AZUR LANE: BISOKU ZENSHIN!

DESCRIPTION

CAST

ANIME ActionAzur Lane
MANGA Slice of LifeAzur Lane: Bisoku Zenshin!
OVA EcchiAzur Lane: Bisoku Zenshin! Hokorashiki Bokou ni Shukusai wo
Not Available EcchiAzur Lane: Bisoku Zenshin! 2nd Season

REVIEWS

• 

  superp2222

  80/100
  They had everything they needed. They used it all.

  Minor spoilers are included. They shouldn't take away from your enjoyment tho :D

  Normally, I make a review for the principal anime of a series that defines my overall opinion of the series in general. If it's sequel seasons are different enough to warrant another review, I will, but this is the first time I've made exception not for a sequel, but rather for a spin-off. That is why for this review I will mostly compare Slow Head to its parent anime Azur Lane

  Azur Lane: Slow Ahead is perhaps one of the smartest moves that whoever was in charge of overseeing Azur Lane's anime productions did. It shows that even if the primary anime went horribly south, something can still be done to save the franchise in the eyes of those outside of its fans.

  Slow Ahead was made by the newly formed Yostar Pictures and Candybox Studio, this means that not only is the anime going to feel stylistically different from its parent anime, its also going to be written by people with ties to the original game itself. This overall worked like a charm, as Slow Ahead completely threw plot out the window and openly invited "plot" to completely run its course in these 12 short episodes. This paints Azur Lane in the picture that we the playerbase have seen it since the dawn of its release: Its a cute game about cute girls. Sure there are some events with interesting plots, but you're not here to dive into the plot, you're here to dive into the cleavage of the whatever ship you have as your secretary.

  Plot
  As I've said before, there is not plot in this anime. Each episode is a short ~10 min long story of the Starter Squad comprised of Ayanami, Laffey, Javelin, and Z23 as they embark on various journeys around the Home Port. Every new episode features more recognizable and loved shipgirls as they do various slice-of-life classics like play basketball with Baltimore, barbecue on the beach with Minneapolis and Rodney, relax in a hot spring with Shoukaku and Zuikaku. Each episode is short, snappy, and has minimal ties with other episodes, effectively making it a snippet of "another day in the lives of the Starter Squad"

  This type of plotline works absolute wonders for an anime based on Azur Lane. Why? Because there's a few hundred ships in Azur Lane, and you're not gonna cram them all in a giant plot-centric story about saving the world (Just look at what happened to Iron Blood — A major faction and one of the most important factions in the original games — in the parent anime). Instead, you focus on the best qualities of each and every girl encountered in these snippets. This not only gives you a positive after feeling after the credits roll but it also reinforces what you loved most about each of these girls. With 12 short episodes, these episodes are also infinitely rewatchable and each time you're going to see the same ship that you've had working hard as your secretary in the game or even oathed.

  Characters
  This was one of the most dividing factors of the parent anime. As I mentioned earlier, Azur Lane has an absolutely giant collection of shipgirls, and it would be impossible to cram them all into one big anime. While the parent anime recognized this, their focus on Enterprise exclusively made the anime bland as hell, especially since they didn't even do much to her character.

  Slow Ahead took one look at what happened to the parent anime and said "Yea, we're not doing that." Enterprise, Akagi, Kaga, and the other "protagonists" in the original anime don't make a SINGLE appearance in the entire show (Except for Belfast because we gotta introduce Bel-Chan somehow). Rather, the side characters that didn't get as much screentime, like the Crane Sisters, Bismarck and Eugen, and the Nagatos are given the screentime they properly deserved and a few other well-known and well-liked characters like the aforementioned Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Rodney are added in for a nicely well-rounded cast. No character development is made, and rather, the anime focuses on highlighting the pre-established traits that these characters all possess. This makes it so that we're not staring at cardboard cutouts, but rather the shipgirls we're all so familiar with. That is why this anime overall felt so much more enjoyable to watch compared to the parent anime. It's just less of a toll and you just get to sit back and laugh.

  Art
  With a change of studio came a change in artstyle. Slow Ahead made the smart choice of using CGI very sparingly and focusing exclusively on animation. The show overall felt very candylike (funny because one of the studios is called CandyBox), it felt very much like a Saturday-Morning cartoon type of anime, and the colors are bright, vibrant, and the animation is simple but detailed and precise. It's the perfect type of animation for a slice-of-life anime such as Slow Ahead.

  Not much to be said of music, there aren't any very good bangers, but its not like the music sucked either

  Overall, Slow Ahead demonstrates the best of the Azur Lane franchise, its vast list of cute and quirky shipgirls that are sure to catch everyone's eye. And the antics of the Starter Squad will never grow old. Way better, well done.

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• 

  Fusionaceblus

  65/100
  AL + Moe = PB + Chocolate. Not my thing, but good for what it is. Also, Boobs.

  So after the uh... "experience" that was the original Azur Lane Anime, I was constantly spouting what they should be doing instead. Just have the girls do stuff. Maybe they listened, or it was already in development, but after a while came the Slow Ahead anime.

  For people who don't know, Azur Lane had a few comics going, and I believe they still are. Slow Ahead was one of them, and in it was usually Z23 or Javelin doing stuff with whatever ship was relevant at the time. Another was Queen's Orders, but that's for a different review. Fact of the matter is, the comic was slice-of-life, instead of the "serious" story that the anime was trying to show.

  To quickly summarize my opinions on the original anime, it felt too unfocused, with it trying to do several things it couldn't in the short span of it's runtime. For a series with over 600 characters, trying to do a story focused anime seems practically impossible to do, since, honestly, most of the characters are boiled down to a trait or two (of course, there's some of my favorites that I feel can offer a lot of interesting scenarios, like Sheffield, Kiev, or Roon).

  So what makes this so good? Well, maybe not "great" but a good fit for the series? Simple. The characters just do cute things. Moe is a perfect fit for the kind of stuff that works for Azur Lane, with so many characters you can have a generally revolving cast save for the 4 starters that seem to work pretty well as a friend group, not to mention the episodes are half the length of normal episodes so they can be more creative with their ideas and not feel like the idea is being stretched too thin. Cute characters do cute things. You can't really go wrong if that's what you're in the mood for.

  Now, why the score is so low for me, is a few things. One, the ever expanding cast still seems hard to keep up with. New Jersey or several of the Prio ships never make an appearance, and while the background is full of several different characters and its a lot less forced feeling, it still feels under utilized. Two, I'm not exactly all that into moe. Either the way the anime portrays it is just underwhelming or not as fun as I would like it to be, or something else.

  Another thing is the fanservice. If you played Azur Lane, you know that the ships in that game are carrying milk trucks on their chest. One one hand it makes a lot of the characters feel rather samey, on the other, is a giant tit. The anime is not shy whatsoever about accentuating the huge chest of the shipgirls in the anime, in fact, the last episode is just Laffey sleeping on their boobs. While I like tits, there feels like a severe lack of other kinds of fanservice present that the game also has.

  They're coming out with a second season sometime in the near future, and for what it is, Slow Ahead is a decent enough anime and a perfect formula for one of my favorite gacha games. Of course, if they can figure out how to do stuff with the Sirens and not come off as ungodly confusing, that would be fun to see, as well.

  Continue on AniList

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