AMAIM Warrior at the Borderline ep25 - The Future Belongs to the Kids -

This hasn’t happened in… well as long as I have had AniList at least. I have a clean slate of currently watching anime. I am just finishing up Backflip and that’s it, no active shows. I figure it will last a couple of hours at most but still, it’s an odd feeling!

Also, you might not be able to tall by how scattered this intro is, but I’m feeling much much better. When you’ve been sick for a few days, as soon as you feel better you feel indestructible. I could wrestle a bear whale juggling cars.

How are you, Scott? Just as well I hope!

I’m not so sure that I feel like I could wrestle a bear or juggle cars let alone do both at the same time, but I’ve been good honestly. This weekend was insanely hot, so I followed my usual pattern on days off of walking the dog earlier in the day and hunkering down to watch anime and read manga while trying to think cool thoughts.

End of seasons are scary because of how empty you feel for a little while with your watch schedule before filling it up again. I don’t think we are experiencing the same thing, but I do have that odd feeling of “Oh, I could watch more anime if I wanted too” and I just don’t.

AMAIM has now come to an end and although it was a show riddled with flaws I cannot help but look at it fondly. Not because of how good an anime it was but because it felt like it was trying and I sort of think of it as a derpy friend now. It really doesn’t hurt that I had a friend to chat the episodes over with. In fact, it helped a lot!

So what happened in this last episode.

In a way, I’m relieved by how happy the ending was. There are a lot of caveats, it was a partial victory and some sacrifices needed to be made but all in all, pretty good outcome. And it all started with the concussion of the altercation with Ghost. In the very first scene, I thought the origins AMAIM looked tiny compared to Ghost maybe that’s just me?

Maybe I am a big softy after watching too many anime series, but I will give an anime series more credit for trying to do something interesting and not getting the landing it wanted then something that just did something really simple and stayed the course in very bland ways that make it forgettable. There is a lot of ambition in AMAIM.

And this ending was something that I was happy with too. Especially since it was that positive ending with some caveats because it felt more realistic in some ways. There is no way that Japan would be free from that one singular battle.

Anyway, we left off with Amou seemingly out of power and out of luck but just n the nick of time, the other two AI came to give Gai a hand and the power of friendship saved the day! I’m being a bit of a jerk, it wasn’t that corny but there was some clear cheesiness. I don’t know if you noticed Scott but all through the first act, the soundtrack was a medley of “deeply inspiring” music. It made it a lot easier to guess the outcome.

I have to admit that I didn’t watch this episode on a large screen like I usually do so I didn’t get the sound quality that I wanted, but it did go the way that I expected it too. I kind of liked it though even if it was a little cheesy. It helped the other two AMAIM pilots feel more important in that scenario too and that is cool too.

Nevertheless, there was still a lot to the fight left. After all, Amou and Brad weren’t the only ones on the battlefield. I did like the glimpses of war strategy we saw, even if they were very superficial. The commanders watching the battle stats in real-time, trying desperately to make long-distance calls about what to do next. The engineers working on real-time updates. And boy, those updates sure work fast. Good thing too! Completely changed the tide it seems. That was almost unbelievable!

Irina, I really don’t have much to add in this scenario. I feel like this show might be one of those operating system programmers dream to help them feel much more important than they usually would honestly.

There was also the funny little gun fight between German and the Man in Black. I’m sorry, I forgot his character’s name. You know who I mean! I thought their entire personal^battle next to the battlefield was sort of hilarious, to begin with, but the scene with the bullet casing.

OK so a lot of you guys don’t watch the show and I usually don’t just describe the episode but in this case, I need to paint you the scene. It’s too good to pass over. The bad evil arms dealer named German is embroiled in a gunfight with the good honourable man in black. They are shooting at each other in the woods as the mechas rage a few miles to the side. German has used some subterfuge and previously planted bombs to get the upper hand and now the good guy is lying on the floor with the barrel of German’s gun up to his head. He is still holding onto his own gun but as he is lying on his stomach, it’s not doing him much good.

Suddenly a noise distracts German for a split second and our good guy immediately raises his arm and shoots up in the air. His automatic handgun spits out the shell casing of the just-fired bullet and this casing hits German square in the face, knocking him just a little off balance and allowing our good guy to get the upper hand.

Let me be clear, this plain and dull description by no means does justice to how glorious this 5-second scene was. I laughed so much!

I think you really shared this fight in all the detail it deserves because it really was just a ridiculously silly scene. But it was fun and I’m glad that German lost in the end though. I never liked him from the beginning and not just because he was an awful character.

As victory slowly seems to creep within our hero’s grasp, Amou and Brad finish their fight and we have our sacrifice of the episode. Gain is…exhausted… He disappears and all. There was a sacrifice but the explanation is that he just ran out of juice or something. But Gai is software, isn’t he? I’m really confused about what happened and somehow that stopped me from getting too sad about it. (Not to mention there was a cop-out). Did I just miss what was going on?

I don’t think you did at all and this didn’t need to be a dramatic scene. I guess I know what they were going for with the speech of A.I. being like humans for Amou in that moment and everything in that situation happening to GAI there, but that was definitely the strangest thing that I was confused by it too.

We also did get an explanation for Brad’s drastic character change and well. It was an explanation. But it also seemed il thought out. The idea was that he was trying to expose his father’s wrongdoings by going overboard like that. But surely there was a better, easier more direct way to go about it. Or like 50. Maybe if we had seen the plan evolve or seen more of Brad’s relationship with his father this very convoluted plan might have made more sense. As it was, it was barely better than no explanation at all.

It was better though. I’m glad they gave us something!

Yeah, Brad Watt really is such a mess of a character. Even if what he did made any sense at all, in which he doesn’t….yeah. There is so many easier ways to pull all the things he did then turning into one insane person that had to fight Amou for some reason. I feel like we are still experiencing the after effects of Code Geass where some character has to be some sort of master mind with a grand plan and not many know how to pull it off as well as Code Geass at all.

And so AMAIM came to an end. In the closing scenes, we got the immediate wrap-up of what the important characters are going to do next and also baby Gai. Yup, Gai’s not entirely gone but because they could only rescue a small part of his programming… for reasons… he is now a baby. And I admit that I am no computer whiz or anything but AI sure doesn’t work like I thought it did.

Baby Gai is pretty cute though!

I also quite liked the still images showing Amou’s .travels over the closing credits. I thought it gave a nice sense of closure to the show!

I really don’t like it when the media of any kind doesn’t understand what AI is at all. One of the few things that Vivy did right for me. Maybe its because programmers are not as apart of anime in cyberpunk series or something or we are going by feelings, but it really is kind of dumb. It would be so easy to just copy and paste GAI again even if the cute baby Gai with the diaper was cute. I’ll let it go though.

But I was generally pretty happy with the ending in how it went about too. Everyone got something they wanted to move future and yeah, Amou traveling was cool too.

All in all, I remain with the idea that AMAIM is a very flawed anime but one that nonetheless enjoyed. And this generally happy ending has put me in a good mood for the rest of the evening. Any closing thoughts Scott?

I really don’t know what else to say honestly I saw before writing more things. It landed a lot better than I expected it too with some cool twists. It had some good ideas and concepts that could have been done better perhaps, but it tried and I left this episode with a good mood too. Not like I had a bad day, but I was uplifted a bit too.