Tales of Zestiria the X

The first episode is just beautiful! I was expecting it to be well-produced, and considering the fact that I had seen the previous movie called Tales of Zestiria: Dawn of the Shepherd, I knew what I was getting into. However, it is clear that the Ufotable studio has gone the extra mile again concerning the animation here because this is just visual pornography! The water! The fire! The tornadoes! The fighting! The city! The fire-breathing dragon! The introduction was simply a treat that whetted my appetite for more. The animation is stunningly beautiful, and visually this is simply one of the top releases of the year. The only shame is that we do not also have a properly epic and coherent narrative to go with such gorgeous animation. Sure I could forgive them for a lot of things; however, the fact that they devoted two whole episodes to advertising their upcoming action role-playing video game Tales of Berseria left me wondering what the point of this was besides marketing and that just kind of pisses me off. Leaving that interjection aside, after watching the first season, I just have to reiterate that ToZ is an average fantasy adventure with beautiful audiovisual design, but unfortunately, nothing more than that. 7/10. (03/07/2016)

If you liked the first season and you appreciate quality animation, and if you can enjoy the glitzy polished veneer, you will enjoy the second season. It is still visually charming. However, it is still just as obvious, sterile, and predictable story-wise. The only surprise is who ends up with who because the relationships seem to have no build-up without the series suggesting it or portraying anything. They simply seem just to happen. Therefore, most of it feels weird to me, like the ending of The Legend of Korra, and I do not care if it is about guys getting together with guys or girls with girls, as long as they build a believable and natural path to it. However, that does not happen in this show. So, I raised my eyebrows, asking "Where did that come from?". It also did not help this anime series that there was a month delay with the last episode, which broke the flow of the narrative because I forgot some of the connections, so maybe that affected my perception of the whole story. However, this was still an interesting and visually nice show with an average story about heroes. 7/10 (14/09/2020)