Spring Pilots: Shangri-La

Wow, I never thought I’d say this about about anything.  The first episode of Shangri-la was great, average, and bad ALL AT ONCE.  This assesment actually makes sense if you split the show into three categories: action, setting/characters, and story.

I’ll start off w/ the bad: the action.  The big fight at the end of the episode felt very anti-climactic.  It was rather abrupt and didn’t flow together at all.  One moment, the military was raiding Duomo, the next Kuniko was trying to understand how to fight w/ the big @$$ boomerang, and then that woMAN was chasing after the shoulder yelling “MEN!!”. I literally facepalmed during that scene.

Next up is the average: the story.  Okay this is kinda unfair.  Shangri-la sorta dumps the viewer into the middle of the story and it’s up to us to pick up elements as it goes along.  Last Exile did a similar thing.  The first two episodes was all about establishing the setting, and the actual story didn’t get introduced until episode 3.  So rather then average, it’s more like “too early to tell”.

But the best thing about this show, is luckily one of the biggest things I look for in an anime: characters/setting.  Within minutes of the episode starting, I was already in love with the scenery.  It’s a real pity that there is no HD release, cause then this would’ve been gorgeous.  While it’s not at Last Exile level, the setting does have a VERY good chance of growing into something to be remembered alongside that and Eureka Seven.  

The characters also seem to be interesting.  Kuniko seems very headstrong and looks to be a great lead character.  All the side characters seem interesting, but probably need more development before I can judge.

So if the action gets better, or they just drop the action completly, Shangri-la should end up being a very good watch, with a high potential to be an amazing series.  Looking forward to episode 2

FIRST IMPRESSION: 8/10

_tekky99