Viper's Creed - Episode 12 (Completed)

By the end of the penultimate episode of Viper's Creed, we were left with virtually everyone except Saiki seemingly dead, giving us what looked to be an epic, episode-long battle between himself and Ulla. Except Ulla wipes the floor with Saiki within two minutes of the start of this episode, with the latter saved only by Sakurako's rather excellent use of a rocket launcher against Ulla. Yes, it was implausible, but somehow seeing her kick ass in this fashion was most satisfying, and trust me, you had to take ever meagre drop of satisfaction you could find in this episode.

So, Saiki and Sakurako (not forgetting Ageha of course) live to fight another day, but with Saiki badly injured and blinded how can they possibly fight on any further? By Saiki using Sakurako as his eyes, of course, tying neatly into the question he asked her in the opening episode.


Now, this is all well and good, but how does a blind man continue to move their vehicle with the extreme precision that Saiki does? How does he manage to at least somewhat hold his own against Ulla's powerful mecha? Most importantly of all, how the fuck does Saiki know that his Maneuver-Roid's main camera has been disabled, and more so why the fuck does he switch to a backup camera when he can't see anything?! Sakurako doesn't tell him the camera has failed, there's no audible alarm for this, and yet not only does he know he switches to another camera that he can't use! This isn't just a plot hole, this is an inter-planetary rift in space sized plot hole - In short, the whole "Saiki is blind" plot point was a farce of the highest degree.

If that wasn't enough to make my eyebrows raise clean up above my head, we then find that after Saiki is defeated, the video files he was attempting to take to the broadcasting company are already there anyway. Why did you even bother Saiki?! "It was a decoy" won't fly with me either, which gives us ridiculous plot point number two.

Finally, the ending simply left me shouting, astonished, at the screen; "What?! What?!?!?!". Because, yes, that's right boys and girls, Haruki is still alive. Yet nobody thought to tell us over the past few episodes while everyone was boo-hooing over him? Whoever wrote this script is not just an utter bastard, but an utterly incompetent one to boot. What were you thinking??

It's a shame really, after pulling itself away from those pretty horrible filler episodes, Viper's Creed looked set to finish up as at least an average yet action packed series that could boast a certain mindless entertainment factor. But, that was before the abomination which it is final episode was served up onto my plate, which (as you can probably tell from the above) has reduced me to a gibbering, ranting wreck of a 'Blogger. Viper's Creed isn't the worst series of all time by a long shot, but this has to be right up there as one of the worst anime endings I've ever seen - It's the kind of thing that should be studied by future generations to prevent such atrocities from ever occuring in the name of Japanese animation ever again.