Re:CREATORS – My Anime of the Year

This is anime of the year. Fight me. While Re: CREATORS isn’t perfect, it takes a fresh spin on a well-known genre and provides a tremendous amount of entertainment value. Re: CREATORS takes the isekai genre and reverses it by bringing the otherworldly characters into the real world. This is my favorite anime this season. For those that have not picked it up, now is the time to binge it. I highly suggest going in blind but if you need more convincing and aren’t afraid of spoilers, read on!

Warning! Heavy spoilers for the show ahead!

The story is not the greatest, but it’s executed very well. The first several episodes establish the main creations and most of their creators enough to make them very likable. One flaw most people talk about is the amount of exposition Meteora does in several episodes. While it does get annoying, she only drones on about aspects of the story only she has knowledge upon; Altair’s plan and the motivations of the creations on Altair’s side are completely unknown to her.

The discovery of Altair’s plans comes from the bubbly magical girl, Mamika taking a darker turn and becoming more and more suspicious of her so-called leader’s motivations for bringing all the creations to the world of the creators. After everything becomes known to all, conflict escalates and the creators and government come up with a plan to trap Altair in an isolated space to defeat her. This needed to be done through a series of crossover events to tie all the creations into the same universe but for all the creations to have the abilities and synergy to fight alongside one another, the audience needed to accept these stories as plausible, because without audience acceptance the stories would not take shape.

I don’t normally get emotional over anime but the final conflict with Selesia’s sacrifice and the created Shimazaki and Altair’s heart to heart really struck me hard. And to add more to the emotional wreck I’ve become already, the final farewell when the creations are going back was heartbreaking. They’ve all had their last moments enjoying time with their creators in various ways and sending them back to their own worlds was the hardest thing to watch. It’s been 22 episodes, 22 whole weeks (if you’ve been keeping up to date) we’ve gotten to know these characters and just hearing them say their farewells was enough to make me tear up. These characters are amazing and them alone is enough to recommend this series to anyone.

If that’s still not convincing, the animation and music are outstanding. Hiroyuki Sawano, known for the music of several major works like Attack on Titan and Kill la Kill, composed the music for this show and it lives up to his name. The second OP for Re:CREATORS is now one of my favorites of his OP compositions. The animation is done by the fairly new studio Troyca, known for Aldnoah.Zero. Their quality is excellent. Character designs are some of my favorite and action scenes are fluid, even rivaling those flashy scenes from Wit Studio.

All these elements together make up what I consider anime of the year. Lovable characters, a well-written story, excellent visuals, and great music, what else can you ask for? Though, anime remembered as anime of the year all have their flaws, and Re:CREATORS is no exception. The massive amounts of exposition from Meteora could have been handled better and some characters introduced somewhat late, e.g. Hikayu, felt a little shoehorned into the story. There is also a lot of deus ex machina in this anime, but when the story is about the literal gods of the creation it makes sense.

I want this to become an actual anime now.

Overall Re:CREATORS is the best show of this year. It, unfortunately, was not seen by many because it was only available on Amazon’s Anime Strike. If you have the ability to watch it, definitely do so because you do not want to miss out on this excellent story. Tell me what you think in the comments, is it anime of the year? Does it deserve less praise than I’m giving it?