated) flashbacks tend to linger on screen for quite a while, scenes that are potentially more important to the plot are sped right by. It’s as if the animation and creative staff had to meet a quota of 20 minutes and didn’t have material or something.

The show is also quite shameless with innuendos, sprinkling enough chunky fanservice goodness over its putrid-shit flavored scoops. The girls are basically tits and a face, and random sexually suggestive scenes litter the anime. The show is horribly edited, with smash cuts transitioning between scenes that are way too short. This gives the show a schizophrenic feel, jumping between completely undeveloped scenes to new, completely unrelated (and undeveloped) scenes. It makes you nauseous after a while. The show features voice actors Chihara Minori and Shizuka Itou — at their worst. The voice acting resembles a screeching inferno and the dialogue itself is a pointless stupid mashup of anime cliches and one-liners. Sometimes, the lips don’t even match the dialogue, which until now, I didn’t even know was possible in anime.

Somewhere along the line, the show lost itself, and forgot that it’s supposed to tell some kind of story. The entire show, from the first smash cut to the fight scenes to the utterly pointless flashback shoved into the middle of the show that’s inexplicably disconnected from everything else is just plain boring. Between the complete lack of pacing, editing, character development, plot, and dialogue, Tenkuu Danzato Skelter Heaven became the very monster it depicts: a quasi-identifiable being with no detail or origin, purpose or identity that doesn’t even make sense. We don’t know where this squid thing came from, what it seeks to do, or even what it is (and don’t worry, we never find out in the show anyways).

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