Just watched episode 7 of Fractale. Basically, nothing here suggests to me that the series is ever going to get over being all over the place. Some parts are pretty good, some parts are just terrible. The show moves at a glacial pace for 18 minutes dwelling on things that aren't remotely important to anything, then crams in a ton of plot-important revelations and action. The recurring villain who appears at the end of the episode is the kind mustache-twirling, always smirking villain that every single anime these days just has to have and it's beyond annoying. Nevermind that all the bad guys so far and incredibly one dimensional. Where's their drive? Why are they doing what they're doing. Who knows, who cares. That's apparently what the creators think. As long as the villains is totally evil, you'll completely buy into it and root for their inevitable come-uppance at the hands of our plucky, quirky heroes.
Everything surrounding the series, including the first episode or two, suggests that the series should be a fast-paced, story-driven adventure series [like Nadia or early Ghibli], but it's not. It spends too much time [of its 11 episode length] meandering about on slice-of-life stuff with no stakes and no relevance. There are a lot of things wrong with modern anime, we've certainly mentioned enough here in this thread, but I think this over-reliance on non-story may very well be the biggest.
No against slice-of-life, some of my favorites series are, but too often series try to tow the line, throw out a bunch of slice-of-life stuff and then try to cram some kind of serious story into the last few episodes and it never works. You know why Aria is such a great series? Because it doesn't try to cram in a story! It knows exactly what it's doing and then does that thing very, very well. Fractale wants to be a thoughtful scifi series wrapped in an adventurous storyline, but also play around with its characters as they visit some new place every week and have carefree adventures and learn about friendship and such. It's ruining what could have been a really good series. But there's also big problems with the writing beyond that, so maybe it would be ruined anyway.
It's just so frustrating.
