What?! People are saying Upotte is tolerable and comparing it to better shows such as Kancolle? I can’t allow that so I might as well tell them they're wrong. I’m also only going from knowledge I have from watching the show about 2 years back, so excuse me if any points are slightly off. Also I’m probably going to spoil things about both Upotte and Kancolle, so if you intend on watching either of those shows I don’t recommend reading this until after.
Upotte is cute girls with guns. That’s it. It has nothing else going for it. The characters are shit, the story is shit, there is next to no character development (I guess you could say SG550 had some character but it was barely anything), a lot of the things it does is utter bullshit, and it has pointless ecchi which isn’t really ecchi.
The first thing I’ll go into is the stupid premise about the girls literally being guns. Sure, the characters in Kancolle represent ships, but they get cool (almost) power armour and don’t have underwear based around what kind of stock they have. “As the real FNC has a skeleton stock, she wears a thong instead of panties, much to her embarrassment and occasional anger.” It would make more sense for them to proficient in using the weapon they represent and not make them the weapon in a literal sense. While Kancolle do sort of the same thing, they do emphasise that the characters have the “spirit of the ship” within them, which is fair enough compared to other shit shows like strike witches which use the “Its magic lol” justification.
Also I wasn’t initially going to include anything about the dub because I didn’t know Upotte had a dub, but when trying to re-find out what the underwear actually symbolised I went and watched some of the first episode again. Jesus Christ the dub is terrible.
Next, the story. Upotte has literally no storyline. The story consists of: 1. Fart around for some time and establish that you’re literally guns 2. Go into a tournament where M16A4’s gun jammed because she ate chicken nuggets 3. Get into some super serious gun battle where the teacher gets shot and should be dead but jk lol he isn’t dead because bullshit reasons
Kancolle doesn’t really have much of a story either, but what it does have is a lot better than Upotte. You can also justify the lack of significant storyline due to it being an adaptation of the browser game. Even then Kancolle has something along the lines of: 1. Show that the characters represent ships 2. Have a good few decently animated battles 3. Actually kill off a character 4. Develop characters for a bit by using the death of Kisaragi 5. Cook some curry 6. Blow up the naval base 7. Introduce a boss
Next, I'll go into some of the characters of each of the shows, and I'll begin with some of the bland Upotte ones.
FNC was pretty annoying and a bog standard tsundere, but she wasn’t that bad of a character. She wasn’t good, but wasn’t unbearable like others.
M16A4 I can barely remember anything about because she left literally no impact. I remember she got a stomach ache because she ate chicken nuggets, and that jammed her gun because literally guns.
L85A1 might be one of the worst characters I have ever seen in anything ever and doesn’t even deserve to be classed as a main character. She wasn’t even there a lot of the time, and I understand that she was in the infirmary because the gun broke and she needed maintaince, etc, but I really feel like they overdid it a lot, and could have made her a viable, less unbearable character.
SG550 was aite. She was the most tolerable of the main characters and actually progressed as a character more than the show did as a whole. Like how she learnt to become a better marksman with that stupid foot thing. It was dumb as hell, but it was progression.
Oh yeah, Galil exists. Probably the best character in the show because just look at how cute she is.
Now for Kancolle characters.
Fubuki is like, a pretty good character as far as I’m concerned. She certainly isn’t the best character in the show (I’ll get onto best girl later) but she actually progresses as a character. An example of this is when she joins the naval district, she is shit. But then she dedicates her time and effort to becoming not shit.
Mutsuki is probably the weakest out of all the main characters. She has a role in the first half of the show when Kisaragi dies, but after that she kind of drops off and has no relevance.
Kongou, while she isn’t really a main character she’s a Brit so I feel it’s necessary to compare her and L85A1, is actually a pretty funny character. While being comical, she does have her scenes where she is actually useful, unlike L85A1. An example would be when she punches a shell away like it’s nothing.
Yuudachi might be my favourite character in the show. Partly because of poi. Putting that aside, I feel like she is the best character to use in relation the character development, because she literally develops as a character. From little poi to big poi.
Now I’ll go onto the OSTs.
Openings: Upotte... MRW. It’s just not a good opening.
Kancolle. actually has a good opening soundtrack.
Endings: Upotte. This ending isn’t the worst thing ever. It’s not bad at all, which is pretty surprising.
Kancolle. Like the opening, the ending is pretty solid as far as endings go.
I also feel like I need to point this out. What is this bullshit? I MIGHT have been able to tolerate the series if they didn’t pull this sort of shit. If they actually killed the teacher I might not hate the show as much. It’s like, worse than school days. At least with school days, it’s a shitshow for 11 episodes then they brutalise the main character for being an ass hole. That redeems the show slightly. Upotte on the other hand makes up some poor excuse so the teacher doesn’t die and everyone can live happily ever after.
I should probably summon /u/V_Epsilon too.
TLDR: Upotte is shit because of the poor character development, story, etc. While Kancolle does everything Upotte does but a lot better.
TLDR NG+: All anime is trash.
