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Shadow Skill TV
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Animation - 7.0 |
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Sound - 7.9 |
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Story - 6.0 |
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Character - 6.4 |
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Value - 6.1 |
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Enjoyment - 6.5 |
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Average - 6.6 |
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| Average |
3.7 |
| Animation |
4 |
| Sound |
7 |
| Story |
3 |
| Character |
3 |
| Value |
2 |
| Enjoyment |
3 |
| Man nehme einen weiblichen Hauptcharakter a la Lina Inverse, füge die Kulisse von Record of Lodoss War hinzu und reichere das ganze mit einer Fülle an Scryed-mäßiger Action an und man bekommt ungefähr das was Shadow Skill ist, oder besser gesagt sein möchte. Das Unterhaltungsniveau der 3 genannten Serien erreicht Shadow Skill nämlich nie und geht im Vergleich dank einer Vielzahl von Schwächen letztendlich gehörig in die Knie. Angefangen beim simplen Fight-Anime Schema das sich von Anfang bis Ende durch die Serie zieht und die Handlung zu einer Aneinanderreihung an wenig hirnschmalzlastigen Prügeleien ausarten lässt die so gut wie ständig unter den gleichen Vorzeichen stattfinden, bis hin zu fast ausnahmslos langweiligen Figuren und einem Plot der am Ende mehr Löcher hat als ein Schweizerkäse. Einer Story, die sich so gut wie ausschließlich mit dem Thema “Stärke und Kampfgeist“ auseinandersetzt, Tiefgang zu verleihen ist mit Sicherheit kein leichtes Unterfangen aber durchaus im Bereich des Möglichen. Da man sich im Falle Shadow Skill aber ausschließlich darauf konzentriert hat die Handlung mit Geprügel zu überschwemmen, fällt dies gänzlich ins Wasser. Hör ich da jetzt vielleicht jemanden sagen “Bei Scryed war’s doch ganz genau so!“? Stimmt, zweifellos ist Scryed nach genau diesem Muster gestrickt aber Scryed hat das was Shadow Skill nicht hat und das ist unterhaltsame Action, womit wir dann auch beim nächsten Kritikpunkt angekommen wären, der wohl der mit Abstand schwerwiegendste ist. Die Action in Shadow Skill ist NICHT unterhaltsam und bleibt, dank sehr schwachen Animationen, die gesamte Serie über völlig blass und unspektakulär. Das was also die Trumpfkarte der Serie darstellen sollte verkümmert zu einer kläglichen Vorstellung die sogar die Fights in DBZ stellenweise bombastisch aussehen lässt. Was Shadow Skill damit noch bleibt ist nicht viel bis gar nichts, denn sowohl Story als auch Charaktere wissen, wie gesagt, nicht wirklich zu überzeugen. Nicht nur das die Handlung am, oben angesprochenen, monotonen Muster leidet sie übernimmt sich auch noch mit der Integrierung von Unmengen an Subplots welche die ganze Geschichte, besonders im letzten Viertel der Serie, nur unnötig verkomplizieren und für Verwirrung beim Zuschauers sorgen. Was natürlich nicht heißt das man es hier später noch mit komplexem Stoff zu tun hat, oh nein es ist nur mehr ein unheimlich schwer einzuordnendes Kuddelmuddel bestehend aus allerhand Vorkommnissen, die es obendrein noch nicht einmal sonderlich wert sind verfolgt zu werden. Man hat besonders mit dem Start der 2. Hälfte immer wieder das Gefühl, dass das Konzept irgendwie abhanden gekommen ist und das Geschehen wie ein kopfloses Huhn durch die Episoden rennt. Die Ausarbeitung der Charaktere war für mich ebenfalls nicht zufrieden stellend, da sie durchgehen von viel zu simplen Motiven angetrieben werden die nicht in der Lage sind besonders tief blicken zu lassen. Sonderlich große Sympathieträger sucht man leider auch vergebens. Letzten Endes bleibt mit Shadow Skill nichts weiter als ein extrem einfach gestrickter Haudrauf-Anime zurück, dessen möglich gewesenes Unterhaltungspotential hauptsächlich von schwach inszenierten Action-Szenen im Keim erstickt wird. Das konfuse Skript und die schwache Handhabung der Figuren kann man durchaus verkraften, aber das Herzstück eines Fight-Animes sind nun mal die Fights und wenn diese beim Zuschauen keinen Spaß machen hat dieser sein Hauptziel deutlich verfehlt.
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0 of 1 people found this review helpful.
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| Average |
6.0 |
| Animation |
7 |
| Sound |
7 |
| Story |
5 |
| Character |
6 |
| Value |
5 |
| Enjoyment |
6 |
| I knew this would be bad from the beginging, I'm not sure why i saw it through to the end. Elle, the main character in the begining, has a fun personality, but she suddenly becomes useless about 60% of the way through. Most of the other characters are 2D with few exceptions. Gau Ban suddenly becomes powerful for reasons that just don't work for me. A lot of time is wasted in verbal posing and most of the important characters choose dumb names for themselves. Majority of attacks are boring/repetative except for that guy who uses the YIN style. The Story unfolds slowly with poor pacing and lots of illogical plot device that one could ignore if some of the other elements weren't so bad. This really isn't worth watching.
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| Average |
4.0 |
| Animation |
7 |
| Sound |
9 |
| Story |
1 |
| Character |
2 |
| Value |
3 |
| Enjoyment |
2 |
| I was very disappointed with this anime.. very disappointed.. because it had so much promise. The name for a start was very promising, but it never quite explained why its called Shadow Skill properly. That element was never developed properly.
Furthermore the fighting techniques in the series borders on the rediculous and the plot, nonsensical, especially at the ending as with a lot of animes. Somehow alot of animes seem to botch the endings. This one especially. We see an enemy jumping over cliffs and bridges in ONE jump, but the hero, who is even stronger than the enemy, is WALKING and took forever to get to where he wanted. Such logical implausibilities should not have been possible in the first place. Also, you have a junior fighter taking one HELL of a beating, enough to kill ten people, suddenly winning a fight because he's understood some crappy logic. If it was just a quarter of a fight, or even halfway through the fight I can understand, but after a busload of pummelling to the extent that he can't stand??? Then miraculously through understanding some logic he stands and beat the crap out of one of the strongest fighters in the world.
I would advice you to skip this series unless you really have nothing else to do, as the story suffers from too much plot manipulation and illogical scenes that EVEN in an anime is simply painful and tortous to watch. Maybe if you're 12 its ok. For any adult, skip it.
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0 of 1 people found this review helpful.
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| Average |
3.2 |
| Animation |
7 |
| Sound |
6 |
| Story |
2 |
| Character |
2 |
| Value |
1 |
| Enjoyment |
1 |
| Horrible beyond words. Even as a fighting anime this is of no value to watch. The characters are linear, the plot is inconsistent, and even the fights are not enjoyable. For instance, not only are the fight scenes filled with uninteresting moves, they drag on with characters announcing the extremely long titles over and over again. Magic (Seal) using characters always end up the 'seal' what it's name is. Then the seal replies with a lengthy poem before the spell is cast. The lack of interesting fighting skills combined with the constant interuptions to the action ruin this even as a fighting anime with no plot. This is even worse than Scryed
So in short, whatever you do don't watch this, and certainly never pay money to own it. Watch AirMaster, watch Naruto, even watch DBZ, but pretend this one doesn't exist.
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0 of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Haruko |
(2004-08-23 14:03:59) 2004-08-23 13:44:58 |
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| Average |
8.5 |
| Animation |
8 |
| Sound |
8 |
| Story |
8 |
| Character |
8 |
| Value |
9 |
| Enjoyment |
10 |
| I watched parts of this years ago, when it first came out on fansub, and while I had liked the first eps, I remember being turned off by ep 6 (the one with all the love declarations), then I missed a bunch only to catch up in the 6 last eps, which did not make much sense, unsurprisingly.
The fighting and malevolent crisis going on undreground reminded me a bit of Scrapped Princess (but maybe that's just me), although Shadow Skill has no pretention to be *deep*. It's about cool martial arts. And reasons to fight, to become strong... that's about how deep it gets.
Overall, this series could have done with fewer episodes, or rather, it could have developped this Lunaris Umbra character, which was much talked about in mysterious terms, but besides two camera shots as she appeared, was never developped at all. At all!!
Meanwhile, there was quite a few filler eps, like ep 6, which could at least have been compressed. Ep 4 was filler too, but it was fun.
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isokana |
(2004-08-12 10:39:51) 2004-08-07 19:42:48 |
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| Average |
6.7 |
| Animation |
7 |
| Sound |
7 |
| Story |
5 |
| Character |
8 |
| Value |
6 |
| Enjoyment |
7 |
| Shadow Skill tries to be more than a simple fighting anime. Some high-thought plans are going in the background and characters ponder the true purpose of a fighter.
Well, those big plans were pretty vague and after the last episode I wasn't quite sure did I know anything more than in the beginning. The story started out pretty slow and it never hooked me thus long pauses between episodes and I never got the hang of what was really happening. All the talk about what makes a vaar or a sevaar started to bore after the midway mark.
Fights were the best part of the series. Characters were interesting enough and I was looking forward to who was going to fight who next. Animation looks little old but is good enough. Music was fitting for a fighting series.
Shadow Skill has the potential but fails to use it. Watch if you like fights and don't mind some philosophical mumbling in between.
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Cauldron |
(2004-07-18 04:53:00) 2004-07-18 04:47:04 |
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| Average |
7.3 |
| Animation |
7 |
| Sound |
8 |
| Story |
8 |
| Character |
6 |
| Value |
7 |
| Enjoyment |
8 |
| A good fighting series. I found it to be very similar to Slayers, except it was more serious and the characters stay in the same place.
The story was good (politics mixed with martial arts), it's a shame that's the secondary characters are under employed. The series would have been better if they were better used.
Also I have another reproach :
*little spoiler*
The ending.
Very bad and unimaginative ending. I hate when the situation is the same at the end than at the beginning. It looks like the 26 eps of fighting, trials and achievements were just anecdotal.
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marc |
(2004-07-13 07:40:14) 2004-07-13 07:38:58 |
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| Average |
4.8 |
| Animation |
4 |
| Sound |
7 |
| Story |
4 |
| Character |
5 |
| Value |
5 |
| Enjoyment |
4 |
| I have to say that this is the 1st anime series I’ve ever watched where I really didn’t like the art. I usually never take that into consideration however in this case I found the animation style to be so poor that it made the show hard to watch. Its not that the actually drawing or characters looked bad, but its just so dark that at times you cant really see what the hell is going on. I don’t put too much weight into art style anyways so moving on... The story was extremely lacking. Some country wants to overthrow another. There are these super solders called Sevaars that guard the target country and basically this series is about them specifically Elle and Gau. Gau develops and gets stronger but is just too shallow and stupid to be believable or likable. I found it hard cheering for him; rather I wanted to see him die so we can just move on. Elle was a little more interesting but again all the characters, on both sides, were just plain boring and underdeveloped. This show is about fighting plain and simple. The plot, characterization, and everything else took a back seat. I do enjoy fighting but the scenes in this one were very repetitive (we saw the same moves dozens of times and none of them really made any sense) and they scenes were just plain corny (example… Gau shouts “hyougi mace� or something stupid like that and it ends up being a simple punch to the stomach… just lame)… so it got a 4 for enjoyment. Voice acting was average everything else was just bland or plain poor.
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| Average |
9.8 |
| Animation |
10 |
| Sound |
9 |
| Story |
10 |
| Character |
10 |
| Value |
10 |
| Enjoyment |
10 |
| Easily the BEST fighting anime I've seen. Great story! Great characters! Great action scenes!
The amount of violence is decent, not overwhelming, yet enough to make you want more action.
The charcters are great, and especially the way Gau Ban develops to become the great warrior amazed me lots!
Anyway, I really dont see how people managed to rate it that low... Even the first half of the series which is mostly criticized is imo just amazing and is what makes Shadowskill the anime that it is!
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| Average |
9.5 |
| Animation |
9 |
| Sound |
9 |
| Story |
10 |
| Character |
9 |
| Value |
10 |
| Enjoyment |
10 |
| Honestly, I don't see what all of the fuss is about the animation. Although in certain episodes it may be slightly lacking at times, when it needs to be good, it's excellent. They don't reuse scenes over and over like a lot of other anime out there.
Also, for those that haven't seen the entire series, don't even bother reviewing it. That's way too biased. You're basing your review of the plot on something that hasn't even developed at all yet. The entire first half of the series is devoted to character development, background information, and foreshadowing. Not long after the half-way mark, the story -really- picks up.
This series is definately worth watching if you watch it all the way through. People reviewing after watching less than 10 episodes has made this series' rating very unfair. It's easily better than quite a few series on the top 100.
Also, for those saying that the OVA is better, I don't know what you've been smoking...
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0 of 0 people found this review helpful.
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| Average |
4.5 |
| Animation |
3 |
| Sound |
8 |
| Story |
5 |
| Character |
6 |
| Value |
2 |
| Enjoyment |
3 |
| SIMILAR TO: Shadow Skill OAV
Oh dear. This suffers from what I call the "Hunter X Hunter" curse - the poor animation destroys the overall anime.
Unlike the OAV (which I liked), the series has some very basic animation, which is saved only by the plentiful action scenes that try to make good use of it. The story and characters, whilst above average in the OAV, are brought down a knotch here in the series because they just suited being in an OAV more.
But once again, I have to come back to the animation, because that is what spoiled the overall enjoyment of the series for me too. The replay value of the series is also affcted, as I've tried to re-watch this series many times but just keep giving up cos the animation pisses me off.
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0 of 1 people found this review helpful.
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| Average |
8.8 |
| Animation |
9 |
| Sound |
8 |
| Story |
8 |
| Character |
9 |
| Value |
9 |
| Enjoyment |
10 |
| I'm not generally a fighting-anime fan, but Shadow Skill managed to somewhat impress me with some good action scenes, interesting story and well-designed characters (which, I admit some could have been developed a little more/more background given).
The animation isn't particualrly stunning, but the fact that they actually animated almost all of the fighting in FULL, rather than re-use images over and over or rely on that 'still image moving across the screen' crap is commendable, considering some of the cheap fighting anime they release these days.
I liked the fantasy setting, rather unusual for a fist-fighting martial arts show (well except for a steel boomerang lol). The manga-to-anime conversion of the world of Shadow Skill is quite done quite well, albeit leaving a small plot loophole here and there. They don't follow the entire manga story till the end though, but that's not unusual. At least the ending point was chosen well and left few seriously pressing loose ends *cough*BESERK*cough*.
For those who lament the demise of quality in some of today's fighting anime releases, give Shadow Skill a go. The dated-looking artwork and slower initial pacing may turn some off at first, but don't let it fool you. I consider SS an unsung classic in the genre.
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| Average |
7.3 |
| Animation |
7 |
| Sound |
8 |
| Story |
7 |
| Character |
7 |
| Value |
7 |
| Enjoyment |
8 |
| A very solid fighting anime with a bit too many plot holes.
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| Average |
8.8 |
| Animation |
9 |
| Sound |
10 |
| Story |
8 |
| Character |
8 |
| Value |
9 |
| Enjoyment |
9 |
| Hooray, the first to review this!
If you have watched the OVA, go watch this. I am sure you will find 10x more enjoyment than the OVA. If you haven't watched the OVA, good. You probably will vomit anyway after you finish.
Shadow Skill has tons and tons of action. And you probably won't be disappointed in the fighting scenes. Get a bit boring at the end because there are some secret remain unsolved. I think the creator is trying to leave some opening to the story for a second season. But overall, it's better than most fighting anime out there.
The opening theme "Born Legend" is definitely one of the best.
Alan
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