RAIL WARS!

DESCRIPTION

CAST

NOVEL ActionRail Wars!: Nihon Kokuyuu Tetsudou Kouantai

REVIEWS

• 

  jaxter184

  19/100
  I wanted trains, I got an incompetent MC surrounded by tsunderes

  Never have I been so thoroughly disappointed by a work of fiction. A complete waste of what seemed like a very interesting premise. I can't fathom the incompetence of every individual in the series; Nana has no control or oversight over her loose cannon subordinates, Naoto proves himself completely unable to perform even the simplest security-related tasks, and Noa, despite being a professional idol, fails to behave with a single ounce of charisma or likability. Pretty much any of the plot conflicts could have been solved with just a little more communication between members and departments. While this is certainly true of many plots, I'm holding it against the show because it is constantly implied that the JRF is a highly efficient, well-oiled machine, yet it's clear that every single member is not only under-trained, but also a poor fit for their role.

  Perhaps I am being overly harsh; I started watching it because I read the description and got excited to see the dynamic of a spunky, persistent team as they unraveled a continuously expanding, high-stakes conspiracy threatening the well-being of their organization, and by extension, their country. I was looking forward to seeing the protagonist grow from a naïve high-schooler with a rose-tinted view of the rail industry and an adoration of trains struggle to redefine his impossibly idealistic expectations of the job to meet the harsh, yet reasonable, reality.

  What I got was 288 minutes of the platonic ideal of bad anime. Every member of the main cast is a one-dimensional plank that remains completely static throughout the entire run, and the supporting characters are forgettable and capricious. I don't think there was ever a point where I felt like I truly understood a single character's motivations. Every character seemed to behave in a completely inscrutable way, and the word vomit that they try to explain the plot with would probably be worse than just not explaining anything at all. The bit about freezing electrons to stop them from flowing is a particularly poorly written plot point that just totally broke my suspension of disbelief. I think the thing that made it particularly bad is that there could have been any number of more believable ways that liquid nitrogen could have been used to disarm or delay a bomb explosion.

  I'm also mad that Shou was sidelined. He's easily the most unique and potentially useful member of the team, yet almost never interacts meaningfully with the plot, and hardly ever gets a speaking line. He probably could have been replaced with a dog and the plot still would have worked (and he still would have been the most interesting character).

  The only solace was the one (occasionally two) train tidbits in each episode. However, even though the trains should have been the stars of the show, I would be willing to bet money that the amount of animator-hours spent drawing butts and boobs was at least 3x higher than the amount spent drawing trains. I would have given this show at least a 6 if it consisted of just a montage of the train facts. Heck, if they took out the bad writing in the plot-heavy and fanservice parts, and increased the train focus, I could see it being a 7 or 8.

  Also, I counted, and out of the ten named characters who show up in more than one episode, seven of them serve as love interests for the main character. Like sure, harem is a genre with a non-negligible fanbase, but this seems like overkill. Is it even possible to enjoy the implied romantic relationships when literally every female character with a name (except one) falls in love with the main character?

  I would like to say my disappointment is immeasurable, but it's pretty easy to measure; I'd say I wanted this show to be about a 6 or 7, and it ended up being a 2. Frankly, there's no one to blame but myself since I only read the description and not the genre tags, and as a result, ended up expecting PSYCHO-PASS in a world of nationalized trains instead of the oops-all-tsunderes harem anime I should've expected.

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