Was Hand Shakers Really That Bad?
Warning: there will be minor spoilers in this, so please don’t read it if that’s going to upset you.
The premise of Hand Shakers is reasonably interesting. It’s about pairs of people (called Hand Shakers, go figure) who hold hands and are thus able to fight using manifestations of both their will and connection to their partner. These manifestations are called their Nimrods, and the world they fight in is called the Ziggurat. For most Hand Shakers, the entire point of fighting is to be able to eventually “meet God” and have a wish granted. However, the show specifically focuses on Tazuna and Koyori. Unlike most Hand Shakers, their reason for fighting is much different. Simply put, Koyori’s existence is unstable. In order to survive she must a) never lose a fight within the Ziggurat and b) hold Tazuna’s hand for a certain amount of time every x minutes/hours — the times change throughout the show, continuously getting longer.
Anyway, as research for this article, I tried to get some opinions on what this show had done well, since I couldn’t come up with much on my own. I messaged people on /r/anime who either had positive feelings about the show, or were upset by people who were negative toward it.
They couldn’t give me much either.
The majority of people who posted in /r/anime’s Hand Shakers discussion threads were watching this show either out of a desire to maintain a no-drop record, or to get the medal offered for completion of the show. I’m not saying no one watched it because they liked it, but those people were in the significant minority, so I already had a pretty small sample size.
As for what those few samples I got had to say for the show? Hand Shakers has really pretty colors, the music is hit-or-miss (I, personally, enjoyed it), and Koyori is cute.
That’s all I can give you. Most people, when asked, referenced those reasons. A couple liked various characters based on personal fetishes, some liked the art style, and some liked individual character’s Nimrods, but, basically, it can be reduced to good music and pretty colors. The only other thing mentioned is that some people were impressed with GoHands’ willingness to try out a different style, even if it didn’t ultimately work out well.
Despite the overall inability to say what Hand Shakers did right though, people persist in asking why everyone says it’s bad — as if it’s merely some popular trend. I’m not saying it’s not, but it generated real hate in viewers for perfectly valid reasons.
The animation for Hand Shakers ranges from decent to horribly awkward. It’s not the frame-by-frame that’s a problem (mostly), but the angles. GoHands seems to have the weirdest fixation on showing things from every possible angle, including things that just don’t look very good. The camera constantly circles the characters like it’s some sort of, relatively, slow-moving electron. It’s an interesting idea, to be sure, but it turned out more dizzying than enjoyable.
Characterization isn’t any better. I like Koyori, but mostly because she doesn’t speak until the latter half of the show, and because she’s adorable with a gorgeous fairy outfit. Given her silence, I could imagine that she was saying what I was thinking, as opposed to what GoHands would probably have her say.
Most other Hand Shakers have weird and, mostly, annoying verbal tics that are apparently supposed to pass for personality. One complains about being mistaken for a child all the time while her partner uses “su” in all of his sentences, another quotes famous people while her partner talks about resounding quite a bit, another randomly draws and describes tarot cards and constantly squeals about how awesome her brother is, and Tazuna constantly talks about whether something “meshes” or not. And, when Koyori finally does begin to speak, it’s clear that Tazuna has unfortunately infected her with his verbal tic.
It’s not that characters have no personality at all beyond these tics. Just… very little. The best characters I can point to are Koyori and the scientist, Makihara. Koyori starts out as a blank slate, but ever so slowly starts to show some preferences and emotions. (I admit, I may be biased because of her cuteness.) Makihara, on the other hand, is one of those weird characters with more mysteries than answers. Toward the end of the show, they finally give him a background story and some answers — and it’s actually kind of good.
Speaking of kind of good, the plot itself isn’t actually that bad. It’s definitely not great, but it doesn’t totally suck. It’s no worse than “boy, who is a terrible ninja, somehow is capable of evading the elite ninja of his village, and dreams of being that village’s leader” as far as premises go, and the plot carries through reasonably well.
The whole “Koyori will die if she loses” plot point is completely terrible, though. To begin with, as soon as the creators decided that Koyori’s life depended on winning battles, and that most other characters’ lives didn’t, they messed up. It isn’t fair to the other characters at all. It’s a show about battles between people, but you’re emotionally blackmailed into rooting for the main characters, not because you like them, but because losing for most everyone else just means not automatically getting their wish granted, while losing for Tazuna and Koyori means death for Koyori.
Execution of the “needing to hold hands for x amount of time every x minutes/hours” plot device had its ups and downs. On one hand, they did a nice job showing how Koyori and Tazuna manage to sleep without her dying overnight (it involves a cute sock thing holding their hands together). On the other hand, though, they solved the problem of everyone else wondering what’s going on by telling their friends that Koyori’s foreign. Somehow, everyone accepts constant hand holding as a totally natural way of dealing with her transfer to another country. Also, we’re never told just how Makihara determined how long Koyori can go without holding hands — and it seems to just get longer arbitrarily as the plot requires. Finally, at the beginning, Makihara explains that all partners, not just Tazuna and Koyori, have to hold hands a certain amount to remain within the Ziggurat, yet no reference to this is ever made again.
That said, it’s not like I spent the entire show being totally lost and confused, which is more than some shows can claim. So, despite its flaws, I’d call the plot average.
One vaguely good point about Hand Shakers is that Tazuna has parents, they live at home, and they’re nice, mostly normal people. Anime characters have a tendency to only have parents when they’re useful to the plot in some way, which means most anime parents are either abusive, neglectful, or just plain weird. Tazuna’s parents are, admittedly, a bit strange for not finding it odd that a random man came to their home claiming their son needed to hold an equally random girl’s hand for an undetermined amount of time, but they don’t go out of their way to be weird either. I’m not sure it says good things about a show when one of its high points is that the MC’s parents are average, but it’s something different anyway.
However, their action scenes need work. Most of this is the camera angles and lack of a clear flow of events, but there are plenty of other flaws. The most glaring was the bouncing balls. One of their characters uses bouncing balls as their Nimrod. Even when she was doing nothing but standing still and bouncing one ball, the sound of the ball hitting the ground didn’t match up with the ball, the ball didn’t deform upon hitting the ground, and her hand didn’t react at all to the ball hitting it, leaving it feeling absolutely nothing like a ball bouncing. Come on GoHands, I only took one computer animation class in college and even I learned how to do that much.
So far, the show ends up being just on the bad side of average. Yes, it already had a lot of hate, but it wasn’t irredeemable. If it had a solid last episode, and the second to last episode made me hopeful they’d manage this, it would have evened out to “okay.” Unfortunately, the last episode was pretty bad, even compared to the rest of the show. Without spoiling too much, they don’t solve anything, they introduce new mysteries, and they excuse some pretty terrible actions by a character with the explanation “because he’s kind.” Because, apparently, GoHands is totally unaware of the usual definition of “kind.”
However, Hand Shakers did do a couple things right. They had some very pretty outfits (Koyori’s fairy outfit and the last pair they fight especially), a lot of pretty colors, a decent premise, and some possibly-good-depending-on-who-you-ask music. It’s not much, but if these are the things that matter most to you in a show, then darn it, this is the show for you.
Otherwise, you can probably handle giving it a miss.
For those of you who want to believe in Hand Shakers though, MozillaFennekin has a lovely alternate view available.
