Based on a still highly-regarded apocalyptic comedy, Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer was one of the most highly anticipated anime for this current season. With how simplistic yet well done the source material was, it should have been easy to turn the series into a great anime. Unfortunately, many fans are utterly underwhelmed by what they've seen so far, making the series seem to be a low-effort show with even lower quality.
Plagued by bad animation, odd pacing and an overall cheap feeling, Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer has already turned off most of the viewers who were desperately looking forward to it. This also makes elements such as the plot and character feel incredibly generic, diluting what made the original manga so well-received. Here's why Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer is such a hellishly bad anime so far.
Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer Has Cheap, Stilted Animation
Something that fans were worried about from initial video and images for Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer was the animation, and those fears were justified given the first episode. The series utilizes still images as much as possible, making the show feel more like a motion comic than a true anime at times. This particularly cheap and not especially dynamic form of animation was also seen in Netflix's adaptation of The Way of the Househusband, which was likewise heavily criticized. Given how static and lifeless basic conversational scenes are, anything beyond that looks especially atrocious.
This can be seen in the action sequences in particular, which take this still imagery to an even more boring extreme. While these static images are likely meant to evoke comedy, the fact that they're the only form of action in the series makes them fairly embarrassing-looking. Barely anything moves, even when it needs to in order to convey dynamism or tension, completely removing the stakes from a series that's literally about the end of the world.
Given that the series was produced by the studio Naz, whose mostly unremarkable history involves minor work for forgotten shows like Idolish7, the amateur-hour production all makes sense. A more illustrious studio like Madhouse or MAPPA could've solved these particular problems, but perhaps not all of them. After all, the action isn't the only thing that fails to be exciting, with poorly aged elements made worse by how uninteresting the show is to viewers -- and how uninterested it seems to be in its own content.
Biscuit Hammer Makes Poor Writing Worse With Terrible Pacing
When the manga series debuted in the mid-2000s, Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer may have seemed more unique in combining its premise with random, sometimes slapstick humor. Unfortunately for the show, such elements are no longer very original or even funny, and the show comes off as a cheap imitation of much better anime or even equally generic ones from years past. The boredom only grows with the series' deadpan protagonist Yuuhi, who's about as interesting as a wet napkin. It's bad enough that he's uninteresting, but so much of the first episode is wasted in his simply rejecting his calling. These scenes are full of poor attempts at comedy, such as his casually throwing the talking lizard, and the whole affair feels too bored with itself to do anything but spin its wheels.
This stalling is a problem with all the characters, as the show's first episode is more focused on exposition than anything else. The problem is that there's no reason to care about any of this at the beginning of the series, especially when the characters are so bland and undefined. All in all, the series feels even older than the source material, seeming more at home among generic comedy anime from the 1990s. Everything is so uninspired that it makes the manga's story retroactively worse, as it too had a slow start. At the same time, its beginnings weren't nearly as rough as this, giving few but the most dedicated any reason to keep watching. For those who want to, however, Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer can be streamed through both Crunchyroll and Hulu.