Cardfight!! Vanguard 2018 thoughts as of October 20, 2018
Uuh. First post in a while. I’ll mainly use this account for text posts/280+ Character tweets when I want.
So with CFV2018′s first arc coming to an end, I think I may as well put up my thoughts on it. The reason is that this anime has a lot to suffer from, imo, so where do I begin?
First off, the art style. Ever since OLM has been shoved into the job of handling the animation from Cardfight!! Vanguard G NEXT on, I’ve been... really iffy about this. Ranging from Chronojet Dragon G’s proportions being completely off for just about every 5-second frames he exists in to the minor details like the picture I will always dub “ChronoSmrt”, I was honestly worried that the V-Series designs are gonna be like that, but worse. But all that amounted to was me being worried for the wrong reason.
Though the character designs for the V-Series are actually okay, the show feels like it was trying to be minimalist in order to save the animated scenes for Cardfights, as evidenced by mostly flat colors and general lack of shading for some characters and some settings’ backgrounds not having actually interesting locales, which was something G took the extra effort to draw up. Even though Card Capital has a decent design, the interior feels desolate and barren for a main setting, as if it’s a completely empty hospital. Something that is seriously jarring in the show is that in some or most of the scenes, characters would have thickened outlines as if it’s to define a serious moment, but in actuality, it personally does the opposite because of how often it occurred.
So, I got the art style out of the way. Next comes the soundtrack. I do not like the soundtrack. A glaring problem I have with the soundtrack is that it’s bland; Coming from the context of the tracks used in the Cardfights, it’s not varied and carries an unusually clashing techno beat, compared to the variety that of G and OG. Aside from the casual piano theme and “Kai’s V Theme” as the standout tracks, there’s just not really anything good or memorable about the tracks.
Now, last but not least comes the story. I don’t really have too many problems with the story, being a manga-based anime with only 12 volumes behind it. Though there are alterations to the story, the general writing for the arc is still one-to-one; Kai chases out AL4 members out of Card Capital, Kamui and Aichi try to liberate a shop from them. I do like the differences the anime made, and these differences I liked were all done in the first episode; slightly extended screen time with Miwa and Kai before Kai beats Morikawa effortlessly, and Kai and Aichi meeting for the first time at the very beginning. However, other differences were minor at best that doesn’t shift the general writing too much.
All in all, do I still like Cardfight!! Vanguard 2018? At this point, I consider it a guilty pleasure of mine; the story’s a bit too safe and the differences are mostly minor, the art style’s conflicting, the settings don’t really offer any interesting locales that made them feel like they’ve become a part of the real world, and the soundtrack lacks variety in favor for a more techno beat that is incongruous to the already dull settings.
