Second post of the day is the review of the anime BECK – Mongolian Chop Squad.
The story is about a middle-schooler Tanaka “Koyuki” Yukio who joins a live band group named the BECK founded by the genius guitarist Minami Ryuusuke. Basically the story revolves from the birth of BECK towards their dreams to become professional.
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Story:-
A slice-of-life anime, with zero magic and stuff. Some fighting is in order though. This anime doesn’t have the most captivating story, but it still pretty good at moving people emotions. The anime is suitable for all people, despite heavy music connections. This is mainly because the anime is not really obsessed at tracking Koyuki’s improvements in playing electric guitars and singing ballad rock, but also his love life, his swimming practices and others.
Story is well-paced, and nothing in the series feels like a filler episode. The ending could have some more airtime though, cause it seems that the last 2-3 episodes has been packed with too much ending events. I have not read the manga so cannot comment on the difference.
Generally, the story is good unless you despise heavy metal music and only like some sugar-coated standard anime themes. Or maybe you don’t like English expletives? There are plenty of them here, I wonder what time the anime is shown in Japan.
Character design:-
No problem really with character design. Very well done for humans of both sexes, and dogs, and parrots……
Voice acting:-
Japanese voices are quite good, especially the voices of Chiba (Shuntaro Ohata) and Ryuusuke (Yuuma Ueno). The fact that Koyuki has 2 voices probably dragged it to oblivion, mainly because the difference between both is very apparent. Others are not really outstanding to mention here.
BTW, English voices sucks. Pitiful attempts at screaming F**K, MOTHERF**KER and other American English expletives just reminded me of the student of Azrael here. The less said about the English dialogues, the better.
Animation/direction:-
While there are no apparent problem with the quality of directing,
some quality issues when it comes to little animation such as characters walking forward
at long range. Generally, nothing really to complain about.
Conclusion:-
I’ll get straight to the rating and gives it 7 out of 10. There you go.