Now that my burning hatred for GoHands after nearly ruining the Tokyo Babylon 2021 adaptation is down to it’s final bits of kindling; I think I can try (keyword there), and finally put up my review on their latest offering Project Scard: Praeter no Kizu.
Project Scard is all about three factions, Helios, Artemis, and the Public Security Special Service Force and how they all interact with one another in the lawless area of the Akatsuki Special Zone, in Tokyo. Public Security being part of the police faction is attempting to reign in the lawlessness nature of the area. They have two scard users. Artemis, backed up some serious commercial industries, is lead by lady Azusa and her two ‘wings’ Ran and Jin all three of which are scard users. The final and main characters of our story are Helios, lead by Arashiba Eiji the hero of the Akatsuki his younger brother Kazuma, and healer Kagami. We then throw in Yamato Kai, a resident of the district and his younger brother Minato, as the duo accidentally get involved in a gang fight, where the hero of the Akatsuki dies, and hands over the power of his scard, to Kai. Oh, and apparently some scard user with a scard called Fenrir is on the war path, and might you know, kill some scard users and civilians alike just for shits and giggles.
I would love to try and write a different plot summary, but there’s really no point. I’ve looked through my notes, re-wrote my plot synopsis three separate times, referenced both MAL and Anilist and I really can’t come up with anything better. Project Scard suffers from a lot of issues from the jump. The first being there’s no explanation as to why anything is happening, or why we should care.
Normally, I hate the exposition dump, but I can say that this series probably would have faired better with one told via a narrator. There’s no lore as to who or what scard and scard users are. They just exist because that’s why. There’s no elaboration about the factions, other then without them there’s no conflict. And without conflict, GoHands can’t animate some sparkly fight scenes. There’s not even an explanation as to why it matters that Eiji dies. Sure, he’s the hero of the Akatsuki but that means jack shit when we don’t know why the Akatsuki is this war-zone in the first place!
Being brutally honest, Project Scard is what happens when a studio can’t actually come up with a new idea. At first I’ll admit that the idea of this anime was interesting to me because it resembled K. Around episode 3 I realized this was just an extended butchering of K, re-wrapped with some new costumes and even less female characters. Scards are the same as Kings, except they all have different powers and team up rather then recruited non-powered up people to their group. The factions, down to the costuming and color division, read exactly the same as K. Point being, don’t waste your time with Project Scard, and just go watch K, it’s the better of the two series anyway.
That being said, Project Scard does have one major difference between itself and K. It actually has something to unique to it, that I never noticed it in any of the other anime I’ve watched and reviewed before. So this particular nugget of a mention has to be something special. This being the dialogue. The most unnatural, repetitive, and overall annoying dialogue I’ve ever heard in an anime. The follow summary, is what makes up half of any given episode of Project Scard:
The speaker will recite their name, what faction they are from, what their scard does, the scard’s name, their opponents name, the power of their opponents scard, and their name again before actually saying something to progress the plot via a verbal babble info-dump. Any plot progressing, new to the viewer information will inevitably be interrupted by an unnatural incorporation of the speaker saying the opponent’s name again, and then they will begin combat.
If it is Ran on screen the spice will be a badly incorporated idiom of some sort, which Jin will provide the meaning too, even if it’s an obvious one. If it is Jin on screen he will reference how much he doesn’t want to do overtime as part of Artemis, or how much of an otaku he is, it’s extra special both will be said. They will then repeat the name of their adversary, their power, and then begin combat.
That’s literally half the dialouge of the series summarized for you. I would say that to make it more palable to make a drinking game of it, but you’d end up dead before episode 2’s opening theme starts. Remember how I put a narrator should have done the exposition dump to help this story out? That was intentional, because the dialogue of these characters is the most long-winded, indirect, unnatural sounding info-dumps I’ve ever heard. There’s not a single scene, a single pair of characters that has a normal sounding, direct and succinct, unpretentious conversation in this story. It’s simply bizarre how bad this dialogue is, and I sincerely hope the dub team cleaned it up and streamlined it because my god the original is bad.
I feel like that’s enough, but there’s two more major negatives that I want to include. That being that Go Hands, does not know how design kid characters, their eyes especially Minato’s are ridiculously large that it’s uncomfortable. Like… I’ve seen oversized eyes before but this is too much. Oh, and also like Tokyo Babylon 2021 when GoHands was in the mix, apparently Ran’s outfit was plagerized too same with Kazuma, although GoHands has never said anything about the matter. Also just in general GoHands can’t come up with original ideas so….
To very breifly round this out there were a few good points to Project Scard that sparkle in the otherwise pile of garbage it is. The animation, especially the blending of 2D and 3D for fight scenes was very nice. The fight scenes themselves, of which there were many, were visually pleasing to the eye. However, a lot of other animation was bad. I wrote a note saying that in episode four, Kazuma walks like the notorious Code Geass ‘Soup’ spoof so that should tell you something about where and how they allotted resources and time.
Additionally, as much as it hurts me to say; Project Scard had a banging soundtrack. Like seriously, the series had an awesome jazz themed soundtrack because that ending music was the only pleasurable sound to come from this series. It’s just a shame that it ended up… here. Instead of something where a banging jazz soundtrack would be an added bonus, not one of two selling points.
So should you watch Project Scard? No. Absolutely not. It’s riddled with more problems then the ones I managed to bang out a cohesive thought on. I can say with resounding confidence, that if you do have the urge to watch this; just go watch K instead. And with that, I’m going to close this rant review here. I’ll see you next post with more measured takes.
Phoenix Talks Pop Culture Japan 