Divine Gate

Title:Divine Gate
ディバインゲート
Overall:Unevaluated
Keywords: , , , , ,
Notables: AMAMIYA Sora
Animation - Pierrot Plus
ITO Kanae
KAKIHARA Tetsuya
SAITOU Soma
TAKETATSU Ayana
YOSHINO Hiroyuki
Three alternate worlds exist, those of humans, demons and fairies--Terrestria, Hellestia and Celestia, respectively. The three worlds have collided, resulting in the creation of some sort of gateway that allows travel between them, which has led to chaos.

12 episodes
OverallArtAnimationCharacter Design MusicSeries StoryEpisode StoryReviewer
Unevaluated Stretch [series:3146#628]
(One episode watched):

My standards for how good a show has to be for me to watch it have gotten pretty high lately. Once I would have gladly watched pretty much whatever anime was served up to me in a new season, but I don't have time to burn anymore, and have watched so many unoriginal anime that I have run out of patience with shows that aren't definitely of high quality (at least in my opinion). Lately I have found so many shows to be of little interest, and have such a vague grip on exactly what it is that makes a show interesting to begin with, that my reviews of non-starters seem to have become very repetitive and unoriginal themselves. So, instead of just complaining I now ask myself 'what changes to this show might have made it interesting enough that I would have been willing to watch it'? In regards to Divine Gate, I think this show needed something really novel. Demons and fairies are dime-a-dozen in anime, and so are 'gates' to alternate realities, whether they be magical worlds or video game virtual realities. I noticed that as the rogue, outsider character with a special ability (another very commonplace anime trope) walked through the rain early in this episode I found myself composing lines which he might have been thinking or saying to himself; it seemed like a golden opportunity to flesh him out was being ignored. Instead, the show gave us some poetic nonsense at the start; I hate this stuff, because it usually does more to confuse me than to give me an idea of what's going on. Maybe it's fashionable in Japan. If there's going to be a gateway to an alternate reality, why not use it to bring something more intriguing than demons and fairies to this one? The idea of people getting caught in a fairy video game, as in the second half of SAO, made infinitely more sense than this premise does. I guess I need the premises of the shows I watch to make a fair degree of sense. As a contrast, I recently watched a Persona 3 movie; that was neat and original because the bad guys there were basically freakish monsters from within our own minds, not some dubious demon world. And, as is usually the case, the writing of Divine Gate wasn't good enough to instill the characters with interesting personalities. Even protagonist Aoto seemed pretty lame, with the all-too-common 'traumatized by childhood incident' background. This show seemed very stereotypical to me, with among other things a supposedly awesome organization to deal with supernatural problems, complete with expensive and shadowy meeting room for members to cryptically debate matters. As a result I just couldn't believe that much of anything fresh and exciting would come about (a guy who can use water as a weapon didn't thrill me). I was wishing that Divine Gate either get much better in a hurry or hurry up and be over.

Last updated Monday, September 21 2020. Created Thursday, January 14 2016.

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