Shining Tears X Wind Review
Rating: 2/10
Plot: Six teenagers are living a normal life until a wolfman attacks. No I'm not kidding. Sit down and let me finish. A catgirl appears—SIT DOWN! And she drags them into a fantasy world called 'End Earth' where we discover that the three boys in the group are meant to be soul bladers, legendary heroes destined to save their world with the ability to pull swords from people that trust them, and the girls are............
They have to end a war between two lands and stop a bunch of generic monster models that come through portals.
Breakdown: Yup, it's not only as stupid as it sounds, it's worse!
To start off, no I haven't played either of the games that is based on/tying together, but series that require different medium homework already get taken down a notch by me and I'd imagine I'd just be more angry or insulted at this given that the games are supposedly good.
There are many bad anime out there, but this is one I'd call bad and simply lazy. Hell even the font choice is lazy. Just look at that title font. They couldn't scroll through the default fonts.
If you think wolfmen and catgirls were generic enough, let me list off the monsters that they usually fight in this series. It's an assortment of bat creatures, which is about as creative as they get, zombies, golems, dark elves, gargoyles, goblins and mummies. Yes. Mummies... And I'm not just exaggerating on these either, nor do they have some special End Earth name. They have extremely stock monster designs and though they don't mention the names for all of them, they do mention golems, zombies, dark elves and mummies, so it's safe to assume that they are all referred to as such. They also ally with regular elves and dwarves as a bonus.
Let's jump into the story because we have a lot to cover. The six teens mentioned before, let's call them team #1, team #2 and team #3, enter End Earth. Team #1 is our main team for at least a bit. It has the main character anyway who is Haseo—I mean, Haseo—I MEAN, HAS—This guy looks exactly like Haseo from .Hack//Roots(GU) is what I'm saying.
Tell me otherwise. Seriously. I haven't seen two characters look this similar since the butler from Sacred Seven and Sebastian from Black Butler.
Anyway, this guy is Souma and he came into End Earth with his crush, Kureha. After they get attacked by some monsters, we learn that Souma is a soul blader; a warrior with the ability to draw magic swords from people as long as they open their hearts to him or at least trust him enough.
Congratulations, you've learned of the only interesting aspect of this show.
All of the guys were brought to the world to be soul bladers, and the girls........I still don't know, I'm sorry. Seriously, I thought the girls were just their respective guy's sword sheathe (Double entendre!) but we later learn that they can pull swords from quite literally anyone as long as they trust the soul blader in question. So....yeah, I have no clue what they're here for. They don't even really do anything outside of being sword dispensers except maybe Hiruda/Hilda. They have no fighting skills so.......pointless.
Team #1 is soon recruited by Shumari, some important guy from Land #1 in End Earth.
Who ends up to be, spoiler alert, a villain.
The way that they learn this is by meeting up with Team #2, made up of Kiriya, Souma's rival, and Shiina who is feisty™. They have made a mercenary group called The Luminous Knights and joined up with Land #2's government that is fighting Land #1. In the time frame of maybe a day, the two guys have learned enough about each land's history, the reasons behind the war, and grown so attached to the people there that they are willing to fight their friends to the death in order to help them succeed.
After learning of Shumari's cunning deception, he is forced to hand Kureha over to him as a hostage, and instead of staying with the only two people he knows in this world and can actually trust to some degree, and, ya know, making an attempt to get Kureha back, he instantly walks away from them after Kureha is taken so he can wander in the desert for half a day to mope and nearly die. He gets better and returns to help though with no explanation as to how he did that.
Once they get Kureha back, Souma realizes something or other about himself and physically hands Kureha over to Kiriya because she's property I guess. Then he goes off and does his own thing again because he's a loner™.
After that, Souma meets up with a guy named Zero; a pretty boy with black and white angel wings who I realize had really no purpose during the entire series.
Really, he saves Souma from an explosion, gives him one of his rings and tells him to be the new guardian of the world for some reason and then leaves. Later we learn that he washed up on shore when he was a kid with no clues to his past or identity other than the two rings on his hands that are sort of a trademark of the series yet also don't really have a point, purpose or explanation given about what they do. Similarly, the two winged staff thing you see in the title screen also had no ultimate point, no power, no focus given to it, and I only barely noticed it being carried by Ryunna. His name was also Xion back then but he changed it because, as we will learn, that's just what people do when they go dark. Either that or he didn't want to be confused with that Kingdom Hearts character that no one gave a crap about.
He later joined a group of mercenaries that called themselves Weiss Ritter and were great heroes of the land until a dark force called Zeroboros overtook one of the members, Ryuuna. In the process, Ryunna 'stabbed' herself on Xion's blade. And by 'stabbed' I mean, the sword completely disappeared within her body like a magic trick yet was still treated like a stab wound. Xion tried to seal Zeroboros away, but only ended up absorbing it into his body, making him sprout black wings and causing him to kill another comrade of his, Lazarus, who bleeds blue raspberry kool aid.
After realizing what he had done, he screamed in terror, and one of his wings turned white because
Mao, Xion's love interest and aforementioned catgirl, stumbled upon the scene and he was unable to face her so he flew away.
Mao spends much of the series (the half she's actually in anyway) looking for Zero, whom she shouldn't be calling Zero if she didn't know of the story nor knew of his name change, but that never matters because this entire thing is never resolved because Zero would rather be a mopey unhelpful pigeon than actually patch things up. They never even speak to each other over the course of the series other than in flashbacks.
This is even more pointless and dumb considering that Ryuuna and Lazarus are brought back to life by Zero. How he did that, I have no idea, especially since he explicitly told Souma he couldn't bring people back to life, but there it is. So if Zero was afraid Mao would hate him for killing Lazarus and Ryuuna when they're both still alive and have fully forgiven Zero, then I have no clue why he still never confronted her.
I guess Zero's purpose in this show was to give the girls that nice yaoi-esque scene where he bathes Souma. He's not naked, but he is being bathed and Zero does get erotically close to his face.
Anyway, Shumari is taken care of rather quickly when we learn of our real enemy, Team #3, made up of Saionji, a super serious older teen, and Hilda Leah/Hiruda Reia, a rather shy yet very intelligent glasses girl who has split her personality into two beings, one evil, Hilda, and one good, Hiruda, (I suppose that's how it works anyway. That's the way the subs were treating it.) in order to deal with whatever atrocities she encountered in End Earth.
Okay, I get the split personality thing, my suspension of disbelief can go that far at least, but if the split was to deal with the mental stress of whatever horrible things she saw, which are never explained or shown, why is her other personality evil? You'd think it'd be cold and unfeeling to merely deal with the stress, not evil to do nothing but create more.
Also, she's the one I mentioned who is the only human girl with a legit role. She's a witch....She has a broom, magic powers and a big black pointy hat; she's a witch. And she also experiments with ancient weapons, controls the dark elves and makes androids. Oh yeah, there are androids too.
Anyway, after about two days in End Earth, Saionji has become the emperor of Land #3, an elf land, and has become an evil guy with the good elves of the land turning into dark elves, which means they have to use black, gray and purple in their color palettes instead of yellow, pink and red. He's also renamed to Trihart/Traihard. The Wiki says 'Traihard' and the subs I had said 'Trihart'. I think it's funnier with Traihard, because that added with the RPG vibe just seems hilarious to me.
Why'd he rename himself? Because he went dark. We went over this, remember?
Traihard blows up a bunch of lands and kills a bunch of people and he also has no qualms against killing his friends for the sake of Land #3's purposes. Supposedly it's justified because Land #3's in danger from dark energy and I guess the only way to save it is to cause world war and be a dickface.
Kiriya and Traihard are willing to war with each other while Souma and his new friends, the old Weiss Ritter group, try to be neutral and act as mediator. His master plan of getting them in a meeting and asking them twice kindly not to fight fails (that is exactly what happens), so war continues. Not that it matters. He's such a pisspoor villain that he gets defeated like four times over the course of three episodes.
Traihard and Kiriya meet on the battlefield and want to have one final soul blade battle to finish everything once and for all. After losing his blade, Traihard is about to finish off Kiriya when a girl named Zechti steps in front of the blade and dies for him.
Oh yeah, Zechti. Uh, the elf queen, Celestia, got killed because of Shumari's deception, which initially sparked the war between Land #1 and #2. Zechti was created by Hilda by combining an ancient weapon with Celestia's genes for some reason. Because science.
Zechti met Kiriya earlier with the intention of killing him, and in a feat of what I like to call whiplash character development, Kiriya falls for her in all of a half hour trapped underground with her or, in the viewer's eyes, about two minutes.
Kiriya's crushed by this and we have to care I suppose, but this event triggers the REAL villain of the series, a background character I only noticed an episode beforehand named Killrain, who was Celestia's brother. After witnessing his sister being killed again, he goes crazy with his dark elf powers so Traihard, Kiriya and Souma team up to stop him. Along the way, Hilda and Traihard remake Zechti with her gene particles (See Recommended Audience section for details) and Hilda's soul blade gets destroyed by Souma and Kiriya, making the evil half of her go away. Something that makes no sense considering several people have had their soul blades get destroyed with no lasting effects.
After they confront Killrain, we discover the REALLY REALZ villain was someone called the demonic king, because they couldn't be arsed to come up with any better title, named Elferen, which just sounds like a brand name ointment.
Elferen had been using Killrain's hatred and grief to control him and use him as a puppet because demonic kings just do that. Either that or he's been taking lessons from Emperor Palpatine. Also, he has no buildup, no real backstory, no motivation, no nothing outside of the fact that he wants to destroy End Earth with dark energy for no reason besides evil.
Elferen's actual form is also a giant moth. Because.....Moths are always evil in like everything. And why wouldn't they be? Personally, I can not think of a more frightening creature than something that purposely hurts itself because of its addiction to porch lights.
Since regular soul blades are useless against him for some reason, they have to use ultimate soul blades, which were just introduced in the episode before the series finale and are only drawn from people who are the soul blader's specific holy grail. What does that mean? I have no clue. I thought it meant soul mate or something similar but that theory doesn't work because of something I'll explain in a minute.
In an effort to save Traihard, Hiruda nearly kills herself, which shows her utmost devotion to Traihard and allows her ultimate soul blade to emerge.
Zechti's desire to save Killrain triggers hers to give to Kiriya, and Souma is left without a super special sword.
Until Kiriya nearly falls off a ledge and Souma saves him. Their camaraderie causes Kiriya's ultimate soul blade to emerge. This is why the holy grail thing still doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, they could be soul mates for all I know, but where would that leave Kiriya and Zechti?
…Threesome?
When the soul blades are called upon, they emerge from the chest area. Given how nearly all of the people used for this purpose are girls, that obviously results in several boob shots. But there's another thing. The person also makes sex faces and moans when the sword is removed. In the cases of the ultimate soul blades, they make even more obvious sex faces, blush and moan loader.
…....So yeah, anyone putting the pieces together for Kiriya and Souma's ultimate soul blade scene? Not like he's exempt from this. If anything, they purposely make it worse by having the gentle smiling, nods of approval to remove the sword (double entendre! Again!) and to make things even better, when Souma grasps the phallic symbol he says, I swear to God, 'it's hot.' And Kiriya smiles in response.
The crap clouds in this show were suddenly cleared by this ray of blatant yaoi overtoned sunshine; I burst out laughing for a good three minutes. I was prepared to give this show a 1/10 but it gave me one moment of pure entertainment so it got one extra point for that.
It was just so out of nowhere and in the middle of the final battle no less. It's like the only reason Elferen wasn't attacking was because he was baffled by the sudden intrusion of yaoi in the scene.
Oh and wanna know something else? You know how sometimes at the end of an episode they'll show production credits over a scene from the episode? They replayed the scene of Kiriya's sex face and moaning.
I guess the rationale here was to make Souma the more impressive one to pull a soul blade from a soul blader since he's the main lead and that had never been done before, but man that was funny.
Oh and these ultimate soul blades are also lame in their design. They all look exactly the same; glowing blue swords of light. The only minor differences are in the hand guard, which you can barely tell apart. They could've at least had them all use a different color or something. Some degree of creativity, guys!
At least the regular soul blades all looked different and had different powers. This is beyond bland and lazy.
For those looking for an epic battle between the three and Elferen, prepare to be disappointed because this is also so poorly executed I thought it was a joke. They barely battle at the end of the episode 12 and from the time they say 'and now the ultimate final battle begins' in the recap in episode 13 to when he dies is exactly two minutes. I clocked it. He's there, then he's dead. He doesn't even say anything when he dies. Shadow Suzaku from FY: Eikoden got a better buildup and send off than that—AGHH DON'T MAKE ME COMPLIMENT EIKODEN!
They don't even have a real battle. They do the same basic schtick that always comes with these shows. Put the three weapons together and use its ultimate attack. That ultimate attack, btw, is a beam of rainbow light.
Which would make more sense if the swords were varying colors instead of blue across the board but wouldn't want to make that extra effort. Since that takes up barely any of the final episode, the rest is bidding farewell to the humans and sending them back home....Well, half of them anyway.
Traihard decides to stay in End Earth with Hiruda to help get everything back in order from the damage of the dark energy. No jail time or punishment for blowing up towns and killing people and sparking a second war; everyone just up and forgives him. At least I can take this as community service. Also, I guess screw your friends, family and life back in Elde (our world), huh? Now that I think about it, none of them seem to miss their lives back home or even bring it up. Makes me wonder why any of them are going back.
Despite being in love with Zechti, her returning his feelings and no given reason for him to go back home, Kiriya decides to go back home.
Souma is about to go home, but decides at the last minute to stay with Mao. Oh yeah, remember Mao? The catgirl who was Zero's love interest? Yeah, she's apparently in love with Souma now. She's been absent for most of the series and this basically came out of nowhere, but yeah, love, hooray. I'm seriously thinking they threw that in there to assure the audience that Souma was straight. Also, again, guess screw your family, friends and life back in Elde.
So to recap, the only person who had an established legit reason to stay behind in End Earth is the only guy who decided to go back home. Good job.
Also, I love how a few episodes of this anime had fighting over Kureha be a plot point (to the point where Souma admits he wanted to kill Kiriya partially because he was in the way of their (non-existent) relationship. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.) yet by like episode four she's nothing but a decoration.
Want some bonus stupid stuff and bad writing that I omitted?
Kiriya and Souma both have the ability to turn (I believe Kureha's) soul blade into a laser gun by grabbing the hand guard and have it act as the trigger. The sword doesn't change shape, it just starts shooting lasers out of the tip.
They make a big to-do about Souma being able to pull a soul blade from Lazarus despite him being a guy to make him seem more impressive as the main character I suppose, but it fails for two reasons.
1 – Even though Souma has only drawn from girls, no one ever told him that being female was a requirement to having a soul blade drawn from them. The only reason he thinks this is because, like I said, he's only drawn from girls. Not surprisingly considering 85% of the people around him are female, creating a not-as-fanservicey harem.
2 – Traihard pulled a soul blade from a guy named Jeed in an earlier episode, so this entire revelation is moot anyway. We know it's possible, there's no restrictions against doing so, and Lazarus has done nothing but trust him so I dunno. For those wondering, Souma was present when Traihard pulled the sword from Jeed, so there's no excuse for him to think this. Also, neither Jeed nor Lazarus make the sex faces or moans, which is probably a good thing because Lazarus is an anthropomorphic dragon.
Souma apparently loses his ability to draw soul blades after he hands over Kureha to Kiriya and his ability to draw soul blades then relies on the ring that Zero gives him. I say 'apparently' because before the episode in which he loses said ring, there's no indication that he lost the ability to draw soul blades because he never tried. Also, the ring doesn't light up or do anything when he draws soul blades so I have no clue what all that was about besides making a big scene between Mao and Souma.
Mao's a princess. This is only ever brought up once and it doesn't affect the plot at all but there it is.
Souma's clothes are stupid.
Nothing to do with bad writing, but look at that vest. At least Land #2 gave Kiriya actual battle garb. Land #1 basically made Souma's vitals as unguarded as humanly possible. Plus the bare chest + vest combo is not helping the yaoi overtones.
Art and Animation: Studio Deen........*sigh* I can never decide with Studio Deen. Their better works are mediocre at best, but when they're bad they're pretty damn bad.
The human characters, most commonly Souma, suffer from no-nose-most-of-the-time syndrome when shown from the front because don't you know that noses don't cast shadows and just melt into your face when viewed from a front profile? They retain their nostrils, but their noses vanish, making for some incredibly awkward shots.
The art bounces between passable and poor. Some of the beast characters like Basou, Hyoun and Jin-Crow have interesting character designs, especially Hyoun with his sparkly rainbow crystal skin, but it's mediocre at best. Also, several of these characters notably wear masks to avoid animating their mouths. Animation is also second-rate. Many of the battle sequences are incredibly short and usually resolved with a swing or two of a soul blade. Also, they have the Studio Pierrot trademark of 'light slash on black background+Shaking still frame of battle with action lines=Animation'
Music: The OP and ED are too catchy for their own good. They're okay songs overall, but you remember them mostly for the melody. The BG music is bland.
Bottomline: This show is as generic, lazy, boring and stupid as it gets. It's too long even at 13 episodes for me to recommend for a laugh, even with the hilarious yaoi-esque scenes that hit-and-run the series. There are far better shows out there, and even without having played the PS2 games, I can assure you that even fans would be majorly disappointed if not angry.
Recommended Audience: No swearing, no nudity, sex faces and moaning that might seem awkward if anyone ever came into the room as you were watching.
Fake violence. Oh, yeah that. There's plenty of fighting in this show, but no one ever gets visibly injured. Even when Souma's supposedly too injured to bathe himself, hence why Zero does it, there are no wounds whatsoever on him. Not even those scratchy dirt marks that sometimes indicate wounds. He looks perfect. And when people die, they turn into glowing particles.
This is what I was talking about with Zechti's death. When any character seems to die in this world, their body vanishes into a cluster of particles. Think when monsters get destroyed in Yugioh or when Digimon die. Except in the cases of Celestia, Ryuuna and Lazarus who actually leave behind bodies for some reason. All death scenes are mostly offscreen except Ryuuna's where the sword gets sucked into her body like she was hit with a Portal gun, yet it still kills her without a wound or blood, and Zechti's where the sword actually does pierce the body, yet leaves no wound, no blood and doesn't even cut her clothes. Great job. As a bonus, she does an overly dramatic slow motion spin move to ensure everyone that this is really dramatic and weighty. The only blood you ever see is Lazarus' weird light blue blood, and even that's just coming from his mouth not a wound. 7+