A great Disappointment – Rage of Bahamut: Virgin Soul

I don’t know about any of you who are watching this series, but I am not enjoying this anime on any sort of level. After the last episode, I can also add in that it hasn’t affected me on any sort of emotional level either. Even after all this time, when something about the characters would affect me just by being familiar with them, yet it hasn’t. This didn’t happen with the first series, because I greatly enjoyed that show. I can legitimately say that the strong aspects of the first season still hang around in the second season. This is where my thought process of where the second season fell behind began. There is a lot more to it than that. No, this is not a review. If this was a review, I would be writing about the positives too, which the show does have. I just need to complain about this show somewhere else then twitter which only allows me to complain 140 characters at a time. I’m sorry if you really love this show, but there are a lot of things that just make it meh to me.

To start off, Genesis and Virgin Soul are two different kinds of series. Genesis is an episodic fantasy adventure series centered around four people traveling from place to place. Virgin Soul is a fantasy series centered around the human capital city. Changing the type of show is a great idea, especially since people can tire of seeing the same again, even if there is a four-year difference. The major problem for me here is that Virgin Soul never fully takes advantage of the fact that it’s taking place in a city. Yes, there are special events that happen like festivals or our main character wandering around the city, but we never dig deep into what makes the city work or even any of its people. Have you noticed that any interaction in the city has mostly happened between the main characters and no city side character has been developed in anyway. Does that make it feel like a living and breathing city to you? Genesis got away with this, because since that series is one setting per episode.  It didn’t have to dig deep into each setting like a show centered around one city.

Next, there is the fact that none of these characters ever worked well together in a group. In fact, the series was full of individual actions followed by other people covering for those actions or getting the first person out of the mess they started. Even when there are plans, nothing changes. The people who go off on their own never learn anything either. They still go out and perform actions without thinking beforehand. Nina, our main character, does this all the time. Azazel, the demon of the group, does this also. Kaisar, the knight of the group, does the same. Each for their different reasons, but still. Then there is always the secondary group that covers for them. No solid group interactions, just “we are meeting together” just to have things go another direction. A lot of big personas without that much personality to them. Nothing ever changes, which leads to next complaint about this show.

The character development in Virgin Soul is questionable at best. Nina is a bubbly dragon girl who is ridiculous strong and can’t control her dragon powers. Her arc centers around her ability to control her dragon transformation powers, because she gets flustered by hot guys which is what the key is behind her powers, and falling in love with the bad king. Those two arcs are just one weirdly convoluted arc. Yes, she fell in love and she can control her powers now. That’s never completely explained, but I guess that’s ok. She maintains her bubbly nature and never knows how to take anything seriously, until the latest episode when something big happens. Nobody else ever changes though. The wild Favaro from last season is now in the mentor role and the father character to Nina, but he doesn’t come in until half way through the show. Then there is Jeanne de Arc who goes through some changes compared to last season as well, but she doesn’t come until the middle of the show also and most of her developments are through flash back. Lastly, the King. We never fully understand him. I realize why an all mighty King disguises himself *cough*, but he never feels like a consistent character. He feels more like a plot device than anything else. All in all, Virgin Soul is filled with mostly stagnate characters that don’t know what they are doing, which makes the series feel like it has zero direction at all. Like my last point, this leads to my next point as well.

Rage of Bahamut: Virgin Soul isn’t that well written. For some reason, it doesn’t flow very well. The show feels like it’s written in the style of “this happens and then this happened” without any sense of cohesion between point of interest. Nothing there to ground the series in any sort of way. The biggest example of this the fact that there were two prison break scenarios in short amount of time. Sure, the settings were different and all that, but that doesn’t change the fact that they were prison break scenarios. The first one made plenty of sense, but the writers could have found a way around to prevent the second one from happening.  Then there is the fact that they tried to add some Disney Princess aspects to the show. Since Nina is our female protagonist, that automatically puts her in that role. In the first episode, her traveling through the town and grabbing bread and stuff from that one guy (who we never learn more about) put that Beauty and the Beast Belle vibe to the show, then there was the random dance scene at the city festival with her and the in disguise (cough) King, and latest reference was the shoe that Nina left behind at the end of a ball. It felt like a charming thing in the beginning, but having these elements didn’t add anything later in the show. It was another aspect thrown in to appeal to a certain audience somewhere. That’s another problem with the writing too. The show is such a huge hodge podge of ideas that doesn’t fit together cohesively. There as a plot about demon slavery and Azazel being a demon batman that was huge in the beginning, but that is not focused on or barely mentioned now. If this show had any narrative sort of focus, that wouldn’t be as much of a problem.

A couple seasons ago, I was incredibly excited about this show. A sequel to a series that I enjoyed four years ago? Hell yes! I saw a lot of other people excited as well. Then the first episode happened and it was full of excitement and energy and stuff. Now, I don’t see many people talking about it. I can kind of see why, it’s a show that is missing a lot of elements. Maybe this show should have only had one cour, because I don’t think the writers behind the series knew how to handle two cours. There was a lot of filler in the show which could have been cut down and made a more cohesive story in just one. In the end, I don’t think there is anything truly memorable about the show. I feel like I am going to completely forget about the show when it ends until I start writing year end material. It’s not completely meh though. There are some great fight scenes and a lot of good spectacle and great animated sequences that make some of this totally worth it. It’s just that the material around these aspects are just so meh.

Does anyone feel like I complain too much sometimes? Maybe it’s the mood that I am in this week or the fact that stomach doesn’t like me as much right now? Anyway, I plan on writing more positive posts in the future. Might be a surprise or two as well.