So here we are: W’z. Good ol’ W’z. W’z W’z W’z. Which is pronounced “wise”, apparently. Damn, no more calling it “Wzzzzzzzz” (but no I’m still going to call it that). It looks like this a thing I need to have seen Hand Shakers for. I have not seen Hand Shakers, and I don’t really want to. Oh well, guess I’m going to be semi-lost for this! I feel like I’ve almost been tricked into watching this show under the pretence of it being a Hand Shakers rip-off, but instead it’s an actual sequel, and I’m annoyed about it but not enough to stop watching.
To my untrained eye it seems that W’z is set 10 years after the events of Hand Shakers, and the beautiful men are fighting. I imagine there were also beautiful men fighting in Hand Shakers because that’s sort of GoHands’ entire thing as far as I can make out, but I think these are probably different beautiful men to those ones.
It looks like our main character, Yukiya is a Hand Shaker? Which I think is a person who gets powers to fight to get God to grant their wish? And he’s an irregular Hand Shaker at that, which, among other things presumably, means he can bring people into the Hand Shaker dimension(?), which is like a big screensaver world that primarily seems to function as a music video setting. It looks pretty cool, to be fair. I’m not crazy about the art style of this show in general, but it’s exactly what you’d expect from GoHands. It has its moments and there are a lot of creative decisions that pan out, but overall the look reminds me of overly-polished DeviantArt art: it’s not that there’s much wrong with it technically, but the flashiness is so off-putting that it paradoxically cheapens the whole aesthetic. Plus I get dizzy watching their camerawork. You could definitely get motion sickness from it. Won’t GoHands ever think of the queasy?
I’m not wowed by Yukiya as an MC at all, but I’m willing to give him a chance to get some character development in him, even if my hopes aren’t particularly high. We’ve had some pretty serious hints about his weird past dropped, like how he thinks he’s 14, and suggestions of his dad being an important person, but they’re so obvious and clumsy that it’s hard to do much but laugh at them.
The other big character of the episode was Yukiya’s female sidekick Haruka, who might grow on me, but for now, I’m finding her pretty bland. Not as bland as Yukiya, because I can at least name one of her character traits, which is more than I can say for Yukiya (he… likes music? Does that count?). But that character trait is tsundere, so it’s pretty close.
We also meet a few other Hand Shakers towards the end of the episode, but there isn’t really anything interesting to say about them now, and if there’s anything to say after eleven more episodes, you can colour me surprised.
I can’t say that this episode is disappointing because it’s almost exactly what I thought it would be, but I do think it’s a shame that it didn’t end up proving me wrong. The premise of a wannabe house DJ trying to make it big online had potential, and I could even handle the shoehorned-in action element, but GoHands never planned on using the situation as anything other than an underwhelming flavour sachet in the instant ramen that is this misleadingly-labelled Hand Shakers sequel, and it is painfully obvious.
I’m probably going to stick it out to the end, but I won’t be blogging about it. It was fun to do this once, but I’d feel weird about consistently covering a sequel without having seen the original installation. Plus I really can’t see this thing getting much better from here.
Possibility of watching: High
Possibility of blogging: Low
I believe GoHands’s approach with W’z and Hand Shakers is Style over substance – namely the anime is a vehicle to showcase all the animation styles they’ve developed over the years to establish themselves as a brand name similar to Kyoani or ufotable. (Especially the dynamic camera movements, which is the specialty of one of their main animators.)
This animation blogger summed it up as :
“…A few select studios like BONES, KyoAni and ufotable have earned their fame due to exceptional production strength, but for everyone else the solution has to be more quirky…(In GoHands’s rush to build their brand through flashy overpolished animation) at some point the methods replaced the goals – scenes no longer are meant to achieve a result, they’re showcases of this particular aesthetic the studio’s built.”
TLDR Studio higherups insist their original anime Must use all their inhouse animation aesthetic, regardless of whether it fits the story or characters being told, in order to stand out of the pack and solidify their brand as the creators of their unique Style.