Shaman King (2021) Review - A Worthy Reboot?

in #anime2 years ago

Reboot Of A Classic Shonen

Japan has perhaps in last 5-6 years kinda cashed into nostalgia mode by rebooting lot of old Anime from different time periods whatever its Tiger Mask, GeGeGe No Kitaro, Fruit basket or upcoming Urusei No Yatsura. If we look at our Burger Counterparts on America who tend to subvert and gender/race swap characters from original movies - Japanese approach is rather just giving a more modern HD experience to an old series.

Sure GeGeGe No Kitaro changes the setting in more modern world with cellphones compared to the original one, but i would argue lot of other elements have stayed more or less same. In most of cases like this new Shaman King - we're having a more faithful adaption of manga than original 2001 one.

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Now visually there is more modern and perhaps what i would call "glossy/glowwy" approach to character looks in this reboot. Both styles as seen above are something i enjoy, perhaps peak Anime style always been that 80-90's OVA quality, but we don't really see that anymore.

So yeah...the new version is looking more modern and is more faithful to the manga. Now the issue fundamentally here is that you only have 52 episodes to basically tell a story that easily over 70 episode story, which created massive pacing issues especially towards final arc - which pretty much ruined it.

Now overall it was decent reboot, but in some ways perhaps the original had a better ending to a degree and did some things better, but in some aspects also quite horrible with some plot twists.