Ah, Hand Shakers, my mortal enemy. What is there to say about this anime? Well, a lot actually, almost none of it positive. Released early in the winter season of 2017, it quickly rose to infamy for a planetoid-sized hoard of problems, with brutally vicious would-be critics such as myself describing it is a masterpiece of fail, among other things. If Big Order was that in the best way possible, this is in the worst way possible, for a myriad of reasons that will be demonstrated and abridged shortly. It is a new level of bad, a new low of over and underproduced, over and under-thought rubbish that lacks any creativity whatsoever yet fails in ways that are either seemingly unheard of in and of itself, or unprecedented in its sheer magnitude of awful. I feel no remorse or hesitation in calling this not only the worst anime of 2017, but the worst anime I have seen to date, probably a spectacular contender for the coveted title of “worst anime of all time”. So, enough build-up; let the slaughter begin.
Part 1. What positivity remains
Remember the phrase “almost nothing positive” from literally a paragraph ago? Let’s get that “almost” out of the way. The actual art for the characters looks really good, and immensely detailed. Barring the CGI (which believe me, I’ll have a field day with), lighting (similar situation), and animation (take a wild guess), if you were to take a screenshot of the show, you would probably conclude that the show looks visually pleasing. Whist many people would also praise or at least cite the music of the series as a point where the show didn’t detonate catastrophically, and I feel this only applies to the ED theme “Yume Miru Ame” by Akino Arai, which is actually a decently pleasant and quiet melody, a lowkey emotional piece that actually works, bolstering me desire to cry after each and every viewing of a single episode of this putrid abomination. Oh, and the main character of the show has these two parents who are just sorta there, being lovey-dovey to each other, and they’re only there for approximately 4 scenes, none of which are terribly long. Admittedly this isn’t really much of a positive as it is damning with faint praise, but these are the best, least offensively poorly-written characters in the entire show, so we might as well take what we can get as fellow beggars.
To think I could squeeze even one decently sized paragraph out of the positives of this show without an incessant amount of filibusters. Either this is the skill of me as a writer, proof that even absolute worthless garbage may not be so absolute in its worthlessness as I thought, or just me trying to make sure I don’t come off as a hateful, prejudiced maniac hating on the show blindly. Most likely a combination of the three, as this show has sent me into a blinding rage on multiple occasions. Now for the plethora of reasons as to why that is…where do I begin with this? In every other way, this show is almost equally bad and there really is no one elephant in the room; the room had to expand exponentially to fit nothing but elephants. Might as well go in escalating order from the aspects that aggravated me the least to the ones that vexed me the most.
Part 2: Unnecessary praise of bad sound
It seems like a majority of the people who watch Hand Shakers seem to agree that if nothing else, the music in Hand Shakers is, if not necessarily exceptional, the best aspect of the show. In essence, I agree, the music in this show is the least bad major aspect of the show, but that’s damning it with faint praise, insanely faint praise. I already mentioned the surprisingly memorable ED theme and if you haven’t noticed, it is the only sound-related positive I mentioned. The OP, “One Hand Message” by OxT, as my original review (meme) described it, is a very generic OP with irritating vocals that sound somewhat like auto tune with a really annoying guitar (which I never thought I’d say about the use of a guitar), and it gives off a grand feeling of obnoxious genericness; a horribly perfect fit for this show in terms of my experience with it. The OP seems to be relatively liked by viewers (especially apologists) but I highly doubt anyone would consider it to be a top contender for opening of the season with stuff like Rakugo 2’s OP and Blue Exorcist Kyoto arc OP, let alone the year with stuff like the Re:Creators & Attack On Titan 2nd Season OPs, Youjo Senki & Princess Princess Principal OPs, Fate/Apocrypha OPs, or Mahoutsukai no Yome OP.
Many viewers of this unholy abomination also seem to feel like the OST is actually pretty good, both on its own and in terms of use in the show, both of which I must quickly and snobbishly scoff at like the rude, pretentious, cretin that I am (because I’m right and you’re wrong, clearly). The music in this series is lackluster to put it politely and there is only one jingle I remotely remember and that’s because I purposely added the accordion from Sonic Unleashed Spagonia hub world theme into the mix in my head and that game has the best OST of that franchise. Very rarely would the music fit, like the episode 4 fight which has calming jazz music in arguably the most frantic and “animated” fight of the show (because episode 8 has more movement in its fight but the main source of that is reused animation from episode 1), or one ridiculously awful song that fails to give calming and “satisfying” closure to the end of episode 7 (the least offensively terrible episode in the show). So yeah, even the OST is terrible and handled poorly, which is to be expected from a show that handles visuals and editing like mech addict schizo wielding nunchucks with nails battered into them. I’m not even going to bother with the dub, which wass dead on arrival given the character designs; let’s draw our attention to the one thing that wants to punish us for doing so: the visuals...
Part 3: The assault to both the eyes and the spirit of art and production
It is not an exaggeration to say that this series has the absolute worst visual presentation I have ever born witness to and ever hope to experience. Let’s start with the CGI, because it is arguably some of the worst I have seen as well. The CGI environments do not look terrible, in fact, they may look decent on occasion, barring the obnoxious GoHands lighting that is so unnecessary, ugly, and bright, as to rival the lighting in Mahouka for “worst lighting in anime”. It’s everything else CGI related that is a nightmare to look at, most notably the nimrodes (almost every fighter has them and almost all of them look like Skelter+Heaven CGI). Chuckle-worthy name and spelling aside (yes, the subs I viewed consistently spelled it as such), not only do they never look good on their own right, look terrible especially blended in with the great art of the show, and have this one special problem the entirety of the CGI contains, which is arguably the most unforgivable aspect of this anime’s mind-numbing visuals. The CGI chain nimrodes are the most notable culprits of this crime, that being the borderline random frame rates. Episode 1 has this at its worst as you will see multiple strings of hideous and large chains moving at completely differing speeds and frame rates, which is utterly repulsive for more than just the fact that those are moving the way they are. The frame rates of the CGI are never congruous with the frame rate of the 2D art & animation, which combined with the fact that the actual 2D animation skips frames liberally making it just as unstable as the frame rate of literally everything else in the show, as well as the fact that you are dealing with the most unwieldy camera in anime history (particularly in the fight scenes and the entirety of episode 1), and in the fight scenes (notably episodes 1, 4, and 6, the 3 absolute worst episodes of the show and some of the worst in anime history), you're expected to deal with all of that at once, it causes the absolute worst brand of nausea and visual overload ever produced barring the infamous Electric Soldier Porygon Incident! It is mind-shattering, eye-watering, and nauseating to watch, and if a piece of audiovisual entertainment ends up being physically unhealthy to watch for patrons of the medium it’s in, then any good will or remote positive the visuals had is officially rendered nothing short of moot!
It seems as if there was sheer ambition thrown into what ultimately amounted to absolutely detrimental digital and editing effects to make the series stand out, with no regard to the capabilities of the staff working on it, or the audience that will witness said product. However, it seems that same level of passion was lost on everything else, including the rest of the visuals minus the character art, which was already a visual trademark of Studio GoHands, the studio in charge of this cornercopia of disasters. As mentioned prior, the actual animation of the characters is surprisingly conservative, even on the fight scenes, resulting in a plethora of skipped frames in the combat, notably in the fight that takes up the first half of episode 4 (oh, and the choreography is always egregious, especially when it comes to swordplay).. The camera only accentuates the issue here and it feels like they let the camera roam around and cause mayhem in episode 1, letting it do insane tricks and flips and movements unnecessarily in the classroom scene in that episode, then decided to put the tasmanian devil on a leash and release it for these already terrible animated and produced scenes. It’s arguable that a lot of the series’ visual problems would be solved if the camera wasn’t handled so schizophrenically, but even still, the CGi and overall animation would make this show terribly produced anyway. While the art for the characters looks good on paper, the actual designs of the clothes, bodies, and even hair in the case of Koyori (which changes at the drop of a dime for no explained reason), look terrible and generic, with the bodies making the characters look younger than they should; this makes me believe that the main characters are midgets and that other adults in the show are no older than me, a high school senior (at the time of writing, of course). There is also egregious live action stock footage for the food and the menus whenever the characters are at a restaurant, which happens on at least three occasions.
Lastly, to really sell just how bad the production values of this show is, we need to mention another rather frowned upon subject within the community: reused animation. Now, reused animation was considered rampant yet relatively acceptable and necessary in the 70s and 80s, and to a lesser extent the 90s, particularly with the magical girl and mecha genres. Mobile Suit Gundam and Sailor Moon were considered to be especially willing to use this and made that pretty much more of a genre staple rather than a simple cost-cutting technique; that was what the technique was. It was nothing more than a way of saving time and money for the studios and the animators working on it, and barring a few shows that decided to use it liberally as a toy rather than an occasional tool (Gundam SEED and SEED Destiny), it seemed as if the 21st century titles generally shied away from that tactic in favor of more digital effects & cost-cutting measures like CGI. In the 2010s, it seems as if most studios began droppinbg the ball just asd hard but in different ways to some early 2000s anime, with bad frame rate issues and a resurgence of CGI that was bad even 10-15 years ago before they made vast improvements on the whole. So, where am I going with this? Well…
Leave it to Hand Shakers to bring it back on a semi-consistent basis, particularly with one specific clip in episode 1 that shows off some of the CGI environment of this show, complete with fisheye lenses, awful lighting, and the lowest frame rate I have ever witnessed in an anime (I am convinced that it is somewhere in the single digits). This clip lasts for roughly 12 seconds if memory serves, and is played at least once for approximately half of the episodes. There are a few more minor if still egregious examples (like repeating bits of the very first scene or the entirety of small scenes at points) but not only are those usually one-time occurrences, but if there was ever a moment that showed the fullest extent of how incompetent the use of ambitious and effort-saving techniques could be, this being played once for ⅓-½ of the series, would certainly be it. Even played once, taking everything else into account, that scene is almost laughable to watch. There is reusing footage that looks good on occasion, there's doing that with bad footage, then there’s doing that liberally, which this show does if you somehow needed me to spell that out for you. Any show that did even some of what has just been revealed to you so far would probably be seen as a technical embarrassment and all around laughing stock to many no matter how good the plot is, making it have such a high barrier of legitimate entry as it is, but when you realize just how broken this show is from a writing standpoint, it becomes clear that even if Ufotable were to animate this series (since it seems like GoHands tried to one-up Ufotable in all of their trademark techniques yet only Ufotable has even attempted doing this apart from thee guys, making them the only ones to do it competently) and make it a technical marvel akin to what Akira was for 1988 and still is by today’s standards, this show would still be seen as a massive dud. More on that comment in a moment, but regardless, this is where a black hole is reached…
Part 4: The dead on arrival addition to the survival battle royale premise and how everything about this battle royale “survival” game is more broken than SSBB Meta Knight and SSB4 Bayonetta combined
This will be a document the size of the Gate of Babylon weapons collection owned by Gilgamesh himself by the time I’m done with this part, and how perfect of me to use that because it’s time to talk about the premise of the show, how the show is a blatant Fate/Stay Night knockoff, and how it was dead on arrival, visual obscenity or no. Let’s try to keep things spoiler-free that way we don’t go vehemently flying off the rails, shall we? After all, we are better than what we’re reading about at the moment; let’s dive into hell together!
The premise of this show is that seven pairs of fighters, each with specific powers, fight each other in order to receive a wish of any kind from something divine, with the main character being attacked out of nowhere and gaining both his female partner and their power to survive, kickstarting his inclusion into the this long since established event for said wish whilst defeating each pair one by one. Does this sound like Fate/Stay Night, verbatim? Does the protagonist sound exactly like Shirou Emiya? The comparisons don’t end here! Tazuna, the main character, is an altruistic high schooler and engineer who attempts to do most of the fighting to protect his female partner, his engineering is only a hobby and is rendered irrelevant beyond the second episode, and he thrusts headlong into danger to fight to protect his partner, no matter how insensitive and brazen he comes off, no matter who tells him to get back and wait to avoid risking his life as harshly. The main difference is that Shirou Emiya (depending on the version his character appears in) is a nuanced character who learns to not let his ideals get the better of him and remote common sense and his ideals are constantly challenged, and Tazuna...isn’t. Oh, and for good measure, his team’s power is a sword that can unleash a devastating attack that fires a brutal projectile rush from the blade, and the main antagonist can pull out a myriad of projectiles out of nowhere for our protagonist to deal with in the final battle. Need I say more here?
Actually I can, just not in the way you’d think. There is one key addition adds to the whole F/SN thing in order to pass it off as its own: Hand Holding. Now, before you facepalm, hear me out: Each duo must hold hands when they are in this battlefield called the Ziggurat (which activates when a pair of Hand Shakers encounters an enemy pair, and I’ll get to why the Ziggurat and the entirety of the Hand Shakers game is broken beyond belief shortly; that will last a while...) otherwise they are kicked out and are forbidden from continuing their quest, and if Tazuna lets go of her partner, Koyori, she dies. All of this sounds absurdly stupid to say the least, as this sounds like it is practically impossible to turn into a legitimately compelling story (ergo this garb’s dead on arrival), ad it also sounds like blade users would be at a crippling disadvantage and projectile-based users would dominate the game massively, but it’s like the writers knew all of this. I say that because almost immediately after these rules are established in episode 1, the rest of the series disregards these rules altogether in increasingly contradictory and absurd ways. To start, episode 2 has Tazuna and Koyori in the shower and he lets go of her hand for about two seconds; nothing happens. Episode 3: Koyori can go 15 minutes without holding Tazuna’s hand now. 2 episodes later, 2 hours! They made these arbitrary and beyond unnatural and unexplained extensions just to serve the plot and make the two characters not always have to be in the same frame. Oh, and the pair in episodes 3 and 4 constantly separate so there goes another rule. Most pairs afterwards break this “rule” too, because why should an established battle royale require rules? I mean, it’s only a survival GAME! Forget facepalming, smash your head into the wall until either your skull or the wall caves in, because this is just mind-shatteringly broken!
Note: Don’t actually do that, you’ll probably get injured; instead, just imagine it or scream into a pillow until your throat gets sore. Maybe even use a stress ball or punching bag to relieve the pain.
You may have noticed that in the header for this part, I put the word “survival” in quotations. Well, to spoil this show for you (you shouldn’t be watching this irreparable broken dreck anyway), everyone lives. This “survival” game doesn’t kill anyone despite how fatal the damage may look for some characters. The closest a character came to death is Tazuna in episode 8 and he recovered right quick despite having his body beat up and immediately coming close to drowning (before somehow getting out of underwater rubble when no one was around anymore, because the idea of logic is nonexistent in this show which tries to be taken 100% seriously). There go all stakes, assuming there were any in the first place thanks to the constant rule-breaking and the fact that the motivations of the characters (aka their wishes) are as asinine and irrelevant as possible in context. Let’s dive in as I will not bother breaking apart the already beyond dead plot any further due to spoilers and me not willing to even bother for the sake of my already ruined sanity. Oh, but before that, let me mention one thing: this show doesn't even really have a plot.
Part 5: The “characters”, and their “motivations”, and why they vex me so much
As any vigilant viewer who is decently well-versed in anime can tell by watching this series, the characters here are all worthless, comprised of mostly caricatures of actual characters; templates, if you will. That would be bad enough on its own, but each of these individuals is beyond terrible, due to sheer stupidity, asspulls, pretentious quoting, general annoyance, or what have you. As such, we have no reason to care about these idiots. I have already covered discount Shirou Emiya (Tazuna) and how horrible a protagonist he is, so the only thing to mention about his is that he wins every single fight by pulling a random new power out of his ass like he was Erza Scarlet from Fairy Tail (except he does it even more frequently and consistently, which is really astonishing, all things considered). With that uninspired and unlikable turd out of the way, let’s start with his companion. Second verse, same as the first, but with more brevity and composure...hopefully.
Koyori, particularly at the start of the series, is the human equivalent to a pet, except with less personality. She’s a human vegetable that can understand communication and human needs. Hell, the ED gives her more personality than the first 4 episodes of the anime do! What the hell?! What is it with these MCs and having little to no personality?! I mean, as I said, she gets personality traits eventually, but she is the second half of the main character duo, and it should not take 4 episodes just to give one of the two most important characters in the series a single personality trait! It's not like she’s a remotely good character anyway. Hell, she doesn't actually do anything (like fighting or trying to help in non-combative ways) in any fights except for the fight in episode 6, where she leads Tazuna to figure out what she figured out in order to win (and even then, he only won by new power ex machina). At least show shows some semblance of a personality by the end of episode 4, and is marginally more realized as a character than the rest of the twats in this show. Still, that's not saying much, as her personality is still vaguely defined and uninteresting. Also, her escalations are horse shit. She can gain more time away from holding hands...for some reason. Her subplot about trying to talk is only referenced for plot convenience and is never developed properly (not that I would expect such talent from anyone involved with this show), and she randomly gets a mahou shoujo costume and nimrod in episode 9 for asspull plot convenience as well, right after finally talking. Just...she either has no personality, a bland personality, or grows via plot convenience, depending on the episode. That's just sad. Sure, she gets a “sad” backstory about how she and Mayumi had a right childhood as Hand Shakers, but again, still doesn't help her much as the backstory is terribly executed. She had the most potential to be a good deuteragonist (secondary protagonist) but, as per usual with this atrocity, they squandered it.
Next on the chopping block is the scientist, Makihara. He’s basically what's used to justify all of the nonsense present here with “not enough data” or just by explaining some of the broken basics of the “death game” and is incredibly annoying, not to mention forgetful of critical information they somehow adds more problems to the show’s narrative (see part 4 or my original review for more detail on those problems). Sure, his past comes in handy in terms of providing a little bit of info to Tazuna, but that’s about it. His voice in the sub is really irritating when you combine that with his mannerisms. The dub doesn’t win him any points either.
Let’s talk about these other Hand Shaker duos, shall we? Not in detail like last time of course; my brain and sanity (assuming I had any left after this cataclysmic nightmare of a television series) can’t handle trying to regurgitate the awful memories in detail. They’re all abysmal and generic, even more so than our already broken main duo. I detest each and every one of them and have literally no legitimate reason to care about any of their endeavors for even a nanosecond; let’s take a deep breath for this one. *inhales for 4 whole seconds*
We have a obnoxiously generic and worthless BDSM pair, the bossy loli and bumbling male cohort, impossibly annoying siblings who play cards, act inhumanely stupid, and are “in love” despite literally everything about their relationship (from how they act, not their brother-sister thing, and no, the fact that the brother is adopted legally doesn’t count given they consider each other siblings) so that makes no sense and is only there for pathetic pandering and equally pathetic “attempts” at drama (as you can see, these two are the worst of the bunch), an irritating and pretentious (if pretty) idol who can't lip-sync to save her life (or this show’s life for that matter) and a hyperactive manager who is even more infuriating to put up with and can channel his inner “star wars kid” during combat for egregious choreography, and lastly a certain final spoiler boss and pulled out of thin air new companion that should have been related to Tazuna given his backstory of his sister dying in bed with her hand stretched out, the fact that Koyori was on that same bed and recognized him, and the fact that this was thrown out the window for her (no, episode 11 doesn’t help matters and in fact had a few new questions damaging to the show I am not asking here; read the original review for those). There are two other characters listed on MAL that do not actually appear barring one specific moment in episode 6 that is so baffling due to apparently doing damage to the enemy duo of that episode yet it has literally nothing to do with the rest of the show (How does something like this happen? Why are they never present again? Does this mean that there are technically 6 current duos in the show instead of 7 or...my brain hurts!) That was a mouthful.
Now for the motivations of most of these pairs and how those motivations are surprisingly baffling. On the outset they seem interesting (barring the two siblings and their motivation to fall in love with each other, which...not only is nothing stopping them, but Masaru in particular doesn’t feel like he’s in on that at all), but then you remember that these are the motivations for entering into a kiddie version of the Holy Grail War! These are wishes that are relatively easy to accomplish and in no way warrant such risks. Part of what made the contestants and overall battle royale survival games in say, Fate/Zero and UBW interesting is that many of them had wishes that could not be done by normal means, like Kiritsugu’s wish for world peace, or Soichiro seemingly wanting to settle down with his servant (meaning he’d probably wish her into becoming reborn in his time effectively or something). Nothing is stopping the siblings from falling in love, or whatever the idol and manager want, or whatever the loli and subordonate want, or what Tazuna wants or what the final guy wants. Actually, neither the main protagonist, nor Koyori, nor the final guy and his partner, actually seem to have a real goal, nor do they accurately develop one beyond the final guy simply wanting to meet God, probably just for the sake of seeing if the guy from the flashback was right. Hell, the first duo doesn’t seem to have any wishes either. To be fair, these characters are all insufferable enough so if it means spending less time with them, I guess not having worthwhile motivations is ok for getting them out of existence faster. If only some of them died, since I utterly detest every single combatant here, some more than others. This has got to be the worst, most infuriating cast I have ever had the displeasure of putting up with for 4 hours, and discussing these miserable sacks of Goji droppings any longer will set my brain on fire.
Epilogue
Never before could I have imagined a work of fiction that could vex me so much I would actively become a meme of salt just by mentioning it. There have been shows before and since that have made me go on hateful tangents, but none as passionately hateful as this one. The visuals are a nightmare, the narrative is a black hole and then some, and the characters make me want to go on a rampage like I was Guts from Berserk, and all in all, every week I have spent watching this putrid abomination from either the 7th or 9th circle of hell has been a detrimentally hateful experience. It’s not that is has nothing going for it, but it’s just so destructively broken and malignant that it is worth less than nothing. If I could give this a negative grade, I would, not just for being worse than noting on most levels, but also because it's also the only anime I know of that can actively cause physical disarray for the viewer. There has never and will never be an anime worse than this, and if someday I am proven wrong, then at that point, I may have to give up my sanity once and for all. Never ever watch this show if you value your time, brain, eyes, or any remote aspect of yourself. This isn’t even worth it for a cheap laugh like I thought it would be before I saw it. It is a new level of bad, a level in which there should only be one resident for all of eternity. It at once is the antithesis of creativity and a testament to everything that can go wrong with ambition in art; it is the enemy of creativity itself! Let’s give one final farewell to Hand Shakers, the show that broke my spirit 10 times over; see you in hell!
Screenshots
