English Dub Review: Clockwork Planet “Gear of Destiny”

Everything is gears. And fanservice. But mostly gears!

Spoilers Below

Guess what everybody? The planet earth has given up the ghost. How? We don’t know. It just died. Run with it. So this mysterious engineer comes out and says, “Hey! I can fix it, I just have to turn everything into gears!” Nobody’s heard of this guy, nobody knows his name, other than “Y”. Sounds legit, let him have a go. So, everything is turned into gears and clockwork, why not? Advanced supertech is now possible, even though everything is still clockwork driven, and there are no microelectronics in sight. But we have Y’s tech as a phlebotinum, so we don’t have to explain anything. Sound like the setup for a convoluted joke? It does, but it’s also the premise of this series.

Naoto Miura is a high school kid with a slightly obsessive complex towards busted clocks. He keeps claiming he’ll fix them, but he really just ends up cuddling them and trying to romance them… Oh, this is off to a weird start, already. He has no money, no materials, and no talent for fixing these things, but he keeps on collecting them for the attempt. A clockwork coffin/stasis chamber drops through the roof and into his living room. Inside is an extremely human-like automaton, and she’s very pretty. His sensitive hearing picks up that one of her gears is stuck, and is keeping her from becoming active. He fixes the part, waking her up. Her name is RyuZU, and she was one of the first automata, made by “Y” himself. So obviously, she’s full of awesome. She is also acerbic, and generally mean-spirited in her analyses of people. She proceeds to declare him her master, and seal the deal by sucking on his index finger. And pulling it in and out. Swirling her tongue all over the- what the heck is going on? This is how she registers a master? Okay. The building crumbles and they are forced to find another place to stay. She suggests a love motel, while he says a nerd cafe is fine. A bunch of punks come over and start hitting on RyuZU, and when Naoto steps in to defend her, she responds by showing how little protection she needs. A pair of scythes on mechanical arms pop out of her skirt and knock the baddies out. They go to a cafe to sleep instead.

While all this is going on, lets talk about the people who dropped RyuZU on his house. Breguet Company is a big tech company, run by Marie Bell Breguet, the youngest president the company has ever seen. So young, I’m not even sure if she’s in high school yet. But, she’s aloof and snot-nosed like an ice queen/corporate chick is supposed to be, so I guess the company handed her the job. She goes in to check up on a project at the central spire, and a bunch of military suits comes in to be threatening. She tells them to bugger off and continues working. That night, there’s an earthquake, and she comes out of her room to investigate. Without her clothes. After assembling the head staff, they figure out that the military has decided that they are going to drop the Kyoto grid off the map, killing everyone in the city. Why? Well, they’re trying to solve some problem, but I certainly haven’t heard what that is. Welp, guess we gotta go stop the evil military!

And that’s this episode. Yup. That’s what you get. A canned plot from a few hundred games, two scenes of blatant fanservice, a bajillion CG-animated gears, and a canned evil-government-gone-honey-badger plot blatantly ripped from Final Fantasy VII.  Man, I had high hopes for this series going in. I love sci-fi, and steampunk theme is ever so stylish. I saw the art on the ad up above, and the art of the light novel, thinking that this was gonna be great to look at. Hey, Yuu Kamiya wrote this? Great! I’ve heard wonderful things about No Game, No Life. I bet this will be a riveting, actiony series!

No. None of the above. The only parts that look good are done by CG. Heck, I can tell that the ending credits were done in Flash, and THEY look better than the art and animation for the rest of the episode. That’s bad. There was a bunch of places they could have used CG to make their day easier, and amp up their animation at the same time, like with the many faceless automata drones in the opening battle. Nah, we’ll just draw those, and cut corners in the animation. Close up flyby of a transport plane? Draw that too, and do it fast and crappy so the lines aren’t straight from one frame to the next, nobody will notice. So many of the action shots were cut in such a way to make the harder to animate stuff just not be there, resulting in an action show with no real action.

Now, I’m okay with fanservice. You can’t really watch mainstream anime if you aren’t. Personally, though, I would rather it be done tastefully, such as a bad camera angle causing a partial upskirt or a bit more attention to the animation of breasts (Man, I feel dirty writing that). That’s anime for ya. That’s fine. But then you have these excessive things that don’t serve a purpose in the plot or even stay in keeping with how the characters behave. A robot that’s mean to everyone suddenly going to town on a guy’s finger. A girl who is the president of a future equivalent to a Fortune 500 company forgetting to put clothes on when she goes out in a public hall. There is no reason for these characters to act this way, and the time you wasted focusing your attention on this stuff could have been spent giving this anime a plot.

That just leaves us with the voice acting. You have the three main characters being voiced by people I have to admit I don’t recognize. They’re all familiar with each other, from previous projects, predominantly KanColle and Seraph of the End: Vampire Reign. Dallas Reid (Naoto) was on Hetalia, and I’ll be seeing him again tomorrow night in Sakura Quest. He really didn’t connect with me, spending a good amount of his time squealing or screaming and just generally not feeling like a real person. Jeannie Tirado (RyuZU) was in Smite, and her performance was conflicted. It was far too cheery for a robot that burns people on the mic. I was okay with Skyler McIntosh. No real problems. Wait, who did Christopher Sabat play as? The BODYGUARD? You have a voice actor who has been doing much-loved characters for as long as I’ve been watching anime, and you have him with three lines as a bodyguard. Really? That unremarkable technician got more lines than him. Wasting talent right there. I’m sure he’ll have a bigger part as the show goes on, but still. I’m sorry. If this were all that I was ever given of this show, I’d give it a score of three or four. I want this show to be more. It has everything it needs, it’s just that it is using it all wrong to make an inferior product. They still have time to make it good, so in the meantime, I give it five unnecessary gears out of ten.