Aaaaaaand… We’re back with another Glitch production. Glitch’s newer, more mainstream work has been slightly positive for me—I loved The Amazing Digital Circus, as well as Knights of Guinevere, but I thought The Gaslight District was a pretty big flop. (If Murder Drones counts as “modern/mainstream” Glitch, then I wasn’t a fan of that, either.)

Will Gameoverse tip the scales in favor of Glitch being a hype machine, or will it create an unfortunate balance between the excellently done and the poorly executed? We’ll see!

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Overview of Gameoverse

What is It?

About video game worlds!!!… horrifically exploding. And saving them means helping the bad guy stop the good guy or everyone dies.

Gameoverse is an animated action-drama set in an interconnected video game universe, meaning just about anything goes. Gameoverse‘s twist on this setup is that having the hero win any individual game is a bad thing, as it causes that game’s world to immediately self-destruct.

Who Created It?

Ross O’Donovan is the creator of Gameoverse. This project with Glitch is not the first time he’s brought Gameoverse to life—over a decade ago he created a short animated series (originally on Newgrounds) following this same concept, but the two series have nothing to do with each other: Glitch’s Gameoverse is being treated as a total reboot.

Content Warnings

Some swearing, but, to my memory, it’s all lightweight stuff.

Some internet discourse might lead you to believe that this episode features inappropriately dressed characters, which I find ridiculous. Yes, this episode largely takes place on a beach/underwater, so two of the female characters are in swimsuits for most of the episode. (The male characters aren’t human and thus generally don’t wear clothes, sidestepping this issue—not that anyone on the internet gets huffy about male objectification.) But, as I read the general discourse, Glitch’s supposed sin isn’t having female characters in swimsuits, it’s having attractive female characters in swimsuits.¹ God forbid we make any female characters look like attractive women, instead of looking like weak men or lumpy hermaphrodites.

The Review

What is the purpose of a pilot episode?

Generally speaking, a pilot episode is a proof-of-concept asking for cash. It’s intended to sell the show to whoever will be funding the project. It’s a taste-test of what the show will be about, what it will feel like, of the cast, and how much time, effort, and resources will need to be poured into the average episode.

Pilot episodes, even for shows that get greenlit, often never see the light of day, as general viewership isn’t their intended audience.

Another significant detail, sometimes there are large differences between the pilot episode and the season of television that later gets produced. This is because a pilot can be useful in determining a show’s potential weaknesses, allowing the creators to fix them before millions of dollars get poured into the show.

What is the purpose of a first episode?

First episodes are supposed to be the hook that grabs audiences. Rather than selling the show to the executives with money and distribution connections (which should have happened by the time the first episode is produced), they need to effectively attract and grab their target audience, and compellingly prove why they deserve your time and attention. If a first episode fails to cut through the noise and make you invested in seeing at least the next episode, then it has failed to do its job.

And, to add some confusion to the mix, sometimes pilot episodes and first episodes end up being the same thing; sometimes they don’t, but the first episode is called the pilot episode anyway.

I don’t know what Gameoverse is supposed to be—a pilot episode, or a first episode that happens to be called a pilot episode. It looks too expensive (and final) to have been put together by RubberRoss on his own in an effort to persuade Glitch to fund the first episode of his show, but it definitely has some rough edges that, if this were a true pilot, I would hope would be addressed in the final series. Unfortunately, that’s not likely to happen, since Glitch treats every one of their episodes titled “Pilot” like a first episode.

Meaning, issues in the pilot likely aren’t getting fixed before any future episodes air.

And that is all not to say that I like Flappers. Obnoxious character voices don’t get passes for being intentional. They can be used effectively (in small doses), but they become grating when the audience is forced to hear them frequently—such as when the character making the voice is elevated to the main cast, as appears to be the case at the end of the episode. If I have to tolerate Flappers every episode, I don’t think I’ll last long.

On the villain side of things, Warrick—who is at least presented as this series’ ultimate villain—was frustrating. His character design is plenty menacing, and he has a cold-blooded killer moment at the end that was fairly effective—but he’s such a nothingburger. Multiple moments in this episode suggest that he’s not particularly bright, and he spends the entire episode sitting and doing nothing (except for occasionally yelling at subordinates). It made me wonder how he built up the organization he leads, with all the resources it controls, in the first place. If I had less issues with the episode, I might forgive this—there could be a good explanation, such as Warrick being a lesser successor to whoever actually started up the bad guy organization. But, given all the other flaws I’ve seen, I don’t necessarily trust that’s going to be the case.

Most of the other characters, though, I think effectively fill their roles, regardless of what type of pilot this is. Kit’s backstory is layered on a little heavily for an audience-focused pilot, but I could see an executive wanting to see where her planned arc was coming from, and where it was going.³

I have no complaints about the animation. Actually, I think it looks very good, and, at least in this episode, it does a strong job at tying together characters that come from extremely different game worlds while allowing those game worlds to be distinct. It also is visually distinct from most 2D animated shows that I’m aware of, perhaps most importantly Knights of Guinevere (Glitch’s first 2D animated series).

As for what actually happens in Gameoverse‘s first episode… I hope it doesn’t represent what the average episode is going to look like.

Here’s the thing. I like the show’s overarching concept a lot—completing a game destroys the game world because now the game is over, so our protagonists have to help the villain of a game win definitively so that the game can exist forever, while the antagonists are working to help the hero speedrun the game. That’s pretty unique. But, as presented in this pilot, the idea of Kit, Kaboodle, and now Gobbles and Flappers spending most episodes flying to a new planet and either succeeding or failing at having the villain win just seems… boring. I’m having a hard time putting into words why, but I can’t help but worry that it will quickly get very repetitive. I hope this show takes its concept in a different direction, focusing more on an overarching, serialized narrative than an episodic game-to-save-of-the-episode.

There’s a lot of other cool things that could be explored, after all. As one example that pops to mind, seeing a world return into existence because a real-world human made a new save file could also create really interesting scenarios—as well as questions about the nature of existence.

So, the characters are an extremely mixed bag. The animation is good. I think the setting and premise has potential, but it wasn’t well-realized in this episode. Where does that leave Gameoverse?

Wrapping Up

Well, Gameoverse is 100% free to watch, just like everything else Glitch has made, which means you have no more to lose than about thirty minutes of time if you give the episode a try, and a fair amount to gain if you end up liking it.

Which is a way, way weaker recommendation than I had for The Amazing Digital Circus, or Knights of Guinevere, which I wish just about everyone would watch.

I’m not sure why, but I want Gameoverse to succeed. I feel like there’s a potentially excellent story in there, one that’s, unfortunately, obscured by the pilot episode, and a few very poor character decisions. Significantly, to me, these are not feelings I had with the last Glitch series that didn’t work for me, The Gaslight District. So I hope I’m right. I’ll watch up to three episodes to see if Gameoverse proves to simply have had a rough start, or to see if there was a very good reason it took thirteen years of production to finally be forced out the door.

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For fans of science fiction, consider checking out my novel, The Failed Technomancer. If you prefer fantasy, I’ve got you covered with Inner Demon.

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1. This is a tangent, but another recently-released animated pilot was under fire for nearly identical reasons, Planetronika. I think it’s good to allow female characters to be attractive—animators enjoy creating characters that look good, and viewers enjoy watching characters that look good. Those are good things, and anyone who tries to apply creepy, insulting labels to such things are probably just revealing too much about how they thing about beautiful, natural things.
   It’s bizarre how much fire some creatives receive for trying to make beautiful things. A lot of creepy people on the internet, I guess.
   That said, I didn’t particularly like Planetronika, and that was in part because of how specific beats portrayed Butterfly within the context of what the show is doing. In a show attempting to emulate 2000s children’s cartoons (including going for an all-ages audience, so far as I am aware), I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having an attractive character, nor with having amusing scenes where, for example, her butt gets lit on fire and someone has to put it out with a fire extinguisher. That’s just good old-fashioned physical comedy. But there are also more questionable scenes, where Butterfly’s side-boob (or other anatomy) is emphasized in a way that doesn’t seem appropriate for kids, and one where she is thrown against a wall and her oddly bulging crotch is left in center shot, hanging above her head, for a few seconds—that also seems age-inappropriate. I don’t think I would have these concerns if the pilot’s target audience were clearly messaged as, minimum, older teens. ↩︎
2. … I just got that joke… ↩︎
3. While thinking this review over I looked over some other people’s thoughts, and I agree with the idea that this pilot should have been split into two or three episodes, with Kit’s world getting destroyed being the first. Kind of like what I thought would fix The Gaslight District… Man, Glitch needs to learn to slow down. ↩︎
4. Fold also looks a lot like Pleakley (Lilo & Stitck) to me, and it isn’t helped that his voice sounds very similar. ↩︎