Let’s face it: the reason most of the people who kept watching this show did so is because they were either Mamiko Noto/Kugimiya Rie fanboys/girls, they wanted to see how much more sex/violence/disturbing images the show could contain, or the plot was unsatisfying and they wanted justification for watching the previous episodes. I fall (mostly) into the last category.
Spoilers for the series below.
The Mnemosyne OVA was… interesting, to say the least. When I first saw the trailer of this show, I’ll admit it immediately caught my attention because of the huge amount of violence and nudity; not to say that this is the reason I watched it, it was just really surprising (though not so much now that I’ve seen things such as Kanokon and Higurashi) . I also thought about that the concept, routed in Greek Mythology, was unique and could go in various directions. My positive opinion of the show was re-affirmed by the first episode; anyhing set early nineties has a classic feel to me (though it’s only a decade ago) and the episode had just the right amount of mystery and intrigue mixed in with the smooth animation and excessive violence to make me anticipate the rest of the series (There were also zombies and clones; what’s not to love). I felt that the show would continue to be good if it could keep the balance of of the overall plot and seperate cases right. And to a certain extent, it did. But there were a few things that bothered me.
The coherence of the overall plot, even when I’ve seen the final episode, still isn’t as fine-tuned as it could be. I didn’t empathise or really even care about any of the main characters except for Rin, and possibly Maeno. None of them had a well-developed enough backstory. Asop turned out to be crazy and sadistic for no apparent reason, Mimi was just a loli sidekick, Laura was almost the same as Asop but she helped Mimi and Mishio at the end, Sayara ( the scientist in the first and third eps) was also crazy and sadistic (those types of people are plentiful in this show) and Tajimamori and Rin’s relationship wasn’t nearly as prominent as it should’ve been throughout the show’s run. I would’ve preferred that the main plot had taken a backseat to the seperate cases (which I quite liked compared to the rest of the show) rather than simply be under-developed with an episode at the end which throws in a lot of information in at the end and ties it up with the rest of the plot all at once. If they had mentioned at least partially the nature of Asop’s existence, or his wanting to have memories (because apparently they are DELICIOUS), or the information about God’s bride and the Guardian beforehand, then it may have felt like the show flowed naturally towards it’s conclusion. But this didn’t happen, and while the gratuitous amont of sex/violence interests remporarily, it gets boring as time goes on; if you go past that and the more-engaging-than-the-main-storyline individual cases of the series, there’s not much left to keep you watching. And I’ll always be dissapointed that more didn’t arise out of Asop’s consistent torturing of that single immortal and the game of chess he was playing, as seen above.
The animation of the show also took a hit; there were many inconsistent character designs as it went on, and there wasn’t nearly as much fluidity that was present in the first episode, as if things such as discovering Apos being both a man and a woman weren’t enough to watch *shudders*. The music is pretty forgettable, except for the awesomness of the rock tracks used in the OP and the ED.
But though I say such things, I did like the series as a whole. In my opinion, it didn’t live up to it’s potential and it had its flaws, but it was very entertaining to watch due to its mindless nature at (most) times (regardless of what I write, seeing lots of action/explosions/yuri antics is fun) and there aren’t many other shows that would have the main heroine thrown into a jet engine.
Series Rating: 7.5/10
Galneryus rocks.
I liked it yes, I thought the aspects of time lapses after each episode and character relationships were intriguing.
That being said, I also hated how Tajimamori had almost zero show time. I thought he was more important than that – should have shown up in episodes before.
@Hoshi
Eh, the time lapses seemed more of a gimmick than anything else; I already know about how immortality means being the same and watching things change and seeing people die and all that adn the technique didn’t really click with me. It’s kind of funny how the last few scenes took place in a medieval setting despite all this.
I don’t even know why I watched it. I like Mamiko Noto. But I didn’t really know what to think of.
It was a very simple series. There was almost no character development, but the show didn’t rely on being complicated so it didn’t matter.
About the only thing I enjoyed about the show were the characters besides Rin.
Overall the presentation of the series was kind of weak. It tried to have a overall plot. But the episodes kept on getting attached to the episode-specific stories that were never really interesting (like episode 3 having the virus and all).