Failure Frame: A Different Kind of Hero's Tale

Can an isekai protagonist be more than just a powerhouse hero? Find out as we unravel the captivating journey of Taka in "Failure Frame," a refreshing addition to Crunchyroll's 2024 summer anime lineup. This episode promises an exploration of Taka's complex character—one shaped by past trauma and a thirst for vengeance. Unlike the typical genre fare, his story unfolds through unique low-tier skills like poison and paralysis, making his path to growth far more relatable and intricate. We'll also talk about the intriguing dynamics between Taka and Sarah, the elf knight princess, whose bond is more about educational exchanges than fleeting romance.

Our discussion doesn’t shy away from critiquing the show’s reliance on familiar anime tropes and narrative diversions. We tackle the harem-like setup and some convenient plot devices, such as Taka's acquisition of a magical horse with little backstory. While we highlight these narrative weaknesses, we also appreciate the innovative blend of hand-drawn and 3D animation that sets this series apart visually, despite its occasional jarring effect. With an evocative soundtrack that adds to the mix, "Failure Frame" earns a solid 3.5 out of 5 from us. This series fills a unique niche for those yearning for more content reminiscent of "Jobless Reincarnation," and we discuss its potential for future seasons amidst a competitive anime market.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Anime Review
• 17:51 Anime Tropes and Weaknesses
• 27:57 Anime Review Rating and Marketing Trends

Transcript

  📍  Okay, so like, welcome to Second Emulation, the podcast thats all about pop culture, like, literally everything from movies and TV shows to the latest anime crazes. Join us for, like, all the juicy deets and insights on whats happening in the entertainment world. were like, totally here to spill the tea on whats hot and whats not, so if youre looking for the ultimate pop culture fix, youre in the right place, honey. So, like, grab a seat, kick off your heels, and lets dive right into it, shall we?

I'd like to thank Emily for that intro, and welcome back new and current listeners. Today's episode is going to be an anime review  of an anime that I recently watched and figured I'd talk about it.   Let's get into it.  The anime title is called Failure Frame. It's a   one season, twelve episodes.

Couldn't find the  no producer for this. It is listed on Crunchyroll  and  for part of its  summer lineup for 2024. The summary reads, Taka always faded into the background  at school and when he's summoned to a world with his classmates.  That still doesn't change. They all acquire top tier skills except Taka gets the lower tier skills and is banished to the ruins by the goddess to die. 

Now,  let's go into  the character.  Let's talk a little bit about the summary a little bit.    If you didn't know, this is N. S. Isekai.  I know how many some, many people might feel about that. You might love it or hate it. There are some good isekai anime and some bad ones. And I know that we're just in this year where they're going to keep churning them out  to figure out which ones stick, which ones don't. 

But me personally, I actually enjoyed this one.   Now it does.  It does follow some trope  of  that fall under the isekai storyline.  But let's get into it.    Character development, we're    following   Toka,  who essentially is the one that gets banished. And what's unique about this is that again  nothing out of the ordinary.

He's seeking Val Vengeance Now,  we assumed  like any isic high type character or storyline  the character's eventually gonna get strong.   Now he doesn't start off strong right away.  He's  what was done to him by the goddess of him being banished to die.  It's essentially what's fueling all his actions and his motive.

Let's just get out of the way. He wants vengeance.  That's all he cares about. That's all his whole existence.  Now, what's very unique about,  This is that this character, Taka, is given three abilities, Poison, Paralysis, and Sleep.  Now those essentially just affect, those by itself don't, are not considered   their low tier,  but  Taka finds a way to utilize them and level up and eventually escape the ruin that he's in.

Now  again  what makes this very unique is that Takka has PTSD and past trauma from  you know living in the modern world and being abused.  And so he takes that with him  Other people probably  his classmates have lived a good life. Unfortunately for him, he's already damaged. And so he feels the need to prove himself.

Very different   than other characters in the Isekai realm where they're just,   their life was grand.  and their modern world and now they're summoned and they're just op He has a baggage and he's already damaged  And that's what I like. I like a character who's developed. That makes him more relatable to certain He's not perfect that he has issues. 

I Think those type of characters  Have the most  Huge potential for growth within a series and talca  is no different  You see him grow within this series  out of again, he is being fueled by vengeance, but he's also holding on to like  They  He wouldn't be seeking vengeance because he's relating to what happened to him in this world to how he was mistreated in the modern world And so now he has the ability to do something About it.

Now mind you he  is going to want to take his vengeance out on the so called goddess, but he understands that he is nowhere capable of taking her on at this time and that he needs to somehow grow and develop and get powerful and strong. He wasn't strong to begin with, and he does have  handicaps that prevent him.

So   Things like that make this character more interesting  Now we are introduced to some other characters  I think Sarah the elf let's call the elf princess to save some time Who ends up becoming?  We end up getting interactions with this  elf knight princess  And What's interesting  is that his interactions with this person, again, is not something of  the normal usual trope that we expect from an isekai story or someone who is considered OP. 

When they encounter an attractive woman, of course, very attractive woman,  They just go googly eyes over this person  based because he's driven by vengeance   helps her out.  We find out this, the  warrior  princess or elf knight  has a, in order to do her magic, she has to give up her  she gave up her ability to sleep. 

So it's almost like a pact like That in order for her to use Her specific high tier magic abilities stuff like that. She had to give up something so she can't sleep  Because she gave up her ability to sleep or sacrifice her sleep in order for her to use her magic  Which was something that was very unique   And they have a weird, they have a  a business transaction relationship where  he brings her on as his bodyguard  to protect him since he's no warrior  and the interactions with that is transactional because he doesn't know how things are in this world.

 Like again, Marvel vs Capcom game was not meant to be relatable, as they weren't 1967's style games, but OIQ was meant to be funny.   Speak out of turn or  give himself away in any situation that they might be in that  might endanger them  even though she's already   promised her sword and her shield to him as protection as the bodyguard.

But I find that their interactions is always interesting because she's very.  Noble and loyal as a knight and she After we find out that you know he tells her what his aims are  She accepts it. She goes. I will help you I have nothing else if this is once you what you want to do I will stand by your side and help you fulfill this    And that's something that's very interesting because you don't get too many characters in anime  where  the main character is  I want death.

I want revenge. I want these people to suffer. And then   the next character you're introduced to is  you know what,  I've been spending some time with you and let's make this happen.   I will I am loyal, I will   whatever you need  in the pursuit of your vengeance, let's do it.    Not to mention   there's a point in the story where you find out that she is also being pursued.

And   in a way, she needs him.  And once her problem is dealt with,  she then realizes that he is  much more capable. And he's very, Taka is very absolute in his convictions.  But he's still ignorant to the world around him that he needs information and she's    She's that for him. She's the interpreter.

She is the   the mediator between  the information and relaying information to him. Cause he doesn't know anything around him,  the ins and outs.  So  I think that is  for character development for those two characters is very unique.   And we do see it   In some  isekais, it's not very too often we see that kind of dynamic   in  anime. 

Maybe with some other ones, I'll have to look them up, but like that dynamic there is very unique in itself. Now, moving on to strengths and weaknesses. 

What I found was a weakness was the show is limited to 12 episodes because as I was watching it.  It did leave me on a cliffhanger,  which I was not expecting.  And I'm like, crap, I want to know more.  And  it's one of those things when you find a good anime to watch and you're like, you're so invested and then it just ends and you're like, crap, will this get picked up again?

Will there be a second season? I hope so. And   if it's popular, I'm hoping it will get picked up.   I was so invested into it  that  when it ended and there was like, Oh  here it is. Here's the end.  Nothing So for me, I feel like that was a weakness because it would have been  cool  hey,   Season 2 is announced, you know for the series No, no information that I can think of as of yet off to look into if there is a season 2 announcement  For this which would be very nice, but   I'm not  Having my hopes up for it  Now 

Another weakness of this is that  anytime we're introduced to a new character  or just a character in general that  we're introduced to, they're killed off. Right off the bat,  because Taka is so sick on vengeance, once he obtains every ounce of information from this individual, the individual that they were introduced to, they're killed off.

Immediately,  and you see that trend there. Like he only has people in his inner circle or that he can trust. But like any person that we're introduced to that might, that's a new character   they're. Briefly there and then they're killed off by him  And we won't see any ripples  An example of this is that we're introduced to a You know a noble person who?

Does like their versions of  the gladiator games?  No  Introduced to him very briefly how he has very so much control over  this town  gets killed off  Again, they're fighting, Talka fights him, ends up killing him off. Boom, we don't see the repercussions of that one act.  Do the people revolt? Do people find out  that person's dead?

He just kills him off. Boom, and that's it. And then the story moves on.  Again we, we see these dragon riders,  another example, he obtains information from them.   And these are the dragon riders who are pursuing the elf   princess knight.  He obtains information from them as much as he possibly can and then he kills them off. 

There was alluded to some epic battle   later on. No, it was a farce. He just needed the information that he needed and he kills them off.  And   which I.  I get where he's in that mindset. If I let this person go, they might track me down and come after me later when I'm vulnerable at something I can't have  preventing me from getting to   from enacting my revenge.

But I kinda wanted to see  some of these characters, some of the ones we're introduced to.  Live and see the repercussions of     them spreading the word that Taka's alive and having that get back to the goddess and his classmates and things of that nature.  I understand that he wanted to keep his existence   As quiet as possible.

No one know that he exists and have them presume that he's dead. I get that. It just    It just seemed very fast and I get it.  It's 12 episodes. So not much room to expand on those type of pivotal story moments.  So I myself found it.  as a   as one of the weakness  for that. 

Now, one common anime trope, of course, is that  the character ends up getting a harem. I wouldn't call this a harem, but it's a, I figure it's a weakness, but  this Character in order to  mitigate the harem ness of it his companions He ends up taking up along the way are all female  There's no  I can't say there's no love interest but  at the end we do get a love interest from the elf princess warrior who she ends up developing for Taka and Taka kind of develops some feelings but they're not like perverted.

 He does express like Internally that   he does like her in some sense because he can be vulnerable around her  and that's the first time he can, you know can be vulnerable without someone taking advantage of that but the common  trope I find as a weakness is that his party members are all female  And so  that You know  I Didn't see coming until actually Looked back and realize.

Oh, yeah, like each of the people that joined his kind of     Party up to this point. They're all female    Not well, I guess it would make kind of sense if they had another guy, you know He that person could betray him at any moment Yep.  But they were all female.   Not mind you like he was overly like perverted towards them in any way.

It just seemed like each one,  his reason behind it is that he saw different aspects of their personality  that was relatable to  family members   from his past.  And I felt like that was a weird way to explain why   these women are with him because and why he decided to help them in a certain aspect because they just reminded him of   a family member and how  nice that family member was even being   of the opposite sex. 

I think another weakness here is just like  obtaining the tools.    I may have forgotten him, but  he conveniently gets  a monster egg that ends up hatching, and it turns out to be a horse  that he imbues magic with, and becomes like this demonic horse that he can ride when   they've been walking everywhere.   

 Things of that nature don't really make sense because it's  okay, there's no backstory on the creature.   We're just, you're just  left to assume that, okay, this is what it is. This is the world we're in  nothing.   We're not given as much information on the creatures that we're dealing with.  

 Within the series  So that I consider a one weakness is he can really have  you know items  That can help him on his journey another weakness is that While this is all happening We're also told that there's like this Yeah. Giant epic war and battle happening that the goddess who summoned him and his classmates there is training the classmates with their tier level skills to fight in this battle  and  There has been no  evidence of so called battle that we know of.

We're just told that they're gonna be sent out to battle and that they're not the first summon. There's been other  people who've been summoned, hero's summoned to this place to fight  some type of war, or monsters, and I'm thinking  How many times do you have to summon people if you didn't get it right the first time?

So it does make me wonder there's something else going on that they're not telling anyone. And they're just  purposely just overlooking  Hey, yeah, there's this war going on. We're training them  for something.  And so that is very interesting. And then those who are, who can't fight or refuse to fight are killed off.  

 There's   two stories going on one for Taka and one for  the goddess and like this giant battle that's supposed to be happening. I felt   was a weakness for the show because we spent so much time  with Taka and then it was split and tell us what were what was happening with the other classmates and their development which  Ooh, okay.

That's this, but it did dilute   what,   talk of story because I didn't care what was happening to them. It didn't need to be there. I felt like that was a real weakness story, like showing me what's like these random characters who but they apparently seemed to  fixate on which had no interaction with the main character whatsoever  so I don't know why they did that but i felt like it was a real weakness they could've just not had those parts in there  and   to me, That was a weakness they kept pivoting Trying to make you focus like there's just something greater happening here and you need to be aware of this  But at the same time you only got 12 episodes so  As much as they're trying to put into the storyline you know  It felt like  That didn't need to be there that if they were going to do a second season You  That could be the second season  it just took away from  the anime.

Mind you, these episodes they are slated like twenty what? Twenty three minutes or twenty six minutes  and that's what they enter in the outro. The episode itself is much shorter about maybe sixteen minutes or seventeen minutes. That's it.  So you can imagine that  if they're telling a story for every within each episode, they only have so much time or minutes to explain the story or whatever that episode was about before the credits hit.

So yeah  they had one episode that was dedicated to a character that From his class, that I didn't even know about. And, frankly, didn't care about because  she wasn't introduced.  In the beginning.  She, they were like, hey, she's weak, we need to train her up, And we kept getting more time with her. They kept showing, she kept getting more screen time, which I disliked.

I was like, I don't want, I don't care about this person. Why you keep showing this character?  It's just death flags all over her.   If you're showing that, or showing us this because she's gonna die at some point  have it happen off screen   so that I felt like it was a weakness  of this anime, which is   they kept,      they kept trying to move away from the main story and giving you this second storyline that was happening or the, what we'll consider the main story of the anime. 

Sorry about the little tangent there, but  moving on to some unique aspects of the anime. So what I found very interesting about these anime is that.  It's a mixture of hand or digital hand drawing and 3d animations. And I had to do a double take because there were certain aspects when it came to   the action part,  there was 3d models.

So versus blend of,    some 3d animation and then it would   go into hand drawn  and I   don't know if that worked well with the series  but there were certain points  one that was very evident, I think with the first interaction and dual   action scene that we get with   Taka and he's   helping  The elf princess is that we  get that moment and it looks like 3d and you can tell it's 3d animation,   Injected on a hand drawn environment  It  looks out of place.

And so  It does get cleaned up You know at times, but there's sometimes that it does stick out as our thumb I could have put this as a weakness, but it's it was very unique and I know  Some anime studios are trying to find that balance of just hand drawn digital and  3d animations when it comes to certain things and me personally it's They could have just maybe  left it as hand drawing.

Because it does stick out as a sore thumb  when it came to some certain action sequences.  It looked like PS3   Character Model That's  what it looked like so I'm not sure if that's what they were going for  Or that was meant to happen, but there are certain steel stills in   that It was a very unique approach to the animation  that I was not expecting.

And I know a lot of studios now are trying to find that blend of  trying to work new styles, new way to It said that brevard tf2 russia, mcdonough, We watched bashor tell his story, him talking to an animatic boy. Tf2 the dub's talking to the other dude. N to  animation,  just caught me off guard.

So I put that as something that's very unique.  aspect of this and it's probably something that we're going to see a lot of   depending   on the studio and what they're trying to do 

Yeah, so  It just caught me off guard with that but  all in all  There weren't any more unique aspects of this anime. I think the fact that Actually, the intro and the outro were very unique. I think those were some unique  I find unique is that they had a very good soundtrack that was   that kind of set the tone for the anime itself.

So I wasn't expecting that.  Now,   going on to what more what I would rate this anime is that  I would give it a 3. 5 out of 5. Reason for it is that it's still something new.   There are some weaknesses for this anime. I don't know if it's going to be a one shot. It does allude that there's going to be, like I said, even a cliffhanger that there might be a possible a continuation.

Again, I don't want to keep my hopes up for that because there's been cases where you know  There's a cliffhanger We use it for a sequel and then you find out the anime is one and done But the manga is still going so I'm hoping you know it may get picked up for a second season Who knows?  What ends up happening a lot for these is that they do get an opportunity to showcase  the opportunity to become from a manga to an anime.

And if it does very well, then    merch and things of that nature and then views. That's pretty cool.  It will give them the push to make more. And  A lot of  some of these animes that come out ya'kno during these seasonal line ups Some of them don't have any marketing ya'kno, behind them.

So they kinda get like Lost in the sauce by like your main heavily marketted world renowned and y'kno  Steady series, like My Hero Academia,  Reincarnation of Slime, Those that already have an established fan base and merits those ones are gonna get picked up no matter how much And Demon Slayer's like name brands will get picked up  and they'll keep going  For new studios who wanna, y'know, have an idea, create it   and get the series going, it's hard to do that.

So you see a lot of animes that either have a manga following behind it, get made into an anime, and just no sequel behind it.  It's just it's one and done which ends up calling them one shots because they either You know the marketing didn't do well for it. They didn't have the perfect numbers. There's a fan base.

It's just  it's hard to compete in an anime against name brand stuff so  I'm hoping that  this does get the recognition it deserves and we're able to see  a sequel for it. If not, it was a good anime. It's just that  it  sucks   and I say that as being an anime fan is that   you get, used to watching many different  genres of anime through the course of these seasonal lineups and then just a lot of them just end up in the anime graveyard because they either they're one shots there's no falling behind we'll just call them one shot there are some that are purposely just one shots but there's are some that actually have continuation stories but  They're just not enough push behind it for a sequel.

And so they're just one and done. And it's unfortunate for some.   I'm hoping Chainsaw Man gets a sequel.  That was a good one to watch. Who knows? But, again,  I stand by my rating of 3. 5 out of 5. It was a good anime. Lots of unique things that was tried in this, but overall,  I feel  if you're looking for  a different type of anime, then Fatal Frame  is a good watch  to have. 

To add to your watch list of anime.  You can watch it once, it'd be done.   It  just,  it will fill that void of isekai that you're looking for. It doesn't go away. It's not too overly aggressive, it's not too over sexualized.  It, it has a niche that it's following. So if you're  waiting for the next season of a job is reincarnation, this kind of fills that void a bit for you while you're waiting for the next season.  

 All right,  that does it for this episode. And again, I'd like to thank everyone for listening and new and current listeners and pass off to Emily to do the outro. And you guys have a great one.  Bye. 

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