Tales of Zestiria the X - Season 1

The first episode is just beautiful! I was expecting it to be well-produced, and considering the fact that I had seen the previous movie called Tales of Zestiria: Dawn of the Shepherd, I knew what I was getting into. However, it is clear that the Ufotable studio has gone the extra mile again concerning the animation here because this is just visual pornography! The water! The fire! The tornadoes! The fighting! The city! The fire-breathing dragon! The introduction was simply a treat that whetted my appetite for more. The animation is stunningly beautiful, and visually this is simply one of the top releases of the year. The only shame is that we do not also have a properly epic and coherent narrative to go with such gorgeous animation. Sure I could forgive them for a lot of things; however, the fact that they devoted two whole episodes to advertising their upcoming action role-playing video game Tales of Berseria left me wondering what the point of this was besides marketing and that just kind of pisses me off. Leaving that interjection aside, after watching the first season, I just have to reiterate that ToZ is an average fantasy adventure with beautiful audiovisual design, but unfortunately, nothing more than that. 7/10. (03/07/2016)