Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-30096930-20161106212324/@comment-147.69.24.70-20161106230440

In terms of actual martial effectiveness the fights have stopped being consistently good ever since the end of volume 2, especially when it comes to weapon based combat. The majority of fights in season 3 were pretty good but there were some fights like the ones in episode two and three that just looked terrible. What I suspect is going on is that RT's fight choreographers, while they are clearly very skilled hand to hand martial artists, are overestimating their skills when it comes to weapon based combat. The worst case of this I have seen so far this season is when Jaune was training in episode 2. During that sequence Jaune not only misused his shield horribly, but he also dropped his shoulder on his final cut which is one of the biggest no no's in all of swordplay. All it all I felt that Jaune's poor weapon usage distracted from what should have been a much better scene. Now maybe that was solely a animation error, but you'd think that the choreographers would at least look over something like that before it was finalised. As for the monster fights, they still look mostly good. There are a few odd bits here and there, like Sun and Blake's blatant disregard for the laws of physics, or Ren's weird levitation and Nora's lack of hitting the Golem in episode 1, but for the most part it's pretty good. At the end of the day I feel as though there has been a noticable drop in the quality of the fight scenes which is sad because that is one of the things that this series is most known for, and I would like to see more care put into the fights in the future.