What anime are you watching right now? Summer 2016 to now

[Shamsiel-kun]

It is one of several OVA's that have a bit of a reputation despite having a very cookie cutter plot full of stereotypes. That has something to do with when it was made, where the plot devices used were fairly new. Madox also had some very nice and very detailed garage kits, in a time where garage kits were still rare and often not particularly good.

[Joy Evangelion]

That Mona was a weird one. What was she even supposed to be? The funny one?

If memory serves, I believe she was the office booze hound. Or was she just drinking water out of that vodka bottle, I don't remember the joke, hehe. Anyways, shame it wasnt too much your thing, but I guess thats how it goes; I guess I have an endless appetite for cliche anime hijinks (I'm a simple American man). I really liked the design of that girl main character with her green hair and one sharp tooth.
My Dress Up Darling was an enjoyable watch. I didn't really care about any of the characters, but I thought the guy was realistic enough and the way his feelings developed for the girl seemed natural, even if she was sort of a perfect dream girl type. Once the show was getting close to the end it was also fun to see how CloverWorks were able to save some yen with still shots and close ups and all that stuff, hehe. When you're an evageek you can spot that stuff from a mile away.

This season most of the shows I'm watching are continuations, Kaguya, Ascendance of a Bookworm, Love Live 3, and Amaim. Also watching SpyxFamily because I'm a CloverWorks devotee(Loved that Wonder Egg Priority!) Its shaping up to be a really good season... but I think that's what I say every season.

[Blockio]

So a while back I picked up D4DJ after seeing a vtuber play the game for it and finding that fairly entertaining; fun little music show, I liked the first episode a fair bit, but fell off of it and didn't watch more. Until I picked it back up two days ago and had to stop myself from binging the whole damn thing so as not to end up going to sleep at 10 in the morning. I don't know how or why, but somehow that silly little show ended up being unreasonably fun to watch.
First purely music show I watched, and I have a distinct feeling that it will remain the best of its kind for quite a while.

[chazthesilencer]

Netflix cancelled, week off work, fancied watching the Demon Slayer movie, so I finally decided to cash-in on the Crunchyroll free trial they’ve been dangling in front of me for years.


^You can always count on Crunchy for a laugh.

Demon Slayer: Mugen Train
One thing I appreciated was that the movie jumped straight into continuing where the TV series left off, no wasteful preamble or recapping. There’s nothing worse than an animay film that spends 30 minutes replaying rubbish you’ve already seen. Goblin Slayer, for example.

There’s only so much you can do with sword-fighters in a narrow environment like a train carriage, so I was curious to see how exactly they would fill almost 2 hours of run time in such a cramped setting. The answer: retell the classic Superman story-

Its been out a while, but I'll be polite and use a  SPOILER: Show

“For the Man Who Has Everything”.

The protagonists are put into a pleasant dreamstate they don’t want to wake from; it’s a tried and tested premise that works, but the approach is complicated by the inclusion of outsiders who invade their dreams and attempt to destroy their spiritual cores from within... why they couldn’t simply poke the defenceless dreamers with their ice picks is anyone’s guess.

This almost worked for the movie, but the rules for dream invasions and escape are not properly explained; it’s all dream logic anyway, right? We see main boy Tanjiro escape from his delusion, but none of the other three lead characters. That’s 75% of that story glossed over without a second thought…

The final 20 minutes is reserved for a flashy duel with a new baddie, who gets plopped-in out of nowhere. Nice animation, but the emotion is lacking.

It was alright.

Demon Slayer (2nd Season)
More of the same stuff provided by the first season, i.e. nice animation and familiar characters with new baddies for them to face. All one can really ask for.
It was satisfying to see the baddie finally defeated after such a monumental struggle, but I did feel some shades of Revenge of the Sith by the end.



The first season is enjoyable. Overrated? Maybe. But it has its fair share of well executed and memorable moments that keep it entertaining enough to revisit.
After watching the movie and second season however I found myself pondering: “What were the standout moments of these instalments?”

What am I going to look forward to rewatching when I revisit them down the line?

Hmm… well-

SPOILER: Show

Beast-mode Nezuko

was a memorable moment, but nothing quite up to the level of the climax of episode 19. Then again- that is a high bar to match.

[Blockio]

I watched Season 1 of Magia Record over the past couple of days; show's an utter mess. I do not understand a word of what's going on, and not in the good way. I'm gonna give the rest a shot anyway, maybe this will make more sense in retrospect, but for the time, this has way too many characters and a plot that is best described as a poorly thought out mystery box in and of itself, confusing at best, openly contradicting itself at worst.

[EvaChero]

Found "Gene Shaft" on Tubi and have been watching through episode 4, pretty interesting. Has a giant mecha component that reminds me of a cross between an EVA and something HR Giger would have dreamed up. Interesting premise with all the DNA determinism in order to modify humanity and its behavior for survival of the species......Love the buggy software aspect, all it needs is a Windows 3.1 logo......

[UrsusArctos]

Hmm...looks like I do need to watch Madox sometime, if only for the fact that I love seeing animated depictions of military hardware!

I watched Season 1 of Magia Record over the past couple of days; show's an utter mess. I do not understand a word of what's going on, and not in the good way.

I couldn't last five minutes of the first episode, and I would recommend against putting yourself through watching the whole bloated mess. IMHO, none of the entries in the PMMM franchise have understood anything of what made the original so great and are limited to reproducing all the style and none of the substance.

[Blockio]

IT does seem very pointless so far, yeah. It'S not quite bad enough to be a complete waste of time, but I'd be lying if I called it good

[Shamsiel-kun]

Hmm...looks like I do need to watch Madox sometime, if only for the fact that I love seeing animated depictions of military hardware!

It is available on a popular free video site. Apart from the mechas, it has a very cookie-cutter plot (it's no Patlabor).

[Blockio]

Madox does about as much you can do with a plot in the 40 or so minutes it has for runtime. It's nothing groundbreaking, but well executed

[Blockio]

I finished Magia Record and yeah, it's still bad. Definitely had its moments, but it suffers from the old sidestory problem of way the fuck too many characters and subsequent lack of focus. Blue spear girl should have been the protagonist because almost all of the actually relevant plotlines were about her anyways, and the show would have been much better.

[Blockio]

Watched Diebuster; most of what I can say is that it continues in Gunbuster's footsteps of five boring episodes to one good final episode. Nowhere near as good as Gunbuster and living squarely in its shadow, but an enjoyable enough watch regardless

[UrsusArctos]

Lol, I wouldn't categorize Gunbuster as "five boring episodes and one good final episode"! Gunbuster's first episode wasn't great but it was way better after that, and seeing the Gunbuster standing on top of the Excelion in its now-legendary pose with the Excelion March in the background never gets boring for me!

[Mr. Tines]

Even without Funiroll paywalling everything, this would be a dead season, so I've been hitting the backlog.

New Game!! was more of exactly the same (but I hope that code review and check-in integration and testing are handled better than in the anime, in the same way one hopes the code from Senko-san is not representative of real life).

And when watched in binge mode, rather than weekly-as-aired, Space Brothers flows much better than it did at the time -- the introductory recaps can be ignored, along with the 3-episode mid-run total to-date recap. Watching 10 years on, there is also the amusement at the near future that has NASA getting to the moon again, with not a hint of SpaceX-style private space activity - at least not this side of the "now read the manga" last episode.

[chazthesilencer]

The stand-out highlight of the season so far is undoubtedly Spy x Family.
James Bond, the Bride (Kill Bill) and a telepathic tyke play family to prevent the outbreak of war; hijinks ensue.
A nice balance of comedy and an occasional dash of action, tied together by the emotional core of the show- Anya, the mind-reading 6 year old.
Her role has managed to be endearing without being overbearing after six episodes, so far.



I find myself rewatching episodes dubbed just to get a little bit more of it.

I also look forward to new eps of Aharen-san wa Hakarenai each week.
A tiny, stone-faced girl with no concept of personal space befriends a tall, stone-faced boy; hijinks ensue.
One might describe this as Komi-San Can’t Communicate, except funny.
The comedy works for me because it is delivered as straight-faced as the characters are drawn.
For example- when the leads are having trouble communicating in the first episode, the idea of bone vibration is suggested as a solution, so what does Aharen do? Head-butts the boy, naturally.

For some odd reason, Aharen’s hair shadow is tinted blue behind her neck, similar to another girl this season:

I can buy Aharen’s hair being slightly blue, but shouldn’t Shikimori’s be a darker shade of pink?

Shikimori's Not Just a Cutie – High-school, romcom fluff about an unlucky lad and his seemingly perfect girlfriend.
Nothing much to type about, but the unusual highlight of the show is its end credit sequence. Would make a neat game.
Shikimori may be sporting the Pink-hair blue-eyes combo I love, but the most attractive character on the show by miles is clearly the mother:



A Couple of Cuckoos – This is providing me with my weekly dose of salty, fattening goodness one can only get from a harem/love triangle comedy.
Fairly vanilla stuff so far, although sadly not above the walk-in-on-girl-bathing trope. One has to accept it just comes with the territory at this point.

Continuations:

Ascendance of a Book worm S3 – More of the same, familiar content from the first two seasons. Seeing the ripple effect of Main’s innovations coming back to haunt her is an interesting, unexplored/ignored story point for most Isekai titles.

Kaguya-Sama: Love is War S3 – Is up and down. I didn’t care for the rapping in ep5, but I did enjoy the return to the mind-games element of the ep3 coin game, something which felt sorely lacking in the second season.

The Rising of the Shield Hero S2 – Oh dear. If the crunchy comments are anything to be believed- the six episodes that have aired so far are supposedly part of an arc the writer hated, and I can believe this wholeheartedly.
Episode 6 was a special kind of bad. The two new characters in the hero’s party (Rishia and Ost) are each given a big moment that was either supposed to be triumphant or emotional, but both fell completely flat.
I like my green-heads, but Rishia’s overpowering the baddy’s magic after 6 episodes of self-doubt didn’t feel like a moment earned. Having her wear a chicken suit for a few episodes only to have her break out of it upon finding her confidence was a hilariously on-the-nose visual metaphor.

SPOILER: Show

If everybody cries when Ost dies, it’ll make the viewers sad too, right?

Nice try. That worked about as well as a blind watchman.

[The Killer of Heroes]

Yeah I've been really surprised at how pleasant Spy x Family is. So far its just done its thing really quite well.

Has anyone been watching Summertime Render? I've liked it so far but I really wish it was a bit slower of a burn.

[Alaska Slim]

ULTRAMAN S1 & S2



Get used to the enemy / friendly losing the left arm. That happens a lot.

The Good:

The fight choreography is great; the Ultraman-as-Ironman aesthetic I think works.

I know what a Cesium Beam is now.

Agent Adad stealing the show by toying with everybody.

The Bad:
Best joke in the series is what happens to Shinjiro's mother

SPOILER: Show

She's not a character. She shows up for ONE scene, and is never heard from, named, or mentioned again.
Like if Shin had simply given birth to Shinjiro through asexual reproduction.

S2 is only 6 episodes long. It works mostly as set up for S3.

The Ugly

The character models are very static; in instances where they should have taken damage, they don't, and many times the expressions on the characters faces are hitting the uncanny valley like a hero to a brick wall.

Lots of gratuitous death and injury.


Verdict: Ultraman-as-XCOM almost works. I probably enjoyed it most just in making that comparison.

It's probably fun for true Ultraman fans to watch as that's what it's referencing pretty hard, but that's just a guess.

[Alaska Slim]

Even without Funiroll paywalling everything, this would be a dead season, so I've been hitting the backlog.

Have you tried Requiem for the Rose King yet?

Like Kurosawa, I feel like British history is not truly experienced until you see it in its original moonspeak.

[Shamsiel-kun]

Shin Sakura Taisen The Animation (Funimation Bluray)
I long put off buying this because I was afraid it would not be up to par with the original and because it was kinda expensive around here (70 Euro for 12 episodes... ). I was quite pleasantly surprised, although the plot could have been a bit better, which I mostly blame of the villains being somewhat one-dimensional (Sakura Taisen's Aoi Satan has quite a bit more depth to him...). In general the episodes were nice to look at, with good quality animation and decent plots (and quite funny moments, e.g. when the other girls basically call Kamiyama, the male protagonist, all kind of very disrespectful things culminating in

SPOILER: Show

"gigolo"

, much to Sakura's dismay ).

Expelled from Paradise
A rather nice if somewhat simplistic animated action flick. Also, the fanservice and very revealing costumes of the female main character were a bit jarring - I didn't know 16-year olds could be that stacked . Curiously, the rest of the movie is pretty much free from the other kind of contents that you would expect to go with that kind of fanservice (no leering, male characters going for a feel, sexist comments, etc.).

[Alaska Slim]

Kaguya-sama: Love is War Season 3 ep.11



An homage to the greatest 2D romance ever -- where the husbando is made real at the end.

SPOILER: Show

a-ha