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Aoba Tsuzaki is your fairly typical young
teen, if she were a boy that is. Obsessed with building models of robots
and mechs, Aoba is a tomboy living life happily with her grandmother and then
everything suddenly changes when her grandmother dies. Soon after the
death Aoba is kidnapped and finds herself in Venezuela, the base of an elite
fighting force known as Angel. She soon discovers that she was born with a
natural ability to pilot robots known as Jinki, which Angel use to fight with.
And then the action begins... |
To start with, Jinki: Extend is your fairly atypical mech show. Young teen is drafter into a fighting force they know nothing about, discover they have a natural ability to pilot mechs, find out that they are a 'chosen one', blah blah blah. Jinki contains these cliches (and more) and for the first couple of episodes I found myself easily predicting what was going to happen next. The storyline was simplistic enough that anyone who hadn't seen a mech show before would still be able to guess what would happen next. It was slow and dull. |
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The soap opera approach does
carry all the usual negatives of the genre though, namely bad
dialogue, shallow characters and dragging of story. The fourth
episode illustrates this best as it is essentially a two minute
training montage fleshed out into an entire episode, which is lazy
writing at best. I never found myself caring greatly for any
of the characters either, finding them lacking in personality.
Due to the slow-moving nature of the show though I'm sure they will
develop more in the next volume. |
Despite the negative points though Jinki is still
pretty entertaining and good fun though, but only because it is so easy to watch
as it is nothing challenging. In a twist though, this valuation only
really applies to the first four episodes as the final episode on this volume
suggests that something darker is coming in volume 2. Indeed, the episode
suggests that things are going to get a lot better. |