Death Parade Review

I've decided that every year around Halloween I am going to do a review on something eerie. Last year I looked at Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. This year I will take an in-depth look at the 2015 anime series Death Parade. Death Parade is among a select group of anime that is not based on a preexisting manga. The series spawned from a short film titled Death Billiards, which was originally produced by Madhouse for the Young Animator Training Project's Anime Mirai 2013.

So what's Death Parade about? Well, whenever a person dies, they are sent to one of many bars run by bartenders serving as arbiters. Decim, the series's main character, runs a bar called the Quindecim where he is responsible for judging couples who died together. It's a formulaic process. The humans arrive at Quindecim with no memory of how they got there or of the events leading up to their deaths. Decim on the other hand receives a handful of his guests' memories from the information bureau so that he has a rough idea of who each of his guests are. Then he explains to the guests that they cannot leave the bar until they have played a game. One caveat is that the players will be putting their lives on the line, and Decim shows them a sinister collection of human dummies behind the wall of his bar to drive the point home. Frightened and with no other choice, the humans play the game while Decim decides who will be reincarnated and who will be sent into the void.

The whole idea of the games is to create severe tension which will bring out the darkest parts of each player's nature. After all, fear and self preservation are the most primal human emotions. This in theory is the last piece of the puzzle in showing the arbiter who these people really are. While they are playing, the humans slowly regain their memories of what happened to them and ultimately realize that they are dead.

It's an intriguing premise, one that wouldn't be out of place in an episode of The Twilight Zone. But whereas a Twilight Zone version of this would only end with the realization that the guests are already dead, Death Parade goes a step further and analyzes the entire system used to judge people's souls.

Enter Chiyuki: a woman who wakes up in this strange reality with no memory of her past life and is brought to the Quindecim by the supervisor Nona to be Decim's assistant. Almost immediately, Chiyuki begins to notice flaws in Decim's judgments, claiming that there may be more driving each guest's actions than pure negative emotions. She is also horrified to learn that sometimes Decim rigs the games when it appears that some people need a little push to release their inner darkness. Throughout the course of the series, Decim becomes less sure of himself as an arbiter due to Chiyuki's influence. Is he actually creating the darkness in people's souls rather than simply bringing it out?

This leads to the revelation that Decim is an arbiter who has been infused with human emotions, even though he doesn't quite understand them.  Nona accepts that there is something ironic and unfair about the arbitration process. The arbiters are incapable of feeling emotions or knowing what it's like to die, yet they are the ones who are tasked with passing judgment on those that do. Therefore, Decim is her experiment in improving the system, and Chiyuki has been unknowingly tasked with helping Decim understand what it means to be human.

This anime is one of my all time favorites. It raises great topics of conversation about living a fulfilling life, what it means to die, and the morality of judging people based on incomplete information. That being said, I would caution viewers about some disturbing content. Characters violently attack each other, blood is shed, and murder, rape, and suicide are discussed and shown.

If there is anything I can criticize, it would be the show's lack of closure. I want to learn more about how this afterlife works. Several minor characters give us tiny glimpses of what goes on behind the scenes. There's Castra, who sits on a throne of flesh and bones and determines which bar each deceased person will visit. Her words of wisdom are "All righteousness is in competition with itself; I'm surprised it doesn't lose interest." We also meet another arbiter named Ginti. Whereas Decim is outwardly polite, Ginti is a belligerent, ill-tempered jerk who riles his guests as much as they rile him. Then there's Quin, a member of the information bureau who is Decim's predecessor. Managing people's memories is so stressful, that she turns to drinking to put her mind at ease. And finally we have Oculus, a childish old man who is the self-professed god of this whole operation. He spends the majority of his time playing pool while Nona runs the arbitration business.

Not many of these characters are given a lot of screentime. But when they do have your attention, they drop little snippets that beg for further elaboration. Oculus mentions in Episode 5 that God has been gone for a long time. What does that mean? Is God dead? High School DxD presented a world where God perished in a battle between angels and devils. What happened in Death Parade's world that caused God to go away?

In Episode 7, Quin states that the increased number of deaths is making it difficult for her to do her work condensing people's memories. Could this be why the arbiters' judgments are incomplete? When deaths were less frequent, were the arbiters given more complete information on their human guests? There is so much more to this universe as hinted at sporadically by the various side characters. I just wish more time was spent on them and their stories in addition to Decim and Chiyuki. Twelve episodes is really insufficient to gain a complete picture of this world. I think that a 26 episode season would have allowed the supporting characters and side plots to really shine. At the very least, a second season would be appreciated to answer some of my questions.

Well, I think that covers just about everything. Overall Death Parade is an extremely thought provoking series with two excellent main characters who help each other learn and grow. It should not be missed by anime fans, or people looking to explore the pros and cons that go with making impartial, emotionless judgement calls versus those informed by the heart and soul.

Everything Wrong with Pokemon Evolutions

Every day I look at PokeBeach to see the latest news in the world of Pokémon. In particular, I pay attention to new trading card game products to see which ones I will consider parting with my hard earned money for. One of the first things I look at with these new promotional tins and collection boxes is the pack selection. After all, a product's value is determined by the quality of its contents.

I've been disappointed with several products lately due to their inclusion of the XY Evolutions expansion set. It has to be one of the worst sets of the XY series, and perhaps one of the worst sets period. Many forum users and popular Youtubers have expressed their displeasure for the set for multiple reasons. Evolutions represents a huge missed opportunity to end what was arguably one of the best eras of the entire Pokémon Trading Card Game.

XY Evolutions was meant to be a remake of the original Base Set which was released in Japan on October 20, 1996 and in the United States on January 9, 1999. Vintage artwork is used for the cards, while the attacks and effects have been modified to fit within the current format.

The main complaint against Evolutions centers on the cards themselves not being very competitive. A few cards have some potential to work in existing deck archetypes, but none of them brought any game changing mechanics to the table. According to Andrew Wamboldt of the Charizard Lounge, this was due to Pokémon themselves not wanting to shake things up too much just prior to the release of the next generation Sun & Moon base set, which would introduce powerful Pokémon-GX to the meta game. Evolutions' main purpose was to satisfy collectors who remember opening Base Set packs two decades ago - which brings me to the next point.

The entire year of 2016 was marked with promotional products to celebrate the twentieth year of the Pokémon franchise. A TV spot was shown during the Super Bowl, various legendary Pokémon were distributed to video game players throughout the year, and collection boxes containing trading cards from a special set called Generations were released each month.

Generations contained reprinted cards from XY era expansions with the stipulation that all the Pokémon featured had to be from the first generation. Exceptions to this rule were Meowstic-EX, and cards from the Radiant Collection subset. So when Evolutions came out in November 2016, it felt like we had already seen it before.  Not only that, cards included in Generations were actually playable in several different decks, and pull rates for ultra rare cards were usually pretty good.

Hopefully, with the release of the fourth Sun & Moon set, the number of Evolutions packs included in products will decrease. It simply had no business being a mainline set. Making Evolutions a mini set would have been a much better choice for both collectors and players. That way, those who aren't caught up in Base Set nostalgia can purchase the products they want without having this otherwise useless set shoved down their throats. There also should have been some differentiation between Evolutions and Generations. It's rather hypocritical for a set called Generations to focus only on one particular generation of Pokémon.

I just hope that Pokémon comes up with a better way to end Sun & Moon when the time comes. Usually, each series concludes with a greatest hits collection featuring new artwork for popular cards. That was the case for Call of Legends and Legendary Treasures at the end of Gen 4 and Gen 5 respectively. Evolutions was a rare misstep for a franchise that otherwise had every reason to celebrate 20 successful years, and several more to follow.