Review of Fire Force

In a world shaped by mighty flame, Spontaneous Human Combustion exists. Humanity has been plagued by this phenomenon for over a century. Sudden death by flame, followed by a rampaging infernal corpse demon left to terrorize any in their wake. Tokyo's Armed Forces, Fire Defense Agency, and Holy Church of Sol needed a solution, as which lead to the creation of the Special Fire Force. A collection of soldiers and pyrokinetics gathered to combat the oncoming fires. Shinra Kusakabe is one of the rookies gathered from the latest generation of firefighters. A young lad who nicknamed the Devil's Footprint for his abilities to generate firefrom his feet. He joins the force to be a hero, and search for the infernal that claimed his mother and younger brother twelve years ago. His battles in the force will soon reveal that the fire's smoke has some mirrors, mirrors to be shattered and reveal the hideous truth behind their world of flames.

Fire Force is the latest Shounen to take the anime world by storm, or, at least it had the potential to be. The hype for this anime is real, it showed such early promise from its praised animation, to its steady pacing, and of course its stylistic usage of fire. So what went wrong? This anime was shaping up to be real anime of the year material, but for me and many other people it just kind of lost our attention. Was it a weakness in the writing? Too many slideshows in the animation to save budget in between the fight scenes? Typical Shounen fight scene problems? Did other anime such as Demon Slayer's second half steal away its explosive premier? To answer all those questions, yes, but also no.

In truth the problems I personally see in Fire Force as a whole are just few, however their repetition is the real issue. First off I have to talk about the animation, because it really isn't as good as it was made out to be. Yes, early on there are plenty of scenes to be hyped about, to watch repeatedly cause they are so damn good. However as the show went on, the lack of physical movement within its many non-combat scenes was difficult to ignore. I don't care about fantastic animation anyways as an anime fan, yes it's great to see, but seeing how most anime originates through manga popularity, I think we all can live without Fate budget level fights as long as everything else can hold our attention to the screen. To put it simply, if you were to watch this anime dubbed, 90% of the time you wouldn't miss anything if you didn't pause the anime to read a text on your phone. Especially when the anime slowly started to forget that it had a whole cast of characters to work with.

A lot of Fire Force's charm was thanks to the dynamics between Company 8's members, sadly in typical Shounen fashion, Shinra takes center stage halfway in and didn't feel like sharing. Don't even get me started on how Tamaki is handled, or lack thereof. Or how Iris is basically forgotten about completely for the second half. All while Shinra himself, I'm gonna be honest, I don't like him. He's incredibly stubborn, and it's played up in fights for way too long to the point of banality. Also based on the few times he and Tamaki interact, I wouldn't be surprised if he's sexist. (Keyword being wouldn't be surprised, I'm not directly calling him sexist.) Not to mention despite his faults or naivety at times, he never gets in any real danger. Or it's the complete opposite where he is in all of the thinkable danger imaginable, and still gets out with little to no long term effects. Kind of the equivalent of say like Deku from My Hero Academia not having scars on his hands to remind him not to act recklessly. With the way Fire Force is structured as a whole, I'd argue nobody really grows or learns from the events that happen. It really feels like this anime is trying to be hype for the sake of trying to be hype, a lot of things don't really make sense, but are not played up for laughs either. Which ended up creating this weird middle ground where nothing really happens, and with that aforementioned lack of animation across during a majority of the anime, it really needed to play up more laughs with the cast as a whole.

So after everything I just said, is Fire Force worth your time? That's a big maybe, in my opinion it is good fodder to turn your brain off, but is too stagnant outside of its fights to keep your attention as the plot moves forward. Fire Force isn't over yet, it is set to pick back up for a season two in the summer of 2020. It might hit the ground running now that the groundwork is set, or it will continue to dwindle it's own flame before being blown out by the many other highly anticipated anime coming next year. Only time will tell how the Fire Force's flame will act.