I mean, Scrapped Princess is technically proficient. That’s probably the best thing I can say about it. It’s got great animation, decent music, and a strong voice cast. The execution though…not so much.
you'd never guess that mogudan did the original art for the light novel
There’s two big problems with the show, which go hand in hand with each other. The first is that the story itself seems like it doesn’t really know how much to draw from which of the many light novels that this series originates from. There’s a lot of what feels like aimless wandering from the characters. With a tighter plot and brisker pacing, this could generate an exciting story of narrow escapes while they try to figure out just what exactly is going on. Instead, rather than drive the story forward, the wandering basically provides opportunities in the storyline for others to do things to them.
Related to this is the fact that the series does a pretty bad job with the whole world-building element of its setting. The original feel of the setting for the story is a pretty standard high fantasy world. There’s magic, knights, and a prophecy around the main character, Pacifica. So far so good. A few episodes later, we learn about a religious cult that seems like it will figure somewhat prominently. Again, no problem. However, now the characters are really starting to build up.
oops, spoke too soon
This is making me wary. The show doesn’t really seem like they can handle them all, as they go away and come back with just bad enough timing that they’ll leave too early and I won’t catch who they were, or they’ll stay away too long and I’ll forget why I should care. Shortly after this point, we start getting tons of made up terms. Dragoons, guardians, peacemakers, whoa slow down here. We’re ending up like that one xkcd strip, and things are not looking good.
We’re at about the halfway point now, and then we get another big suspension of disbelief bomb: there’s also these aliens in their spaceships going around affecting the Earth. Alright, now this has gone too far. Fantasy and sci-fi go together all the time, but haphazard world-building just makes the whole thing seem half-assed, like they’re just tossing in every idea that they can think of. if they had built up to this a little bit better ahead of time, it would feel like a satisfying reveal rather than yet another thing that should be cool (like say, dragon mecha fighting in space) but isn’t because I just don’t care any more.
Would I watch it even if I weren’t forced? Honestly, I didn’t expect this series to be as terrible as it ended up being.
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