Anime mechs, weird robots, hot chicks with HUGE eyes, and overly long and incredibly frequent transformation sequences. Could this be the hierachy of Western anime? Well, I could say that, but then I'd have to commit seppuku for such lies and treachery. T
4.9
"Poor"
A bunch of orphaned, arrogant teenagers get these weird little machines that turn them into genetic little mechs, go to "battle" with a whole bunch of adults, and the whole generally ends up being a parody of itself. The only time a concept like that could ever work is in "Kids Next Door". DICE is not KND, it is an anime and it honestly makes an attempt to be serious about it. Lo and behold, it fails miserably. If I weren't so stingy with the lower scores, keeping a '0' as being the worst possible show ever (which would be a show so bad, it ends the world as we know it), I probably wouldn't have given it a 4.9.
Whatever the case, this follows the standard plot of a bunch of kids becoming the heroes. As I said, Kids Next Door pulls this off great, being a parody of it more than anything else. DICE is not a parody. All the humor is... not even funny. The plots are incredibly underwhelming, and the characters- oh my god, the characters... You have surely seen a kids show where the kids on the show actually make you want to... not have kids. Imagine a group of seven of these kids, horribly voice acted, and all covering a stereotype of Western and Eastern anime. We have the hotheaded "Jet", the shopoholic "Puffy", and the badass who's name I can't even remember. Then the boring chick (not hot), the mechanic/geek, and someone else I couldn't be bothered to remember. I really wish these kids would just DIE, but for some reason, they don't. They get themselves into all kinds of stupid scenarios, through their own carelessness. The thingy that turns them into mechs got shot out of a girls hand once, and for some reason, one kid was in a WARZONE and managed to turn into a mech just fine. One guy was in a cave and had to activate a thingy that reverses gravity so he could fly, and this caused all the large boulders and very, very big rock spikes to actually burst through the ground on his getaway, being pulled up by the gravity reversal... which was turned off, but that's beside the point.
And they always get through these scenarios on sheer luck. Every 'victory' is really just one big happy accident. If the characters weren't so heart-rendingly godawful, maybe I wouldn't WANT to see them die in a horribly, horrible way.
I'm not even going to touch the facial expressions or the voice acting. Because... there are no facial expressions. At least Transformers have faces, the DICE mechs are just CGI models that have no faces or anything. The ones who do are limited to a talking animation. A bad guy will actually give his "evil mean headed" speech and look like he's talking about the weather. The facial expressions are just that bad. Voice acting is worse.
The mechs and action sequences are just... awful. The animation, despite being CGI with a toon shader, manages to look like HORRIBLE hand-drawn animation. One punch takes about 3 individual drawings. A standard one uses, what, 10? 20? Whatever the case, it's jittery, it's awful, you really don't feel immersed at all. The action is terrible, and while they have mechs, they serve no purpose. These are mechs, damnit, and yet the mech-kid gets on a motorcycle and drives around. The mechs don't even have guns as far as I know. The action goes like this: Kid loses the ability to go mech (somehow) > Bad Guy gloats > Kid does something retarded > through some sort of divine intervention, kid gets mech thingy back > bad guy surrenders (that's right, no battle, just a quick surrender).
And the music is just ONE song. ONE BLOODY SONG. It's used every episode, and is just terrible in itself. No ambient music, no variants, NOTHING.
If you like anime, this is just going to make you go cry in a corner somewhere. If you aren't an anime fan, you'll just be thinking "wtf is all the fuss over this anime shite?"
Don't watch this show. Kay? Kay.