After what we saw in last week’s episode, I guess the big questions will be 1) why does this episode exist, and 2) why does it exist here?
— “Not bad, but not great. The problem is that none of it leaves an impression. How should I put this? … Stuff like this isn’t exactly rare. The fundamentals are all there, but the only response it elicits is a yawn.”
Oh, I see Kanye has seen Amagi Brilliant Park, too! But seriously, his words describe this show to a tee. It’s not bad, but it’s not great. And nothing that we’ve seen over the past three months will leave much of an impression. Will you remember this show in a year? Two years? Hell, I probably won’t even remember it in a month. It’s only claim to fame is making fans think that KyoAni has return to their “roots,” a.k.a. giving us shiny boobs over shiny abs.
— But hey, KyoAni shouldn’t feel too bad. We’ve all phoned it in from time to time. I have as well. But a spade is a spade, and this show is just… it’s nothing, man. It treads that dreaded middle ground between exalted greatness and memorable trainwreck.
— So the goal is to make a promotional video for the park, but Tricen’s first attempt is about as fun as watching the average Fate/stay night episode. As a result, Kanye has our little triceratops friend go around and ask the rest of the staff members for ideas. First things first, Moffle echoes Kanye’s sentiments. I guess they’re more alike than they think, and this is probably why they butt heads with each other. And they both have that strange affection for the show’s most boring character.
— Moffle’s solution? Have everything explode. Calm down there, Michael Bay. This is a cheesy amusement park for kids.
— Macaron wants the visuals and the music to be more “aggressive.”
— Meanwhile, Tiramie is… pretty damn creepy. Another way to describe this episode: “Too many cooks will spoil the broth.” Oh, the wacky hijinks that come from having the eccentric staff members pitch in their ideas!
— C’mon, Fiddy… how can you not recognize your own thighs?
— When it comes time to asks the Elementario, Kobori channels Gou. Unfortunately, Tricen’s execution of her ideas are, well, a touch misguided.
— Muse, on the other hand, suggests that the PV includes shots of… just water. Literally just various bodies of water. Holy shit, I know you’re the faerie of water, but that is the lamest idea out of all the suggestions that we’ve heard so far.
— Meanwhile, Salama somehow has videos of Muse sleeping in bed. I’m sure shippers out there are tickled pink by this, but this is just as messed up as Tiramie’s “lewd” pictures.
— Sylphie is just boring.
— It’s finally time to ask the most important person for ideas. Y’know who that is. The park’s most important person is the same person who keeps herself cooped up in one area and does absolutely nothing to help the park. Yeah, that’s the one!
— At this point, I’d just tell Kanye to make a video, because he seems to think he knows what he wants to see. So why don’t our boy genius just have a crack at it?
— I’ve always wondered why the accountants got to look relatively normal compared to everyone else…
— Wut.
— But yeah, Tricen is now asking the lesser characters for their contributions. Other than one or two amusing looks into these characters’ personalities, however, most of them are pretty bog standard.
— It’s just the age-old problem of trying to do everything at once. If you do so, you’ll end up succeeding at nothing. Maybe this is the show’s veiled critique at itself. Who knows? Maybe. ‘Cause I mean, just look at this very episode. It’s one way to give us a glimpse into these characters’ personalities, but it’s done in a very lazy way. And other than a few exceptions, it doesn’t tell us anything new either. We already know that Moffle wants to be an action hero. We already know that Tiramie’s a pervert. And on that note, this episode seems better suited as an episode that introduces us to the rest of the cast rather than something to cap off the entire series. This should’ve been the third or fourth episode, maybe. It certainly shouldn’t have been the last episode.
— In the end, we see the final draft that includes everyone’s contributions, and I guess the humor here is supposed to lie in the absurdity of it all. We see action, we see creepshots, we see mundane footage of the Diggeries doing construction work… But the truth is that none of this is really all that absurd or silly. Tricen ends up making something that, to me, is just as boring as his first PV.
— The best part is how we’ve seen all of these clips already, but we now get to see them again stitched together! C’mon, man, it’s the last episode. Are you really going to be this lazy?
— Kanye reluctantly goes with the original PV, but Tricen says he leaked the twisted one online anyway. Okay then.
— And that’s it. That’s the last episode. Well, that was definitely one way to send this series of…
— Final word on Amagi Brilliant Park? Well, the show has some charm, but you can tell that KyoAni was phoning it in the entire time. Not once did the show make me roar with laughter. When it did try to inject some drama into the story, it was too little, too late. I hardly know anything about these characters, so obviously, I’m not going to cry for them. I don’t suppose the light novels are much better, but even so, the studio should’ve had the vision to pull it together. But maybe they’re just too busy working on other things1, and they just needed Amagi Brilliant Park to fill up a time slot. I wouldn’t know. I just know I won’t miss it.
— Honestly, I kept waiting for this episode to turn into a PV for a future sequel to the show or something. That would’ve been slightly clever, at least.
1 I hear Tamako Market has a good love story, but then again, my Twitter feed says a lot of things that I don’t necessarily agree with. Plus, I don’t particularly like going back to watch older series unless they’re said to be exceptional. Oh well. So what’s next for a KyoAni, anyway? A Beyond the Boundary movie? Wow, really? Did people even like Beyond the Boundary?
Moe Sucks 
Your Twitter is probably talking about the movie, literally titled “Tamako Love Story”, rather than the original series.
I know about the movie.
I thought beyond the boundary had some pretty cool ideas and i wanted the series to succeed so badly but it fell flat mostly due to a not terrible but mediocre script, piss poor direction, and a not-too-great series composition, which pains me to say because kyo ani are really talented at animating and it’s a shame that they dropped the ball on this “dark fantasy” (which ended up being some pretentious label because it dropped the ball on its tone as well). Still, beyond the boundary has a cool premise and it could be really great in the hands of good writers and director which i am hoping the movie falls into. I really waned to like the tv series and ended up feeling really meh about it as i neared the end of it and reflected upon it. Should the movie reveal itself to be promising (and use the art style from the LN promo), I will be sold on this movie. Oh, and this final episode of Amagi Brilliant Park was sort of ok; the series itself was alright as well.
The only episode that I remember of that anime is the idol dance. :-D
In a lot of ways, mediocre is worse than bad. That’s what I’ve found a long time ago in most everything. Movies, anime, books, etc.
Like the post mentions, you can find pleasure in something that’s good and bad: the former bringing genuine and probably the highest form of pleasure, and the latter providing something akin to schadenfreude.
But with something being mediocre, it just invites all sorts of unpleasant feelings. First and foremost probably being, “What the fuck?” Then comes things like “Give me my wasted time back” and/or “What the point of this?”
And like E Minor, I didn’t find this show funny or even amusing. I thought that maybe it’s my comedy-axis being largely Western focused and thus being fundamentally different from Japanese-style comedy. But I remember that no, it’s not that, because I’ve been brought to laugh-out-loud laughter before by the likes of Gintama, Nichijou and Danshi Kokousei. So big surprise, whoever wrote the jokes for Amagi just isn’t good at writing comedy. Which to be fair, writing comedy isn’t an easy task. But then again, maybe if comedy writing isn’t someone’s forte, they probably shouldn’t be writing comedy in the first place.
Sure, KyoAni’s good at making things look “good”, but at this point almost everybody’s capable of making things look serviceable.
The female cast were cute, but, let’s be honest, EVERY female cast in these types of shows are cute, hot or sexy. The fan service (yeah, even the cheerleading scene) wasn’t all that amazing either. So really, meh. What else did they have? A male protagonist that seems like a jumbled throw-together of several other male protagonists?
This episode is just another example in a long list of “things that went on for a little too long”. Like the post aptly shows, there’s nothing in this episode that justifies itself existing. Nothing profound or vital to the story really takes place. A few extra seconds maybe mashed in with the end credits of the episode before this would have sufficed to “wrap” this show up.
If you want an example of a good version of what this episode was trying to do, go watch the finale episode of HBO’s Generation Kill, where a montage video is produced and is actually meaningful to the theme of the show.
So, yeah. Forgettable really. Although to be fair, I really didn’t have much faith in this show to begin with.
beyond boundaries AKA glasses
KyoAni is known as a troll, because it teases fans with things that they will not do, and do things that can sell and “test the waters”, to make a marketing troll from time to time, to appear as a “rebel” who doesn’t care about the money.
They did that with endless eight (Haruhi “2nd” season?) or hinting for a FMP sequel on their other shows. And here comes Amagi Brilliant park, from the author of Full Metal Panic and with the ripoff joke of a character that is the only one who can remain in memory just by that association.
That said, It is like the anime studios really can have some sort of personality, being KyoAni a hipster who boasts about originality, but in fact goes for the market and has a lot of money to spent on frivolities, as it is ending a show with the lamest episode they had on stock.
The comedy was fine on a general aproach of the series, but this episode was really lacking on everything and that phrase of the main character really fits it and reveals that it was intentional.
How would you sum up the series overall, E Minor? Worth checking out or does it run out of steam halfway through? Your analyses of shows are usually spot on and I’d like your take on it.
For me, it’s a harmless enough diversion for 13 episodes. I criticize it from the point of view that it could be so much better, so much more interesting, so much more memorable. But if you just want something light to watch, it’ll do… then you’ll forget all about it in a week or two. If that’s good enough for you, then you’ll probably enjoy the show.
Magi Brillaint Park
Dead inside, Moe over
We will not miss you
Well, since KyoAni announced Nagato Yuki-chan no Shoushitsu, it’s more likely they are putting all their efforts into it. Strangely enough, another anime, “Hibike! Euphonium” has been announced to be released at the same time (or so I think?) so that can explain stuff.
Anyway, I completely agree with your view on the show. The more I think about it, the more disappointing I find it. Not a bad show overall, but yes, a forgettable one, and I deeply regret that fact since I really had some hopes about it. Damn you, KyoAni!