English Dub Season Review: The Silver Guardian Season Two

An excellent example of how a shift in format can gum up the whole thing.

Overview (Spoilers)

Now within the game of Grave Busters, Suigin Riku must battle his way through the training course to be taken seriously. Along the way, he makes friends with a cute, petite girl named Farin, who decides to help him in his quest to rescue the love of his life from the bad guys in Totem. After running into a few other characters that mean little to the plot of this season, he is given a call by the leader of Totem to go to a particular event raid, and enter Level Zero. In the process of that, Suigin recovers his missing memories from his childhood, including the first time he met Rei. This also includes loot from the raid boss, which levels Suigin up to an ungodly degree. After another confusing and convoluted fight, he and a boat load of other people arrive at the front door of Totem…

And that is where the season ends.

Our Take

And I was left confused. This season was a bit of a shock. Just before, I binged the first season, which was done in a format of twelve, 12-minute episodes. I jumped into this season, and was pleased to see the full half-hour episodes instead. I looked at the stats, and saw that they were planning to do twelve episodes of this. Sounds great! The series could use a bit more time to develop the characters and plot, and it felt like they were going to get it… but they don’t. What Haoliners never bothered to tell anyone was that by twelve episodes, they meant another set of twelve, 12-minute episodes collected into six, half-hour double episodes. So, when I reached the end of episode six, I came back to Funimation with the thought there would be an episode seven. Hmm, no episode seven. Came back the next week… No episode seven. After another week, I had to look it up. Season over? Not only does the shift in episode length obfuscate the length of the season, but the way the season ends is an awkward and halting end. They were fighting a dude, then convinced him to fight the boss of Totem instead. We’re on the doorstep of Totem central, about to go for another fight. Then, nothing. Season over. It’s horribly jarring.

That ending comes on the tails of a season that tries to dump as many characters onto us as possible in the vain attempt to make us think there’s a lot going on. When the summary of the half season takes that small of a paragraph, you don’t have enough plot, bro. There is quite a bit of time in the middle spent on a gang of player killers that immediately get slaughtered by meeting another character called the Collector. She’s somewhat new to the season and is a bit of a wildcard. But, we also have no explanation for her actions. The reasons for Rei’s kidnapping was either retconned or simply forgotten. The thugs stated it was because of Yuki Riku’s debts, but here, it is all because the Totem… want… something? I think? In fact, we only understand the motivations of two characters: Suigin and Farin. Suigin wants to find Rei, and Farin has no friends other than Suigin. She is probably also in love with him. Other than that, every character seems to act at random, and bad guys are taken down by throwing more characters at them. I’m not kidding! This is the only show where I could measure a character’s power level not by any displays they make, but by the number of characters that are introduced in order to be a deus ex machina against them. The final fight introduces the leveled-up Suigin, brings back Purple, then introduces three more characters, all of whom are ineffective, then Suigin saves them all, only for Nishikaze to invalidate the whole fight by convincing the Randengyoku to fight someone else… next season. The majority of the fight was a giant Randengyoku firing a colossal chaingun that dropped shells that were real bombs that never exploded because he was done fighting them.

And that isn’t the only thing totally random. The game world of Grave Busters is ill-defined, convoluted, and paradoxical, often times making plot holes and contradictions with itself. Our first introduction to the game’s currency last season stated that it couldn’t be converted back into real-world money. Here, mere days later, we have most of a half-episode devoted to how the game’s money functions as a crypto-currency. Sure, it can’t be converted to yen, but it spends all the same. So the whole reason he couldn’t pay off the thugs that kidnapped Rei last season was overturned. The game is so laughably unbalanced, the only way it became the overnight success of the show says it did is because of creator fiat. This is a literal Pay-To-Win MMORPG. Those are two genres that should never mix. Pay-To-Win games are exclusively player against player, using the game’s enemies only as training. They tend to be a flash in the pan type of game, around for a year or two until everyone moves on to the next fad. MMORPGs, on the other hand, will always have a rich environment that relies on its non-player enemies to reward players for continuing to play over a long period of time. They have a deep meta-game, especially as players hit the level caps.

Grave Busters is none of those things. It doesn’t even qualify as a game, as much as a giant bank account with bells and whistles. Players are given special Buster Items at the beginning of the game. These items give them unique powers with their own mechanics. This makes it impossible to have a meta-game, as such a thing relies on being able to specifically tool their characters’ build to work well against the current PvP and PvE climate. Everyone having their own unique ability makes the game to unpredictable for a meaningful meta-game to arise. Of course, you can also get your hands on one of the Grave Treasures, which are unique items with powers so remarkable, players are limited as to how many they can have. Those special abilities are rather moot, however, as the true power of the game is the Asset Graph, a visual representation of how much money you have in the game. What does it look like? Well, phallic isn’t the exact term, but it is pretty much the comparison we’re making here. It’s a bar that shoots upwards in an attempt to impress everyone with the size of your… bank account. Wanna prove you’re better than whoever you’re fighting, whip out your Asset Graph and compare its size to theirs. Most of the non-unique items in the game grow stronger by pumping in-game money into them, so the richest players are the most powerful players. How do you get money in the game? Well, either beat the dungeons (which have all been cleared out within a few days of the game’s release) or pay the company that made the game real money. So, let me ask you: who in their right minds would play this game? It is a shameless cash grab without any real game mechanics of value. No story. No real quests. No point except to get you to spend your money on a cryptocurrency, then use that cryptocurrency to frivolously power-up items to beat other players and take their money. Oh, and the most powerful players, known as the Billion Players for the fact that they have over a billion in their account, are all people with a unique title. That means that in order to join them and have your Asset Graph make sweet love to pierce the heavens, you have to somehow get one of these unique titles that nobody can get. Those on the top will always be on the top, and there is nothing you can do about it. So, what’s the point of the game? Nothing.

Look, the voice actors knew they weren’t working on anything with character-based writing. This was a dumb action show that wasn’t fully thought through. Looking back, almost every review I did of the series said the voice acting was ho-hum. Enough to say that the job was done, but not enough to make me care. There has been one character that consistently got my interest from his voice: Randengyoku. Who is his English VA? Well, when you find out, let me know in the comments below because nobody seems to know who this guy is because this project is so poorly documented. The animation as of episode one of this season was already a step down from the amazeballs we got from season one. From there, however, the whole deal continued to go further downhill. Its almost as if the budget just dried up twice as fast because they were producing two half-episodes a week. Such horrible animation errors, lazy direction and cinematography. Was this even the same team?

And no, that last image wasn’t in the show. I made that from two separate shots in photoshop in less than a few minutes. Still better than most of their direction.

How to Watch

Well, considering it’s only about three hours, just sit your butt down with a soda and a bag of chips and just plow through it. Together with the first season, you can watch the entire series in one day. Order some Taco Bell or something, you aren’t in for a lot of a commitment.

An excellent example of how a shift in format can gum up the whole thing.