Review of Seraph of the End: Battle in Nagoya

Ladies and Gentlemen this is a rare example of a perfectly mediocre anime. Flawlessly bland, exquisitely insipid, wholly vapid. Watching Owari No Seraph is like eating air, there is simply no taste, good or bad. Owari No Seraph: Nagoya Kessen-hen is the uninspired continuation of an anime that should never have been made. Story: Lets recap. A mysterious virus wipes out most of humanity and vampires come out of the woodwork to wage war on the surviving humans. Yu, our cliche shounen, hotheaded/immature/cocky/must-protect-everyone protagonist, has joined humanity's army to fight the vampires. He really really hates vampires for killing his childhood friends. He reallyreally wants to protect his friends too. The second half starts after he unleashes his mysterious superpowers on the vampires about to kill his comrades.

As with so many mediocre anime, the premise itself is neither novel nor self-evidently atrocious.
The product is simply a sand-flavored cake.

Slow pace/shitty action:
There are a few identifiable things that contribute to ONS' mediocrity. The pacing is mind-numbingly slow. Most of the fight scenes in the show are related to training/testing of some sort. Learning to unlock your sword's potential, fighting your own weapon's demonic spirit, getting tested by the higher ups, learning to fight as a team, etc. The actual action scenes, what few there are, are usually pointless or indecisive.

Convoluted storyline:
The agendas of the humans and vampires are not well developed. The leadership and structure of the two factions are left nebulous and simple questions like why the two factions are fighting? why the vampires are so sadistic? What is a demon in relation to a vampire? etc are not explained. At times ONS try to draw clumsy moral parallels between the humans and vampires but it's just too messy and blurry to have any impact.

Art: Mediocre
Sound: Mediocre
Characters:
The characters are poorly fleshed out and easily forgettable. They will make predictable decisions then inexplicably decide to trust their mortal enemy for no reason.
In the background of the almost completely absent character development is the homoerotic attraction between Mika and Yu. I'm still trying to wrap my head around how that fits in (no pun intended). I think the core problem is that both characters are just too underdeveloped for me to know where their bond is coming from. They are "family" but then Mika looks like he wants to bone Yu. Yu seems to act differently when he's around Mika. The male vampires are all pretty androgynous and the act of drinking blood is unsubtly sexualized. Then there's that strong pederasty vibe between Ferid and Mika... I dunno...whatever.

To say that the characters are flat would be an understatement. They aren't even cardboard-flat. They are 100%, eco-friendly, RECYCLED cardboard-flat.

Yu: Brash, hot headed, annoying as fuck. Where have we seen that before? Oh right, everywhere. He's a cookie-cutter shounen protagonist. He will charge into battle screaming at the drop of a hat without thinking. He has two objectives--kill vampires; protect friends. There's no growth throughout the series and he is exactly the same from beginning to end.

Mika: Now a vampire. Struggling with his various 'urges'' you might say. I don't think it's a stretch to call his bloodlust an allegory for homosexuality but again, whatever. As a character his thought process is largely absent. Why is he siding with the vampires when they murdered his friends? If he is siding with the vampires why is he so hesitant about drinking blood/killing humans. If he is hesitant about killing humans why does he enable his friends to murder children and distrust humans so much? If being changed into a vampire has altered his thinking why does he still have such a boner for Yu? Why is he so wishy washy about everything?

Everyone else:
Too many half baked characters to keep track of. For such an vacuous anime you would think there would be plenty of room to develop the side characters but not really.

Enjoyment: Meh

Overall: Overall disappointing. The last few seasons of anime have been pretty weak so I finished this out of boredom. Watch only if you are really, really bored.