Shadowverse Flame: r/anime Awards 2023 Thoughts
This is part of a series of posts, reworking my casual writing from the r/anime Awards about the various shortlists and nominees. I do a lot of writing for the awards which never gets released outside of awards, so I figured I’d try bringing some of it out and putting it here. They’re not meant to be anything too serious or in-depth, just reworking my thoughts as I posted them in the awards server to here. This isn’t representative of the awards themselves or anyone other than myself involved in the awards. I’ll make a larger post with all the shortlisted shows from each category in the Write-Up Collections tab after I’ve posted all of the individual write-ups for that category here.
Of the categories I was juror for in the 2023 r/anime Awards, Shadowverse Flame was shortlisted in just Anime of the Year, and so that was the category where I discussed it.
Watch Links: Crunchyroll
I'm actually kinda surprised how much runtime of each episode is just card battles. I know this is a card game anime, but, at least early on, I was expecting more Slice-of-Life vibes, some more time outside the card battles. There’s a few episodes where we get a break and spend time with the characters, but that’s very rare in this 50 episode stretch. The episodes flow pretty fast, but after a certain point, the battles being such a massive amount of the show kinda sucks when most of the battles are filled with explaining card effects and game mechanics the show has now gone over countless times. So much of every episode is card animations we've seen a billion times, explanations of the effects of cards we've heard a billion times, explanations of how the game is played we've heard a billion times...and a sprinkling of emotional dialogue from the characters. That said, the card battles don’t feel like they drag on forever, even though many battles last multiple episodes. They've got a flow to them that lets the 24 minutes in an episode pass relatively quickly. The turns in the card battles progress pretty fast. There were a few times where I either didn't understand the rules or it seemed like someone was cheating, and while I understand them better now and think it's fairly consistent with that new understanding, it would still be nice if the series was better at explaining some of these things.
The cast is a mixed bag. I’m not a fan of the main character to be honest. Like, he's not just socially inept (although he is also very much that), he's downright rude. Early on, the dude abuses his first friend at his new school (Subaru) very easily, and then when this chick (Shinobu) gives him food when he's starving and legit in trouble, he repays her by...going to the club which she is the leader to beat her at card games and poach members? I'd have been insulted if I were her. Here's this dude I just helped out, and now he wants to come in and poach members of my club? Light just comes off as downright rude, and everyone is way too accommodating of him.
Subaru is fine, he's an ok friend character. Not the archetype I usually enjoy a lot, but he’s inoffensive. He’s not gotten his arc quite yet. Itsuki has a bit going on, but it’s not super compelling or interesting, especially because he’s kinda preachy. I liked Tsubasa and Ren pretty much from their introduction, and they only get better from there. Tsubasa easily has the most depth to her character and the struggle she faces, and has the best dynamics in the show. Ren brings good energy to any scenario she’s in and has her own scenarios which bring some depth to her character. Gentleman was annoying early on, but as they get a bit more fleshed out in terms of motivation and reasoning for their attitude, plus getting to see a bit more expressiveness through their irl form, it becomes a lot easier to like them. The episodes which focus on some combination of Tsubasa, Ren, and/or Gentleman are usually the Slice-of-Life episodes and coincidentally are also often my favorite episodes.
To talk about the production for a second, it's not great. I do like the character designs some. There's some cool stuff in terms of creature design for different decks, but the human characters are also varied and interesting. Some are better than others. Animation is standard, and the reuse of animation is sometimes tedious. Backgrounds are standard to bland or bad. Very much the futuristic school basic aesthetic. The fights aren't really animated either. Sound is unremarkable.
I think that the themes about passion and understanding explored during the battles in different ways for different characters are pretty alright (although the dialogue is pretty heavy-handed and lacks subtlety). The tournament arc is probably my favorite part of the show, the tournament used to reconcile each of Seventh Flame's members' pasts and have them face some representation of their past hang-ups. They vary in quality and none of them are super profound, but it's just kind of a nice arc which systematically uses card games to explore characters and their relationships and struggles. Gentleman faces Shinobu, Tsubasa faces her old senpai, Ren faces her old club president from Fifth Sword, Itsuki faces the Second Blood president, and Light faces Haruma. Subaru is the only real exception with his match against Fuwari from Fourth Wind, which doesn't feel like as much of a reconciliation, but also his problems have yet to really be addressed, so it’s fine to give him a pass for now I suppose. It is a bit convenient that the minimum club size which the characters have met but not exceeded is just enough so that everyone gets to play 1 round in the tournament, but that is the kind of thing I can forgive. I do wish that this rule was consistently applied, though, as First Reaper, Second Blood, and Third Feather all fail to show any semblance of club size beyond the single character we are meant to care about and, in the case of First Reaper and Third Feather, 2 female club members who are friends with the character we are meant to care about. Second Blood is referred to as inactive as a club, so that’s fine, but the other 2 seem to have a total of 3 members at the start of the show, and then Seventh Flame poaches Tsubasa so Third Feather has 2 after that.
This show was a fun enough time, and while I don’t think I’d recommend this show for anyone not interested in a card game anime, I can at least say I didn’t feel like my time was wasted.
