RWBY (pronounced "Ruby") is an American CGI-animated anime-style web series and media franchise created by the late Monty Oum for Rooster Teeth.
Plot
The story takes place in the world of Remnant, which is filled with mysterious and malevolent creatures known as the "Creatures of Grimm". Prior to the events of the series, mankind waged a battle of survival against the Grimm before discovering the power of a mysterious element called Dust which allowed them to fight back against the monsters. In the present day, Dust is used to augment people's abilities and powers. Those who train to battle the Grimm are known as Huntsmen or Huntresses. The series focuses on four girls, each with her own unique weapon and powers. Together, they form team RWBY (pronounced Ruby, which is also the name of the main protagonist, Ruby Rose) at Beacon Academy in the kingdom of Vale, where they are trained to become Huntresses alongside team JNPR (pronounced Juniper), team SSSN (pronounced sun), team CRDL (pronounced cardinal), team CFVY (coffee), and various other student teams.
Why It Rocks
- Pretty cool animation that almost looks exactly like a CGI-style type of anime art.
- Awesome action.
- Every girl in the RWBY team is based on a certain fairy-tale character, which is a very unique concept. Ruby is Little Red Riding Hood, Weiss Schnee is Snow White (even her name is Snow White in backwards German), Blake is based on Belle from Beauty and The Beast and Yang is based on Goldilocks.
- The weapons are original and fun to watch in action, like Ruby's scythe/sniper rifle.
- The character development is beautiful, most notably Weiss Schnee and how a simple case of loneliness affects her.
- Funny, relatable and hilarious characters, such as Team RWBY themselves, Nora, Penny and Jaune Arc.
- Pretty cool character designs, such as Yang, Ren, Cinder Fall, etc.
- Decent storylines.
- Blake's background is considerably inspirational, and allowed episodes to cover serious issues, especially general discrimination in a racial group (in this case, the faunus, who are humans with certain animal features such as ears, tails, or retractible claws).
- Decent jokes, such as the comedic chemistry between Ruby and Yang.
- The voice acting fits the characters nicely.
- The background design is great.
- The illustrations on the volume covers are awesome.
- Incredible, inspiring soundtrack.
- Mostly in the later volumes, the emotional scenes are tear-inducing.
- The writing is great, especially after Volume 1.
- The RWBY Chibi spin-off. That is all.
Bad Qualities
- The animation in Volume 1 wasn't great, with lots of technical errors that looked too much like video game glitches, but thanks to the atmosphere of the episodes in general, this can be easily overlooked.
- The writing in Volume 1 could have been better. It had that standard anime feeling with barely anything special. The later volumes were much more emotionally powerful.
- Some Bad Voice Acting
- Ruby and Yang were not developed that much. Ruby did get more mature, but both Ruby and Yang mostly remain a mystery.
- Why is almost every weapon part-gun? Tactically, it makes sense to be able to switch between a melee and ranged weapon on-the-fly, but... why?
- The action scenes in Volumes 4 and 5 were rather clunky, and didn't have the flow of the first three volumes. This can be blamed on Monty Oum's death, as he was the lead animator, and when he died, a new animation team was brought in which didn't give the animators a good direction, thus making the fights on those episodes subpar (with exceptions like Qrow vs. Tyrian in Volume 4) with problems such as a bad balance between talking and fighting (on most of these fights, the banter breaks the pace of the fight).
Trivia
- RWBY was made by the same makers of Red vs. Blue, another Rooster Teeth fan favorite.