RWBY

Well there is Blake, who can be a cynical Tsundere but she probably falls in line more with a Kuudere. That is of course assuming any of them go dere at some point in the series.

From how it looks, I feel this would be better off as a video game. Has all the elements. But as an anime? Nah. I can do without.

Yellow was the worst trailer.

fix'd

yellow was my favorite trailer

White was my favorite trailer, though after seeing Weiss in the series my positive opinion of her dropped sharply. I have mixed feelings about the Yellow trailer since it was less informative than the other trailers, focusing more on action and sex appeal; however I admit that those factors are what drew me into RWBY (well a majority of my interest lie in the promise of an amazingly characterized story...still waiting).



It's not really an anime per-say because Monty Oum's studio is in America, many people debate on it's existence as a cartoon or animated short. A majority of RWBY fans impulsively declare that RWBY would be better as a videogame on the grounds that it's got good animation and an appealing world...these are not valid reasons for a competent game. Not to mention the impracticality of making the game itself, RoosterTeeth is nowhere near the resources or influence required to produce a game that meets the expectations of the fans and even if it were released the chances of it being competent are even slimmer considering their inexperience in the gaming industry.

Red>White>Yellow>Black.

Ruby's trailer was great, but it has been all downhill from there. The actual series was a huge letdown.



Semantics.

It's still young. It's slated 'till mid-November, so it still has plenty of time to surprise us. Although I will admit that it's first impressions are amateurish in comparison to Monty's previous works.

For my own preferences on the trailers, Ruby definitely takes the cake. The other three are a mixed bag. Weiss had her lovely singing, and was artfully done, while Blake and Yang had good action marred by somewhat sub-par acting.

Well the actual series being a let-down is not breaking news, but I'm curious about why you think these trailers should be ordered in this manner.

Semantics-the stagnant life-blood of the internet and philosophy.




Monty Oum's previous works are pretty, but there was no actual depth to them (Dead Fantasy had a brief story element, but that's not what people watched Dead Fantasy for) which is possibly one of the reasons why he's struggling right now to piece together an exceptional story.

I think that a majority of the expectations I and various other people intrigued by RWBY made were probably incredibly extravagant, maybe to the point of being unfair. The current RWBY is a blindingly generic and occasionally cringe worthy title but at it's core RWBY fulfills it's goal as mildly interesting and brief entertainment for free, not some sort of rising star success story like many push it to be.

Well, Red was clearly the most thought out trailer and the one they undoubtedly put most time into. There might not be any acting but the animation is way better than anything Monty has done before. It was also marketed well with the entire "Well, we'll be revealing something soon and it will have this MMD/animeish style to it." and then RT simply didn't say anything else. This pretty much goes for the White trailer as well but Red is my personal favorite.

As for the Yellow and Black trailers they are sub-par in contrast to the Red and White trailers. Not only do they get tanked by the awful acting but it's too obvious they didn't put as much time into those. Or rather, they probably did but had no idea how to try to get an introduction to some kind of story into the trailers and so the animation and voicing probably got a bit rushed.

In all honesty, all of Monty Oums works are all clearly the work of an amateur. Hopefully RWBY will help him and his guys to get better since this time around they'll have to do most of the animation themselves. In opposition to his earlier works where most character movements are clearly ripped alongside the 3D model and they try to hide their own bad animations with swirling cameras and high-speed action.

Well, from the trailers, I think everyone was expecting another Dead Fantasy, to be quite honest. Crazy action is something that Monty's good at.

If they wanted to do story, they should have included some elements of that in all the trailers, and used a different format rather than 5-minute clips.

But since they are only five minutes, I'll stick with it. Like I said- it's still young.

Yes I agree with your statements. If anything the appeal of the first two trailers resulted from stoking the curiosity of the viewer through by being enigmatic, but the other two could have been episodes on their own considering the length of the previous episode and their story content; and if they do use one of the trailers as an entire episode then I would be pretty pissed.



Most of Monty's fans did beg him to continue Dead Fantasy, and there are traces of Dead Fantasy within RWBY so such expectations are more than likely.

Well recall that this is a trailer, and that leaking generous amounts of the story is detrimental to rousing the general populace's curiosity; which is why I think the mysterious nature of the R&W trailers were related to their success. Also it's Monty Oum, the people want action.

The good die young. However I am likewise going to stay with RWBY since a turnaround is not impossible and there is still some merit to RWBY as a fairly bland but still mildly entertaining animation with promising lore.

I am getting the distinct impression that you and I are simply talking in circles of mutual agreement of each others' points- just worded differently.

It's surprising when you reach a peaceful compromise on the internet, seeing as it does not happen often. Though we do have similar views toward some aspects of RWBY and I do agree with your points on occasion, I did disagree with you on the prospect of adding more story content to the RWBY trailers; and the point of arguing about altering the trailers themselves seems pointless now that RWBY has started.

Third episode is out, voice-acting improved (slightly), the character interactions are now intriguing and the comedy is entertaining now. These sort of improvements are minor, but a sign of progress nonetheless. Fingers crossed folks.

Just watched the third episode and honestly I liked it more than the second one. Somehow it was just better. Plus it's so nice to see them all getting along so well. Riiiiiight....

And it seems I was right in saying that Weiss was a bit of a bitch.

Just watched episodes 2 and 3. Have to say that I'm getting kind of bored. I understand the need for exposition, but without the kick-ass action, all I'm seeing is bad acting and it becomes more apparent the more I have to see it consecutively. Also, how did that Jean (?) guy get into that school? I thought it was, like, for pro fighters and he seems like a failure. Probably comic relief, but still.

This is sort of personal, but what bothers me is that the trailers gave me a picture of the characters, and now they're totally different from what I imagined. I wasn't really sure what Ruby was going to be, but idealistic female protag doesn't come to mind. I did NOT think Weiss was going to be a total bitch. I thought she was going to be all stoic and serene and shit. Blake seemed like she was pretty normal and a little sassy to her friend and not a total loner. At least Yang is like how she was in the trailer.

Either way, I still have hope because my love for epic battles and cool weapons will keep me going.

If you consider that these episodes are only 5 minutes long, we would essentially still be on episode one of an anime. We're only about halfway through the episode at that. In any case, I agree with the off characterization, though I don't agree that this is poorly animated. Quite the opposite actually, especially when you consider how much time goes into rendering and whatnot. For someone just working on his own, it's amazing that he's able to design the characters so closely to anime and that he manages to do the action so well.

As a frame of reference, my friend did a 7 minute video that he poured his heart and soul into and the characters' faces were kinda like empty doll faces, not to mention that the motions were a bit off. Meanwhile, Monty Oum practically effortlessly gets the art style down AND the motion. Oh, and consider render times. For a one minute video that I did, it took 3 hours to render, then find all the mistakes, and then another 3 hours to render out. I can only imagine what it's like for Monty Oum...

I don't think anyone has been knocking the animation, just the writing. Also, he's not the only one working on this, there were a handful of people helping him with the project.

I think this is something that everyone will have to watch in one sitting to judge how good it really is.

Jaune might have made it into Beacon Academy because of his family, he did say he was from a family of soldiers or something like that. Plus maybe the kid actually has the stuff, he's just hopeless outside of combat; a fairly common trope in anime.

I had many high expectations for RWBY that were failed as well but remember that a trailer is simply used to accrue media attention, not give concrete details about the story or characters simply to rouse attention towards them. So it's to be expected that something beyond expectations happened.



I and several other people have criticized the animation quality, mostly just nitpicks like objects clipping through other objects but having the cookies in the first episode simply disappear on contact with Ruby's mouth in Ep.1 (pure laziness) or Jaune's absurd shield fumbling movements were concerning. I want Monty Oum to tighten up his work in general, but I do not have the right to set quality expectations for this series considering that I have no clue what burdens professional animators hold to the point to where I can relate to them and if Monty's studio takes on anything comparable to those burdens.

I thought I'd give my somewhat biased view of things (since I find Ruby the most adorable thing in the universe).

1. Animation

First of all, Rooster Teeth is not a professional animation studio and we can't expect the same level of animation quality we get from major Japanese (or western) studios. This doesn't mean I'm not allowing constructive criticism or comparison, but expecting flawless/perfect results is unrealistic. It's much closer to indie than professional work and should be treated as such.

Furthermore, doing it in semi-3D forces some degree of realism (in non-action and non-comedy scenes) and makes any complex actions/motions that much more difficult to create. Yes, I'm talking about the cookie scene - the whole point was to show Ruby's innocence in a lighthearted way while conveying exposition, and the cookie thing was only supposed to entice a chuckle from the audience. The typical anime would do this in chibi style, making Ruby into a star-eyed cookie gobbler (I actually tried to shoehorn a RT/AH reference here but gave up) while playing silly music in the background, then going back to exposition half a minute later. This could work in a 20-minute episode and I'll get back to that later, but my point is that realistically portraying a human eating 10+ cookies in half as many seconds is all but impossible, and excessive exaggeration would undermine the overall tone. Perhaps the animation could've been done better, but I consider it a result of limited production resources and not something people should nitpick so much about.

Also notice how chibi-Ruby and exaggeration work well in a later (comedy) scene when she isn't strapped to an interrogation chair.

I haven't heard any other major complaints so I'll consider this chapter closed.

2. Plot/story/characters/etc.

This is where it gets slightly absurd. AFAIK, RWBY (the first season, to be specific) will consist of 16 episodes, 3 of which will be ~11 minutes long (the others being ~5 minutes). If you do the math, this comes out to about 100 minutes, which is the length of a feature film. Now, I may be horribly mistaken, but I instantly assumed RWBY is going to be an anim(at)e(d) film initially released in 5-minute segments. The only logical reason why they're doing this I can think of is to allow the show to gain popularity, a one-time release wouldn't accomplish this.

What I'd like you to do is take any movie you like and watch it in 5-minute segments, one per week, and then analyze each of them like you analyze RWBY episodes. See where I'm going with this? I don't think you can complain about the story or characterization when you're barely 1/4 of the way into a movie, and you definitely can't split it into 5-minute parts and criticize each of them separately.

Take Weiss for example. This is what people see:
- E02: Weiss is being a bitch.
- E03: Weiss is being a bitch.
- E04: Weiss is being a bitch.
Result: Weiss is a bitch, QQ about lousy characterization after barely 10 minutes.

What actually happened:
- Weiss is introduced as a spoiled princess at the beginning.
Result: What I think about Weiss? I dunno; I'm still watching the movie, not now.

This is also the reason there's a "lack of action scenes", unless you were expecting a Michael Bay-fest or Dragon Ball or whatever. Watching action scenes for 90 of the 100 minutes would get pretty boring. The amount of action seems quite normal: there was some in E01 and E05 is guaranteed to have lots of it. If this was released in 15-20-minute segments, every episode would have action scenes.

The main problem is that people tend to compare 5-minute RWBY episodes (which are likely to have a movie-like pacing) to 20-minute anime episodes (while we're barely into the second episode) - it just doesn't work. I know everyone's used to getting their 20-minute episodes each week so what people are saying can almost be Google-translated from "There's not enough action/story/characterization/etc." to "There's not enough weekly content.". Notice how you're 98% less likely to analyze and criticize each episode separately when watching 10 in a row (ex. just starting a show that's been running for some time) compared to watching one each week.

tl;dr

I don't think we can give any constructive criticism at this point, other than nitpicking about details. Animation and voice acting are expected to seem somewhat amateurish and should be accepted as such. Story and characterization can be analyzed when the first season has aired (or we've reached the 50%-mark at the very least).

/rant

Also, Ruby is cute and I want to cuddlerape her dakimakura. [size=10](Please, stop...)[/h]

I've been meaning to watch this, but I guess now that FAKKU has found it I have no more excuses lol

Not much to say in the most recent episodes though I did notice a couple things. Pyrrha is looking down a scoped sight without a scope? The Grim shown at the end are the same ones that Red faced in her trailer (they have the same build and the bushy tail gave them off), possibly they evolved to the forest environment or suffered some sort modification.