Review of Hand Shakers

"The road to Hell is paved with good intentions", as such is Production GoHands and Shingo Suzuki's motivations in making this travesty. LA wants you to to put your hand in front of your face...then start violently shaking it in front of you...yeah that dizziness and annoyance is Hand Shakers in a nutshell. Let's get on with this..... In terms of characters, Hand Shakers has a major problem with it's characters...as in their nothing but running gags with a body, let's start with the main duo, Koyori Akutagawa voiced by Sumire Morohoshi and Tazuna Takatsuki voiced by Soma Saito, Tazuna is a mechanic and has this schtick wherehe sees if a situation or problem is in a "mesh" or not, Koyori is probably the worst character for LA, merely because she hardly speaks thus giving us no personality either and she is a special case where she needs to always have her hands joined with Tazuna otherwise she dies...except when it doesn't and she can even stay far away from Tazuna for a vague "limited amount of time?"...yeah LA is just as confused as you are, but the main duo characters have alot more problems but that a bit later on. So how about the rest of the Hand Shakers?, well Break voiced by Jun Fukuyama and Bind voiced by Yoko Hikasa are essentially the BDSM couple and LA hated both of them, one as a waste of Yoko Hikasa, second is that Break is a overly lunatic "kill kill" guy making him instantly unlikable and even worse what with his powers in physically abusing Bind. Lastly is that Bind essentially a moaning machine thus a waste of Yoko Hikasa...let's move on to Chizuru Misudera voiced by Sumire Uesaka and Hayate voiced by Kaito Ishikawa , their schtick is that due to how Chizuru looks like a little kid, they think that Hayate is the boss when really Chizuru is. That's it. Next are Masaru Honjou voiced by Ayumu Murase and Riri Honjou voiced by Ai Kayano and their schtick are cards, more respectively Masaru for a REAL LIFE card game by the name of Precious Memories and Riri with tarot cards, they were the ones LA was expecting them to be interesting....until Riri hit the incest bomb destroying any chance LA would care about them (and LA doesn't care about their backstory it's every abusive parent storyline and an even sloppier incest subplotline...LA could take Onii-chan Dakedo Ai Sae Areba Kankeinai yo ne! more seriously than this). Next are Kodama Awaza voiced by Mikako Komatsu and Hibiki voiced by Tomokazu Sugita who have the entire idol and her manager routine...it's just that Kodama has this schtick of quoting random people, Hibiki is just fast. Finally let's talk about Makihara voiced by Shoutaro Morikubo our primary repetitive exposition fairy and obviously yes...he gets annoying very quickly and just spouts off things about Hand Shakers, Nimrod and the Ziggarut...something he should have KNOWN and said to Tazuna and Koyori AGES AGO. -sigh- what can LA say...this character cast is ghastly horrible and at best stereotypically "running gagged" annoying.

It does feel like the Hand Shakers' characters TRIES to look at certain genres from Bind and Break in an abusive relationship "romance" genre, Masaru and Riri's incest, Chizuru and Hayate for comedy and Kodama and Hibiki for the idol genre and seriously LA thinks that Kodama as a character is the closest character to have legitimate character development outside of trying to be a Hand Shaker through her being a "fake idol" or sorts...until she immediately retracts her statement and be her running gag persona again...-sigh-, however the biggest problem is that even with this in hand, they DON'T DO ANYTHING WITH IT and just use their wasted character potential as running gags and nothing more...

Let's move to the element of Hand Shakers everyone is "interested in"..*ahem*, in terms of animation, the animation done by Production GoHands, the animation is "ambitious" to say the least but comes with the territory of wrong execution in the process, what does LA mean by that?, well for the majority of the battles in Hand Shakers, it has the tendency to do ALOT of changing perspective with long panning shots of the fight, but the rapid perspective changes along with the twisty and turning battle flow makes you either disorientated from the experience or just plain confused of the battle itself all due to the speed, different animations perspectives and the spatial plane on during the battle makes it extremely hard to know what the hell is going on most of the time, outside of the battles, the animation has "photorealistic" backgrounding with the animation with the bright animation on the forefront (typical Production GoHands, which isn't a bad thing), on it's own, that is quite unique, but coupled with the bright characters and their designs makes the background standout even further and again MUCH worse when it comes to the battles as well. CGI was also used, mainly on the weapons and LA just could care less how "cool" the weapons look like as the CGI implemented into the battles clashed with the photorealistic environment only brings focus to the colorfully CGI weapons and the characters carrying them (in which it even gets infected to the background). LA started seeing repetitive "stock footage" previously shown in earlier episodes which also dampened the animation quality though LA does exactly think this one is something to rage about as LA was more annoyed and placed under headaching inducing moments with it's ambitious animation style more. LA "gets" it, Hand Shakers wanted to do something unique but was slightly too ambitious and wanted EVERY animation idea on the plate, instead of making a more cohesive animation style it just felt like a disorientated mess.

In terms of voice acting, felt like it was where there would be some grace here and there and there is thankfully but that only makes the characters they voice all the more troublesome...it's not the voice cast's fault...it's their bland characters. LA will rapidfire all this soooo <LA breathes in>...Soma Saito was ok, Sumire Morohoshi got a VERY easy paycheck by essentially moaning and grunting all her lines and when Koyori FINALLY DOES starts to speak...she's ok at best but LA still has a problem with Koyori as a character and not because of Sumire's acceptably ok vocals, Yoko Hikasa was wasted on, Jun Fukuyama was annoying with him basically shouting all his lines, Ai Kayano and Sumire Uesaka were tolerable at best, Ayumu Murase was ok, Tomokazu Sugita, Shoutaro Morikubo and Mikako Komatsu talked far too much making them very annoying. -sigh- with this good of voice cast.....all LA can say to this is that it's a HUGE wasted potential on this voice cast.

We haven't even gotten to the PLOT of Hand Shakers...well that's easy yet vague as hell enough...the concept of Hand Shakers is like a sanitized version of Mirai Nikki or Fate stay night, with no blood, no killings and with no solid reasoning as to why Hand Shakers are fighting each other (Yes, LA knows that they can get a wish or meet and become god? and everything, but even the wish-granting or meeting and becoming god is extremely vague.) Which breaks any sense of tension during the battles (unless you develop motion sickness first) as we KNOW all the characters aren't gonna die from the battles due to the rules of the Ziggurat allowing for fast regeneration after the battle and out into the real world. There is one major subplotline what with Tazuna and Koyori's "romantic" relationship but due to it being one-sided on Koyori's part and worse, but there's just no chemistry between Tazuna and Koyori and it just comes out a completely forced and manipulative, from their interactions to them as a fighting duo and LA entirely blame Koyori for this as she just doesn't emote and when she DOES starts emoting and speaking, her personality is as dull and bland as Tazuna is and probably even worse in the romantic standpoint as she only ever thinks and talks about Tazuna...this is our main love relationship people and even at it's best it's just cliche. Koyori maybe the one pushing the romantic relationship but LA still doesn't see the romance side of things as nothing more than the main characters faffing about before the next disorientating battle.

The final arc of Hand Shakers does try to explain Koyori's backstory and the entire backstory to the major villain of Hand Shakers goal in fighting Koyori and Tazuna in all this and it's a grand effort just to explain, something LA greatly wanted after all the faffing about and lulling it did just to get to this point and fine, the final arc did salvage what lackluster plot it had it already had. The ending still didn't fix it's animation flaws to our main leads, Tazuna and Koyori (yes even Koyori's backstory didn't help her own character!, it just gave us more depth to the already blank slate Koyori...but nothing more and even WORSE on Mayumi's part). The final showdown overall had problems with spatial battle orientation due to how Tazuna and Koyori kept changing their battle area...and it ended -sigh- in an anti-climax with a rush character development job on Mayumi as well, ohh and the entire challenging God thing is only said in passing due to the resolution of the major villain in their final showdown with Tazuna and Koyori. Overall, LA felt rather mixed with this ending.

Yes, Hand Shakers, LA is shaking LA's hands....in pure disappointing awe as to what you produced, fine you had the best of intentions, but LA mostly thinks that either you were too ambitious or you had no idea what the hell you were doing!, sure being ambitious is a double-edged sword, where if you put effort and KNOW what your doing, that ambition can bring about a great show, but in LA's eyes, that ambition can be corrupted if you don't know what the hell your doing and your overly ambitious to the point of just throwing everything at the wall and just seeing what sticks. Yes, at the start of this review, LA DID call Hand Shakers a travesty and on an animation standpoint, it's an experimental misguided travesty if to the point of headachy induced nausea, but what really broke the anime for LA was the lackluster and extremely lacking plot AND it's one-dimensional "running gag" characters and even lazier romance to our main protagonists. No, this isn't the worst anime LA seen, but it's one of the worst misguided animation experiments in quite a while...

Icarus tried to fly to the Sun with wax wings and in his hubris fell on melted wings...

Production GoHands tried to make a great anime with Hand Shakers with it's disorientating animation and even lazier plot as it's wings and in Shingo Suzuki's hubris fell into LA's WORST anime of Winter 2017.