Kabaneri 2, Kuromukuro 2, and Netoge no Yome 2: Holy crap, the theme this week seems to be awesome roller coaster rides! All three episodes had me going "whee!!!" from start to finish, and I mean that in a good way. And Mumei (from Kabaneri) is quickly becoming one of my all time favorite heroines. I really hope this show maintains its quality through 'til the end.

Ace Attorney (aka Phoenix Wright) ep 1 & 2

It's... terrible. A boring terrible. I've never played the games, but it seems like half the show is direct adaptation of the court room mechanics, and the other half is obligatory build up to those scenes.

The stories and jokes are probably serviceable in the games, where the interactivity helps to cover for the story weaknesses and the wooden dialogue. But here, as a viewing experience, it has me thinking of those filler episodes of Detective Conan where they're barely trying.

In short, the show feels like a cash-in. Fans might get something from it, but I sadly am not.

Tarnsman wrote:1) Free!/Free! Eternal Summer; It managed to be even gayer than I anticipated which is saying something

2) Sailor Moon; Our "heroine" is a selfish, obnoxious, stupid, lazy, and generally worthless human being who has to be badgered by her friends/cat into doing her job.
the "classic" dub OP is basically completely wrong (she fights evil in the day plenty, her daytime love life consists of a guy making fun of her, she constantly runs from real fights, is frequently not there to defend, she is absolutely not someone on whom you can depend, and she turns her back on friends like half the time)

3) Other highlights include, the most qualified character being given no leadership responsibility and being given the basically worthless power of fog

1) Free! Is totally not gay. Eternal Summer however is totally not- not gay.

2) Ha. Yep, that’s the first season Usagi for you right there. One of my favourite little moments in the show occurs early in Stars, wherein Luna and Usagi reflect on their time together and how hopeless Usagi used to be in the beginning.

3) Woot! Yet another Mercury fan.

Alaska Slim wrote:Phoenix Wright

For a show that will involve characters doing little more besides standing, talking and occasionally striking a pose- I hoped the animation would have been a little better than god awful.
That running cycle in the OP. Lordy. That's some janky animation right there. I'll need to GIF that at some point...
 

For those following Kabaneri, there's a fixed sub out now. It still uses the raw with Chinese hardsubs but the timing of the English subs is fixed and they're a lot more readable. It's the [DocDoc] sub; you can find it in all the usual places.

Watched Angel Beats for the first time last week. Such a wonderful series. Basically everything about it was right up my alley;nice concept, fun characters, music(great OP and ED), baseball, silly humor, deep emo tions, enemies becoming friends, good looking fight scenes, etc. One of those animes (like Eva) that held onto me from start to finish and didn't get my mind wandering. Definitely wish it was a 26 episode series, but what are ya gonna do? My only problem with the series was that dude TK. Didn't like his dancing or English speaking, although the fact that he couldn't translate was funny.

I didn't really get too many Haibane Renmei vibes from the series though, as I've seen the two of them mentioned together(I see Sound of the Sky as a sister series to HR).

Speaking of series that are similar to others I'm rewatching Rahxephon for the first time since it was the first series I watched after my year long emergence into Eva back in 2013. I think I read on here that someone was comparing it to NGE, so I had these super high expectations for it that weren't very fair and I walked away from the series disappointed. But now that I'm watching it without comparing every little thing to Eva it's actually a pretty cool series. The animation style is really sharp(to me at least) and I like that a lot of these characters have these goofy hairstyles and fashion choices. Knowing how it ends sort of gives the show a really romantic feel that I can definitely dig. However, from the beginning to now I will say, I loathe the design of the Raxhephon and its enemies.

I was also very happy with the second episodes of my three spring annimays;
Girls und Boot Haifuri High School Fleet -- Looking forward to learning whats up with the German student, and why that woman tried to sink the MC's boat.
Kiznaiver -- Dug the mystery show esque style of episode 2 and got a good amount of laughs out of those things with the big heads. Was that giant inflatable pad at the end some sort of reference to Erased?! ......
Flying Witch -- Possibly. Possibly THE chillest anime of all time. And the show has a wonderful logo. And the clapping in the OP.

Finished Erased, and, yeah, it did have a weak ending. I was disappointed, but overall the show was enjoyable.

Now, I'm watching Kabaneri in the Iron Fortress which is cool, but it's too early to know if it will be consistently good.

I watched a few episodes of The Seven Deadly Sins on Netflix with my daughter. She's way too young to know what's going on, but she got mad when I turned it off. Probably, she liked all the bright colors.

Basically didn't watched any anime of the past season, but was looking forward to my hero academia (and actually watching currently), so yeah basically im currently watching my hero academia right now c:

BrikHaus wrote:
Now, I'm watching Kabaneri in the Iron Fortress which is cool, but it's too early to know if it will be consistently good.

You can probably tell; it's being made by much of the same people who adapted Attack on Titan; same director, same music composer, same studio.

The part I'm digging is that this is a unique story WIT studio came up with. It's hitting many of the same beats as AoT; Steampunk, humanity under siege; protag is *linked* to the threat, but they're free to do more with it than simply what "Hajime Isayama" wrote... and additionally, may have run into the ground...

Joy Evangelion wrote:annimays

I think I found a new friend.

BrikHaus wrote:Probably, she liked all the bright colors.

Cute. How many more years before she gets to watch the one with the purple robot?

Been rewatching a few things lately. Squid Girl is still good for a harmless laugh.
Poor season two, it’s never getting a dubbed release.

Rewatched Yosuga no Sora. Yeah, that visual novel adaptation with a lot of non-comical nudity and the pull-no-punches incest in it.
This is a… funny show. It has two end credits sequences. What’s up with that?
It still has the dubious honour of having the funniest, most negative review by THEM to date.
I wouldn’t call it nearly anything as bad, in fact- this is actually one of the better shows based on a VN I’ve seen, certainly one of the most unique.

If you fancy challenging yourself with something you may find shocking, watch episodes one, seven, then ten to twelve. The Sora arc.

Hai-Furi 1-3

I think I found my GuP sequel

I finished Gangsta last night, after taking a long break from anime besides One Piece... Which even then I haven't watched in a while.

I wonder how many notable series I missed. But I need to catch up on still more of the older stuff like Death Note.

I just now started watching Hunter x Hunter on Toonami. I held off on it for a long time because I thought it looked like a rather "kiddy" show compared to the sort of anime I prefer. . . and now having seen the first episode, I can state that this is indeed the case.

Well, Diamond is not Crash has not failed the 3 episode rule, and will continue to be a Saturday morning cartoon for the moment (with Symphogear GX continuing as a B-feature, in more senses than one, while it lasts). Of the other new season shows, Flying Witch is being comfy, Lululco is carrying on as it started, Bakuon didn't hold my attention, and HaiFuri is on my to-do list.

In the background, I've watched a couple more episodes of Nadia, but at past the half-way mark, I'm still not feeling it -- the characters are irritating at best, fading into just ciphers at worst. I shall have to dig out one of the "how to fast forwards past the filler arcs" posts from the archives if I'm ever going to finish it -- even if the quality had been maintained, I'd still be eyeing the fast forwards button by now, though. Still, I'm not feeling as betrayed by it as in other similar cases, such as Madoka.

Flying Witch is one of my favorite things that's come out in the last few years, and it's only three episodes in. It's so nice and fun, but not sappy at all, and the lack of anything serious happening is so relaxing. The quail in ep. 3 may go down as the best enemy of the season.

chazthesilencer wrote:I think I found a new friend.

Fireball wrote:Hai-Furi 1-3

For some reason(I guess I have no imagination) I was expecting it to be a GuP clone, like scene for scene. But I like where it's going which I imagine is the MC boat gets vindicated and then some hunt goes on for the evil teacher's boat, the German boat, etc. I think the main girls are fun characters(esp. the nervous girl, the spacey girl and the girl with the cat suit), which wasn't something I could say about GuP. The bit in ep. 3 about the German girl knowing about submarines was pretty fun too.

Mr. Tines wrote:In the background, I've watched a couple more episodes of Nadia,

To skip the substandard and downright bad stuff, just go straight from ep22 to ep35. There are a couple of plot-relevant scenes which doing that cuts out, and you can find those here, in an English version of the form that Anno cut them in The Nautilus Story.

Where did you get to with Ideon? If you finished, I missed your report... I'm contemplating whether to watch the series (I've seen the films already).

Boku no Hero Academia ep 4

Best thing about this episode was the French kid; in contrast to the MC who breaks limbs activating his power, this kid looks like he's getting off on his.

I was hearing from a "summit" of youtube Anime reviewers that many expect this show to simply come down from the high the first 2 episodes set, but it seems to me that the themes and feelz are still going pretty strong. They're milking moments here and there, no doubt, but I prefer that to them being handled carelessly.

Library Wars

The only anime ever recommended to me by a family member (my uncle, who is by chance, a librarian).

I appreciate any show that can manage to portray a female MC as something other than insatiably "cute" (No offense, Kuromukuro), and though the premise is more than a tad strange, the show I feel manages to consistently capture genuine human thought processes & reactions, rather than just "anime"'ing everything.

In terms of format, I'm getting some callbacks to Planetes and Gunparade March; where normal work shenanigans are placed in a somewhat extreme setting, and the lionshare of the drama that isn't plot driven, stems from the main "couple". No complaints about that, just noting the nature.

There is a very awkward detail that comes to light in the 3rd episode though:

"The Public acknowledges that we have more combat experience than the Police, or the JSDF."


This was supposed to be a remark of the public's trust in the Library Force's professionalism, but if you think about it, this statement has a very terrible implication.

Their "combat experience" comes from fighting their fellow Japanese, who are acting within a Japanese Government agency, the same as them.
If they have more combat experience, that means the Japanese Government is both paying for their own agencies to fight one another, and doing so in excess to how many criminal and foreign firefights occur on their own; literally spending a war bigger than their other problems into existence.

The Japanese taxpayer is covering both for the vans used by the Media Betterment Committee that the Library Force's destroys, and for the the "larger" rifles the Library Force then requests so that they can destroy the vans better. Talk about make-work.

pwhodges wrote:Where did you get to with Ideon? If you finished, I missed your report... I'm contemplating whether to watch the series (I've seen the films already).

We got to about episode 30 in the re-watch (they were on the Moon, grabbing computer time), before setting it aside for Nadia as something for that late evening slot when we both feel like watching something together as we have a cup of tea in bed before settling down (as opposed to the literal Saturday morning cartoon slot when I watch by myself while my wife's carers are at work).

We were watching Ideon in the evening slot following a dearth of new titles that appealed to the both of us, and so when casting around for something to fill that slot, I was asked for something with robots in, so that was an obvious choice from the back-catalog (as the only mecha show that was neither Evangelion nor RahXephon, nor a leap into the dark amongst the generally badly received run of recent robot titles) and a re-watch for the both of us.

Ideon was my first foray into fansubs, nearly a decade ago, when I'd only a comparative few -- mostly girls&guns -- titles under my belt, and the first time around it felt like a robot of the week treadmill. Coming back to it last year, with more depth of exposure to the medium, including having seen the original Gundam and Zeta (so having more calibration for an "all Tomino, all the time" title), I found myself liking it more, and finding it less way less repetitive than I'd remembered, as well as noticing things (like the sound design) that had gone straight past me on first viewing.

Of course, setting it aside at the 3/4 mark means we were still travelling hopefully, ahead of the arrival at an ending where the show was cancelled under Tomino's feet, and something representing a conclusion had to get jammed into the last half of an episode.

Mr. Tines wrote:We were watching Ideon in the evening slot following a dearth of new titles that appealed to the both of us, and so when casting around for something to fill that slot, I was asked for something with robots in, so that was an obvious choice from the back-catalog (as the only mecha show that was neither Evangelion nor RahXephon, nor a leap into the dark amongst the generally badly received run of recent robot titles) and a re-watch for the both of us.

What, no Fang of the Sun Dougram? What's so bad about watching the protag bot lose it's darn shield for the 16th time in a row?

In all honesty, I did get further through that show than I did Ideon. Perhaps as while Dougram spoils its own ending right at the start; I at least wanted to know how things got there (but it was probably old age). With Ideon, I already read everything ahead of time because of Eva! connections, so nothing caught me by surprise beyond the odd reference. Not to say that there weren't some memorable ones.

Mr. Tines wrote:the only mecha show that was neither Evangelion nor RahXephon, nor a leap into the dark

Did Escaflowne fail to qualify on not enough mechas, or what?

Escaflowne failed the "what do we have available to watch right now" test. It's not a title I've ever acquired a copy of.

Alaska Slim wrote:What, no Fang of the Sun Dougram? What's so bad about watching the protag bot lose it's darn shield for the 16th time in a row?

And likewise.

Having early on followed the advice I'd heard of "If you watch one giant robot series, make it Evangelion", I pretty much stuck to the "watch one giant robot series" bit.