Tag: takt op

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch TAKT OP.DESTINY: Episode 3

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

I think I’m closer to figuring takt op.Destiny out. I could’ve told you from the opening minutes of episode one that this series had a flair for the dramatic, but “campy high-concept action series” is a pretty populated genre these days. That alone doesn’t tell us all that much. When I say that I’m closer to “figuring it out,” I mean I think I know what it reminds me most of, at least at present, and that would be Black Rock Shooter. Not the OVA, the TV anime.

Both shows are predicated on high melodrama and have a broad music theming tied together with ostentatious transforming heroine designs. There are of course some big differences too; Black Rock Shooter is a lot more esoteric than takt op has been so far, and being animated entirely in 3D CGI gives it a very different visual feel, but the general similarity is definitely there. And that’s a good thing! Black Rock Shooter is a real gem, and there’s enough interest in the franchise even ten years later that we’re getting a new anime based on it next year. So believe me when I say, I mean the comparison only in the most flattering of terms. Even the opening for the third episode (“Awakening -Journey”), an honestly kinda edgy scene where Takt and his new Musicart cut through swathes of D2s only to eventually pass out, will make you say “oh the drama” in a good way.

They’re rescued by new character Leonard, who is almost certainly more than he appears, but other than this scene mostly serves as a charming face to drop exposition and cryptic hints on us alike in equal measure.

To the Guy Enjoyer segment of my audience: You’re welcome.

His own Musicart, Titan, helps out here too. I’m actually a little sad she doesn’t get more of a role in this episode. (This is to say nothing of the other Musicart who briefly appears in the opening, cuts a huge magic tuning fork in half(??) and then disappears.)

Now does all of that mean that takt op‘s third episode is particularly great on its own merits aside from that scene? Well, I complained last week that it felt like takt op seemed to think it needed to “explain itself” in terms of worldbuilding and mechanics and such. There is some logic to this–this is a tie-in to a mobile game, after all–but it’s easily the weakest component of the show, and it takes up a good chunk of episode three. The silver lining is that the show’s production carries it even in moments where the story is a bit dry, and the characters are likable enough that even “dry” isn’t actually “boring.” This leaves us then with an episode that is a bit slow in spots but still mostly pretty good. There are worse things to be.

As for what is exposited to us, I won’t bother recapping every nuance, but there are two main takeaways here, and a third that’s essentially a restatement of something we already knew. Almost all of which comes to us courtesy of Leonard, filling his Guy Who Knows Things role here admirably.

One: The “Cosette” we followed in episode one and the latter half of episode two is not really Cosette. Musicarts lose their prior sense of self upon “awakening.” We learn–although anyone who read prerelease press materials sort of knew this already–that her actual name is Destiny, hence the show’s title. Everyone rather stubbornly insists on calling her Cosette anyway, though for the purposes of this column going forward I’ll be referring to her by her Musicart name and reserving “Cosette” for her prior, pre-awakening self. She’s also “unstable” somehow, which perhaps explains her wildly fluctuating power as a fighter.

Two: Destiny awoke in a very unusual fashion. Leonard informs Takt and Anna (and by extension, us) that most Musicarts are trained over the course of many years. (The even moderately attentive viewer will note this raises quite a lot of red flags about the whole “Musicarts forget their entire past lives” point, but that’s presumably something to be addressed down the road.) Destiny’s emergence, all at once, makes her very unusual, and Leonard speculates she may be a literal world-first. She also, again unusually for a Musicart, appears to somehow unwittingly sap Takt’s lifeforce when battling. This again is called out as unheard-of, and Leonard seems genuinely shocked by it.

Three: The only people who can possibly shed any more light on any of this are the Symphonica themselves. And as we knew from episode one, their HQ is in New York. The full route that Takt, Anna, and Destiny plan to take is detailed for us here, starting by going “down” to Las Vegas, along the American South, through the Appalachian Mountains, and up the East Coast to New York. Leonard and Titan offer to tag along part of the way, yet they were nowhere to be seen during episode one. Hmm.

Boy, Titan sure is cute. It would really be an emotional jab to the gut if she and her Maestro died horribly or turned out to be evil or something.

And that’s essentially our episode. There’s another (great) fight scene to close things out, in which Destiny literally blasts Takt’s house away in an almost hilariously on-the-nose symbol of his abandonment of his old life. But hey, the show is at its best when it’s not being subtle. More metaphors like that, I say!

The closing moments of the episode feature our main trio piled into Anna’s car, where Takt and Destiny lightly bicker. For the first time since its premiere, takt op feels like it’s found its “normal” again in this final scene, and the character dynamic that immediately endeared me to the series clicks back into place perfectly. Will it hold up for the rest of the series? That’s impossible to know. But I do know one thing, assuming next episode picks up right after this one. Anime fans? We have a trip to take.

Until then.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch TAKT OP.DESTINY: Episode 2

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime, and provide thoughts and analysis on each episode. You should expect spoilers for both the current episode and all episodes before it.

Serious question; did people think that takt op.Destiny needed to like, explain itself?

Surely some people must have. That’s the only explanation I can really muster for the puzzling note on which the second episode, “Music -Reincarnation-” opens. We open not by picking up after last week’s riotous romp, but at some point before then. A sort of “how we got here.” takt op here runs through its world’s and protagonist’s backstories competently, but without much flash. We see that Takt lost his father. We see him struggle and, frankly, fail, to cope by holing up in his room for an unknowable amount of summers, pounding away at his piano but interacting with no one but Cosette and Anna. (The former of whom acts notably differently here than she does in the first episode, but we’ll get to that.) He gets snippy with them and balks at the suggestion that anything is wrong. Typical traumatized teenager stuff, mostly.

None of this is bad, but it’s a far cry from the knock-you-on-your-ass bombast of the opening episode. Certainly I don’t know how those who liked takt op.Destiny’s more lighthearted side are going to react. And while it’s certainly tolerable, it would be a pretty disappointing note for the show to continue on if it weren’t leading up to something. Thankfully, it is.

You see, it turns out that a traveling, Symphonica-sponsored music festival will be arriving in town. Surely, nothing bad could come of this.

For a while, nothing does. Grand Maestro Sagan (the one responsible for the “music ban” in the first place) makes a brief but notable appearance. Other than that, the festival sequence is fairly lighthearted and warm. Takt and Cosette even play piano together at one point. It’s cute.

Oh you cishets and your instruments.

Of course, this is not the sort of show where things stay copacetic for very long. Soon, a band of D2s are attracted to the festival and everything goes to hell. Cosette nearly dies, Takt loses an arm. If that doesn’t seem to immediately square with what we’ve known of the series so far, you’ll want to hold on to your monocles, because the final few minutes are where “Music -Reincarnation-” really earns its stripes. (And, yes, explains its title.)

We don’t get the specifics–and why would we need them?–but Takt unintentionally does some kind of music-magic that infuses Cosette with new life and seemingly transforms her into a Musicart. We end on a cliffhanger, but not before some truly stunning, wonderfully melodramatic dialogue and imagery.

The remainder of this past-set story to be resolved sometime next week, we must assume.

In general, it’s kind of an odd follow-up to the first episode. Mostly for how tonally different it is, and for the implication that the Cosette we got to know last week is not “really” her. (I suspect, even though it doesn’t come up explicitly here, that being infused with a Musicart somehow changes one’s personality. Recall that Cosette was almost android-y at times last week.) But if takt op.Destiny wants to trade in some of its visual oomph for melodrama, I think it turns out to be well-earned here. I just hope the series doesn’t forget why people tuned in in the first place.

Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: TAKT OP.DESTINY is The Season’s First Must-Watch

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so. GIFs in this article appear courtesy of Sakugabooru.

It starts with a “once upon a time” and ends on a moonlit stretch of highway. In-between? Pleas for human connection scrawled on pianos, mask-wearing monsters that take the shape of apes and giant insects, switched-off jukeboxes that populate lonely diners, and the Great American West stretching into an endless horizon. Welcome to a world without music and the story of those trying to bring it back. This is takt op.Destiny.

Can I level with you, readers? I don’t get to write things like that paragraph up there often enough. In pop cultural criticism you’re generally expected to get to the point. I have no problem with getting to the point, but it’s a truly rare treat to be able to put the long and short of it in the title. You need to watch takt. op Destiny if you have even the slightest interest in following seasonal anime. The End.

But of course you probably want to hear why, and that’s fair enough. But it’s hard to know where to start when everything about a series’ first episode clicks into place this well. Do we start with the impactful, engaging animation? It defines not only the episode’s two bone-crackingly excellent fight scenes but also numerous little fun character moments too plentiful to count. The visuals in general are just gorgeous.

Shot through the heart, and you’re to blame.

Maybe the worldbuilding? The tantalizing glimpses of the backstory we get here are intriguing; built on the backs of typical tropes but presented with enough style that they feel fresh. One night long ago mystical stones rained from the sky and brought the humanoid weapons known as Musicarts to the world. Another night, long after that, another shower of stones brought a great evil. Somewhere in here there are the music-hating D2s, monsters that hunt down and snuff out music wherever they hear it. This world’s silence is the presumable wake of their actions.

In the sky, with diamonds.

What about the character writing? What initially seems like it might be the bud of a tedious harem setup quickly proves itself to be a fun dynamic I might compare to a trio of siblings who don’t quite get along. Takt, our eponymous lead, is no mere audience stand-in, he’s a music-obsessed weirdo. He’s mother-fucking funny.

I wish you would step back from that ledge my friend.

Cossette, his Musicart companion, is a wonderful little gremlinoid who treats the humans she’s supposed to protect (including Takt) with a vague disdain and cares more about stuffing her mouth with food and killing as many D2s as possible than she does anything else.

Sugar sugar, oh honey honey.

And finally there’s Anna, the put-upon responsible “oldest sister” of the three, in at least a figurative sense. She spends most of the episode either chest-puffingly exasperated with the other two’s antics, or driving her car to and fro to get them out of trouble.

The three just work together to a rare degree. On their own, any one of these would be an alright character. In concert, they’re a riot. It’s a wonderful thing to watch all this unfold.

Takt’s first action in the episode is to park himself at an abandoned piano. An object evidently so unfamiliar to the general populace of the town he’s in that the younger kids present don’t actually know what it is. As he begins playing, conjuring a wonderful, warm cloud of ivory tones, a D2 is summoned by the sound and comes running. We meet Cossette seconds later, who enters the series by drop-kicking the masked gorilla demon dead in the face. Takt then explodes his arm into rose petals, in one of the most wonderfully camp touches I’ve ever seen in anything, which somehow allows Cossette to assume a more powerful, magical girl-esque form. She tosses Takt a baton. He “conducts”, which, through whatever means, allows Cossette to produce a sword that also has a laser cannon in it, which she uses to shoot the D2 dead.

This is all, it should go without further saying, ridiculous, awesome, campy, silly, and wonderful. The entire sequence is the platonic ideal of action anime as a genre boiled down to sixty seconds of perfection.

I will avoid recapping the remainder of the episode in detail. The specifics we get are pretty minimal; our characters are headed to New York, there’s interesting little bits of backstory speckled throughout.

You say New York, New York is dangerous.

But the main focus remains on the spectacle, because as pure spectacle, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Will it ever transcend pure spectacle? That’s the natural question that some may pose as a follow-up. And I do think it’s a valid one, but, at the risk of sounding reductionist, when there is this much sheer, obvious joy in the art, I am not sure there is much to transcend. Beyond even that argument, though, there really is something to the presented idea of art as a necessary salve in a world that has lost its appreciation for it. Whether takt op.Destiny will ever explore that is another question, but I certainly hope it does. Perhaps I’m over-optimistic, but this feels like the start of something big.

Grade: A+
The Takeaway: If you have any interest in following action anime as a genre or seasonal anime as a format, you should be watching this.

Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.