Dimension W
(Reviewed on 05/25/2016)
The Sick of this Shit ROSSMAN
Oh. My. Lord. Fuck you, Japan. Fuck you up your goddamn Hershey Highway with a giant rubber dick.
Dimension W is the greatest "bait and switch" anime series I believe that I have ever seen. The first couple of episodes set up a really cool world, they had some fun and interesting characters, pleasing designs, and incredibly high animation quality with action scenes that really absorbed me and got me excited to see how the rest of the story unfolded.
But then it quickly hit a brick wall (both in production quality and plot), and instead of trying to work out a way around said wall (which also represents my sanity), Dimension W then backed up and proceeded to smash itself into that unbudging edifice over and over again, until it was nothing but a crumpled mess, and the wall, along with my sanity, collapsed upon it, irreparably damaging everything and everyone involved.
Let me tell you a little about Dimension W now. Dimension W is kind of like a very light remake of the basic plot of Giant Robo. There's a new energy source that everyone is adopting in the near future, but its implementation seems to come with a cost, and early versions of it are wreaking havoc when used incorrectly.
This advanced energy source, known as the "Tesla Coil," taps into the newly discovered Dimension W (the 4th dimension beyond X, Y, and Z, which make up our 3-dimensional universe) via cross-dimensional electromagnetic induction, but in doing so they seem to cause quantum rifts and strange paradoxes. Supposedly Dimension W is made up of all the alternate paths of choices not made that then turned into pure energy. Hence sometimes Dimension ghosts, and what-not leak, through into our world on occasion, mainly caused by failed and modified coils that can sometimes materialize those possibilities.
A confusing, but fascinating start. But then things turn to shit in the worst narrative kind of way.
We mainly follow a freelance bounty hunter named Kyouma (who is of course an ex-super soldier with mad martial arts skills) who HATES Tesla Coils for some reason, and therefore takes delight in hunting down early prototype Tesla Coils for money. These prototypes seem to have more power than the mass produced coils that have come to cover the world since their introduction... But within them is hidden a dark and secret mystery. Shhhhhhhhh!
Oh, and then there is a Robot girl with green hair and a weird-ass robot tail who is also pursuing the prototype Numbered Tesla Coils because her "father" (the inventor of the coils) told her to do so, but he never told her why. Sound familiar? Green-haired child hunting down prototypes of a revolutionary new power source because their father (the creator of that new power) told them to, but never told them why? That is the main plot of Giant Robo. But I would have been totally fine with this being the background of the story if the rest of Dimension W wasn't such a total train wreck in every way possible, featuring destruction and limp, bloody bodies pouring out the passenger cabins instead of joy and entertainment (because hey, train ride!).
Anyway, of course Kyouma and the green-haired girl meet up and become partners, because he of course has a strange and very forced connection to the robot. And then with the help of Kyouma's old super-soldier partner (some weird blond guy who is now a Tesla Coil police detective), they start hunting down those Numbered Tesla Coils and destroying them because the world governments don't like them for some reason after the "Coil War" (that brought about the end of the internal conflict of New Tesla, and also united the world's powers, but left a lot of questions unanswered about the who's and what's behind said powers).
Half of the 12 short episodes are "missions of the week," wherein Kyouma and his dumb robot girl investigate strange happenings (like ghosts, or a deformed, wannabe Kaito Kid claiming he'll steal some heavily-guarded super coil for shits and giggles), and we the viewers are left wondering just what in the fuckity fuck is actually going on until the very end of each storyline. And even then, these episodes mostly still leave me with a feeling of uneasiness, as if I missed a big part of the background plot. Like I skipped some important episodes or something. For example, there is one double episode story which takes place in a haunted hotel on a man-made lake. Not only were these episodes trippy as balls and weeeeeeeeeird, but there are legitimate ghosts that appear, interact with the cast, and start causing people to actually die!... And nobody bats an eye at their existence. This is supposed to be a world based entirely in science and technology, and then, WHAMMO, ghosts! And everybody involved is just like, "Man, we should do something about these ghosts," like the specters were just some yappy dogs whose owner refused to pay attention to as they kept nipping at people's ankles.
Anyway, the entire second half of the series then suddenly turns into one giant 6-episode-long mission on a desolate, boring island where the primary color palette is brown. You see, Kyouma, his slightly retarded robot girl, and a dozen or so other super soldiers with special (read "lame") powers and abilities are bribed into taking on a mission to Easter Island, where the final battle in the Coil War took place years ago. Yes, THAT Easter Island, but those statues play no part in things here, so I have no idea why it was chosen as the battle ground for where a global energy war would finally end. Anyway, the last half of this thing is extremely rushed, and plot elements are just tossed into the mix completely out of the blue. Ideas of what the Tesla Coils are actually capable of doing get introduced with no hints or foreshadowing, making me feel like this entire production was made up on the fly with absolutely no prep time.
It felt rushed. Like they tried to cram way too much info into 12 episodes, forgot to add some important plot points until it was too late, and then just stuffed them in with no care as to if they felt organic or invented by a desperate writer with 2 minutes before a deadline. Like, the big bad of the entire show was only first mentioned in episode 10, and it was made to feel like we were supposed to know who he was and why he was such a terrible person at the point of his introduction, but I just felt confused. And other characters are brought up once, and shown to have an important connection to Kyouma, but are then never shown again. I like to think that the show was greenlighted, and they wrote the story out for 26 episodes, but then, at the end of preproduction they were told, "Nope. We only have a budget for 12... And 9 out of those 12 need to be animated by the shitty B-studio in North Korea. You now have one month to get this thing made. Sorry."
I was totally suckered in by a very strong first few episodes. The animation in them was almost feature-length-like quality, the plot seemed large and thought-provoking, and the characters were a ball to hang out with. I loved how "ninja" Kyouma was, and how pure the green-haired robot's idealized perceptions of people and the world were, but then their personalities never grew (Kyouma was always only a "bad ass angry man," and the robot girl was always only a dull and boring goody-goody with no motivation at all, and she was so uninteresting I forgot her name).
After the first two eps I found myself both equally confused and bored with Dimension W. It appeared to have no idea what the fuck to do with itself, and yet it still kept going and going, dragging us through a painfully mongoloid 6-episode finale on an unrecognizable Easter Island, where the most ridiculous "super science" robots and phenomena attack our heroes in an attempt to hinder them from meddling in the just-introduced bad guy's kind of sad master plan.
Ah! I've been trying to remember what this show reminded me of! It was like it was trying to be another Darker Than Black, but all it could manage was Solty Rei! The pathetic characters, lame storyline, boring future tech. Thankfully though, Dimension W didn't drag itself on for nearly as long as Solty did. But that is the only thing I am thankful to it for.
SKIPPER
Arrrrrr. The Skipper doesn't know why he bothers with these cartoons anymore. The only ones I enjoy are the ones about pirates, and nowadays they only be about space-farin' pirates. Arrrrrrrr.
Anyway, while I have you here, let me tell you about the time that the ol' Skipper got mixed up with the Chinese Triad, the Russian Mafia, and some Somalian Pirates. So anyway, so there I was, in bed with the mistresses of the head of the Mafia and the Triad, while 12 Somalian whores danced nakedly all around us. Arrrrr. When suddenly... (EDITED BY THE ROSSMAN: I've heard this story every time we go out drinking. You've heard the most interesting part already, and the Skipper just goes on for another 20 minutes, sometimes repeating the part where he had to count all the grains of rice in a bowl with chopsticks, or the guy with the sword would remove his left testicle. I'm doing you a favor. Now I'll just drop you off at his final word.)
The MEGAPLAYBOY
Bad anime is bad anime. I don't think any time was put into this mothafucka. No time for plot, no time for animation quality, no time for anything, Holmes.
You can watch this piece o' shite if you wanna, man, but seriously, it's just dumb. And if you like it, well, you know what that means.... You and I have a difference of opinion, G.
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