As I’ve mentioned before I’m working my out of anime normie territory. I’m currently watching Ah My Goddess (yes I know, but it’s a catchy show) and I know it’s based on a manga so I was wondering if anime adaptations do a better job than here in the west. I know Japan isn’t perfect but it seems like they value the source material a lot more than they do here. Or am I mistaken?
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Anime adaptations can be excellent or they can be terrible. It definitely depends on a title by title basis on how much they respect the source material.
Some anime adaptations even surpass the source material in quality.
Other anime bring shame and dishonor in how much they butcher the source material.
Examples of great anime adaptations: FMA Brotherhood
Kaguya-Sama Love Is War
Kimetsu No Yaiba
Jujutsu Kaisen
Spy x Family
Examples of the worst anime adaptations:
Promised Neverland Season 2
Tokyo Ghoul Season 2
Berserk 2016 anime
I recommend always doing some research to see what fans say on whether a specific title is better read as a manga or watched as an anime.
Not going to lie. When I first heard of it, just based on the premise, I thought I would hate it. I only watched it because some of my friends wanted to.
I am happy to say I was very wrong. It's fucking hilarious and I am glad they forced me to see it.
Sounds interesting. What’s it about exactly?
The synopsis is this
"In the senior high school division of Shuchiin Academy, student council president Miyuki Shirogane and vice president Kaguya Shinomiya appear to be a perfect match. Kaguya is the daughter of a wealthy conglomerate family, and Miyuki is the top student at the school and well-known across the prefecture. Although they like each other, they are too proud to confess their love, as they believe whoever does so first would lose. The story follows their many schemes to make the other one confess or at least show signs of affection."
Basically the boy and girl both engage in elaborate schemes to try to be the one being confessed to. Imagine Death Note level planning/overthinking in an attempt to get your crush to confess to you.
The show is much better than the synopsis and my explanation sounds like.
Cool! Sounds good. Thank you
I even recommended it to friends who don't like romance anime at all and so far everyone has loved it.
It is definitely hilarious.
Can confirm, it's uproaringly funny.
The only downside is the entire premise, of that "battle of love and war," is dropped way too early into the series. Something like 80 chapters into the 280 total it loses that angle to become "how they overcome their trauma" arcs.
Its still great and I enjoyed it the whole way through, but the anime is going to lose a lot of what people liked about it soon because they've run out of those chapters to work with and are going to hit the "long multi part drama" episodes instead.
The ishigami arc kind of already got into that kind of arc and I think it was received generally well. But yeah it will be interesting to see how well it is received if or when the anime passes the culture festival arc.
Ishigami has multiple very long arcs dealing with his stuff. They've only covered part of it.
Its also the first of them. It was well recieved in the manga too, until that was all the manga did (and they pulled some deus ex machina bullshit to "resolve" Ishigami's because the author was in a hole so they could move on). Then there came a bunch, including the Ice arc which idk anyone who likes, all the way until the ending.
I want to add Shadow House as a in between of good and bad. I like the animation, the music, the characters but why the fuck did they add anime only stuff? That's in general why I don't like some adaptions, stop adding needless stuff that makes no sense. The 1999 version of hunter x hunter did it Pretty well, added some extra scenes in between to enhance the plot. I am by no means a purist in that regard, if something makes something flow better do it please.
To explain one point of your list: promised neverland, the first season is amazing, the second cuts out 100 chapters to give it an ending, cutting out the most looked forward to arc since the announcement of a second season.
I forgot Berserk 2016 existed, why can't they just make a good adaption of everything that exists?
I enjoyed Shadows House, having not read the source material I even recommend it to friends. I understand they wrote out an "important" character, or one that will become important later on, and the little interlude at the end of season 1 was filler, but I don't think the filler fundamentally changed anything, and it left it on a nice ending note.
Just because something is changed, does not make it automatically bad. Chrono Crusade is probably the most stark example, the anime outpaced the manga, and so they made up the ending wholesale. It's about demons and the church hunting them, and so they have some big fight with vampiric demon cultists trying to make hell on Earth, and then gave a "the rest of their lives in 5 minutes" ending denouement that is in-character and fitting. The manga? Aliens from Mars. They're all aliens from Mars, and the whole "church vs demons" thing is thrown out because they're actually martians, and the church just happened by coincidence to be able to fight them, stressing that it was happenstance. But aliens from other planets may be on the way~. It's a Shamallamalan level dumb tweeeeest, and hurts the series for its existence, and the anime that played it straight was much better. Even though it changed the source material. Because the source mangaka went nuts.