Sorao meets Toriko when she finds herself stranded and alone in the grotesque and horrendous "Otherworld" and from there on continues on a quest to find Toriko's acquaintance who mysteriously disappeared into that world.
"Otherside Picnic" thows you right into an odd world of madness without explaining much. It is filled with urban legends, horror elements and oddly overconfident main characters with plot armor. The setting is promising and the ambience, to a great extent, really well presented. The show unfortunately fails to capitalize on these good preconditions due to a couple of severe weaknesses. The Otherworld feels like an arbitrary collection of anything that might be scary, without any kind of common plot, interconnection or consistency. The supposedly romantic development between the two main characters is very superficial, hardly touching and the majority of the characters remains, while well designed, unrelatable. The idea of weaving foreigners into the story is well, but when every single soldier in the US batallion barks orders at each other in the worst English with obvious Japanese accent the immersion is entirely broken. A testimony of the studio's laziness to hire native speakers. Finally (and most severely) the story doesn't seem to lead anywhere. Over the course of the first season it achieves very little and leaves you with neither a conclusion nor a cliffhanger.
Watch it if you're bored, but you're not missing out on anything if you don't.
"Otherside Picnic" thows you right into an odd world of madness without explaining much. It is filled with urban legends, horror elements and oddly overconfident main characters with plot armor. The setting is promising and the ambience, to a great extent, really well presented. The show unfortunately fails to capitalize on these good preconditions due to a couple of severe weaknesses. The Otherworld feels like an arbitrary collection of anything that might be scary, without any kind of common plot, interconnection or consistency. The supposedly romantic development between the two main characters is very superficial, hardly touching and the majority of the characters remains, while well designed, unrelatable. The idea of weaving foreigners into the story is well, but when every single soldier in the US batallion barks orders at each other in the worst English with obvious Japanese accent the immersion is entirely broken. A testimony of the studio's laziness to hire native speakers. Finally (and most severely) the story doesn't seem to lead anywhere. Over the course of the first season it achieves very little and leaves you with neither a conclusion nor a cliffhanger.
Watch it if you're bored, but you're not missing out on anything if you don't.