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| Overall | Art | Animation | Character Design | Music | Series Story | Episode Story | Reviewer | |
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| Watch | 7 | 7 | 7 | 5 | 5 | 5 |
 Ggultra2764
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[series:2751#1552] |
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Stella is yet another slice-of-life comedy revolving around another group of friends that are high school girls, this bunch involved in a school club that take part in airsoft gun battle games. The first half of the series is standard fare of the genre as Yura tries adjusting to things with the club members and their quirks when she joins them. The characters are a likeable and quirky punch, though they're a bit on the simple and archetypal side in terms of personality. Plus, I wasn't really into the show's comedy. The second half is where Stella's intentions start getting a little baffling as it attempts to introduce some psychological drama and character developments involving what Yura wants to get out of her involvement with the club, which felt forced just to create unnecessary drama and went against the light-hearted mood established in the title's first half. Beyond that, I don't really have much else to say. If you've been a fan of the ongoing show trend with titles like Girls und Panzer and Upotte!! that involve slice-of-life hijinks with high school girls and school clubs focused around weaponery of some sort, you're likely to enjoy Stella more than I have.
Last updated Tuesday, August 19 2014. Created Tuesday, August 19 2014. | ||||||||
| Unevaluated |
 Stretch
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[series:2751#628] | ||||||
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(Two episodes watched): It's hard to put into words, but in a matter of minutes, if not seconds, the things which the characters of a new anime say and do either cause me to categorize them as interesting people who I'd like to know more about, or as cardboard characters who are of no interest. If a show's characters can't manage to grab my interest rightaway, experience has shown that they probably never will. I guess this is where the approach which the crew behind an anime have taken to depicting the characters is revealed, and that's usually the single most important thing I need to know about whether a show is worth watching. Here we have a group of self-admittedly crazy high school girls who enjoy 'Airsoft', a sort of paintball like game except without the paintballs and BB-firing airguns instead (if I got things right). But the guns seem to play as large or larger a role than the characters do. Even the main character remains pretty much a blank slate at the end of the episode. The jokes are of the smile rather than laugh sort. Once upon a time, anything with Gainax among the credits could be realistically expected to be original, cutting edge stuff. But that was then and this is now. I don't know if Gainax had anything to do with anything besides the animation of C3, but even that wasn't particularly exceptional. The Airsoft game which the girls played (based on a scene from Rambo) wasn't detailed enough or animated well enough to be exciting. The devilish blonde girl pulls a few tricks, but they were hardly brilliant. If they are all going to be this way, what's the point of watching? It just seems that the resources that were devoted to this show were in such short supply that there wasn't enough to give any element--humor, action, personalities--enough to do an above average job. At least it didn't take a cheap shortcut and rely on fanservice. I guess that like all shows, this one could have been a winner by being funny, intriguing, or exciting (or more than one). But it was not all that funny, there was not enough detail to the airsoft game to be particularly intriguing, and it didn't really excite me either. One would think that a premise like this would rely principally on humor, but experience has shown that good jokes are especially difficult to come by. I can't help comparing it to Upotte, which included a good deal of technical data on various firearms in addition to the likewise modest humor. If I've already watched Upotte, I feel that I don't need to watch C3 as well, since the premise is pretty much the same. So, basically this show didn't have anything special, and there are plenty of other new series which do or at least might. Perhaps it's worth a modest Watch rating, but I am more discriminating in what I watch nowadays than used to be the case. Last updated Monday, July 22 2013. Created Saturday, July 06 2013. | ||||||||
Other Sites
| Name | URL |
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| Official Japanese Series Web Site | http://www.gainax.co.jp/anime/stella/ |
