Watched Accel World over the past couple of days; show good, been a while since something hit that particular sweet spot.

Followed that up with the sequel movie Infinite Burst; that one sure was an anime movie.

The evenings have closed in enough that I've been fitting in the odd episode here and there for a while now - though for the current season's Pui Pui Molcar : Driving School, the motion of the sun is less important. After the first season's "everything goes" mayhem, it was hard to see where they could take it, but this new set-up makes sense. Which may be why it's just so-so. Still, a harmless few minutes of Saturday morning cartoon.

From the backlog - Akebi's Sailor Suit, for most of the season after the first episode, was not too far from being "creepy lesbian stalker sue adds girl of the week to her harem" (exceptions like the episode where the girl of the week is a stalker herself and they prowl together hardly count). After all these years, I confess that I don't understand the neuroticism about having/making friends in high-school that percolates some series (Uruhara being another example of same that springs to mind). Perhaps it's a girl thing.

After a while one habituates to the slightly uncanny character designs, as it works towards the big sports' day climax - a change from the usual school festival trope. Verdict: harmless.

Also backlog, and for something completely different, Akiba's Trip, to see the context for the otaku memes it spawned (e.g. "It doesn't matter what a man's salary is worth; what matters is how much of it he spends on his hobbies!"). It lampoons one otaku hobby a week, including actual Street Fighter V gameplay footage in the vidya episode, before wrapping up with the big boss fight. Also, clothes get removed in every battle. Verdict : entirely harmless.

Hot take:

I enjoyed DEATH TOME more than I did DEATH NOTE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNmDZCQ3eIY

I don't know much about Death Note, but it was nice to see the Halloween specials improve in quality from the previous years. They're still not as good as say the first ten, but I'll take what I can get.

Its been a very very long time since I've seen Death Note, and I remember enjoying it well enough, but I'm a little surprised that its had the longevity that it has with Americans. Especially for a fairly self-contained story that I remember a lot of people thinking ran for too long anyways once the Near/Mello stuff started.

Maybe this post belongs here, but it is an animay I have watched, so, whatever.


Yes, yes, I saw The Quintessential Quintuplets Movie. Now, who wants to touch me?

The film is hardly a cinematic tour-de-force. The art, animation and audio is identical to the second season’s look, sound and feel; besides one very brief shot where I think I maybe saw an extra layer of highlights on Miku’s hair, there were no sequences that stood out as looking better than TV-quality.
Cost-cutting measures like panning still-frames were even used during festival montages; heaven forbid you splash a little extra on the animation budget for your big movie, eh?
Props must be given to one sequence however- Nino’s idol-group song and dance number. It was brief- but no cheap, gaudy, character CG animation was used. Bravo.
Maybe that’s where all the money went…

As story conclusions go- you get what you expect: we get our big confession and the mystery bride revealed, the “losers” come out disappointed, but everybody makes peace and is happy by the time the credits roll, warm fuzzies all round.

I suppose the one thing that justifies putting it onto a film-reel is its runtime, clocking in at a little over two hours. Of course- this just means it’ll be chopped up into 5 episodes or so and put onto Crunchyroll with a handful of extra scenes at a later date.
The length became something of a problem for me however, although due mostly to my own poor decisions in life; we get the climactic “girl who gets picked” moment, but then it keeps on sort of going, and going… and I learned an important lesson: don’t drink a pint of concentrated orange and mango squash before a cinema outing (the final act was a bit of a blur for me for this very reason).

For the price of £14.50 I was allowed to see the story conclusion of the most agreeable harem show of recent memory, as well as suffer the worse bladder discomfort of my adult life.
Worth it? Not really, but I don’t mind speaking with my wallet to tell Odeon that this sort of thing is welcome in my local picture house.

Side notes-

There were roughly 20 of us braving the cold weather to go to the cinema that night.
Everybody’s favourite girl was obvious: Miku. The film wasn’t a laugh-riot, but there were three distinct chuckles, and they all involved Miku. Two of which simply came from seeing her pout. Naturally.

After enjoying the manga a fair bit, I watched the Twin Star Exorcists adaptation with the friend that got me into it; the part of it that was an actual adaptation, which is to say the first 20 episodes, was quite good; the anime-original plot afterwards, we ended up dropping very quickly after skipping around a bit and being not very impressed with what we saw of it.
Overall the first arc is a pretty fun watch, in spite of its at times very DBZ-ness. It also has one of the funniest visual gags I have ever seen in anime.

Over the past two days I watched the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha movies; quite enjoyed them. Not worldmoving or anything, but across all four a solid, enjoyable story with a lot of the mecha-influenced DNA that would later be refined into Symphogear. Especially A's and Detonation were two that I liked more than I was expecting to, A's filling the shoes of the original very well while also competently making its own ground as a sequel, and Detonation is pretty much everything I want a sequel movie to be (in no small part being as good as it is because it is the second of two movies, and as such actually has the runtime to do its plot well).
If you have two hours and some change to kill and mecha-flaired magical girls sound like a good time, I definitely recommend giving Nanoha a shot; if you have some five hours to kill and liked the first movie, by all means follow it up with 2nd

Except for the continuations of To Your Eternity and Spy x Family the Fall 22 Season didn’t have much going for it. Everything else was background noise during exercises, hardly worth commenting on.

Chainsaw Man – Humans battle demons in bloody battles, some humans make contracts with spirits and demons to battle better, and bloodier.
I wasn’t enthralled by the story, characters or world presented; the most notable aspect of the show was its animation.
The (non-CG) character movements had a lot of frames and effort put into their posing, looked like stylised rotoscoping, each episode had a movie-like quality about it.
It felt strange to watch however, like it was all over-animated, too good for the silly story it was telling. Breast-fondling doesn’t need to look that good.
Next I’ll be saying I don’t like nice things…

More Than a Married Couple, But Not Lovers – Filling the season’s quota for teen, sexual tension is this show about a gyaru and unpopular boy, forced together by their school to become a mock-married couple (as part of an official education program, no less), will-they/won’t-they love-polygon hijinks ensue.
One amusing aspect of the show was the way the school’s marriage-program goes completely unexplained to the viewer, there must be some interesting lore behind such an unusual concept, but the show essentially says: “To hell with that noise- let’s just get the odd-couple together ASAP. Deal with it.”
The lead male is an introverted gamer geek, so naturally- he’s designed to be a tall, handsome, kind, considerate, gentlemanly lad the girl quickly falls for. How unbelievable, right? Pity he wasn’t given glasses, a ponytail and paint-stained overalls to really compliment the fantasy of the geek winning the beauty.

Some of the colour saturation in this show is overpowering.

Needs more colour. More!

I hope to see the 4th instalment of my favourite CGDCT property: Encouragement of Climb: Next Summit some time in the future, it looks like I’ll need to carefully time a HiDive free-trial binge-session to do so…

==========

Come on, Joy Evangelion, it’s January, let’s do the thing.

Most/Least Enjoyable Animays of 2022:

Runner up: My Dress-Up Darling. A nicely animated rom-com with likeable characters, providing an interesting exploration of a topic that hasn’t been explored all that much in the medium prior. I just wish some unnecessary skin remained unexposed.

Winner: Spy x Family. A great premise with flawless execution. I can happily rewatch this from the beginning again at any time.



Runner-down: Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games Is Tough for Mobs - Not content with being yet another assembly-line Isekai, devoid of any creative or original ideas, it had to stand out by being hideous to look at too.

Loser: Tomodachi Game – Unlikeable characters, doing unlikeable things, all as part of a plodding, poorly executed story that utterly fails to engage. Car-crash television that leaves you feeling like a worse human being for having watched it.

Probably the best thing about the eminently skippable Burn-Up re-imaginings (Burn-Up W, Excess and Scramble), at least the first of which was co-produced with ADV's money, is their willingness to have their lady protagonists be slovenly, horny, gold-digging idiots who are police officers only because they have a natural talent for violence. It's at least an excuse for bombastic action scenes, but in terms of hard-hitting satire, these shows certainly aren't Dominion Tank Police, and even their attempts at non-satirical comedy are not all that funny, consisting mostly of loud slapstick and badly-aged sex pest skits. To their credit, W and Excess do feature fantastically 1990s character designs, but Scramble sadly devolves into looking like a low-rent visual novel adaptation. The most interesting thing about the franchise as a whole is its moral throughline regarding its central concept of extralegal warrior cops:

Original Burn-Up: warrior cops are cool, and they're needed to stop the evil human traffickers.
W & Excess: the warrior cop system is flawed and can be abused and hijacked by super criminals.
Scramble: the warrior cop system was a white-collar criminal ploy to begin with, with everybody involved in its creation being crooks.

This last pivot is actually treated as a major plot twist in the penultimate episode of Scramble, but trust me, it goes nowhere interesting.

chazthesilencer wrote: It felt strange to watch however, like it was all over-animated, too good for the silly story it was telling.

Agreed, chaz. When I was watching the first episode I was quite perplexed with what was up with the artstyle, and I never really got down with it. I wasn't really crazy about the character designs either, but that's probably more of a me thing than anything the people working on the show did. They all looked sort of ugly and strange? IDK. I will say the show did have some exciting moments, and I got a kick out of Power.

But I'm usually never really blown away by whatever the big shonen show of the moment is. Give me an original magical girl, mecha and or sports show instead

Speaking of original sports shows, I'm gonna give my animé of the year(AOTY 2022 Edition) to the great Birdie Wing: Golf Girls' Story. Great character designs, absurd story, and two determined girls aiming for that illustrious Japan girls' high school golf championship.
My runner up will go to the latest season of My Hero Academia, which has been an absolute blast to watch every Saturday. I thought the episodes that came out in 2021 were a bit of a drag to get through, but this one has just been top class each week. The first ep of this season really did a great job of setting up how big the stakes were and the show didn't really let up on the drama for 12 eps.

I wasn't able to watch as much anime as usual this year, but looking back I did catch a decent amount of things that were airing, and a lot of them I really liked: SpyxFamily, Akebi's Sailor Uniform, My Dress Up Darling, both seasons of Love Live!! that aired, Akiba Maid Wars, The Heike Story, Yurei Deco, and Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer.

Favorite film I was able to catch in the theater was Belle. Excited to see Suzume when it comes out.

Older stuff that I watched for the first time this year that I loved were: Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Sailor Moon SuperS and Sailor Moon Sailor Stars, Mawaru Penguindrum, Symphogears, Battle Athletes Victory and Mobile Suit Gundam:Origin.

This season has already been pretty sweet, watching Trigun, Nier, MHA, Buddy Daddies and Spy Classroom.

I've been slugging my way through Nanoha StrikerS lately; saying that the plot moves at glacial pace would be doing the show a disservice, but the difference between that and what the show has going on feels increasingly clerical in nature. I'm 15 (longer than standard!) episodes deep and so far this could have been one 2 hour movie.
But on the bright side, it looks like things are going to start happening very quickly starting next episode

^
StrikerS suffered from the team not knowing what to do with the extended length, and ending up with wild swings between action and extended on-the-fly lore creation. There's a peak about episode 17, then another trough, before the grand finale. Compared with the multiple re-watches of S1 and A's, this one I've only rewatched the once, and that not that long after the much delayed fansubbing finally completed.

---

Meanwhile, what have I been watching? Well, having started out as a cute girls do black ops series, LycoReco suffered the usual fate of series that start mostly episodic then grow a plot. The tale of a genki-girl natural born assassin who's all Sixth Commandment all the time doing clandestine peacekeeping activities would have been fine by itself, without bringing in a pound-shop* Joker as a running antagonist. A sad case of a story having far more than just the one implausibility, almost an example of why you don't do that. Harmless to frustrating.

Birdie Wing suffers another of the standard anime tics. MC, who is a legend in the world of clandestine gambling golf, and sees off other mob-owned players on an amazing mutable underground course meets another player who might be her equal - and then gets a special entry into an Under-15s tournament to play against her. Yep, this legend with a significant track record is another 14 year old prodigy. Mid-cour, the mafia element wraps up and suddenly it's a Japanese high-school golf tournament in the same vein as, say, New Prince of Tennis, right up to the point where the cour ends and we have to wait for the second to air, a year after the first. Decent enough time-filler, pity about the cliff-hanger.

Yurei Deco, or The Adventures of Hack'n'Berry, Finn, and the Detective Club on Tom Sawyer Island was an interesting sub-Matrix style soft dystopia, with a couple of surprise (at least to me) gender reveals. I didn't notice whether there was any discussion of this elsewhere at the time, but it seemed one of those series that fly under the radar, and thus get under-appreciated. Good.

Shadows House S1 definitely speed-ran what was a long atmosphere building introduction to get to the first major event of the series, and its immediate consequences. Half-way through S2, it's found its stride, and is managing to work around some of the omissions from the speed-run chapters. A flawed adaptation, but still a good one. Recommended.

Also in process, The Case Study of Vanitas S1 - it's shoujo, it's silly, and if LycoReco is yuri-bait, then this is definite yaoi-bait. But then you expect a story of vampires in c1900s Paris to be full of raging haemosexuals anyway,


* that translates to "dollar-store", for the USAns out there

I take back what I said about StrikerS, the episode right after where I left off there was the point at which the show started making good on all the things it failed to do before. 16-22 are incredibly strong, and the rest after it, in the grand scheme of things, is still very competent. If the first half of the show were remade to cut the fat, this would be one of the best entries in the franchise.

chazthesilencer wrote:Chainsaw Man – Humans battle demons in bloody battles, some humans make contracts with spirits and demons to battle better, and bloodier.
I wasn’t enthralled by the story, characters or world presented; the most notable aspect of the show was its animation.
The (non-CG) character movements had a lot of frames and effort put into their posing, looked like stylised rotoscoping, each episode had a movie-like quality about it.
It felt strange to watch however, like it was all over-animated, too good for the silly story it was telling. Breast-fondling doesn’t need to look that good.
Next I’ll be saying I don’t like nice things…

The author is a huge cinephile, and almost all of his mangas have scenes taking place in a theater, that's also why the opening is choke-full of movie references (and one reference to Evangelion!) and also why the episodes are constructed like movies, both in the animation and the rhythm.
Also, I have the feeling that the strangeness from the "over-animation" is also made on purpose to give you a general sense of wrongness, there's something similar with the soundtrack (not the bangers that are the OP and EDs): if you listen to it (you can find it in Youtube) you'll notice that almost all of the tracks are full of distorted sounds, off-key notes and stuttering sounds, as if it was listened from a old and damaged tape, which also helps to give a subtle vibe of general uneasiness.

Finally, I don't think that the story is as silly as it looks like at first glance (note that I don't read the manga): while the premise and Denji's goals are pretty silly and follow the codes of the Shonen (the idiot and fearless hero, the dark and brooding sidekick, the overactive girl of the group, the harsh sensei, the jolly and extremely flirty female co-worker...), it's made very clear that those character tropes aren't taken lightly: Denji is an idiot with stupid goals because of his absolutely hellish childhood that left him emotionally stunted and accepting even the shitty conditions of his employment: Makima literally told him that they'll use him like an attack dog and that he'll be terminated if he complains or tries to leave, and all he gains is three meals a day and a daily bath, which he gladly accepts because it's fucking paradise compared to his old life, and there's a recurring question asked to him of why is he doing all this.

A great example of this is his initial goal of touching boobs: in other shonen stories it would be a running gag that the hero never reach (or only at the very end or not in the way he would had liked - like accidentally groping an old woman), but here he very quickly attain his goal without caveats (Power genuinely let her gropes her, with and without breast padding)... and he's left empty afterward, as he said: "That's it?", before moving to another objective of hooking up with Makima, but it's clear that he's as aimless as when he was a slave to the Yakuza, and on top of that his objective was "given" by Makima promising him anything he wanted from her if he manages to kill the Gun demon, in a scene that makes it clear that she's manipulating him for her own gains.

As for the other characters, it's quickly shown that their "shonen" behavior is a coping mechanism for the hellish job they are doing, a facade that often cracks when they are alone and/or in a stressful enough situation. None of the human hunters are mentally sound, the only one is maybe Arai,
The ones who look the happier in this job are those who aren't human (with the exception of Power who's here by force).

So I'm sure that this story will explore more this side of the characters in the following seasons.

I started watching Overman King Gainer, the last of these mecha series from Tomino I have left to see. So far these early episodes have been fairly hectic in pacing as expected, though its kind of interesting to see such a snowy setting in a mecha series (Only other one that even comes to mind is VOTOMS Pailsen Files, which was made several years after this anyways). Apparently this is loosely inspired by some absurdly long French sci-fi novel series and uh wow. I thought LNs got up there in numbers of volumes but geeze.

The other main thing to note I think is that the protagonist of OMK is some kind of professional gamer of all things, which is somewhat forward thinking for a show from 2002 (If this were made today he'd clearly be some streamer or speedrunner or whatever). Maybe a gamer protag is not too surprising considering this is the same period of time that stuff like the .hack franchise was first taking off, but I'm willing to give Tomino some credit here.

I recently watched Berserk (1997) after finding out Berserk was one of the major inspirations for the Dark Souls series. It was a damn good hack-n'-slash anime, but after all the nasty stuff I've heard about the series, it felt more like a very long trailer for the anime I thought I was getting. The only episode that really matched the series' reputation was the very last episode, and even that felt a bit disappointing. I hear the 2016 anime takes place after the eclipse, so I might put my grasses on and watch that next.

I also watched the original DiC dub of Sailor Moon. It's not what I would consider a great anime by any means, but it was better than I expected and managed to keep me interested for 40 episodes. Venus and Mars were my favorites, and they were a welcome relief from Sailor Moon herself, who is not only a terrible leader but seems to forget she has super powers in nearly half the fights she's in. I really wish they'd have done more with the Molly/Nephite relationship as well, as having a megaverse agent go rogue and join the sailor scouts would have been an interesting plot device. But sadly, the creators went with the old MOTW trope of keeping both the heroes and villians as dumb as possible in order to squeeze out more cookie-cutter boss fights without actually moving the story along. I'd like to see a show like this where the heroes and villians are actually intelligent and pose real threats to each other beyond plot contrivances.

As great as Berserk 1997 is, it cuts quite a bit of graphic material from the manga (As well as completely gutting the prologue arc and the ending to the Golden Age arc) that they were simply never going to be allowed to air on television.

I never saw the later adaptations but they don't have a great reputation from what I've seen. Really you should just read the manga.

Watched Lain with some friends over the weekend; show good.