thoughts on Shuten Order
rating: 2.5/5 final time: about 42 hours.
the script is solidly constructed and thematically strong but oh my god, dude, it's so long. it's SO LONG. it's so much longer than it needs to be. sometimes the slow pace creates good tension builds, but for the most part it just dilutes everything. the other critical flaw is the obsession Tookyo-affiliated projects seem to have with being Exciting Premises - 2025 brought Hundred Line with "woah! it's got 100 endings!!" and now Shuten Order with "woah! it's 5 games!!". the "5 games" gimmick here manifests as, predictably, 5 different minimum-work efforts to ape other genres, none of which ever feel like anything more than that. i'm sympathetic to the idea that these games need gimmicks to do better sales numbers and fund the studio, but ugh, they are dragging down the quality of the works SO dramatically. but AT WORST, this was only about 1/3 as long as Hundred Line, with more ambitious, stylish art and a tremendously better script (even though the localization is pretty unimpressive), so it could be worse!
on backloggd: https://backloggd.com/u/fontiago/review/3522197/