I have no idea what possessed me to volunteer for this. Also, fuck everyone who voted for it.


So they start with the Wind Waker tapestry explaining the whole world history, complete with a world map and telling you what the super powers are called in this universe.
I hate it when a series starts like this. It deprives us the chance to learn about the world as if we live in it and I always forget half of the lore by episode 2.


Then it’s right to some crime mans doing crime while our heroine shops for teenie bopper magazines. I know everyone makes this complaint but goddamn does this show look like Patreon hentai. It’s not awful animation but it certainly isn’t good.


Things launch right into a fight scene three minutes in, and not a second too late. The voice acting is horrible, bad on the level of a Newgrounds flash cartoon. I’m 100% Ruby’s only direction was “sound cute” and the generic thugs in the scene are a bad imitation of Pete the Cat doing a bad imitation of Robert De Niro.
A song kicks in, and I think it’s Red Like Roses but all the vocal tracks sound the same and the singer emotes less than Samus in Other M so I don’t know. Play it in the background anyway, it won’t make a difference. I will give them points for making it diegetic; Ruby is listening to music on her Beats.


MMD Joker is pretty good though. His voice acting has a lot more life in it, sounding like the Power Ranger who's too cool to cooperate with the others. The fight choreography isn’t mind-blowing but it’s engaging. I know Monty Oum played Kingdom Hearts, and this feels like a good KH2 cutscene. Like the one where Sora and Roxas fight in the Dive to the Heart.


This set-piece is actually sweet. R/Atheism tries to fly away in his N64 plane while his waifu fights Ruby and a sexy librarian. She blows up a roof, but the librarian reforms the debris into tentacle porn and attacks with it, forcing the explosion lady to panic bomb. Cool use of powers. If Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is a 10 and Dragon Ball Super is a 1, this was like a 6.


Apparently, Ruby is a little full of herself, and sort of a superhero fan girll? She does cute karate poses as she explains her fighting style. It’s hilarious how easily you can tell if the animator gave a shit during any given shot. There was a plate of cookies there, but Ruby jittered them near her mouth and they all disappeared like fucking Pac Man dots. Now she’s doing her kata with motion blur at like twice the frame rate.


Haha what the fuck
I had another thought but somehow my YouTube video turned into Meet’n’Fuck Hong Kong.
Holy shit. This has to be actual Flash animation. Why?

The completely inaccurate news ticker gives me a chance to talk about how aggressively on-the-nose everyone's names are. Lisa Lavender, Ruby Rose, and the sexy librarian was literally named Glenda Goodwitch. That had to be the first pick; there’s no way they started with a worse name and worked up to good + witch.


And somehow I made it through. The episode is 12 and a half minutes long, counting the ending song, and it felt at least twice its length.
Overall, I was pretty constantly negative, but it’s not like they did everything wrong. The beginning of every shonen has to do two things - establish the main character, and show a cool fight scene - and they nailed it. The worst part was by far the voice work, especially coming from Ruby herself. The other characters are mediocre at best, but she’s cheap and shrill and sounds like she has a bag of marbles in her cheeks. RWBY somehow has the opposite problem as Dragon Ball Z, where the main character’s voice manages to be more grating and unfitting in English.

Not a good start, boys. I’m going to speed these way the fuck up starting next episode, both to be more concise and to save me from dragging this shit out any longer than I have to.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Episode 2 begins with some dude vomiting. He just heard that this show is still going, after six seasons.
So all the extras are drawn in as silhouettes. The idea isn’t terrible - fuck modelling unique characters just to walk by for three seconds - but why put them right next to the camera, blocking a real character? Just frame the shot anywhere else. It’s 3D animation: the greatest strength of the medium is that you can put the camera wherever the fuck you want.


AAAAA WHAT THE FUCK
NO ONE TOLD ME THERE WERE CHIBIS
THIS ISN’T SAILOR MOON I DIDN’T SIGN UP FOR THIS
NOPE NOPE NOPE I'M OUT

oh no you're in for the long haul my friend.

good reviewing so far. i guess i'm weird in that i actually do like ruby's voice acting, it's cute in a weird way. torchwick (i think that's his name?) does have some of the best VA work in the series though. you're in for some REAL VAing stinkers later on, there's one character in particular you'll run into that sounds AWFUL which sucks because you'll be hearing a whole lot of her.

the animation is something that gets better over time but still winds up stiff when it's not an action scene, and yeah, they do occasionally do very amateur stuff when they couldn't make enough models. again, kind of goes away over time.

i've only seen the first three volumes though but at the same time that's exactly what you'll be reviewing so...

Holy fuck has it always been this bad?

Like, all I've seen about RWBY is the game and that shit sucked ass

I'm going to dupe as chili ruby rose

I'm going to dupe as chili ruby rose