[TheJaz]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mesnick

All these discussions about the return of the two-part format... Yeah, it's like it hasn't disappeared anywhere. In the Geats, most of the rounds take exactly two episodes. In Revice, the monsters of the week at the beginning were also exposed for two episodes, as well as in Saber, Zero-One, Zi-O...
Sakamoto as a director is cool. Basically, I like the combination of Sanji-Sakamoto. It looks like a return to basics, but not very old.

This is 100% true.

Personally this is why I've used the phrase "strict two-partners" a few times when talking about W or Drive (among other shows)

Imo there's some major distinctions between how W and Drive did things and how "modern" two-parters work.

While it's a bit hard to convery in words the best way I can describe it is by example. In W I would describe the two-part stories as being presented as the main focus of the show, with the running narrative elements being a secondary focus, that became a bigger focus at the end. As well in W a lot of the time the two-parters are cleanly divided, one two-parter doesn't always *naturaly* run into the next two parter, we just sort of get a little tease for it. This isn't always 100% true but yeah

While in geats for example the running narrative feels like the focus of the show, with the two-part monsters/events working more as a framing device to deliver the story. In geats while the monsters exist for two episodes, story lines carry cleanly between all episodes, so conceptually a story line from epispde 3 might still be firmly relevant in episode 6, stuff like that. There are still more episodic leaning story elements, but they feel again, more like framing, and not like the main focus of the show

Again these aren't 100% true all the time but imo they feel very different. The older style is more episodic with light overarching story, while the modern style is more overarching story heavy with an episodeic framing device.

I think ex-aid was the first show to try to make this style distinction, but geats definitely feels like the farthest pushed example of this method

I do think strict two-parters can be fun in their own way, (I like W, OOO, and Fourze all a lot), but overall I just hope that if Riku Sanio is back he does something more different with the show? Tbh while there a lot of things I did enjoy in Drive I always felt like it really wanted to be W a lot of the time and it kind of killed it for me... it felt too samey with a LOT of the same themes and concepts explored, and all within the same style of narrative structure. I'd like to see something extremely different from his past works, bc otherwise I think like Drive (for me anyways) it'll wind up just being a show that lives in W's shadow