Anime 36838 Gintama Shirogane No Tamashii-hen Reviews Filter Check 3

Gintama.: Shirogane no Tamashii-hen
Gintama: Silver Soul Arc

I already had huge doubts about the Rakuyou arc, but here they outdid themselves. Everything negative that Gintama could have ever done was present in just one season.

The plot comes to a head, the final season of Gintama was split into two halves. After these two, only the final movie comes and that's it, the story finds its end.

And yet, this season felt like half an eternity to me. 50% of the time the characters are just running and throwing meaningless dialogues around. The rest of the time extremely drawn-out fights with deadly slow pacing.
- This similar ... problem exists in One Piece, but here the slow pacing has practically surpassed Teo Animation.
In addition, the fights were monotonous, boring, and frankly not even meaningful, yet they took up the entire season.

[Story 3]

After Utsuro finally revealed his plan and plunged Earth (or Japan, since the rest of the world doesn't exist in Gintama) into a state of chaos. Began an endless string of battles, against cannon fodder opponents that were just a waste of time.

[Characters 4]

Here you can see once again what the characters are once you remove most of their traits. Gintoki becomes an overdramatized philosopher. Kagura just looks angry and Shinpachi screams (well that he almost always did). And this is all you see of them.
Yes, there is a war going on. But the characters practically dissolve like sherbet as soon as the plot seems serious. Then they become immensely one-dimensional and flat.

Only Hasegawa and the new Shogun were convincing this season. Through their personality and development.


[Music 5]

The intro is mostly average, the music can't convince like most of the other Gintama intros.

The outro was about on the same level.

The Osts have been enjoyable as always, but couldn't make up for the plummeting quality of this season. Also, most of the iconic posts were missing.


[Animation 4]

The animations have been quite barely average. The intro had been better animated than this season.

Add to that the deadly slow pacing and non-existent dynamics, the fights felt like they were empty.


Conclusion


It was necessary to watch this season, but it broke my heart. I already suspected this, but I had hoped that the anime would still maintain its quality. I still kind of liked this season, it's still Gintama after all.

But as for the quality, no just no.


[Enjoyment 6]

In my opinion, no, actually as a matter of fact, the biggest strength of Gintama has always been the comedy. However, this season explores serious themes and seeks to finally end the anime and tie all loose ends. And it's the absolute worst. Though somehow Gintama the semi-final and final manage to be even worse.

First of all, since this is primarily a comedy anime let's talk about it. Well, it has been subpar at the very best. Most of the comedy is just a rip-off of previous seasons (Jet Armstrong Cannon, etc). The fights were boring as fuck because there wasn't any real emotion ... or interesting backstory behind it. The only one with any interesting backstory is Utsuro, but his story is dragged on for so long that I could barely care. Or maybe it's just me who watched the anime between long periods of breaks because of how boring it was. And Takasugi just felt like a chore at this point. Since this is the last season, why not just resolve all the issues he had as well?

Also, all the characters felt very one-dimentional like as if they were zombies saying the same things over and over again. Saying the same catchphrases that we know best in anime when there's literally nothing else to say, for example, "Let's do our best!" or "I'm going to kick his / her ass" etc. Or just repeating what everyone else says over and over again. Since the author really had to include every single character in every single part of the battle, this left Gintama himself with nothing noticeable to do. They literally had a bunch of characters say that they showed up because they were not given enough screen time since they were introduced towards the end of the anime. And they proceeded to do just that! Similarly, Shinpachi and Kagura were equally useless. My main point is that the important characters felt muted with literally everyone piling up and giving their backstories. As a result no one really felt significant, it was like this whole anime was a blur.

Honestly, I'm a fan of serious arcs in Gintama, for example the red light district arc or the white police arc (whatever it's called). But, this arc really was a disappointment for all the above reasons. Ironically, all the above-mentioned mistakes were not made in the previous arcs. Maybe it was because the author had in mind that this was primarily a comedy anime and so the anime did not take itself too seriously, always keeping a little bit of humour on the side. However, that is what made the serious moments more fresh and unexpected and impactful.

This will always be my favourite comedy anime no matter what the author has done to the final season. However, I feel like this season has cursed me so that I cannot re-watch Gintama for a while now.