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Dec 11, 2025
After a long wait the next arc of Chainsaw Man is a disappointment.
The draw of season one was watching Denji’s interactions with the world and his team. He’s an idiot, but a lovable one who is completely out of his depth when it comes to social interactions. His antics with his team and wider division were the heart of the show, and that meant when the season’s final arc rolled around there were some real emotional stakes because the casualties were people you had grown to care about.
The Reze arc lacks this completely. Denji is isolated from the characters you know for almost the entire
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runtime, interacting with someone that you cannot begin to care about because the end of season one spoils any mystery. Yet it takes the film almost 45 minutes to spring a reveal that should surprise no one. Thus, it feels like you’re just killing time with little in the way of any real character development, just watching a front for something that won’t have you fooled for a second.
Then we move into the second half where the screen is filled with beautiful, colourful explosions. Too many, and for far too long. You will struggle to tell what is going on there’s so much shit on the screen. The art is great, the direction is not.
But the real issue is that there are no real stakes to the fight. Two devils clash, but as the protagonist can’t lose what exactly am I meant to be invested in here? The only other individual present is the shark devil, who the film has done nothing to develop as a character. So it all feels so unimpactful. Things explode, you yawn, and eventually the fight ends. Thousands die, but no one seems to really care. Compare this to the atrocities of the first season, where just some agents being gunned down carried so much more weight because it was grounded in a way this film is not. The end tries to add emotional heft, but it's completely unearned.
By the end I was left wondering what the point was. Imagine we go straight into the next arc and skipped this one. What would be lost exactly? The best parts of the film were the date with Makima at the beginning and the Aki/Angel interactions at the end, because those were the only moments that it felt like anything of consequence happened. But did those need the surrounding arc?
Denji learns how to fight better I suppose. But flashy fights aren’t really what drew me into the show. So I’m left with a feeling of disappointment. The interaction between characters are absent for almost the entire runtime, replaced with flashy fights that are emotional voids, and a character who you don’t care about at the beginning and is already gone by the end.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Jan 4, 2025
Summertime Render promised to be The Thing mixed with Groundhog Day; an island where you couldn’t tell friend from foe, and the protagonist would have to utilise their death to figure out how to navigate the threat. It was made for me. Sadly, the reality is that the show abandons this concept almost immediately. The protagonist so quickly gains a method to detect shadows that you wonder the point of the concept, just make them generic monsters and you get the same thing.
This show feels like a microcosm of all the problems in anime. It can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be
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a drama, a comedy, or softcore porn featuring children. It doesn’t excel at either of the first two, and the last one is just a hill that anime insists on dying on. The writing doesn’t understand how to portray emotion except through having characters shout to convey to the audience that this is A DRAMATIC MOMENT. The comedy is heavily reliant on the tired slapstick you’ve seen a hundred times before and likewise leans on shouting to convey that the funny is happening.
Eventually Summertime Render decides that it’s actually a romance. This also doesn’t work due to flat characterisation with very little difference between the starting and end point for most. The protagonist is your typical bland insert, who inexplicably has half the women wanting to get with him. For several women in the show trying to get with him seems to be their sole motivation in life. He’s also introduced committing sexual assault, so clearly this guy is a winner.
There is a real lack of introspection in the writing. Shadows are perfect copies, not just physically, but mentally too, keeping the thoughts and personality of the original. Yet at every turn the show fails to interrogate what this means. Is a copy the same as the original? How do you feel if someone who died is still alive? Is that life? What does this mean for our understanding of what a person is? How do you handle the mental load of fighting and killing loved ones and children? Not once are any of the questions asked, let alone addressed. The protagonist abandons the island for the mainland, even changing the way they speak to better fit in. Why is their return and the nature of their departure not a barrier or an issue to be addressed? I was none the wiser by the end as to why the protagonist couldn’t have just started on the island. Another wasted opportunity.
The writer also loves pulling stuff out of their arse. Regularly situations will develop where one of two things will happen, either some power that has been subject to no foreshadowing will be used to get the writer out of a corner, or we’ll have flashbacks to conversations that happened in previous loops that we never saw. Both are incredibly lazy. I can understand some of this in a manga with regular releases, but an anime should be able to smooth out these rough edges, yet no attempt is made to do so. You start with something that’s relatively grounded, but by the end is an unrecognisable mess of lore stacked on top of lore which just removes all stakes because you know the writer is going to make up something new again next episode.
We’re constantly told how smart the protagonist is, yet their every action in the show speaks against this. Time after time they make the worst decision possible in every scenario they encounter. One character makes a comparison to failing to save before a boss fight, but it’s closer to a game where losing a particular unit loses you the mission and the protagonist opts to put this unit in the frontline. It was hard to root for someone who was this stupid, and the show never provides adequate explanation as to why half the cast is following this guy, apart from the ones thinking with their genitals.
There’s just nothing to recommend here. It isn’t well written, plotted, or paced. It doesn’t feature interesting characters, it doesn’t interrogate its themes, and its central concept is wasted. At best this is forgettable drek.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Jan 8, 2014
Steins;Gate ranks as my favourite anime of all time, a great cast, a great story and an emotional rollercoaster ride that ended perfectly.
I was not a fan of the OVA, which was the epilogue the series didn't need and was therefore nervous about the film. I wanted more, but the story was so perfectly self-contained, could they pull it off?
Unfortunately the answer is no. It's not a film without merit, there is the kernel of a good idea in here, but it's not well realised. The opening features too much fan service, and too many callbacks to characters traits without there being events to merit
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this. The emotional moments are simply repeats of things done more effectively in the series. And then the ending comes across as a rush job, sloppily trying to fit everything back in the box to provide the happy ending the fanbase wants.
The problem with the film is it never really gains its own identity, it's a lesser repeat of series moments with a different lead, and that's not enough to justify its existence.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Jul 22, 2013
This is an anime I at times loved and others hated.
It has a great sense of timing, there's some fantastic "OH SHIT!" moments and it's not afraid to just dump all over the middle of someone's power of friendship speech. Whenever this anime is about the titans it's a really good anime, the sheer unstoppable force of them combined with the mystery of who or what they are and how they came to be carries the anime forward.
Unfortunately the writing is dire. Absolutely dire. In episode 4 the writers actually have a character tell us what the personality traits of the characters are. That's right,
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they've done such a terrible job of getting this across that they just come out and tell us. You're so uninterested in the fates of most of these people because the anime spends no time building them up or ensuring you get to know them, and the action is less because of it.
It also suffers from endless internal monologues. The writers will just not shut up and show us something, they need to have someone sit on screen for three times as long as necessary and think it at us. In one scene one character monologues about how another is pale and breathing hard. It's insulting. It's a goddamn visual medium but rather than show us these things the writers vomit their awful dialogue all over everything.
Unfortunately this bad writing takes its toll and the anime rather jumps the shark around episode 10. An intriguing ride up until then though, with some moments good enough to compensate for the writing.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Sep 1, 2012
I am a huge fan of the Steins;Gate series, but this is a really unnecessary addition which has nothing to say.
The OVA trots every character out just long enough to do something in-line with their dominant character trait before trotting them off again. Even the main characters feel underdeveloped, you learn nothing new about them and the build-up to the finale is almost non-existent.
The problem is it's about the relationship between Okabe and Kurisu and the main series has already told this story and did it a million times better. All we're left with is the bits we didn't need to see told in the
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dullest, least imaginative way possible.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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