Rozen Maiden Zurückspulen - Overall Series Impressions & Total Series Rating

[Kairin]

This thread is to be used for discussing the entire episodes of Rozen Maiden Zurückspulen ... your thoughts about the show, overall impressions, expectations and hopes about Blu-Ray/DVD-exclusive footage etc.

A few subjects you might want to ramble on about:
General impression of the series.
Opinions on the overall story, writing & plot devices.
Thoughts about the animation quality.
Characters/Character Design
Voice Acting
Which kind of footage (Blu-Ray/DVD-exclusive) you feel you'd really like to see.
What the show meant to you.
What could the creators/animators/writers have done better.

And so on.

The poll represents your total series rating. In other words, how you would rate all the episodes combined (1-10)? If you'd rather rate the whole series by technical/artistic merits, you can do so. An example:

Animation Quality: 1-10
Voice Actors: 1-10
Script: 1-10
Soundtrack: 1-10
Editing: 1-10
Enjoyment: 1-10
Emotional Involvement: 1-10

Average = Total Series Rating

Or a combination of the two. Or your general gut feeling.

Feel free to discuss and more importantly, have fun :)

[justsomeguy]

Unfortunately for the show, it was dull and boring. Adult Jun was boring, depressing, and just not fun to watch, and with only Shinku and Suigintou present for a long time, there were too many episodes before anything happened. I've read the second manga up to the part before what the last few minutes of the final episode cover, and I can't really blame DEEN for anything, they were mostly faithful (besides all the skipped content in the last episode, which I'm sure will be covered if there is another season). There just wasn't any of the fun stuff the previous two seasons had, either here or in the manga.

6/10. Meh, if this is what it means to be faithful, then maybe the show was better when it went its own way.

[Uberchu]

-Atrocious pacing
-Doll shrinkage
-Cutting out the comedy

As an adaptation it was pretty bad, but it was still a good show in the end. 8/10

[totoum]

-Slow atmospheric pacing just like i like it.
-Dolls that actually felt like dolls.
-Cutting out "comedy" that never really made me laugh in the first place so can't say I missed it.

[Triple_R]

There are things about this show that can be legitimately criticized (that first episode setting an entirely wrong expectation being foremost of them), but on the whole, this show did far more right than it did wrong. And for simple good old-fashioned character drama, this show may have been the best show of Summer 2013. The only reason I'm slightly hesitant here is that there's a couple other highly regarded shows from that season which I haven't seen much of yet - Of the Summer 2013 shows I've completed, Zurückspulen definitely has the best character drama. For that reason, I'm giving it 9/10.

Unwound Jun was very strong as the main character and emotional core of this show. At the same time, I think this show did an excellent job of giving each Rozen Maiden doll her own sense of agency, of making each one feel like her own distinct person. The more "supporting cast" dolls (such as Kanaria and Souseiseki) particularly benefited from this, I think. In the older Rozen Maiden anime shows, I only cared about Souseiseki because Desu did, and Kanaria was frankly a joke (a good joke, but a joke nonetheless :heh:). Here Kanaria is actually somewhat competent and makes a real difference, while Souseiseki manages to stand apart nicely from her more popular meme-fied twin.

[MCAL]

What took so long to get this up...

Anyway... I have only read the first series manga so I have not watched the Nomad anime, but I can still safely say i would prefer Zurückspulen over anything else. DEEN (Or more importantly Hatekayama and Mochizuki) really took a very good manga and made it even better. I loved the slow pacing for episodes 2-8 which brilliantly laid out Jun's character and the fast pacing of episodes 9-12 which cut out most of the tension breaking comedy, but left enough time for the character development. All the dolls are much better characters too (Even Suiseiseki with her keikaku dori of Souseiseki's ring), especially Kanaria. The first episode and the last half of episode 13 were major bumps, which prevent me from giving the series one more point, but I still give Zurückspulen a very high score of an 8/10. An improvement on the manga in almost every way.

[relentlessflame]

What took so long to get this up...Nothing. We usually post the Overall Series Impressions about a week after the last episode airs, and this was actually a bit early compared to the norm. It was not a "bug" that it wasn't posted earlier.

[StainGlass]

General Impression
Not a series I would have completed if I wasn't already invested in the Rozen Maiden franchise. I really shouldn't have followed it through, but I did because of this.
Overall, I found this series took itself too seriously, had some pacing and execution issues, and wasn't emotionally involving, atleast for me.

Story
I didn't like the Tales manga to begin with, so I don't have much to say in regards to this adaption. Perhaps instead of sticking to the source so tightly they might have seen room for improvement. That's what I was hoping for after hearing the third series was confirmed.

Drawing and Animation Quality.
I was really pleasantly surprised by the general quality that (DEEN especially) produced for the series. There was a lot of detail to the drawings, and I thought they particularly scaled well. DEEN didn't slip into a habit of producing slack messy drawings like I thought they would, especially with such a delicate design. There were a few poor bombs here and there, and the quality did start to drop towards the end, but not to any great degree.

The animation fluidity was ok. Nothing worth praising, but not below average either.

Background Art
Mixed feelings. I wasn't keen on the background style, whether it was or not, it gave me the impression of photos filtered through Photoshop. Other times there were some particularly nice backgrounds, thinking of EP 11 and the white woods here. The lighting was very nice at times too.

Character Design
While I liked the quality of the art overall, and I liked the detail... I did not really like the art style. It wasn't bad, but I couldn't care for it for the most part.

Taken directly from the manga, I don't know if DEEN really 'designed' anything here, even when transferring a style for manga to an animated medium.
Save for a few shots that come to mind, I found the designs of the characters bland and very limited in regards to their expression ranges and posing. I think I mentioned once before too, that Suiseiseki's design particularly missed form and shape, but my main criticism for the character design is still the bland expressions.

Really hated the design of the manager, very crude, but I think it was the same in the manga as well.

Didn't like the much smaller size of the dolls either, which was an odd decision choice.

Voice Acting
Glad to see the full cast return. The voice acting was as I expected, good :)

BGM
This is what really surprised me about this series. Same composer, but such a different use of music when comparing it to the Nomad series.
There were about 2 tracks I liked, but most of the series was very void of BGM, or it was just very bland.
I think it got much better towards the end of the series though.

OP and ED Themes
Didn't like them and skipped through them when watching. No criticism, just didn't seem to care for them.

Execution / Editing
Train wreck first episode, half of the last. Extremely slow pacing and then a rush towards the end. Really thought the execution of this whole series was pretty poor. There were some moments that I just found very odd, and perhaps because of this again, I was very emotionally detached to everything. I think Shinku's 'death' was one of the most notable scenes of this for me, and Suiseiseiki's overplayed cry out, bizarre imo.

Hated the storybook segments too, pointless, and disruptive.

Characters
I never could really understand Adult Jun, Saito was not really a character, but a cardboard nice girl, the manager was over-played. The dolls take a step back, so not much is developed for their part.

I would give it a 6/10.
It was just not for me, and I do think it had some pretty poor execution too.