This season of anime has had some pretty pleasant surprises. Dagashi Kashi and Erased both kind of came out of nowhere as the better of the season, while other series making their return like Assassination Classroom are just as good as before. I was hoping that the same case would occur for the anime we have today. Divine Gate is an anime based off a 2013 Japanese smartphone game of the same name, running at only twelve episodes over on Funimation, with both an English Dub and Japanese Sub (broadcast dubs yeah!).
Unfortunately, it was not one of those surprises. Despite a unique premise and beautiful art-style, it fails to live up to any promise and will simply be forgotten in time as "wait, what show?" Most of the time, if one is adapting a video-game, it doesn't turn out well, and such fate is seen here.
In a word, this series is "average." Nothing particularly jumps out in terms of story or character that we haven't seen before. There are good parts but also pretty bad parts that make you want to just press fast-forward. The strongest parts are the art and attempts at mystery, but the weaker elements are in plot and in the series's characters.
The show revolves around the "Divine Gate," a mystical place that will allow the one who finds it to get their wish granted. Our main characters, Akane, Aoto, and Midori, all have their own reasons for wanting to find the gate. Arthur, leader of the Knights of Rounds, also has his own desires to find the Gate, and when he discovers the other three, the journey begins to get to the Gate. If they can survive the challenges ahead of them. The series takes place in a futuristic area known as Terrastia--it may or may not be Earth, but I'll get into that--where the world has also seen some new species around. There are half-animal half-human beings known as Defiers, fairies that have come from the land Celestia, gods that walk among men, and mages able to manipulate various elements for energies known as Adapters.
The best part of the series, for me, will always be the art. It is beautiful. Studio Perriot, the studio behind small series like Naruto or Bleach, hired some dang fine artists for this series. They implore thick lines and thick colors with mixes of some sheen in between to bring the characters leaping off the screen. Everything is very solid looking, nothing every looks thin or poorly drawn in. Some of the other elements, such as their energy attacks, flow naturally because of this. Clearly they are computer generated, but because of the art-style, it doesn't feel out of place.
However, that brings me to animation. While the art may look amazing all the time, the animation does fall apart at times. They use CGI for some action sequences, and it is noticeable when they do. It almost feels as if they're cheating, or just being lazy. Most of the fights aren't CGI, and they look pretty good. Not perfect, as I imagine it's difficult to maintain that level of art when doing, but good. I just feel bad every time I see the CGI come in.
The music for the fight scenes was also pretty decent. Most of the time the music isn't very noticeable, as it's just ambiance in the background, but with the fights it gets big, epic. Since there surprisingly too many fights in the series, it's a nice change of pace to hear this music come in for the battles. And speaking of music, the opening is catchy. It's a nice pop-rock mix that doesn't stay for too long but gets stuck in your head for a while afterward.
In terms of plot, the series tries to build up some sense of mystery regarding a couple characters and with the Divine Gate itself. The two most interesting characters of the show are Arthur and Loki. And yes, they are exactly how you think. Arthur is the leader of the Knights of Rounds, which includes such members like a man named Lancelot. Yeah. This show is not very subtle.
Loki, though, benefits more from his origins. He is a trickster and a mystery throughout the series, and it's difficult to see what his next move will be. He plays his own game, and does eventually emerge as an antagonist but only because he goes against the protagonist, not fulfilling the traditional role of a villain, much like how Arthur is not a traditional hero of this story.
Story is used loosely here, by the way.
Divine Gate otherwise falls flat. For one thing, I can't say for certain who our main protagonist it. Is it Aoto? Some of the early episodes are dedicated to building his backstory as it relates to the death of his parents and the event "Blue Christmas," but after Episode 4 and until Episode 11 he becomes just as important as Midori and Akane.
It's tough to pinpoint who the main character is because absolutely nobody gets any character development. I don't count the flashbacks or backstory they have, because that's stuff that's already affected them. They're supposed to be affected by events within the story but that never comes up. Okay, sure, Aoto does join up with Midori and Akane, but you knew that was going to happen anyway and his mannerisms don't change at all.
Episode 5 is one of the better episodes of the series as it deals with some pretty heavy topics, like prejudice, and how we can deal with it. Akane is the focus of the episode and goes through a pretty rough time, but after that the Defiers aren't mentioned again and Akane's character goes back to normal. Aoto is put through some revelations about Blue Christmas but he just brushes it off, as do the rest of the crew.
But at least they have personality. In Episode 3 we're introduced to the three other top students of the Academy where the Adapters hang out, yet in Episode 5 we're given their personalities. No, seriously. They literally created a bullet-list of personality traits and read them off to the viewer for a couple minutes, rather than showing us their personalities through combat or some trial or something. Talk about lazy, again. You could argue that they were pressed for space, given how incredibly crammed this show is.
This cramming takes away from what could have been more interesting parts of the show. The mystery of Aoto's brother, some more discussion on what the Divine Gate is, character development, some more world-building so we know what the heck is going on. Regarding the mystery of Aoto's brother, it seems that they try to mask him in shadow and make Aoto out to be a bad guy, but the answers are so obvious that by the time they're revealed they have no weight to them.
This show lacks gravitas, which is something it could really have benefited from. This is a pretty unique world and overall setting, with an interesting concept behind it in the Divine Gate. What is the Divine Gate, how does one reach it? For much of the series, I wanted to follow Arthur in his quest for the Divine Gate. His motivations weren't clear for a while but he was a complex enough character for me to want to see what happened to him. But, like any average series, his character was eventually reduced to nothing and he was sidelined during Episode 9, where half of the episode was the characters just standing around not doing anything productive.
Ugh.
One of the ways I think these series could have been better was if it had twenty-four rather than twelve episodes. I'm not sure how accurate the game is to the series, but if it had more time, it could have gotten a lot further into our characters and given us more time to get to know them for when they go through tragedies, which is sort of what the whole point of the series is. In the end, I felt no connection to any characters given how they botched Arthur's character and our three heroes are about as interesting as a rock. The series ends with a promise for a possible second season, but should it come out, much like "Seraph of the End," I have little interest in what happens next.
Too much cramming was the downfall of this series. It had to fit twenty-four episodes worth of material down into twelve and try to appeal, probably, to fans of the original game by having as many minor characters as possible. The setting was confusing (seriously, are we on Earth? The "Scandinavian gods" are shown a lot, but, the show takes place on Terrastia...after some change occurred...I don't know...) and the characters dull with lame motivations but decent backstories. The only saving grace here was the art. It makes me yearn for a Divine Gate ongoing, full-color comic. We wouldn't have some choppy animation because of it, and hopefully it would give the characters some time to be fleshed out.
But, that's probably not what's going to happen. And so the average Divine Gate series will just exist as an old Funimation Broadcast Dub, overshadowed by better and forgotten by what it could have been. Oh well.
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