Anime Review: The New Gate

The New Gate is an isekai.

That’s it. That’s all you need to know. Well, you should also know that I’ve read the manga up to volume seven and then stopped because I knew there was an anime coming out and I didn’t want to completely ruin my enjoyment of the show. So, now that it’s over, did the anime do the manga any justice? How were the parts that I didn’t read?

Let’s Jam!

The Story

The New Gate centers around a VRMMO RPG where players are trapped within the game world except… if they die in the game, they also die in real life! We follow our main protagonist Kirito as he…

Oh, wait. Sorry, that’s the synopsis for Sword Art Online. Let me try that again.

The New Gate centers around a VRMMO RPG where players are trapped within the game world except… if they die in the game, they also die in real life! We follow our main protagonist Shin as he… Wait. This sounds awfully familiar… but it’s not because we don’t have to go through 100 floors of Aincrad to see how it all ends! Shin is already at the final boss and he defeats him with his godly overtuned powers just as you would expect from the main protagonist of a fantasy isekai! With the final boss defeated, it’s time to go home! All of the players log out and when it’s time for Shin to go, he steps through the gate and he gets isekai’d into the isekai world that he was originally isekai’d into except the world is no longer the game world but still is the game world but it became alive with living breathing people that may or may not still be NPCs but they sure are going on about their daily lives in non-programmed non-NPC ways!

Oh, and it’s 500 years in the future. There’s that, too.

So, Shin re-enters the world of The New Gate and discovers that time has passed for everyone except him. Feeling a bit slighted (well, not really, he doesn’t seem to actually care that this happened to him but it would have been nice if he did), he travels to The Moon Sanctum, his old workshop where he meets Tiera who has a curse placed upon her. Of course, a curse is no match for a 500-year-old cure spell and he fixes it. He receives a letter of recommendation from her and journeys off to the capital to join a guild as an adventurer. Now, Shin goes around to catch up with all of the NPC companions he left behind while biding his time in an effort to find a way back home.

The Characters

Reading the manga in black and white often allows you to let your imagination run a bit wild. Seeing it in animated form sometimes makes you wish that you were back in your imagination and that is the case here with The New Gate.

Shin is about as vanilla as Breyer’s ice cream. There’s not much in a range of emotion with him and when it came time for one of the most anticipated fights that I saw in the manga, the emotion just wasn’t there. I didn’t feel a connection to him as a character and he simply existed just for the sake of existing. Plus, he’s so overpowered that everything seems trivial to him. The only time when he acted as if he was in a perilous situation was when something political could have happened to him… in other words, when he sent a legendary sword flying through the air, crashing through the roof of the castle and nearly impaling the princess.

Overpowered main characters are a dime a dozen in fantasy isekais and Shin does absolutely nothing to break the mold. It’s also the problem that I had with him in the manga but since this was a story about reconnecting with old friends rather than going on grand adventures, I thought the story itself did enough to cover up the fact that Shin was about as bland as you could be for a main character. In anime form, the story can’t even hide that because you have to sit and listen to every word he said and, at times, it made each episode feel like a slog to get through. Some things are better left in black and white and I feel that’s the case with Shin here.

Spoilers, this is not the only time I will be saying this about The New Gate.

Next up we have Tiera. She’s rather timid and unsure of herself which is to be expected when you have a curse on you to where if you go without your restraining order range, you attract and get attacked by several monsters. When Shin lifts the curse, she’s ever thankful but she doesn’t truly get her confidence back. Sure, she enjoys being free and will follow Shin into the depths of hell but she still retains that timid and shy personality which I get… she’s a cute girl and the male demographic often enjoys cute girls who are timid and shy. While it does ease up a little bit throughout the show, she doesn’t change all that much unless you count that hot little silver highlight in her hair. She’s a supporting character and plays the role well.

Next, we have Schnee… one of the NPC companions who is the obvious love crush. While Shin just sees her as a good friend and a loyal confidant in battle, Schnee sees him a bit differently. Even though she makes it painfully obvious, Shin still has to play the role of the oblivious main character… that is until the final episode when she makes it abundantly clear what her feelings are, and even still Shin feels like he never saw that coming. As someone who loves romance stories, a little bit of obliviousness can go a long way but when you make the dynamic so obvious that Stevie Wonder can see it and the main character doesn’t, it’s hard to believe in the emotion when the bombshell is finally dropped. Outside of that, she’s your typical super-skilled fighter who could rival Shin in terms of power. She does kick ass when she needs to and that’s a good trait to have in a female lead character. Her balance between badassery and her soft, gentle, and caring side made her the best character in the show.

From here we just have a few side characters that pop up from time to time such as Wilhelm who comes off as someone you wouldn’t want to mess with but then you find out he’s a big softie who loves taking care of orphans, as well as Princess Rion who seems to have an obsession with challenging Shin to fight and also kind of develops a bit of a crush on him. We do get to meet some of the other NPCs, such as Girart.. but I’ll touch on this in the next section. There’s also Yuzuha who is an Elementail (get it because it’s an animal?) who can turn into a girl that sometimes gets close enough to that fine line where the FBI might need to get involved. Some are around for an arc, and some pop in and out, but they are there to move the story along while the show mainly focuses on Shin, Schnee, and Tiera.

Art, Animation, and Sound

Okay.. this is where we need to sit down and have a little chat.

First off, if you’ve read the manga, you’ll know that the artwork is rather rough around the edges. It’s not the most well-drawn manga but… I never expected the anime to be faithful to the manga in that way. Or, to put it in a different way, I never expected the anime to stay so true to the art style that it ended up being WORSE than the manga.

But here we are.

To be fair… CLOUDHEARTS is a fairly new studio. Including The New Gate, they have four series under their belt; however, they weren’t alone in this venture as Yokohama Animation Lab pitched in to help and they’ve been around since 2016. So… what the hell happened here!?

The characters were WILDLY inconsistent in their appearances. I’m not talking about it just like the nose was bigger in one scene and smaller in the next. I mean like… facial structure was completely off, sometimes the eyes had details, other times not. Expressions and angles and perspectives… all of them were completely off and it wasn’t like once or twice per episode… it was in almost every damn scene!

Then, there was the animation. The choreography of some of the fights was an absolute mess. I looked forward to Shin vs Girart as the fight came across epically in the manga, and yet, I’ve seen an episode of Ryuusei no Rockman where Ra Mu has fewer details than his model in the Nintendo DS game and I would take that any day over this because at least green squares and triangles Ra Mu has semi-smooth animation frames. The fight was a massive disappointment that didn’t capture the scale of what it should have been. Every other fight in the show was the same way. It came across that the animators didn’t know how to animate action so they skirted around it as best as humanly possible.

The only thing that looked decent at best were the spell effects and that barely gets a passable grade here, too. Like, Astro Note’s studio apologized for their poor quality. Where’s our apology for whatever this animation was supposed to be?

I also feel bad for Sou. I love him as an artist and I think he has a tremendous sound. To attach his name and talents to whatever this show was supposed to be has to be seen as nothing more than a setback for his career. The OP was probably the only thing I loved about the anime adaptation.

Overall Thoughts

Typically, when I do a first reaction and I give a show a resounding YES, it’s because I truly feel that the show will give you some great entertainment. I even stated in my First Reaction that had I not read the manga, this would have gotten a MAYBE from me. Now, I feel absolutely terrible for giving it a YES and even worse for anyone who watched this show on my recommendation. Just like Astro Note’s studio, I apologize.

Had I known that CLOUDHEARTS would take The New Gate’s source material and butcher it to hell and back like that, I would have given this a NO and told you to go read the manga. In fact, if you haven’t watched the show, I applaud you and I will still tell you to go read the manga. It’s not the prettiest manga out there but the story comes across a lot better in black and white.

I could ramble on but I’ll just sum it up by saying the anime adaptation is not the form that you want to consume this media in. It’s not worth your time.

BUT

Despite my doom and gloom attitude, there were some tender moments in the show such as Wilhelm being an awesome supporting character, Schnee being pretty well-balanced, Yuzuha being cute before turning into an FBI warning, and Girart’s story being pretty emotional… despite the lack of emotion on Shin’s part (even his crying didn’t seem natural.)

There were some saving graces… just not enough to make the adaptation watchable.

Again, and for the last time. Go read the manga. You’re better off this way.