#hilaroiusly bad

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Ex-Arm: Forbidden Weapon Patreon Sponsored Review:  Dead Eyes, Brain Jars, Can’t Loose (Patreon Review for Emma Fici)

Hello all you happy people! And i’m stepping out of my usual comfort zone today for this one. See usually I cover western animation and comics. I have nothing against Anime and Manga: I grew up reading Shonen Jump and watching Dragon Ball Z, Yu Gi Oh (Whose card game I still play a LOT), Yu Yu Hakusho (Which is still one of my faviorite shows to this day), Pokemon, Tenchi Muyo, and Ultimate Muscle among MANY others. I still want to finish Hunter X Hunter and Jojo’s Bizzare adventure and watch the shaman king and eden’s zero’s animes and manga wise i’ve enjoyed the fire force manga, what i’ve read of my hero academia, and Pluto, which is one of the best comics i’ve read period. There’s good stuff I just forget it’s there sometimes and let it stack into my already large watch queue. 

So NATURALLY instead of any of the good stuff my first anime episode covered on this blog.. is one glorious clusterfuck of a bonkers premise, a clear rip-off of a much more popular property, and some of the worst animation I have ever seen. And it’s only not THE worst because this happened. 

Fun Fact: This show was written and drawn entirely by unpaid high schoolers. Prove me wrong. 

Ex-Arm WAS made by actual adults.. but ones who had no experience in animation, but were confident they could make it work. And being NEW to a medium isn’t excuse. Plenty of people make the jump and land just fine with writers such as Saladin Ahmed, Rainbow Rowell, and Ta-Nehsi Coates all making the jump from novels to comics smoothly. 

No the issue is clear arrogance: the crew was CONFIDENT they could make an anime without actually talking to anyone who had made one, let alone in CG. And suicidal overconfidence with no skill to back it up NEVER ends well when making a show. It’s how you end up with two seasons of a boy who just hit puberty’s dry erase markered abomination up there, and how we ended up with an anime that looks more like it’s own shodily made tie-in game than an actual  show that aired on television and streaming this very year. 

But it did so join me under the cut as I get into the weeds of one of the most hilariously bad things i’ve seen in my life. 

So we open in 2020 with a mass of screaming color inverted people being pulled into the sky to their doom. I gotta give it to the Manga this is based on, they predicted EXACTLY how 2020 would go. Most Sci Fi really misses the mark.  We still don’t have flying cars, actual hoverboards or super fighting robots, but we did have people floating to their doom thanks to some weird color inverted teenager so kudos. 

We get our intro.. and it is a LOT. The song, Rise Again, is honestly incredibly forgettable.. which I find inexusable for two reasons. The first is while I may not watch much actual anime I listen to anime themes and english covers of said themes all the time. I know my stuff and this theme is just.. nothing. It’s literally nothing. I mean a series this stupid at LEAST deserves a triumphuntly bad or too good for it intro. In between just dosen’t cut it. The other reason is simply that the end theme, Diamonds Shine by Dizzy Sunfist, is glorious. It’s really damn good and would work as an OP.. which begs the question why they weren’t swapped. Were they trying to reward people who actually stuck around for the credits? 

Speaking of credits while the opening theme music is unforgetable the opening itself. .is like the show itself hilaroiusly bad. Now most anime intros are utterly beautiful, long, gorgeous affairs with tons of exciting animation, sometimes hinting to the future sometimes giving a general ideas of things, really showing off waht the show is. Ex Arm is a bunch of clumsy animation interspresed with about 80 character intro cards like this. 

Just the spinning awkward CGI intro that you’d expect from 20 years ago.  It looks like the bastard child of those weird 90′s x-men animated credits

And the breif intros of Spidey and friends at the top of Spider-Man the new animated series.... not one of the recent ones nor some revamp of the original but one made by sony in 2003 to capitalize on the first of the Sam Rami trilogy and to directly serve as it’s sequel... and even then THAT intro does this sort of thing better than ex-arm only having three and with sai dintro itself being really damn good

The animation ALSO looks better than Ex-Arm.. and came out 18 years ago.  And if you think well “holy shit this show has embarrassed itself a lot with just an intro”, well strap in because this show has not yet BEGUN to embarrass itself. 

So we go back in time to 2014, a time when we were on only our second live action Spider-Man film series, a young Steven Unvierse had only just to begun to unravel the tangled mess Rose had left behind, and Gravity Falls had only just begun what would tragically be it’s final season. 

And none of that matters to our setting as we head to a Japanese High School Classroom. Because 70% of anime and manga involve a high or middle school, even when your about to rip off ghost in the shell. 

It’s here we meet Akira

... I haven’t even seen that movie, i’ts been on my to do list for years, and I know tha’ts TETSUO. 

No akira’s that kid I showed before. You’ll know him by his near constant thousand yard stare that says “my brother puts a pinch of acid in my breakfast every day” 

Akira is doing fine till his buddy tries to get him to do some sort of party related thing that involves phones, with Akira not having one because he’s technophobic. And I don’t mean someone who dosen’t LIKE phones or technology or it’ sinfluence on people and is trying to avoid screens and what not, I mean someone whose so ungodly terrified by just his friend HOLDING UP HIS SMART PHONE that he passes out with wavy lines and this look on his face. 

Yeah while the cold open and intro were hilariously bad on their own terms... this is where the series REALLY lets the drugs kick in. Now a main character having some phobia or personality flaw or quirk is actually pretty common, either a sign of supernatural things or just something to make it complicated when the person coming onto them happens to be the thing they hate. Like say a guy dosen’t like bees, well guess who just because the selected mate of the hive queennnnn.. lucky bastard. 

It’s a common anime trope, so it being present here isn’t a BAD thing it’ own. It’s not a trope that would make me WANT to watch a show, but it’s also one I haven’t seen enough in the anime and manga i’ve consumed to really judge.  Conversely I can judge having sexual harassment or embarassment as a running gag, because i’ve seen it way too often even in fantastic works and it’s just creepy every time.

So the idea isn’t terrible PERSAY.. but the problem here is it’s not just some small fear or some nerveousness or something... the kid is having full on breakdowns, passing out from simply being SHOWN one of the most common devices in the world, and having to be taken to the nurse’s office... and the show tries to play it off like “oh you just need to live live buddy”. 

That’s.. actually what happens: We cut to him and his brother talking it over , their parents having died because of course. First off i’m 100% convinced his brother is actually his dad and his brother-dad’s parents simply raised akira, because look at them

He looks old enough to be his dad. And Secondly his brother treats him having FREQUENT PANIC ATTACKS AND PASSING OUT OVER A VERY COMMON BIT OF TECHNOLOGY as “oh well your just a bit withdrawn bro you need to put one foot forward, jump in and live life to the max brosef, live it up bromigo, find your juliet bromeo”. I get people ARE that dumb about psychological issues in real life, it happens, but the SERIES ITSELF frames it like Sensei Brodad is right! If you wanted it to JUST be a self confidence issue and the techphobia tied into that then DON’T exaggerate it 98 degrees. 

So Akira goes off into the night to the convince store and is targeted by a shadowy figure... and i’m questioning less WHY the guy is targeting our hero or has his photo.. and more the photo itself. 

It’s clearly one of those little school photos you give out to your friends, which means Japan has those which is neat. But it also means they went to the trouble of STEALING some kid’s wallet sized photo of a teenage boy for the express purpose of kidnapping him to steal his brain. That will have SLIGHTLY more context in a bit but not much. 

So one transition later Akira exists the convince store when he notices a bunch of hoods harassing another teenager wanting to take her away with them despite her being no. He dickers about it , not sure he can take three guys. .but decides to take his brothers advice and just leap in and do what he can anyway.. and gets hit by a bus as he sprints forward

I’d just like to contrast this with another anime I mentioned, one that ALSO got started when it’s hero got hit by a car trying to do something noble, Yu Yu Hakuso. See that series, for those unfamiliar with it, stars high school pun Yuske Yurameshi, the biggest hood around who frequently skips school, has an alcholic negglectful mom and generally seems like he’ll be a punk and out for himself his whole life. Then one day he sees a child nearly get hit by a car, and jumps in front of it to push the kid out of the way, dying, but going out doing something noble. 

Both have the same idea: a character dies changing the way they are and their thrust into a new life because of it. The diffrence is context. Yuske finds himself in the land of the dead, guided there by the ever bubly and sarcastic botan. This ends up being a problem though: See as things were fated to go.. the kid would’ve been fine. A scrape or too but it would’ve been a one in a million freak miracle. No one EXPECTED Yuske to do what he did, nor to have such inner nobility in him. So Koenma, son of the god of dead King Enma, gives him a second chance: do some good deeds, prove he can be a better person, and he’ll let him come back. And he does, via some shenanigans. Not only that but seeing the people he lost gives Yuske a reason to WANT to come back: he sees his mom as neglectful as she was loved him, his only friend Keiko is devidsted and even his rival who he beat up all the time Kuwabara genuinely misses the guy.. it’s partly because he never got to kick Yuske’s ass but ‘tis clear he misses him. So by helping them, Yuske earns his way back, and while still a little shit, has come back a better person. The continued strangness after this is likewise linked: Koenma offers Yuske a job hunting spirits as his agent, since Yuske’s time dead means he can use “spirit” attacks, and see ghosts, which gets the boy much needed money, purpose and more friends. 

My point is i’d rather be watching or reviewing Yu Yu Hakusho right now. My other ponit is that there it’s used for thematic reasons and gives us a credible ease into the plot. Here... our hero dies, he becomes a brain in a jar weapon thing, and while it MIGHT have some pathos later, ZERO minutes are spent on im dwelling on what he’s lost or reflecting as a character. He spends the rest of the episode understandably freaking at what the hell this is. Which granted is what yuske did for an episode.. but they also added in pathos: what he’d lost, slowed down took some time before getting into shit. Here their so impatient to get to the cool sci fi bullshit we get no sense of character for akira. He was afraid of machines and kind of nervous> That’s it. His death comes off as a black comedy because we didn’t really KNOW him before he got hit by a truck. If your going to put a plot device like this in your shitty anime, maybe check to make sure that i don’t know, one of the most storied ones period hadn’t done it better!

So we jump ahead past BOTH previous timelines to our main one of 2030 where two officers are intercepting a super weapon. Mokoto Arma and Minami. Arma is as the gag probably gave away is a ripoff of Mokto Kursnagi from ghost in the shell, an anime i’ve only seen bits of but a pantsless unitard wearing robot who works for the police.. I mean I don’t have to KNOW GTS and film like it’s my own child to connect the obvious dots. I have eyes. And i’ts okay to take inspiration from something but COME ON. There’s also a grizzled officer with a weird eye thing, if a diffrent weird eye thing. They were not subtle

Anyway Arma and Mini have obtained a super weapon in a briefcase , and we get a fight scene. And while the animation has been laughably lackluster so far.. here’s where it kicks into overdrive as man oh man this is one laughably terrible fight scene. It looks like Arma is just fumbling around at the speed of sound, got places to go gotta break up this arms deal, with hits either barely connecting or looking moe like slaps or the weakest punches. Nothing has any flow or impact, it’s just all so weak. And of course infamously one shot of Arma doing a flying attack with both knees.. looks like she’s hitting the guy with her crotch. 

Yeah i’ts pretty lackluster and shows why MAYBE, just maybe making an action show when you don’t know how to animate, let alone do action is just POSSIBLY the dumbest thing to come out of this country since people started thinking “FUCK scientifically proven vaccines i’m gonna take horse dewormer!”

So our heroines end up outgunned, out manned, outnumbered and out planned so they need to make an all out stand and Mini suggests opening up the box. 

We get a cut to Police HQ where all of the police, including characters who are in the intro but don’t get enough focus for me to pick out their names from the 80 other in the intro. The point is we find out what an Ex Arm IS: a high tech device that can do super powered stuff. Basically your standard justificatoin for superpowers. We see one guy mow down an army by being able to turn intangiable who looks...

So going back a bit, our heroes open the ex arm to reveal a round computer thing.. which of course has Akira in it, specifically his brain. Yes I wasn’t exagerating or making my usual clever quips when I made refrences it to it earlier, the premise of this is that they jammed some random high school kid’s brain in a super computer at some point.

Never forget that while Ex-Arm is stupid.. it’s also GLORIOUSLY stupid and the animation isn’t the only notably messed up thing about it. 

So yeah Akira naturlaly takes this well as Mimi proves to be entirely stupid: asking him to boot up and then being obtuse when it’s VERY obvious this thing’s brain has no idea where it is, that it’s 2030 or that it’s not a WMD. His response to Mimi mentoining he’s in 2030 and the situation he’s in, being under gunfire with a sexy police android whose eye’s he’s seeing through and an idiot while his brain is in some weird machine sums up this show in a nutshell. 

Including him being naked in the weird cyber space thing.. he’s just.. naked for some reason.. 

So our heroine, her peppy useless sidekick and brain boy run into the facility and are chased by phasing guy. They try hooking The Brain That Wouldn’t Blink into the computers but he can’t do it.. it was intiutive with Ghost in the Fanservice’s brain but not this and he’s too caught in his own head. The girls end up having to take a runner and run into creepy ghost hand man leading to another awkward fight scene. 

It’s what you’d expect: the anime equilvent of this

So Akane ends up disabled forcing her to call on resting vietnam veteran face to help leading to this gem of a line

So Akira takes his brother’s words to heart, I wasn’t kidding about the framing and decides to leap into it.. this bein ga girls body. So yeah in TWENTY GODDAMN TWENTY a major plot point of this anime is “cis gendered male hops into female body and get it it’s awkward”

Let’s finish this this review is already days behind: so we do get an intresting finish as while Akira stumbles at being a lady super fighting robot, he does cleverly use his acess to the cameras and what not of the base to review the fight footage, realizing that the Phantom Meance here can’t see what’s behind him or sense what’s in front of him and thus tricks him into phasing a hand into the ocean. This is something I love about anime and why I keep coming back from time to time: the fights can be clever. Sure some are just shoutin gan dpunching, and tha’ts just as fun in the right context, but a lot are about strategy and trying to get your oponent to make the wrong move. It’s why I love jojo so much despite having only read the second and third arcs and seen part of the fourth: it’s all about clever stategy using unusual powers. This isn’t Jojo, by a long shot but it’s SOMETHING, which is more than the entire runtime of this episode has given me. 

So with that our heroes are surronded by guns and Akira finds out he might of caused an apocalypse. Oops. 

Final Thoughts: Ex Arm is really bad.. but damn was it fun.The anime is generic as hell mostly ripping off ghost in the shell but anything else it has, super powers run amok, cyperpunk, is all cliche, and it’s protagonists are all vacant arcytpes: Awkward teen hero, stoic fanservice badass, peppy girl. I’ve seen them all in other works and done better. There’s nothing to them and nothing good. 

So why was it fun? Because it’s a perfect storm of elements that make something so bad it’s good: legendarily perplexing animation, an overconfident creative team who has no idea what their doing but presses on anyway, a plot that’s both uniquely bonkers and clearly leaning on several cliches. It’s everything that makes a so bad it’s good film great in an anime package.  I don’t know WHEN i’ll get back to this.. but honestly while I went in meaning for this to be a done in one and Emma will be rolling on to something else next month for her patreon I will probably come back to this someday. 

So if you enjoyed this review follow for the possible sequel among with aton of other great stuff and considering joining my patreon

PATREON LINK RIGHT HERE

Thank you for coming, thank you for staying, thanks for reading’