Anime, Manga, VN, JRPG, Related Things Discussion Topic CIV

I finished The Girl in Twilight. I was a little underwhelmed in my first impression of it, because it took quite some time before the main plot got moving and the ending left a few major questions unanswered. But after reading some reviews I gained a deeper appreciation of the show as a whole.

The series fuses concepts from Abenobashi and Persona - hopping across parallel worlds and meeting alternate versions of you and people you know, and confronting ugly truths about yourself to gain great power. It's got a lot of potential, but the action scenes in the show are actually few and far between. The focus is more on the characters and their development, which I didn't understand for a while.

The ending can leave you disappointed if you're primarily in it for the plot. Without spoiling too much, the conflict is directly tied to the characters' inner conflicts and issues, so resolving those wraps up most of the plot, but not all of it. I think some things were deliberately left unfinished due to its status as a multimedia project, and also possibly hoping for a second season which hasn't happened. Also some things go unsaid or subtly implied for the viewer to put together, which I also failed on.

But once you understand what the show was going for, you can appreciate it a lot more; what I thought was poor pacing to get to the plot was me not seeing the forest for the trees. My only remaining gripe with the show is that the character animations are kind of flat; there's very little range in their facial animations or any over the top cartoon-y reactions even in the more lighthearted moments. It's like the animators saved their effort and budget for the action scenes, which are surprisingly good - but given the aforementioned focus on characters rather than plot, it seems like an odd choice.

Overall though, I definitely enjoyed and would recommend it. It's a very nice show I found randomly while I had the Crunchyroll streaming channel running on TV.