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When pointing at the flaws of the current state of the medium of anime, there is a lot to find. We are quick to name isekai and terrible production conditions and rightfully so. But one thing that, for some reason, always goes under the radar, are multi-media franchises. Because those are setting new records at starting a story, only for it to not end in the respective anime but some gacha trash or, worse, have said gacha trash be immediately cancelled. As far as I‘m concerned, that‘s the biggest waste of time a medium can muster up and it‘s become a bigger and bigger factor as of late. Because, I assure you, this did not happen in the 00s.
Granted, most anime are incomplete adaptations. Which is obviously pretty terrible in general since why would you specifically want to watch something blatantly unfinished. Heck, I loved Undead Girl Murder Farce and I also would prefer for it to have told the entire story. I’m pretty sure half of the anime I thought were good end on “Sequel never?“ Adaptations are essentially glorified advertisements for the source material. And sometimes the source material never ends like with Bakemonogatari. And rarely, the adaptation never ends, like with Girls und Panzer. The teenagers who got into Girls und Panzer are now married folks. Either that or abnormal single men – which is more likely. But the point stands that if you get into anime, it‘s more so for anime as a medium as you seasonally consume the interchangeable content as a package as a whole in a batch of new anime every season anew rather than the individual anime themselves as those barely give you a rewarding conclusion.
And yet, despite this inherent flaw in the medium, media-mix franchises I find to be particularly cynical. Sometimes, you think you‘re watching an anime original only for the series to reveal at the end that actually, there‘s more and if you want to find out how the story continues, please find out in the actual source material that we‘ve been hiding from you all along! They did this with Occultic;Nine too only to reveal at the end that if you want to see the true ending, you now must buy the suddenly announced visual novel. And then they had to post-patch in that ending because it wasn‘t in there either.
Magical Destroyers was such a funny case of being labelled auteur animation for its opening alone and then people found out it ended on a cliffhanger and the story was to be continued in the gacha game – and let‘s call these out for what they are: glorified slot machine simulations and all you can win are .jpgs, free for you to download on the Internet anyway. This isn‘t even a “Buy the DLC, get the full package“ situation, this is just a perverted bait and switch wherein they try to catch your attention by frontloading the appealing animated content only to trick you into throwing your money at a vastly inferior form of storytelling designed solely with the purpose of extracting your hard-earned money through predatory means now that you‘re halfway into the sunk cost fallacy. It‘s nothing short of fraud and doesn‘t just promote gambling on your side but also on the investors‘ side who see the anime that get made as a promotional tool for the actual money making process and nothing else. As for Magical Destroyers specifically? The gacha game launched alongside the anime and when it turned out neither were successful enough, they pulled the plug on the game the very moment the anime ended. This is just an evil scam method and nothing more. And it‘s become such a frequent story. The entire Takt.OP Destiny delayment dilemma or even the whole Kemono Friends debacle are more interesting than the stories themselves which have the intention of creating monetary value by creating nothing of worth at all.
Yuuki Yuuna was a rare case where some of its seasons were actually good and worth watching and still, most of its characters are locked behind light novel spinoffs and gacha, the latter out of service by now but at least it didn‘t become lost media – well, the gameplay did – as the stories have been preserved through a PS4 port from a studio that does nothing but port VNs to consoles (that‘s already depressing in its own right) that in its entirety asks 80000 yen from you. Excuse me, what the fuck? Are you telling me you want for me to buy this game so I can play it on my PS5 or do you want me to buy a second PS5? Who in their right mind pays for a $500 visual novel?
To add to the amusing anecdotes, let’s briefly bring up Divine Gate – this one‘s a terrible anime with designs good enough that I own the artbook – which meanwhile had gacha characters appear in its ending animation that never appeared in the actual anime. It wasn‘t even teasing, advertising or foreshadowing, none of these people were part of the actual show. I… what? Are we even trying to make anything here? Like, with coherent thought and all that? Have we given up on the creation process from the very get-go?
I like to call isekai and the likes content but what are these advertisement scams then? They aren‘t even content. They are just marketing. Marketing usually serves to promote the content. Here, the content itself is the marketing. This is so utterly backwards I‘m not even sure why I should go back to anime from movies, an inherently superior medium where things usually have a clear starting and ending point.
Anime has become gacha itself, which usually lures you in with quick rewards and gameplay loops until you get baited into the money trap of having to pay to experience more while getting incrementially less. In this case, the early honeymoon phase is the anime itself and then the cash grab products rear their ugly heads. They‘re like those shady hobbyist magazines from back in the days where they‘d give you half a train set in the original issue and then distribute the other half across the next 30 issues so you‘d certainly not unsubscribe. Gotta buy them all. Frontloading some meat and then halting all progress is a famous trick after all and has made its way into online journalism as well. First comes the elaborately crafted clickbait, then comes the paywall. This is not that different.
Cases like Magical Destroyers or Takt.OP Destiny make it all too evident that these anime are just investments and if they realize halfway into the airing anime that the required numbers aren‘t there, in a quick pump and dump scheme, the entire work itself gets aborted and turns into a stillbirth. In that sense, they are all writing prequels now. And by prequels I mean teasers. Because usually, prequels don‘t get released before the actual product and don‘t decide whether the product gets to exist more than a few months in the first place. It‘s all so backwards. In that sense, when it comes to gacha works, anime no longer just promotes gambling, it has become gambling itself. The baseline for a lot of anime originals is “Can we create a successful gambling addiction simulator with an anime as a tool of advertising?“
Even with anime series or franchises that weren‘t designed with content exploitation in mind from the get-go, there is a tendency that it all evolves into just more while halting the overall franchise progress since all progress eventually ends so it‘s financially more sensible for franchises to instead stay on the same spot or walk in circles.
This kind of business approach (and that‘s all it is) also slows the actual story down to no ends. At this point, highly popular franchises like PSYCHO-PASS or NieR have spanned across a decade and it‘s become relatively hard to even point at where they‘re getting. Will Kogami and Akane ever meet again before the final season as the Sibyl system reinvents itself with each season anew? And did you know that there‘s a NieR side story in which Kaine finds a pair of siblings resembling Nier and his sister and she kills Not-Nier and rapes him in front of his sister? Kinda ruins the mood a bit I‘d say. I‘m glad there are all these valuable side stories that retroactively add new layers of absolutely nothing.
And there is just so much of everything to consume, consume, consume. Read the light novel! Watch the stage play! Play the gacha game! Listen to the audio dramas! Buy the spinoff manga! Watch the recap compilation movie with 10 % new material that will be relevant in the future! At some point, you turn from someone who just wants to simply follow a story to someone who is a slave to the factor of the fear of missing out. Franchises and anime, in some cases at least, as a whole have been rethought and rewired. These are the DLCs and season passes of Japanese animation and nobody has quite made the connection yet. The video game industry and anime industry might have more in common than one might realize. Considering the former has bled into cars selling additional functions nowadays, it’s not the most unnatural development.
Even if the medium remains the same for the continuation of the thing you just watched, it’s become more established that the anime in question doesn’t. Anime are inefficient as products insofar as that they take ages to make so investors can‘t just readily react on the spot to greenlight a sequel without a massive delay and even when there is a stream of source material readily available for adaptation, that‘s often not fast enough. The new popular anime is hot now. And if a studio‘s pipeline is already filled due to pre-existing contracts, it won‘t get a continuation even in two years at earliest. Hence the change in directors, character designers or studios. You‘re not even getting a consistent look across what‘s supposed to be the same product anymore. This was very rare back in the days with a few standout examples for the worse like Gunslinger Girls and even in the 10s, not too much of a thing that stood out even then (take Terra Formars) and nowadays, we do studio switches all the time, the artistic integrity be damned. The mere fact that Attack on Titan switched from WIT to MAPPA and looked nothing alike thereafter should have evoked a scandal but it‘s become obvious consumers have stopped caring. They want BRAND, not the art behind it. And, on that note, while I‘m already digressing – each and every time they advertise that these new character designs are closer to the source materials. And each and every time, they look worse.
Of course, this is not limited to anime. Something like The Boys tries to branch out to all kinds of cashgrabbing while padding itself out while also being self-smug about how others do it. But even something as primitive and pretentious in its quest of monetization as The Boys understands that amidst all the franchising and spinoffing, it needs to present more of The Boys itself. It‘s not “Homelander will go on a break for the next 7 years as we try to figure out how to evolve the story“ and it‘s not “Will they kill him or won‘t they kill him? Find out only in our smartphone game!“ 15 seasons of Supernatural are probably 12 seasons too much but at least it‘s more Supernatural. What the fuck even is PSYCHO-PASS at this point, I doubt it‘s even legally possible to get a complete look at the entire picture from abroad. They create so much that even accessibility becomes a problem.
To be fair, I believe we have come to attain a bit more of a heightened awareness to a trend that‘s long since been more present in the country of origin that never really quite reached us overseas as much. Even I didn‘t know for the longest time there was a light novel adaptation of the 4kids commissioned Yu-Gi-Oh! The Pyramid Of Light movie that nobody liked, even though that makes me wonder who even read that drivel. So clearly the transition to multi-media franchises is a bit less crude than as we perceive it to be. But, here‘s the thing: that was oftentimes extra material to extra material. When your main product suddenly ends and wants you to invest in a medium that‘s nothing like it, you‘re just being scammed.
As I find myself nowadays, in a rare moment, watching a regular live-action series again, Generation Kill, rather than a movie, I become all the more emamored with the concept of concluded stories, wherein the writers knew what they wanted to do, the full package from A to Z being all there and no numbered sequels and umlaut extensions anywhere to be seen. A mini-series like Chernobyl does everything it could possibly do within five episodes. That is very valuable.
You can‘t even say that a lot of anime fails at concise storytelling – it doesn‘t even make an attempt at it since that runs counterintuitively to the designated purpose of up-selling and cross-selling. This is why I don’t watch gacha anime. I can see the business men pencil scratches right behind the writing. They have no chance to be good or complete. At no point will anyone with a functioning brain look back at “Gambling Coom Bait: The Animation“ and say “Yup, that was a good anime.“ And series with countless of spinoff stories need to ask themselves the question: if your side content is integral to the story, why is it missable? And if it is not, why does it even exist?
As such, let it be said that whether through an endless barrage of side stories, spinoffs, recaps, compilation movies and products on products to products at products or just simply there being a cutoff in the midst of a story that didn‘t financially pay off to transcend to the originally intended gacha sequel medium, there is one fact that none of this can ultimately change: good stories properly end.
Multi-media projects, regardless which of these two aforementioned ways they take, do not.
Beyond The Mountain Lies A World Of Frills 