An event called the Great Collapse left everyone in Tokyo unconscious; when people regained their senses a week later, a great plant had developed around the edge of the city and a red mist now keeps anyone from entering or going anywhere. College student Chihiro is the last to awaken nearly five months later, after being weighed down with strange dreams and apparently exceptional abilities with strange powers.
This is an anime based on a Square Enix game. It can easily be said that many of you will be quick to decide whether to proceed further. Find it irresistible or detestable, the company has developed a very specific style of beautiful people struggling against apocalyptic calamities and their own troubled back-stories while intricately defined plots are hinted at with a great deal of ominous and, depending on your feelings, pretentious dialogues. All of that is here, in anime form.
In Vermilion's support is the fact that the original game is a card game, meaning the anime is building on more of a set-up than recreating a completed sequence of events. That gives it an opportunity to write for an anime's pacing rather than trying to crunch down a 30-50 hour story with disastrous effects. This speaks in goodwill of the anime overseeing to tell a short and snappy story in a proper period.
The show begins with an exaggerated version of that ever-popular 'keep watching, exciting things will happen in six or seven episodes' cold open that so many shows are fond of. The series is prone to treating us to three and half minutes of characters killing each other with Tokyo Ghoul-like powers before getting to the actual narrative.
This opening segment carefully demonstrates Lord of Vermilion's fundamental compromise -- the show's animation and general art design is poor, but its understanding of storyboarding and shot composition is much better. There are some evocative visual moments throughout this premiere; they just tend to be more persuasive in impression than they are in implementation.
The anime's cold opening shows all the super-powered fighters killing each other with relentless prejudice in reciprocally guaranteed annihilation, with more than a dozen featured in one-on-one battles. It can be presumed that this is one of those 'history repeats itself' stories that have been here for ages but have been especially popular since Madoka Magica's arrival.
Since a few of the characters have featured in promotional merchandises for various Vermilion arcade games, it can be suspected that the goal here is less to make sure every character is well-formed and more to give strong eye-catching notions and one or two qualities so that fandom can do its thing with the rest. It is an effective marketing strategy.
At the very least, this premiere episode spends a great amount of time in establishing the relationship between Chihiro and his friend Kotetsu, doing everything. However, keeping the marketing on a side, the dynamics work well enough and are mostly based on the extreme game voice actors. If the show actually keeps Kotetsu around rather than murdering him for tragedy points, it could form a feasible backdrop for all the great punch lines.
The opening hints at quite a few female characters with varied designs, but because this episode is mostly setting up the premise, they have not gotten to do much yet beyond snarky remarks and deliver cryptic warnings. Still, it looks to be heading towards a gender-balanced cast with a relatively little fan-service.
In short, this all feels like a standard setup for a post-apocalyptic supernatural war. Our introduction to Chihiro Kamina and his family situation isn't attention-grabbing, but it's well executed, and the show dawdles just enough on a pre-crisis conversation to make its dramatic turn settle in among the audience with some impact.
This episode overdid its blend of actual character introductions and ominous reveals, but the episode's overall narrative arc was one that has been seen many, many times before, and Vermilion's take on this classic title stayed appealing throughout.
This looks harmless. It will probably be silly, a bit bloody, and completely lose control of its plotting by the end, but if you are still planning for clamps to keep you wanting for more of the series, you could do a lot worse than Lord of Vermilion.
