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| Overall | Art | Animation | Character Design | Music | Series Story | Episode Story | Reviewer | |
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 Jan-Chan
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[series:1174#967] | ||||||
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Humm… did I really want to watch 17 episodes of this series? When this series first came out, one of my friends emailed me to share that she had heard good things about Cluster Edge and how excided she was at a fun new series. And the first three or four episodes were interesting. (Period!) After which a number of creative comments were made about this series title and of those that I share here, I think that Cluster BOMB might be the most accurate, because this story keeps going BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! while it painfully self destructs. It starts off telling a fun tale of a young man with a flying machine traveling off to attend an elite high school called Cluster EA, which is at odds with the strong influence of the military. And then it shifts to tell a story of ‘artificial soldiers’ in a post-war-world struggle to gain recognition. And then it shifts again to tell a tale of the oppression of some townsfolk struggling under military occupation and the efforts of some renegade soldiers still intent on continuing the war. And then…. And then … (It seems like the story line thread just gets dropped every few episodes and a new one started up.) After a while it got to be a bit ridiculous. With all of the different characters running in different directions, just trying to keep track of what exactly was going on got to be very confusing and this confusion leads to the other major problem of this series. It is customary in a 24/26 episode series for a midpoint episode be devoted as a recap or summary of what had already occurred. But remember – this is Cluster Bomb! It shoots itself in the left foot by wasting all of episode 7 to recap what already happened in the previous six episodes. If that were not enough, it shoots itself in the right foot by wasting episode 10 doing the very same thing. And then true to Cluster Bomb form, after episode 10, it slashes itself in the stomach by wasting some 25% of each new episode lost in flashbacks, rehashing (or recycling the footage of) previous events in the story, as it struggles to keep the story moving forward. (I honestly don't know if they were cutting animation costs by recycling the footage or were just too cheap to spend some money on a decent script writing team?) After watching 17 episodes, I think I know how this series is going to continue. And while I did not give this series an AVOID rating, (and I thought about it several times), it might just be polite or fair to leave it with a WATCH rating, (but I am still thinking ….) Last updated Tuesday, February 27 2007. Created Wednesday, October 25 2006. | ||||||||
Other Sites
| Name | URL |
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| Official Japanese Series Web Site | http://www.cluster-edge.net/ |
