The dialogue in Tomodachi Game, you guys… It’s not getting better. Arguably, it might be getting worse. And I’m a little annoyed about it.
I’m not annoyed that there’s a badly written anime. If I got annoyed every time that happened, I would have very little time in my life to feel anything else than annoyed. And that just doesn’t sound like a very fun way to live. But I am annoyed that it’s the case here, specifically. Let me tell you why!
You see, I am still of the opinion that the base premise is pretty good. Once again it was spelled out for us this week because the show knows we’re not going to pay close attention, someone is trying to split the friends’ group part. I like the idea. You have this huge complicated setup but at the end of the day, someone is ignoring all the goals and points of the game, completely putting aside potential monetary game, and is just spreading petty discord for whatever reason.
That’s a fin premise. And it’s weird. And you could have a good time trying to figure out who’s being a little b all season and why (more on that later). It has a low-brow entertainment appeal and could make for a really good character study.
But that’s completely kneecapped by the show itself. First, the dialogue is bad and second they really didn’t flesh out these relationships at all. Last week Dawnstorm mentioned that the characters do not sound like friends, which I completely agree with but I thought it might be because of all the exposition and clumsy conversations. That’s certainly part of it but beyond that, there is no effort put in to actually flesh out the relationships in this show.
Two of these characters are childhood friends and maybe they are sticking together out of force of habit. O.k…. fine. Two of the guys think the girl with the long hair is hot, so they spend time with her because of that. Makes sense. But that doesn’t mean they are friends really. And what about the other ones. Seems one girl helped the other with bullying one time but that’s about it. None of them seem to have any interests in common and their personalities are very different in ways that would make it likely that they get on each other’s nerves. It’s not only that I don’t think they sound like friends, at this point, I really can’t see why they would ever be friends. And that really destroys the premise.
Moreover, we seem to have gotten a reveal at the end of this episode. Now obviously there’s more going on. Because there are 9 episodes to go. Although if this is the big baddie reveal and then the show just completely changes genres next week and becomes a comedy about an after-school club or something, I will eat all my words and declare this a standout anime.
However, if this is just a first reveal with many more to come, I think they flubbed it. It was too early, we don’t care about these characters enough yet for it to have much impact and it escalated the nonsense (teenagers wiretapping their friends and all) to a point where now they either have to go to completely ridiculous lengths to outdo it or scale back and ruin the progression.
I’m pretty sure it was supposed to be an OMG moment but for me, it just ended up as a WTF moment. And I’m a bit annoyed.
Previous Episodes
I didn’t expect the reveal so soon. I mean the experimenters were happily guessing, and since they’re sort of the greek chorus in the show, I thought we were supposed to guess, too. I had the right inution, but might have guessed wrong, since my intuition seemed too obvious. Since the reveal came so quickly, it’s almost certainly a tip-of-the-iceberg situation: *gasp* compensated dating *gasp* But she looks so innocent!!!! *gasp* Oh no! a manipulative childhood friend. *gasp* When have glasses-wearing characters ever been manipulative? *gasp* There’s only so many times you can gasp, and I’m pretty sure I’ve run out of gasps decades before the show was written.
And, yeah, they just don’t give off friends vibes. Never did. And the more backstory we get, the less they seem like friends. I mean glasses childhoodfriend knows about shy girl’s secret because he’s stalking classical beauty childhood friend. Who had cosmetic surgery. *GASP* Because of an accident. *oh*.
I mean, Platinum End was bad and often boring, but the angels were fun, and there were occasional fun moments, and there were moments with (eternally unmined) potential. This show? It’s just annoying me. Platinum End was at least fun to make fun of. I’m very unlikely to watch the next episode here. There’s just no pay-off for all the stuff that rubs me the wrong way, here.
I can respect that. It’s very difficult to get past the bad writing here
good