[Newprimus]

Originally Posted by Xion Valkyrie

I'm not saying it's a mess because it's a mish-mash of different genres. It's a mess because it takes all those elements and puts them together in a haphazard manner in which the different elements actually diminish each other's impact. The elements it borrows are not really that interesting either, at least from the way episode one set them up. It feels like it's a bunch of different shows duct taped together.

Like someone said earlier, they're doing heavy compression on the first first volume so I'm guessing a lot of the conflicting elements come from the fact that the pacing is completely off. I feel like the manga did things a lot better in that regard.

If you're having a problem with HOW the show has borrowed from different genres and put them together, then that's a different story. I think one needs a good deal of visual novel experience to really appreciate Date A Live. If you have that, then various things about the story start to sink in. Things like how Shidou has to date and conquer girls to save the world, and how the organization treats dating like it's a battle with analysis of the opponent and making judgements. The whole story's a quirky bend on the entire romance galge scene, and most of the audience here likely lacks that experience. It's like watching a movie about poker and you don't know a thing about the game. You're missing out on a large portion of what would make such a movie enjoyable.

As for the adaptation from novel to anime, I think they're doing a pretty good job for the most part. It's like transliteration vs translation. If you copied literally from one format to another you end up with a terrible output.

Remember, a light novel or a manga you can go back a page or take as long as you want to read a paragraph. Anime doesn't work that way. Once a scene has passed, it's done and you can't go back to watch it again (if watched on a TV broadcast that just goes from beginning to end like intended). If a novel is wordy the reader can take their time or read the rest another time. An anime is meant to be watched in a single sitting, and every scene is meant to be viewed in a continuous linear progression from beginning to end. If you stop mid-way and come back to it another day the story and emotional impact from the earlier parts of the episode have waned and aren't as present in the viewer's mind as the creators would've intended. Thus, any scene that feels weird quickly impacts everything that comes afterwards. The fallout from bad pacing is a lot, lot bigger in a visual medium like anime compared to something like manga or novel, where the pacing is dictated by the audience, as opposed to anime where the creators direct the audience's pacing and attention. Like the latter half of episode 1, where the pacing suddenly isn't right. Stuff like sours the viewer's mood in a split-second and it's not something the audience can just adjust for like a novel or manga.

Basically, the anime staff have to trim unnecessary lines and scenes from the source material not just because of time constraints, but because they can upset the flow of the episode. Light novel readers will be aware that the scene with Shidou and Tohka in the end of ep 2 had a lot more stuff going on in it, with several individual gags. Imagine that same scene starting out like it is in the anime, but suddenly in the middle you have these gags pop up while that kind of bgm is ongoing. It's unnatural. That sort of rapid-fire joke gag kind of play works when the show is setup for it, like seizon, but Date A Live is not that kind of show. The kind of story it's trying to tell would be ruined by that sort of fast-paced back and forth style of dialogue and action. So imagine trying fit that novel scene word-for-word and action-by-action into the same approximately one minute-worth of time for the scene I mentioned. You can either cram it in and have the characters firing their lines back and forth like a gag comedy show (which totally clashes with the kind of story Date A Live is trying to tell), or you can draw out the scene. That however would then slow down the pacing of the story so much it feels like a slice-of-life anime, which Date A Live also isn't. Again there is no fixed pacing in a novel or manga; the reader can read as fast or slow as they want, or read in sections, or go back, and so on. Anime can't do that.

So the anime staff have to maintain a very specific pace of storytelling, not fast like a gag comedy, but not slow like a slice-of-life. To fit that ideal speed, some trimming and altering of the light novel lines is required. That Tohka/Shidou scene at the end of episode 2 cut out a lot of dialogue and actions from the light novel, and settled with only them meeting each other, and then pretty much straight to the uniform transformation. However, the scene doesn't feel too rushed or too drawn-out, and they did insert an anime original gag involving Origami's picture which I thought was a creative solution to the problem of how to get Tohka to change into the uniform without the presence of that other student in the light novel (which frankly felt too arbitrary. Shidou obviously had a reason to visit the ruined school, so let's have this random student show up too for some totally arbitrary reason, all so that Tohka can copy her outfit. Light novels can get away with blatant storytelling devices like that far more easily than visual media like anime can).

Pacing aside, that scene at the end of ep2 feels like a nice primer for the next episode, which is going to be the actual date. Gag comedy or slice-of-life would probably have felt out of place at the end of this episode.

My point is, the anime staff not only cannot but SHOULD NOT be literally or even relatively close to literally faithful to the source material. This is an adaptation. They're adapting the source material to fit into a vastly different form of storytelling medium. Sometimes stuff gets cut not just for time, but for the betterment of the resulting work.