Cheap. Easy. REALLY REALLY REALLY SMALL. You're sensing a pattern, right?
Recently finished watching the for SAC series, and it worked for me. I know tie ins generally suck, but eh. My inner rabid fangirl fails to give a rats.
According to the bio, the writer is one of the episode writers from the anime series, so he knows his material. He's not writing fanfiction because what he writes is canon. Yep. This turns out to be the books undoing, as it reads not just like an episode, but like a tv script. There's the big print at the beginning (a laborous description of the physical setting), character placement (exactly what it says), and then dialogue. And monologue. All those voice overs. It would work just fine on a screen, but in dead tree format, it reads like a dead, dead, dead fish.
It particularly suffers from telling, given that information cannot be shown as easily as on a screen, and even though it's only 210 really small double spaced pages, it took a long time for me to read it. Bleeeeah.
Respect the mediums you work in, and the ones you don't, please.
Verdict: It's a tie-in. You get what you expect.
Have you seen the second series of GitS? After the first series, I think I needed a break - That show was "complex" in every sense of the word. I have the DVDs, just haven't had the guts to pull them out of the cupboard.
ReplyDeleteTerry
Not yet. For anime series, I generally wait until the box set is released, both to save money and because I can't stand having to wait for each DVD to be released. I'm not sure if they've finished releasing the series as individual discs yet....but I'll definitely get it.
ReplyDeleteI didn't find the first series hard to follow, but some of the plot logic was a bit iffy. They make conclusions that I have a hard time following the path too, mostly for the sake of convenience, I think. There was such an instance in this book too.