Hey all! So now that the complete season is available to everyone, I figured I'd do what I did last year and review Zero in full after reassessing how I saw the show as it was airing.

This season had a lot to live up to, acting as a soft-reboot while also needing to make a good impression compared to the divisive story arc that preceded it. There've been some ups and downs, and time to process everything we've seen, so how did this ultimately fare?

This is long so it might be best to separate all this shit into categories. And I think it's only fair to start on a positive note.

The Music

I actually really like this soundtrack. It's not Trocadero or anything, but I totally understand the desire to associate Shatter Squad and their stories with a new style of music instead of sticking with the same stuff as before. We've had musical deviations in the past, so a new soundtrack helps sell Zero as having its own identity without abandoning the past at the same time.

And I think this energetic, aggressive rap music fits the more action-heavy pace of RvBZ while also emphasizing the more modern characters compared to the... frankly old-fashioned Reds and Blues. The Freelancers had Jeff Williams' rock music for the same reason; a different cast necessitates a different kind of sound to go with them.

If there's one thing I have absolutely nothing against in RvBZ, it's the soundtrack; in fact it really helped hype me up in the weeks leading up to its release. It was fresh, it was interesting, it was cool, and because music doesn't exactly need to make you think on the long-term, it doesn't leave you wanting anything else by the time you're done with it. I'd totally want to see Omega Sparx (and others) return for more Shatter Squad-centric stories in the future; this was a great addition to this new style of RvB.

The Action Sequences

By far RvBZ's greatest strength comes from its extravagant and creative fight choreography. It's the showrunner's bread and butter and likely the first reason he wanted to work on RvB and all. And while I don't think any of it will stand the same test of time as some iconic fights from say, S8 or S13, these bring their own brand of fun with some especially innovative combat gimmicks in characters like Diesel, West, pretty much every alien character, and both Phase and East individually. The rule of cool is in full effect here and when looked at in their own individual bubbles, they're a spectacle that clearly had a lot of passion put into them.

Thing is, they don't mean shit in terms of long-term effect without meaningful context to back it up.

As visually stunning as these fights are, they're based around pretty bad scriptwriting and equally confusing storytelling, so they don't carry a lot of emotional weight. Many of RvBZ's staff are mainly known for their work on Death Battle, where fights are self-contained, don't excessively focus on the characters' personalities, and don't require serious context to justify their existence; so everything leading up to and after each fight didn't need a lot of thought put into it.

But because RvBZ is a serialized project that needs to tell a complete arc with more immersive stories and characters, the fact that the writing hasn't improved past Death Battle's excuse plots and cheesy one-liners makes it hard to be consistently engaged in the fights, and subsequently for any of these fights to be as memorable as RvB's finest from past arcs.

The sheer quantity of them contrasted with the story not being engaging makes it hard to care the more we see the same kind of shit happen every episode. Because the fights start off excessively over-the-top and end with the exact same level of energy, and because nothing about the story suggests these characters truly learned anything behind their fights or changed up their tempo in any significant way; the actual progression behind each fight feels minimal. Nothing's really changed except the scenery and the odd new cliche that was artificially exposed to us.

By the time the season ends, I stopped caring. My brain's been completely turned off and what was once cool and badass becomes repetitive and dull. Almost every episode is more action than story and because the story didn't carry its own weight, the fights become less and less impressive over time.

These fights, in a word, are... bombastic. Beyond impressive at a surface level but lacking any real meaning beyond that.

That said, I wasn't offput by how the dialogue segments were animated. Different as it sometimes is, Unreal could totally work for RvB as a substitute for traditional machinima.

The Story

This story could have been phenomenal. I could write a SparkNotes version of the season's synopsis and it'd sound fantastic on paper.

Zero, the ex-leader of the UNSC spec-ops unit known as Shatter Squad, intends to reclaim his position of power by unlocking a suit of high-tech alien battle armor using an assortment of Great Keys that he and his crew have stolen from various planets across the galaxy. With Washington kidnapped and the other Reds and Blues separated, Carolina puts together a new Shatter Squad full of talented, albeit dysfunctional recruits both old and new, to keep Zero from getting the remaining keys (including Tucker's) and becoming powerful enough to single-handedly overthrow the UNSC's new Alliance of Defense.

It's not an especially deep story but for an eight-episode mini-season primarily meant to introduce a new cast and tone, it didn't need to be. At first glance this idea seems to take pretty good advantage of RvB lore without necessitating 17 years of baggage for newcomers to get the context, and the premise itself isn't one that would be alienating to series veterans like the last story arc was. This is a comfortable first step. That was always their intent and the ideas at play seem to align everything almost perfectly.

Too bad the season doesn't understand how stories are supposed to work.

Without getting into the characters yet, none of the writers seem to grasp even the most basic fundamentals of storytelling. I mentioned before that the script feels like a first-year student's rough draft that received no constructive feedback before passing it onto the animators and voice actors, and yeah, this still feels like it's the case.

The Death Battle crew is simply not suited for serialized, character-driven content, especially not from a series with such an extensive legacy that's so easy for amateurs to fuck up. If I were hypothetically offered a writers' spot in RvB, I'd be absolutely terrified because of how daunting it'd be to measure up to the peaks of the franchise's past, and to stay faithful to the franchise's soul; yet despite this, I'm confident that even I, a straight-B's animation graduate in his early 20's with no significant industry experience, could have done a better job at adapting Zero's story beats than what we got here. And I wanna say I'm normally a humble guy. This is the bare minimum; even some children's media has more thought put into their scripts, never mind a franchise that's catered to adults, or teenagers at the absolute worst.

They really should have hired a professional to execute Torrian's vision. Jason Weight did great work in salvaging S16's mess when writing for S17, he totally could have given these ideas the attention they deserved. Or some other freelancer that RT's done work with, or new blood that has good credentials. But these are rookie mistakes that no experienced writer would have ever done outside of fanfiction they wrote when they were 13 and angsty. I may sound harsh but I'm being completely sincere when I say the script and story development are just that lazy.

Almost every new revelation is revealed through stilted exposition, with visual storytelling taking a back seat when it comes to learning nearly anything about the characters' pasts. This lack of natural delivery or interesting imagery means that nothing is used to its fullest potential or told in a way that immerses the audience. The introduction to the Squad is narrated by Carolina as if she was reading a wiki article, East and West's past is a series of glorified audiobooks, Zero's motivations are never even addressed by Zero himself, and the Reds and Blues' statuses don't get any explanation or context, not even for those who are actually in the season. Because why would anyone want to learn about that when they could watch glowing Halo action figures clink against each other for the fourth time and counting?

So much about this story feels like it's a sequel to something we never got, like it expects the audience to immediately understand these new characters without first taking the time for us to really get to know them, then they're hurled into a new conflict that we're not prepared to care about yet. You can get away with this with a cast that's been established for 17 years, but not with a batch of newcomers. Every new major protagonist in RvB's past has been given some downtime for us to know what they're about before the plot is thrown at them, until Shatter Squad broke the mold and swept the cracked remains under the rug.

The dialogue is equal parts cliche and artificial, which makes the characters lack any novelty since they're only written as unoriginal tropes instead of as people. RvB prided itself in how organic the characters were, with its more tropey characters at least making up for their shallowness with hysterical jokes and not getting too involved in the plot for their own good. Here, every character is tropey, and only Raymond and Tiny try to be funny at all, leaving everyone else as cheesy non-humans who only act the way they do because the script said so, not because their decisions feel believable or because you feel the emotion behind what they're saying. Every attempt at drama is contrasted by the most corny, overplayed, stock one-liners imaginable, which put together with the rest of the bland script and lack of approachable characters, damages any potential individuality Zero could have had.

RvBZ seemingly goes out of its way to not only ignore anything from prior seasons that it could have used to flourish its ideas, but actually reverses or contradicts them with no payoff to compensate for those retcons, which in and of themselves are either poorly justified or not explained at all.

The pacing is ridiculously fast, meaning any new development doesn't get enough focus to feel earned or properly built up. Big triumphant moments are laughably ineffective on an emotional level because every single character arc is rushed to shit, often at the expense of what little personality they had to begin with. I understand the show's minimal budget but resources weren't applied to the right places to make this story work; way too much time was put into a gratuitous amount of fight scenes at the expense of RvB's bread-and-butter standing-around-and-talking schtick which is just the easiest way for audiences to get to know the cast. Alternatively, if additional dialogue-driven scenes weren't going to break the budget, we should have gotten more of them on top of the action. This imbalance didn't benefit RvBZ at all.

You don't learn anything about the characters when all they do is look cool, and at no point in RvB history, not even in the Freelancer arcs, was “cool” the number-one priority. Cool was supplementary to the characters, who we spent time learning and caring about via constant banter that helped sell their chemistry. Even then, the one episode of RvBZ that doesn't have a fight and is entirely devoted to the characters extensively talking to each other somehow still makes audiences learn nothing new about the characters or their story. It just regurgitates the same exposition as before because that's all they had to offer in the first place. Hell, it feels as though none of the characters learn anything meaningful from their losses because they never visually change up their strategies beyond the odd armor upgrade here and there. Despite the season's ridiculously short runtime, it's amazing how repetitive its structure is.

Nobody involved put enough time and effort into making these characters feel human or for the story to feel like a memorable trip, everything about RvBZ is a means to an end with the sole focus being on spectacle. Which again, doesn't do it any favors in making it memorable or worthy of a rewatch. The fights floor you the first time, sure, but once that adrenaline is gone, there's nothing else to go back to, nothing more to discuss, and nothing more to revere.

And a lot of that is because it's... just not funny. Like it has one or two good gags but for a series that even in its most serious seasons, made sure to complement its storytelling or action with character-driven comedy, this season doesn't find the time for us to learn more about the characters through jokes and banter, or heaven forbid, for a joke to influence the plot or otherwise be brought up later in a moment that would make the characters feel more real. Outside of the very last dialogue exchange, and the one interaction devoted solely to the three series veterans, none of the comedy feels authentic. There are no running gags, no callbacks, not even any room for quips, because of both the nonstop action and the need to take itself as seriously as possible, when even Joe Nicolosi's cliche-as-fuck storylines knew that they benefited from being ridiculed even if they still tried to play everything straight despite that.

So much about this derivative storytelling and ridiculous character motivations would at the very least have been helped by giving us jokes at their expense, and considering this season was literally designed to be cheesy according to Torrian himself, you'd think they'd use its cookie-cutter cliches as an outlet for humor instead of expecting everything to be taken seriously.

Nothing about this season's funniest moments feel intentionally funny because nothing about the story or the character arcs have a shred of irony in their execution. Every cliche is meant to be taken at face value, and when the storytelling doesn't go anywhere beyond first-draft cheese, it's uncomfortably cringey. It'd have been really easy for One or East's recklessness, West's stern attitude, or Zero's pretentious motivations to all be sources for comedy, because RvB generally takes the piss out of these kinds of ideas and at the bare minimum will point out how silly it all is when looked at through a certain lens at least once. For instance, Locus and Felix are serious characters but they aren't without their moments of vulnerability in terms of others making jokes at their expense, including each other. RvBZ doesn't want to be vulnerable, it doesn't want to be laughed at; and that keeps it from not only being identifiable, but also from carrying the same spirit that RvB has had in damn near all of its past incarnations.

But again, the ideas at work are good, which I think is the only thing keeping this season from being as bad as, say, S16 which had an awful story/tone and an awful premise despite still carrying some of that RvB soul. I didn't mind the new kinds of aliens they showed, I liked the new armor enhancements and weapons the characters used, I liked the backstories of characters like Axel/Zero and Phase/West... but only in theory. In execution, everything, and I do mean everything, falls flat in some capacity, because no one looked at any of these ideas and asked, “This is interesting, how far can we go with it?”.

And all without any consequences or significant changes by the end of the season beyond the bullshit loss of Tucker's sword that required nothing short of sodomizing the continuity to pull off.

The Characters

Rather than dumping one long essay on these guys, I'm gonna do my best to rank the named characters from my favorite to least favorite, and go over the pros and cons of each in list form.

1. Raymond is the only character that the series was comfortable in both ridiculing and consistently using for comedy, which makes him the most identifiable because he's allowed to be human. He's the new guy who hasn't been trained in the forbidden art of Ham and Cheese yet, so he's able to take in his surroundings the way a RvB character normally would; by being awkward, being confused about everything, stumbling into success or failure, and prioritizing the small dumb shit during moments that would otherwise be serious. The phone charger gag is probably the funniest thing in the whole season because it's synonymous with RvB's charm: the ability to juxtapose a gruesome military setting with mundane, trivial bullshit that everyone can relate to, and it even has a modern spin which is great for the audience RvBZ aimed to achieve. He's the one that's the most eager to learn about his fellow recruits, the first to want to lend a hand, and the most sincere in his actions because he doesn't have an agenda or an identity that he's desperate to maintain. The closest thing he has is wanting to fit in, and that once again fits in perfectly with the underdog vibe you need in at least one RvB character. He humble-brags about being the super-cool tech guy and yeah, he's good at his job which keeps him from being dead weight, but really, he's just kind of a goofball and he knows it. You need a guy like that in an RvB story. If the season really didn't want its main protagonist to be one of the three Shatter Squad members with buttloads of backstory baggage, then I think it would have actually been the most beneficial to give Raymond that role because his casual demeanor and his status as the new kid on the block make him the perfect audience surrogate. He's the one with the most immediate potential to offer for future stories because he's the only Shatter Squad member to not be arbitrarily held back by the wooden script of their first story. I like Raymond. He's cool because he's not trying to be cool. Be like Raymond, kids.

2. Who gives a fuck if she's not in Shatter Squad, I still adore Tiny. She already gets brownie points for her entire introduction being one giant punchline; I think almost every Shatter Squad member should have at least gotten that much; but her contagiously spunky personality combined with being the only other character who remembers how human beings are supposed to talk just makes her a joy to watch even when she's not doing anything in particular. Perhaps being a minor character meant she had less to live up to, so the writers weren't concerned about making her the best that she could be, but that aloof execution was to Tiny's benefit. She was memorable because she was allowed to exist without being hamfisted into the next source of bland drama. With a cast like this, being pleasant to watch regardless of context is an absolute blessing that I've learned more than ever not to take for granted.

3. Axel's okay considering what he had to deal with. I think he made the best first impression with the exposition dump team introductions because he, along with Raymond, are the only ones whose characters weren't defined by shit they've done in the past that we weren't allowed to see beforehand. Despite his beef with Zero, that's not what we learn about him first, which leaves room for... get this, his personality to speak for itself. Axel's the dad of the group, which lends itself to both serious moments and comedic moments that we don't often see from the regular Reds and Blues, who despite their familial bond, don't really have a parental figure outside of the stoic Freelancers. He's the first to reassure Carolina that they're here to help on principle, the one who knows the most about his squad, the one who'll watch out for them and keep them focused on their priorities... but he's also the kind to unironicically serenade a lawnmower as if it's a military-grade weapon of mass destruction, and that shit's just hilarious. And yet, Axel's not perfect. He'll encourage teamwork but when faced with difficult personal choices of his own, he's not above making honest mistakes that he believed would be best for everyone, mistakes that are hypocritical, and he's called out for them; but because his decisions have relatable context, they don't come across as bad writing. His backstory with Zero, as much as it could have used more focus and scenes outside of their falling out, provides just enough insight into both his flaws and his strengths as a character, so much so that... yeah, if there were no limits on who the main character could be, Axel should've been the season's protagonist. He had the closest ties to Zero which meant he had the most to lose by fighting him, and the most to gain by overcoming his losses to be the best man he can be, the best man he wants to be. But after his mid-season showdown with Zero, the story sidelines him and doesn't even give him much of a say in the final showdown. While I liked Axel when all we knew about him was that he was the parental figure, the fact that the season wanted to give us more to his past without committing to it really kept Axel from being my number-one favorite. You're gonna see this a lot; genuinely compelling ideas that are stained by a lack of commitment due to the season's ludicrous pacing holding it back.

4. Phase or East; whatever, they're the same so I'm just gonna go with Phase because I like that half of her more. Phase made a phenomenal first impression in Episode 1 solely due to the rule of cool; her teleportation knife allowed for some innovative fight choreography and it was refreshing to see a female antagonist that held such a strong position of authority for a change. As for East... she was okay at first, she made for a solid straight man with her backstory complementing that behavior even if it became increasingly more annoying with how much the season insisted on not showing us any of it, and then... the twist happened. They're the same person, and suddenly she basically has to do a first impression all over again because East was a traitor all along so they have to show us that side of her too, and the opposite also applies to Phase. I always figured the two were related somehow but... a “Holo-Echo”? Really? If that kind of tech had been foreshadowed earlier in the season I might have given it a pass but that was just an ass pull that isn't tied to either RvB or Halo lore. This isn't the kind of twist that fans can be rewarded for because good twists require subtle clues that benefit best with hindsight. It's why Felix's turn worked so well, in addition to sticking to their guns with it and giving us an appropriate amount of time to learn about him both before and after his bad-guy reveal. Here, we don't know enough about her story with either Zero or Shatter Squad to make her betrayal to the latter and her loyalty to the former emotionally effective. So her final showdown with West was gonna be forced no matter what. With how little we knew about their past on a direct level, there were just always gonna be missing pieces to her motivations. Phase can't bring it upon herself to kill West because... reasons. Then she rejoins Shatter Squad because... reasons. There are so many whys here that the season can't be bothered to give answers to. Phase's personal stakes weren't pronounced enough to make her decisions believable, and at that point she really ought to have just killed West to at least try and bank on whatever emotion the story wanted to have, and go rogue because she's frankly got more potential without needing to be restrained by characters she just doesn't have good chemistry with. She has decent fight choreography with Zero and I like how their teamwork contrasted Shatter Squad at first, and I think Phase has the best vocal performance out of anyone in the cast both old and new. But she doesn't gel with anyone enough for me to look forward to her either staying loyal to Zero or finding forgiveness with West and the Squad. The fact that she stole Tucker's sword without killing him was already a disrespectful blow to his character, but the fact that Phase doesn't even use it outside of opening the temple door is legitimately infuriating, and one of the prime examples of RvBZ not using the franchise's legacy to improve the final product. She looked at the sword wistfully towards the end so... does she regret it? Does she want to keep it? Did she find something interesting about Tucker? Who cares, this script sure doesn't, and that unfortunately makes Phase more detestable than if they didn't surgically transfer Tucker's biggest novelty onto her for reasons that just weren't worth it in the end, despite that having nothing to do with her story or her personality. Another example of not going far enough with her for me to be engaged in her story, despite liking her character well enough at a surface level.

5. To Zero's benefit, Carolina was definitively the best veteran character they could have used with this particular kind of story, and all things considered, I don't think they really fucked it up. But I do wonder what they ultimately wanted to do with her, because they started off with her being the distant mentor only to have her be the honorary sixth member of Shatter Squad when it felt like the season was trying to build itself to the opposite of that. She should have had more reasons to be involved in the first batch of missions if they were just going to give her a spotlight in the final two fights anyway, and the fact that they arbitrarily gave her reasons not to be involved at first that don't make any sense beyond “Let the rookies take it”, which... shouldn't matter when Wash's life is on the line, is probably the only thing I seriously have against her portrayal here. Her attitude is appropriately plucky without being outright silly and her relationship with Wash is as strong as ever, but they don't do anything groundbreaking with her either despite being in the season as much as the actual Shatter Squad. She could have carried the season, but instead she's just there.

6. Zero could have been an amazing villain if they had just done one thing with him... make him funny. Because his motivation combined with his over-the-top delivery and delusional arrogance are all absolutely hysterical in how narmy they are. The guy rants on about wanting “Ultimate Power” like he's a teenage edgelord, and to make things more comical, he doesn't even know what that power even is until he sees it for himself. We find out that he wants it because he quit the super-awesome Shatter Squad after he felt his efforts were wasted when the war ended, when there was seemingly nothing stopping him from joining the present-day Shatter Squad and fulfilling his destiny that way. He goes out of his way to give his opponents opportunities to stop him again and again because he's that full of himself. He has this Shakespearean dialect that tries so hard to be intimidating but when it's used to project his shallow, childish aspirations, it all seems satirical. And if it was satirical, like if every character sarcastically remarked how vague, petty and immature Zero always is, and he lashed out at the characters for it, that might actually make for an interesting villain, especially if we actually got to learn about what he was like when he and Axel were partners in the original Squad. He wouldn't lose his edge as a threat because of how indisputably powerful he is, so unlike O'Malley who is just as ridiculous but can't act on his threats, Zero's the equivalent of an angsty teen if his strength was just as unhinged as his emotions; silly, but still absolutely dangerous. The plot exists because Zero got salty; that's a brilliant idea for the first big bad of a new RvB cast that mirrors its first villain while upping the ante. But no, like many things in this season, they try and take him 100% seriously. And it's all for the worse. Without any irony to his performance, what could have been charming is instead uncomfortably awkward and void of any sort of creativity. This isn't helped by the fact that Zero is such a powerful force for next to no reason beyond working well with his teammates (which might be effective if we knew why Phase and Diesel were so loyal to him), and the fact that Zero's defeat has entirely to do with his lack of self-esteem and not actually being overpowered by Shatter Squad. He's every bad cliche villain rolled into one, without the safety net Temple had of at least attempting to mask himself in a comedic layer to make the cringe slightly more bearable.

7. Wait, I thought West was the parental figure, not Axel. Yeah, the last two Squad members have this problem of sharing the same tropes as other, better Shatter Squad members, with very little about them actually being unique the more you stop to think about it. West works as the gruff commanding officer but falls flat on his ass once he gets all sentimental about East; in part because his voice actor has the emotional range of sandpaper, but also because it's hard to keep up with the path of logic behind every decision he's made when we're only able to follow his story through narrated exposition. He's a badass fighter, probably the most badass Shatter Squad member of the batch; I like his plated shielding in the finale, and I do admire how he was willing to let himself get killed by East herself to atone for failing her as a father, but everything leading up to that moment? Needed a second pass, like a lot of other stuff in this script. Nothing about West comes across as utterly wasted like Zero, but the more I think about it, the more it's hard to tell what made West's story anything special when he was playing double-dad duty with Axel, who had the same motivation and more.

8. Washington is not only pointless in the grand scheme of things, but his mere presence actively ruins his wonderful character arc from the last two seasons due to the baffling decision to reverse his brain damage off-screen. The most redeemable aspect of the time travel arc was nixed for... really no reason at all, because outside of a couple of decent hits in Episode 1, Wash contributes nothing to the story outside of being a motivation for Carolina. They could have had him keep his brain damage and just slowly learning to adapt to it in battle, and that alone would have boosted Washington's spot on the list substantially, but the fact that this season tried to bring him back to peak form only to just make him a victim with no individual contributions throughout the entire story honestly makes me feel uncomfortable. Why was this decision made; in fact, why were all of these decisions made in tandem with each other? Did no one take the time to ask what could be gained and lost from not going through on this choice, not just for the story they wanted to tell, but also in terms of trying to respect whatever fans salvaged from Joe Nicolosi's contributions to the franchise? The Zero crew tossed away what was unanimously the most beloved addition to his time on the show for basically no reason, and that just makes my skin crawl because I know, thanks to hindsight, that this wouldn't be the only time where Zero's writers didn't acknowledge or respect the show's legacy or what could have been done with it instead of actively fighting against it. Personality-wise Wash isn't much better; he's not bad but he's not memorable because he's not allowed to be. He's a plot device. And unfortunately that's something he has in common with another Blue Team member too.

9. Diesel was fun in his first fight but became increasingly more dull the more appearances he made without giving us any more reasons to like him beyond being the big guy who can tank bullets really well. He's practically Zero's poster child in that he's equally style over substance. You can tell based on whatever little dialogue he has that he might have been a decent character if they committed to giving him a character. But instead he's the angry guy; no context about why he's here, what he has to gain, and why he's as ridiculously tough as he is, with any potential charm losing itself fast because no one gave a fuck when writing for this guy. You can't convince me otherwise.

10. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. They had something going with Tucker in the last season; so much time was devoted to damage control for how he was handled in the years leading up to S17, and it finally looked like he was going to return to full form the next time we saw him, but this? This is insulting, because there's no explanation for the decisions the writers made for him besides either not giving a fuck about what came before Zero, or deliberately trolling those who watched what came before Zero for who knows what reason. Nothing about Tucker's execution feels like it was trying to respect his character. No context is given for Tucker's new position in the military, he acts just as arrogant and immature as he was in his worst seasons, he's not a capable fighter, they don't even get his “Bow Chicka Bow Wow” right. This is a caricature of Tucker designed solely to act as a plot device rather than because the staff believed there was something Tucker could contribute that only he could do for this story. And no, his sword doesn't count, because that would require either killing him or obnoxiously retconning one of the most important story elements of the franchise. Guess which one they go for? RvBZ strips Tucker of a huge part of his identity without having the balls to kill him or to even have him go out in a blaze of glory regardless of his survival; instead they inexplicably pass on his sword to Phase with no rational explanation that doesn't leave a stain on past stories in the process, all while leaving him with nothing, not even a badass final stand against the bad guys to show how he's matured since his poor decisions during the time travel arc. If they really wanted to get someone's energy sword as a plot device, they should have just gone with Locus; he's more expendable, fits better with Zero's serious tone and action-packed presentation, and already had foreshadowing of something bad happening to him due to his distress signal from S16 still being unexplained. It'd have been a hilarious yet tragic twist if Carolina thought Zero was going after Tucker, only for Zero to hunt down Locus instead and outnumber him three-to-one while Shatter Squad was distracted. But that would require wanting to use anything RvB's past seasons had in a clever way, and this season proved it didn't want to do that. Tucker's final scene where it was just him and the Freelancers was nice, probably one of the most authentic scenes of the season, but it doesn't excuse what they did to get to that point. I don't know how they can restore Tucker to his best self after this, but if this season has taught me anything, it's that you don't have to care about your predecessors to get what you want out of the story, so Zero needs to be prepared for everything it's done to not matter in an instant because its successors don't care enough about it. Fair's fair after all.

11. One is one of the most superfluous main protagonists I've ever seen in fiction. Not only does One carry practically no personal stakes in the season, not only are her legitimate contributions to the story practically nonexistent, and not only is her entire character arc is just a lesser version of an existing character in East... but her entire personality isn't even consistent with that character arc. One was described as being the loose cannon who could be a formidable leader if she could only work on a team and stop being arrogant/entitled. It's another cliche in a season full of them, but good execution can make me look past that. Unfortunately, the season often forgets that One is supposed to be selfish and reckless as much of her dialogue is devoted to looking out for her squad and calling people out for not acting as a team, and in return others call her out for acting like too much of a girl scout. Nothing about One's attitude (i.e. playful teasing) proves to be detrimental to Shatter Squad's progress, which not only makes her character arc ineffective as her various speeches don't reflect on her own experiences throughout the story, but further cements how redundant of an addition One is to the cast if she's not going to provide anything substantial to the characters around her or to herself. Sure she's the leader, but anyone can be that, as evidenced by Axel, Carolina, and West all taking charge when no one else was capable. This is again even more noticeable when you realize that East has much of the same personality as One, only they actually follow through on her actions by being more rude to her teammates and actually giving her a story that complements her indecisiveness towards working in a team. One gets none of that. She has no story, no history with Zero save for sharing the same rank, no motivation besides win fight, and no payoff to her decisions because Zero defeated himself and One's influence didn't radically change the way Shatter Squad worked together, seeing how their fighting style hadn't really evolved, and squad members still branched off and did their own thing regardless of the “teamwork” moral. She sorta has something with East, but their chemistry is so shallow that the payoff doesn't feel natural. And I'm sorry to Fiona Nova, because I know she's had it rough since starting at RT and I know how enthusiastic she was about headlining a new instalment of the company's longest-running franchise, but she really needs work as a voice actress. I don't think it's entirely her fault; the script was against her from the beginning; but every attempt at giving a serious monologue feels like she's conveying every possible emotion at once instead of really immersing herself into the context of the scene, and her sass is a little too tacky and overacted for me to call it charming in the same way I would the Reds and Blues' brand of sarcasm more identifiable than obnoxious. One should not have been the main protagonist of this season, and I'd even wager that she shouldn't have been in the season at all unless the writers were prepared to give her more relevance. Other characters needed focus and depth too, and it feels wasteful to devote so much time to a character that just doesn't bring anything unique to the table.

TL;DR, RvB: Zero is a visually stunning experience that loses its luster once paired with the context between its action sequences. Rather than adding onto the existing adrenaline, the story lessens the impact of the fights due to its shallow characters, cringey scriptwriting, frantic pacing, inability to commit to its ideas in stimulating ways, lack of awareness or irony in its absurdities, and general lack of respect for its source material, both in using past stories to its advantage, and in maintaining the spirit of why RvB was appealing to begin with, namely in Zero's significant lack of relatable banter and witty comedy.

The season has good concepts unlike the last major story arc, but the execution is lazy and uninspired, resulting in missed potential that doesn't leave a good first impression of its new cast and tone. Had different scriptwriters been tasked with bringing the showrunner's visions to life, in addition to potentially reevaluating how the show's budget and resources were allocated, this could have been a fantastic soft-reboot. As is, it's all style over substance, which makes it unmemorable compared to its more creative and iconic predecessors.