#exarm

A Birthday TheList- 2021 Year-In-Review

Hello everybody! On Sunday, January 23rd, I celebrated another birthday. I didn’t do much. I had naps, played video games, and, of course, watched anime. Since I’m celebrating my 41st year on this blue ball (forty-one and having fun), I thought it’d be cool to take a look back at 2021 and the anime I discussed during that time. Let’s go! Note: The date beside each anime is the day I posted about…

Disclaimer:

I won’t bore you with the details but this is my second attempt at writing a post about EX-ARM, a show I already find infuriating anyway, so I apologize if I come off as testy in my writing. It may seem a little messy but it’s only fitting seeing as this show is nauseatingly incompetent.

The premise of EX-ARM is a boy gets hit by a truck and wakes up in the future as a brain trapped inside a briefcase. What could possibly go wrong there? A very simple premise for an isekai (I guess it’s an isekai?) but actually I’ll think you’ll find that EX-ARM is very un-simple. It goes through all this in the first episode sure. However when you get into the second episode, you get the impression that it’s going to be like some kind of G.I. Joe deal where the gang are going about peacekeeping and engaging in macro-aggressive counter-terrorism. The treks are so ill-explained and the thematic dive into war-profiteering, corrupt trading of weapons and money-driven diplomacy is as shallow as piss on the bathroom floor. This animé is too unintentionally silly with it’s wonky computer-generated visuals and fast-paced info dumps to try doing anything serious to begin with. They aren’t too keen on focusing on all these heavy undertones because the clear focus for the production staff is on the fight scenes which you can’t take seriously either.

I could go on and on about this series and it’s failings but it will be nothing you haven’t heard before. My main gripe is that it could be good and obviously the animation is a huge obstacle which I don’t want to rag on too much because I have to assume that there is a reasonable explanation. But I often think that there are animations on YouTube that are done by one or two people that are of higher quality and I return to being completely mystified. Sure, they would be of lesser quality by animé standards but they would have to be better than whatever that image is above. The choppiness of it all means that nothing carries any weight and it’s almost impossible to pay attention to. On my viewings (22/03/2020 to 02/04/2020), there were even absent subtitles and spelling errors in some scenes and it’s not like the subtitles help either. Everything about this series makes it hard to follow and yes, there is a stark difference between a story being hard to follow and a story having a lot of lore to get stuck into. This story in question is BORDERLINE IMPENETRABLE.

So I get the impression that this gang of such whacky and quirky eccentrics are members of a counter-terrorism unit including the boy trapped inside the Amazon Echo. This is my first problem. It never really gets across that Akira should care about the cause as much as he does but that sums up the show really. It does so much skipping over development so every story beat feels unearned and it isn’t helped that every plot twist is so trite and cliché. The second problem I have is that the only characters that really matter are Arma (far left), Minami (centre left) and Akira who is inside the metal egg... thing. The rest of them tick zero boxes with me even on a surface level and that’s being exceptionally generous on the three main characters I just mentioned. Arma is an android who is just a far worse Aegis from Persona 3 and looks far less cooler because of the choppy fight scenes. I just want that to sink in for a moment.

Aegis is a character from a turn-based RPG on the PS2 who comes off as far cooler than Arma, a character from an animé that came out in 2021 based on her combat ability alone.

Most of them, I can’t even remember the name of. They also don’t do a good job at explaining why Akira is so brilliant and can do all these cool hacking things that he does. He is able to enter other electrical appliances and androids in the story, including Arma, and use all their limbs with excellent proficiency. There is one scene in the first episode where he struggles but from then on, he seems to be able to do everything impeccably. Again, unearned.

The show left me scratching my head at times which is an understatement if I’ve ever heard one but sometimes a character will die and the “cinematics” give off the aura that we should really give a shit about it. Most of the time though, I was asking who on Earth they even were and why we should care. Spoiler by the way but one of the antagonists is Akira’s older brother who we had precisely one scene with them together in the whole show and Akira barely talked about him ever. Yet, it was played off like some ground-breaking, heart-stopping revelation.

The short answer to this article is that this show failed on every front. It made me laugh at the beginning but towards the halfway point, I grew furious with how poorly the plot was conveyed and then just tired because it felt like it would never end. Do not seek this animé out unless you have a deathwish because it’s not even so-bad-it’s-good or even so-bad-it’s-funny. It is just an infuriating watch.

Heyoooo!!