Ubu Roi, in comments on his own site, compares Misaki Chronicles to Shingu: Secret of the Stellar Wars:

I probably won’t give [Shingu] an A+, because it lacked the emotional punch of Misaki Chronicles. But it was a very well done show. The characters were great, and the story kept me guessing right up until the final moments. In fact, as I say above, it also kept me guessing AFTER the final moments.

A lot of time, I was going, “Well I knew something was coming, but that’s beyond what I expected!” when hit with another twist in the plot.

Which got me to thinking: I gave Misaki Chronicles 3.5 stars and Shingu 4 stars, and I stand by that. But it's true that the ending of Misaki Chronicles affected me more strongly. So why?

My answers are massive spoilers for both series, so they're below the fold and in a spoiler box. Do not read them unless you've seen both series.

Last warning: don't read this unless you've seen both Misaki Chronicles and Shingu:

One reason was that the animation in MC was worse. The CGI and cell-animation didn't really fit; the radical difference between them was jarring.

Another reason was because Divergence Eve and Misaki Chronicles pandered. I think I respected Shingu more because it didn't feel the need to.

There was also the issue of character motivation. In Shingu there really aren't any villains. Even the guy you might consider a villain isn't one; he is doing what he is doing partly out of a feeling of guilt, and also because he's trying to prevent a repeat of a catastrophe.

In the end, I understood the motivation of everyone in Shingu except Muryou, and even for him there wasn't really an enigma.

LeBlanc in Misaki Chronicles is a chilling villain, but I didn't think that the final revelation of his motivation really worked. He's the result of genetic engineering intended to enhance his intelligence. It made him warped, and the fact of him being the product of genetic engineering, plus the way he was raised as a kid, has filled him with resentment. He wants to get revenge by destroying the entire universe. I never really bought that.

And I never really fully understood what the Ghoul were, or what they were trying to accomplish. For the Ghoul I could simply accept that they were completely alien and that it might well be impossible for me to understand their motivation, but LeBlanc's motivation was a pretty serious flaw in the story telling to my mind.

The revelation of LeBlanc's motivation was also shoehorned in. Second from last episode, it's hitting the fan, Lyar is fighting for her life, and everything comes to a screeching halt for four minutes of straight plot exposition while LeBlanc tells Misaki the story of his life.

There's a lot of plot exposition at the end of Shingu too, especially when Jiltosh, Muryou, and Hajime are hanging inside the energy cloud, but it didn't feel as much like a splice job. It felt more organic. The basic story about Jiltosh and Mugen was rolled out more slowly, in ways that made sense, mixed in with other things going on so that it didn't feel as much like it was bringing things to a halt.

In the case of that last part, it did bring things to a halt. But that was a relief; it was a reprieve. Jiltosh was seconds away from blowing Nayuta to kingdom come, and stopped in order to talk to Muryou and Hajime. And they kept him talking until Hajime could find Nayuta and give her a link out of the maelstrom. So it wasn't, "Damn it, why are you stopping now!" as far as the audience was concerned, it was "Thank goodness, you stopped just in time!"

Finally, I thought that the plot of Shingu was simultaneously much more complex and much better constructed.

On the other side of the coin is the fact, as Ubu Roi said, that the ending of Misaki Chronicles has more emotional impact. It's tears-in-the-eye-and-lump-in-the-throat territory. Shingu's ending is good but it doesn't have that same kind of impact.

But that's because Divergence Eve and Misaki Chronicles are a horror story, and the ending was the dawn after the night of nightmares. Shingu is fundamentally a comedy; it was never intended to punch its viewers in the gut the way so many things in DE/MC do.

Overall, I thought Shingu was better, and that's why I gave it a slightly higher rating.

If you want to comment, please follow these guidelines. First, no spoilers about any other series. Second, if you include spoilers about these two series, enclose them in spoiler tags: (spoiler)this is your prose(/spoiler) except use square brackets instead of parenthesis.

Irrespective of length, sincerity, or importance, I will ruthlessly delete all comments which do not follow these guidelines.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in at 03:05 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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