Reviews:Kantai Collection

Reviews for the Kantai Collection online card battle game (and associated anime and manga spinoffs).

Strong voices and good character interactions make for wonderfully engaging slices of life at the Naval District. The girls' friendships are heartwarming, their hijinks are hilarious, and their losses and near-losses are tearjerking.

Unfortunately, the campaign against the Abyssals doesn't keep up its end of the bargain. The naval combat itself is nothing special (mostly the ships kind of sail around and take shots at each other...Girls und Panzer and High School Fleet had better attention to group tactics and naval combat, respectively), and the larger campaign has a ham-fisted WWII allegory that falls a little flat. I could forgive the sneak attack on the naval district (that's not exactly how the Pacific War started, but it's in-character for the Abyssals), and Akagi's dreams of WWII repeating itself could have been the seed of an interesting plot, but when the Battle of Midway Redux is looking like a repeat of the original, the admiral just pulls a few instant repair buckets out of his hat and swoops in with Zuikaku, Shoukaku, and Yamato to save the day.

Related to the shortcomings of the naval campaign is that we don't really see why it matters. We are told in the opening of the first episode that the Abyssals have driven humanity back from the sea, but we never see any of those humans, or indeed anything of the world beyond the Naval District and Japanese fleet. Contrast this with Arpeggio of Blue Steel -Ars Nova-, which had the same twelve-episode limitation, but showed the politics of the world and other efforts trying to deal with the Fleet of Fog (while also finding time for slice of life and a naval campaign), and also made the Fleet of Fog into interesting, engaging characters in their own right (while the Abyssals, as depicted, are little more than Generic Doomsday Villains...and even then, they're pretty light on the 'doomsday').

I hear that the movie has better animation for the naval combat and digs deeper into the origins and activities of the Abyssals, so we'll see how that goes and what happens with season 2. Until then, I've got a couple fanfic recommendations that I think do a better job with the "moe anthropomorphized WWII warships" world than the anime (I'll put up a proper fanfic recs page, with more details and a few more recs, but I got inspired to write this review first):

• Belated Battleship, for the 'epic campaign' flavor. (May contain more Eagle Land than some folks want, but it focuses on all the navies.)
• Things Involving Shipgirls That Are No Longer Allowed, for pure slice of life.

The movie does have much more impressive animation for the naval combat, and the greater attention to the Abyssals (and, to a lesser extent, the fairies) is very interesting. It confirms what fans have long suspected, namely, that shipgirls and Abyssals are twisted reflections of each other, and in particular, that when they sink, they (have a chance to?) reincarnate on the other side. I could quibble about some of the character interactions and such, but the move is in general an improvement over the series.

There is a little nugget of dialogue that starts to address why all of this matters to the rest of humanity (who are completely absent in the movie, even the Admiral himself). The "red-water" zone growing out of Ironbottom Sound, which causes shipgirl equipment to age and rust at accelerated rates, is also said to destroy the natural ecosystem of the area.

At all other times, however, the shipgirls are focused on the war's effect on themselves. Why do they fight the Abyssals? To sink them all and make them shipgirls again. The conversation between Fubuki and the Abyssal shadow of Fubuki indicates that the Abyssals are largely motivated by jealousy, of all things -- evidently, being made of hope is what lets shipgirls do fun things like making curry, while the Abyssals are stuck on the bottom of the sea with nothing but hatred and despair. The Abyssals think that the only way forward is to bring that despair to everyone else in the world and perpetuate the cycle of warfare (and Fubuki's response is basically "no u, hope is stronger"). That's not a bad motivation for a few grunts (or for a computer game where the focus is on managing a fleet of ships-turned-beautiful-women, rather than debating the causes and justification of war), but it's a little disappointing to hear it coming from a top-level adversary who is a serious threat to the fleet and (implicitly) the world. Likewise on the shipgirls' side -- it's fair enough that Fubuki and her friends are most focused on how to get their friend Kisaragi back, but it would have been nice to hear about the bigger picture from e.g. Nagato.

Permafrost13 (on Reddit) said it best:

It feels that the producers have written themselves in a corner by making the Abyssals nothing more [than] cardboard cutouts for the ship girls to destroy. They have no real stakes and motivations in the war other than to follow their twisted instincts, so there's not much else they can do with it really.

I stand by my verdict above: it's not a bad movie (or TV show), but there are fan works (fanfiction, doujinshi, etc.) that I like much better.