Lately I've been watching livestreams where people broadcast anime online, on sites like ustream and livestream. I've found that it's a good way to get back into anime, and it's exposed me to things I probably wouldn't have tried watching on my own. It's also a good way to meet people that like anime, and chat about the series as we watch them. Some of the series I've seen are, I think, more fun to watch as a group than they are to watch alone.

Most of the stuff I've seen this way I've enjoyed. I've even seen some things that I was really taken by, that I probably wouldn't have thought to watch on my own. However, tonight I tried checking out a new stream that I had never been to before, and what we watched was really awful. It was the first series I've watched this way that I really disliked.

It's a series from the 90s called Maze.  How do I even explain what it was about? It's like if you took all the bad trends and cliches in anime from that time and put them into a big blender, and then topped it off with a big helping of awkward and unfunny sexual humor. It's got giant robots, it has very underage-looking girls in skimpy outfits, it's got an annoying fairy character. The main character, a girl, turns into a sex-crazed man when night falls. There was almost no story, and what little there was is dumb and hackneyed, and it's attempts at "humor" are just pathetic. The characters range from annoying to repulsive; two of the characters that join the main group, a man and a woman pair, are rebel mercenaries who join the main character because -- and I'm not kidding here -- they plan to rape her when she's vulnerable. And those are supposed to be the good guys who we're supposed to root for?

"Action" consisted of characters standing around and going "Oh no what do I do?" for several minutes before powering up -- with a transformation sequence consisting of animation reused every episode -- and then dispatching the enemy effortlessly in one move.

The dub is also really terrible, as most anime dubs were in the 90s. The host of the stream changed to the Japanese track with subtitles because everyone in the chat was making fun of the hilariously awful acting and voices. I don't think he realized that we were having fun riffing on the bad dub. It was the only thing actually making the show entertaining. I left after he switched it.

I didn't dare say anything about how awful I thought it was in the stream. The host unironically said that he actually really likes the series. I'm probably not going to that stream in the future.

Last Edited By: greybob 04/13/11 10:10 PM. Edited 4 times.