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Final Thoughts – High Score Girl

I would have regretted following my instincts here.

I almost dropped High Score Girl after the first episode simply because I didn’t find it all that interesting, but the buzz around MAL wound up getting to me and I went back and finished it all, and I was surprised by how invested I got.

High Score Girl is a romantic comedy focused around a boy who meets the titular character in an arcade and learns that she’s a fighting game prodigy, despite her classy upbringing and lack of a home game console. She never says a single word in the entire series, so the two of them most often communicate their feelings through video games (and, in her case, violence). I thought this was all I needed to know, but going back and finishing it was a worthwhile experience, because it evolves into a compelling story about the girl – Akira Ono – and her incredibly stressful home life, as well as about main character Yaguchi’s classmate Hidaka, who finds herself drawn to him, and then drawn to video games, finding herself to be a natural talent. We wind up with a pretty classic love triangle, and while normally that’s one of my least favorite tropes of all time, it winds up working here because Hidaka has the emotional maturity to understand that Yaguchi doesn’t see her as a girl, just as a friend he plays games with, and that’s something she has to work to overcome.

I don’t really have much to say about the video game elements of the story other than that they are effectively used as character motivations, but I do want to mention the show’s unique aesthetic. It’s entirely rendered in CGI and sticks as closely to the style of the source manga as possible, which results in a look that takes some getting used to. Basically, the characters’ faces are rendered in 2-D manga style on top of the 3-D models rather than trying to animate faces, and while by the end it was working pretty well for me, it can make them look like dolls for a while.

I’m also not thrilled by the ending, because it seems like the last episode is almost entirely setup for the three-episode OVA airing this season (which, Netflix being Netflix, we won’t get for a while) rather than resolving any narrative threads. While getting three more episodes is fine, I really have to wonder the point of doing things this way instead of just adding a thirteenth episode to this season and leaving the rest of the story to be adapted in a second season at some point, because it’s pretty unsatisfying to end on a cliffhanger, even if a continuation is guaranteed.

Overall, though, this was much more exciting than I thought it would be. I wouldn’t say it was amazing like some of the reviews I’ve seen – the American perspective on Ono’s upbringing seems to be one of abuse, even though this is pretty normal for girls of such high-standing families, and it’s not examined in all that much detail, instead being very suddenly a problem near the end of the show. I also barely noticed the music, which is surprising given that Yoko freaking Shimamura composed the score for this – I sort of wonder if it was a warm-up (or warm-down) from composing for Kingdom Hearts III.

Let’s see if it manages to wrap things up a little better in the Extra Stage OVA.

7/10.

Final Thoughts – SSSS. Gridman

TRIGGER is back, baby.

And in Fall, they began an answer to a question. That question is: “What if we threw Haruhi Suzumiya and Neon Genesis Evangelion into a blender, hit puree, didn’t put the lid on, and dumped a shitload of Gurren Lagann into the mix?” While Gridman is already a developed “franchise”, SSSS is just so uniquely TRIGGER-flavored that I really can’t compare it to its source material other than saying that it’s definitely my favorite show of its kind.

Like I said before, watching Tokusatsu shows is pretty tiring by yourself because they take a very long time to tell what is usually not a very complicated story, so distilling one down into a single season and pacing it perfectly is enough to really pique my interest all on its own, but in a year where this exact studio already collaborated on a different robot-themed show that made my want to tear my hair out, and a year where Gundam Build Divers let me down, Gridman was such a breath of fresh air that I found it compulsively watchable and very deliberately saved it for (almost) the last show I finished this season.

It looks how you’d expect from a TRIGGER production – that is to say, cool as hell – and this is probably the best integration of CG and traditional animation that I’ve seen in a TV production, and without spoiling too much, the story really seriously manipulates the viewer into thinking they can predict what happens next, just to keep the Holy Shit Quotient healthy when it starts sprinting in the opposite direction.

This really sounds like I’m about to give it a perfect score, but I’m not, and it’s because of what happens in episode six, which I’ve already discussed – namely, that the main character gets the crux of the plot essentially infodumped at him by a character who then vanishes for the rest of the story. I hate so much that this happens, even though it is basically the last time any sort of exposition dump happens in the story, because it forced me to compare it to Another, which is utterly heinous in comparison to Gridman. Blech.

Still though, it’s easily the best “mech” show I saw all year, and it’s sitting at a ridiculously low 7.48 on MAL, and that’s a damn shame, because this one’s going in the Hall of Fame.

9/10!

Final Thoughts – Banana Fish

Strap in, because this one gets complicated. Also, spoiler alert for both this and for 91 Days, because I can’t just talk about one thing, I have to swerve way out of my lane. If you don’t want to be spoiled or read a lot of rambling, I’m giving it a recommendation.

Let me start by throwing in some context. Summer 2016 saw the release of an original show by Studio Shuka (best known for the sequel seasons of Durarara!!) called 91 Days, a mob story with very deep homoerotic subtext about a boy taking revenge for the murder of his family by a crime family by infiltrating said family and becoming a close confidant to their leader, who also happens to be the insanely attractive Nero. His hotness isn’t especially relevant to my criticism, but like…

Woof.

Anyway, mob stories as a rule do not have happy endings – they usually involve villainous protagonists that have to do very bad things in order to accomplish their goals, which are also often not very noble in intention. If they happen to accomplish something good, it’s a side effect. In the end, Nero becomes very aware that his new friend has been systematically destroying his family since the moment they met, and after a lot of bloody violence, the show ends with the two of them walking alone down a beach on an overcast day. They talk about their experience, and both of them know that despite genuinely growing to like one another, it’s far, far too late for this to end well. Nero pulls out his gun, and the screen cuts to black a moment before he pulls the trigger.

It’s fucking powerful, and the entire time I watched Banana Fish, I was thinking about that ending. While Banana Fish is a very different show, if you really boil it down, it’s also a mob story about taking revenge for the loss of your family, and the things you have to do in order to achieve such a selfish goal as vengeance.

Banana Fish ends up swinging a lot wider than 91 Days, ultimately, because it brings in a lot of even more adult concepts and handles them with varying results. Rape, for instance, is mentioned a lot as something that happened in the backstory of several characters (all of whom are male, though they weren’t always the actual victims), and it’s neither handled carefully nor is it glamorized. The main character Ash actually seems to have developed a complete lack of caring about his own sexual well-being from having been involved in a lot of child pornography, and many times over the course of the story he uses his body to seduce men he needs things from because his good looks and experience are enough to make basically the entire cast want him.

But the only one he wants is the Japanese college student who suddenly got caught up in his plans, and becomes magnetized to in a way he’s completely unable to handle.

Banana Fish is the single most queer-coded show I’ve ever seen that never has the subtext rise to become pure text. The author herself has stated that in all the time Eiji and Ash spent together, they felt as lovers, but never consummated that feeling. They do embrace intimately whenever they see each other after a period of absence, but even when they share a room, they have separate beds divided by a nightstand. It’s almost strange how sudden the stop on this relationship is, like after displaying a lot of male affection and even kissing at one point (as part of a ruse), the two of them suddenly no-homoed.

I think this is probably a result of the time period the story was originally written in – like I said in my premiere review, Banana Fish as a manga was published from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, in a time where the U.S. was facing the AIDS crisis (so media endorsing gay relationships between men were generally not widely accepted due to the massive stigma) and Japan was…well, Japan has pretty much been “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” for a very long time. So writing a story that goes right up to the line for readers that seek such things out (who were certainly there, BL as a genre is now a staple in Japan, particularly among women, whom Banana Fish was targeting since it was in a shoujo magazine) but doesn’t step over it was probably ideal for the time period.

However, I really question whether the author in question (Akimi Yoshida, just to get her name in here) was opposed to changing this position, or if director Hiroko Utsumi ever considered asking her for her input, because the story has been updated to take place in the present day, when being gay in America is not a particularly big deal, especially in New York City. I’m really afraid that it’s going to be a while before we get explicitly queer shows in Japan that don’t involve the tired aggressive, rapey seme archetype like DAKAICHI or even Bloom Into You, because this would have been a pretty good chance to try that out, given that MAPPA already made a show two years ago that also toed the line without ever actually showing Yuri and Victor being together on camera (and no, even the kiss doesn’t count, they deliberately cut away from it).

We also have to deal with the fact that these stories don’t have happy endings.

After the conflict is over, and after resolving to never see Eiji again for his safety, Ash is given a letter from him that contains a plane ticket and a heartfelt plea to understand that Eiji was never afraid of his partner despite all of the violence he had been involved in, Ash begins to run to the airport, towards his happy ending…and is murdered, because cosmically that’s what he had earned. While I fully approve of this as an ending, it is still pretty firmly an example of Burying Your Gays, and warrants a lot of scrutiny because of that.

Basically, I’m not sure how I feel about it and I don’t know that I ever will be.

But now that I’ve gotten all of that off of my chest, Banana Fish is a terrifically-plotted mob action story that seems to have gotten a lot of love and passion out of studio MAPPA, easily comparable to Yuri On Ice!!! from 2016. The action is brutal and satisfying, the twists are fantastic and kept me guessing right till the end, and the entire thing plays out much like a Shakespearean tragedy. I just wanted to express my disappointment that in a show as well-written as this one, with critically acclaimed source material, Banana Fish couldn’t take the one extra step that would have made its finale that much more meaningful, because I was sick to death by the end by all the emphasis on what good friends its leads were.

8/10!

Final Thoughts – Merc StoriA: The Apathetic Boy and the Girl in the Bottle

I just couldn’t get into this one, I’m sorry.

It’s a very cute show, but there’s a reason I didn’t do an Update post on Merc StoriA, and it’s because I’ve just had little desire to go back to it. I did manage to go back and finish two more episodes, but the very lackluster animation and meandering plot makes it pretty unable to hold my attention, I can’t really stop myself from pulling out my phone while I have it on. That unfortunately means that I don’t have much else to say regarding its quality – I do still like the kid-friendly art style, but ultimately I don’t remember very much of what happens in this show and I think that says a lot considering that I just finished the third episode a few minutes ago. It leaves very little impression, but I might just not be the right audience for it.

5/10.

Final Thoughts – Girl in the Twilight

This soured on me pretty quickly, to be honest, and it’s probably because I watched Release the Spyce immediately before it, but in terms of cute girl action shows, this one just comes up a lot shorter in one really specific way – the cast.

See, the approach of doing character episodes leading up to a finale is a well-worn but perfectly fine way of doing things, however, in comparison, the cast of Girl in the Twilight comes across as boring and uninspired, and oddly elastic. They get development in their individual two-part stories, and then get re-Flanderized into easily digestible tropes instead of remaining complex. It makes the previous episodes seem less impactful in hindsight, since the only thing that really mattered was the girls getting henshin transformations.

Let me explain through comparison – Digimon Adventure featured a cast of children who began the show as, well, kids. They weren’t suited to working together and could barely function without adults present, and then over the first arc of the show, they each got an episode of focus in which they learned about their flaws and gained the power to literally evolve, with the arc ending in a big fight they all had to work towards. While a fight that they needed every single member for would take a while to come around (given that the final episode of the arc is actually the beginning of Takeru’s character arc and he loses his partner), by not trying to include every single character in every scene, it keeps everyone continuously growing – why waste time on undercooked character moments when you can just give it to the plot and let the focus character have the screentime they need? This approach would definitely have worked better for Girl in the Twilight, and it could have done with some fat-trimming. Maybe instead of the entire cast unnecessarily going to every single parallel world, it could have just been Asuka and the focus character encountering the alternate versions of their friends instead of overstuffing the story with extraneous characters because they’ll be important later.

It’s not the worst thing I’ve seen, but I’m so close to the end of Fall 2018 that I’m becoming less tolerant, frankly, and I’d rather just get on with it when all I’ve got left is Merc Storia and Gridman (and Tsurune, which still doesn’t end until next week.)

5/10.

Final Thoughts – Release the Spyce

It’s not Princess Principal, but it does know how to have fun.

Release the Spyce is the latest in a trend of cute-girls-doing-action-things shows (which I’m very much okay with, keep that going) and while it doesn’t quite live up to its most obvious contemporaries (Princess Principal and Yuki Yuuna), I’m pleased to say that it does present us with a solid cast and a very good time, with a lot of surprises piled into the last few episodes.

Don’t let the art style fool you – this is an honest-to-God action show with blood and death and swords that get used for their intended purpose, and while I was afraid by episode 11 that the production might be on the verge of collapse, it turned out that the director had been saving resources for the final fight in episode 12, which looks splendid and is exactly as well-animated as the action from the premiere.

I do want to say that the ending is a little bit contrived, and confusing given that over and over again Release the Spyce reminds its viewers that deception is the most important tool a spy has, and the third quarter lags quite a bit in the lead up to the last confrontation – more than once I found myself wondering when we were gonna get to this big thing that the characters all say is right around the corner – but standing as a fun piece of pulpy spy fiction, it’s meant to show you a good time, and it certainly manages.

7/10

Final Thoughts – IRODUKU: The World in Colors

A visual treat and a satisfying romance.

IRODUKU is one of the only time-travel shows I’ve seen in recent memory that gets the concept really right, and that might be because it goes in the direction of starting in the future and travelling back to the present time, creating a sensation almost like nostalgia for the late 2010′s. It also doesn’t focus very much on the fish out of water aspect of such a story – to its clear benefit – by instead honing in on the fact that main character Hitomi is essentially a long-term tourist. Everyone she makes friends with learns that she can’t stay very long…including the boy she falls for, the only one who might hold the secret to why she can no longer see color in the world around her.

Let’s start with the biggest postiive – this show is gorgeous. I don’t know what director Toshiya Shinohara – previously best known for the first season of Black Butler – pulled out of his ass to get the incredible post-production talent that worked on this show, but it pays off beautifully with the best-looking Fall 2018 show aside from Tsurune (which should be disqualified anyway just by virtue of being a Kyoto Animation show). If literally nothing else, watch the first episode just to marvel at the eye candy.

But I don’t want to discount the plot, either. IRODUKU manages to be the second drama this year focused on a high school photography club (hello Tada-kun) and shares a fair few similarities with that show, but here we get a much more consistently dramatic affair rather than a lighthearted comedy with a ramp-up at the end. IRODUKU’s mysteries are a very good hook into its tale of a girl whose depression has become a physical ailment, and while its solution is a little bit of a cop-out, it does manage to stick the landing by not taking the easy way to satisfaction and resolving its romance in the most dramatic way possible. It’s a very strong package that I hope I’ll remember for a while.

8/10!

Final Thoughts – DOUBLE DECKER! Doug & Kirill

It’s fun, but not especially memorable.

Ultimately, it seems like Double Decker is stuck between wanting to be two different shows with much, much better productions – Cowboy Bebop, and Blood Blockade Battlefront – and it does manage to get some of the fun out of both of them, but doesn’t really get the nuance of either.

Let’s start with that production, though. As I mentioned before, the art design is very cool for a setting that could be easiest described as “Westpunk New York”, but fairly often we end up going somewhere utterly normal looking and it just winds up reminding you that the rest of the show looks middling at best, and the more I watched, the more I grew to loathe the character designs, which look like Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s reject concept art, and – hot take here – the fact that the MacGuffins looks like Tide Pods just ends up making me unable to take them seriously.

The other thing robbing them of narrative strength is the fact that for all the harm they supposedly do, very rarely do the monstrous transformations caused by overuse of Anthem actually stick. Almost every time, we see the Villain of the Week looking totally normal again as they’re placed under arrest despite just going through Parasite Eve mutations, and while I understand that this is meant to be in keeping with the lighthearted tone of the show, it doesn’t really jive with the world of the story.

The cast isn’t much better by the three-quarter mark, either – the only character I’m likely to remember at all is Kirill, who admirably is not just a try-hard prodigy of police work, but an idiot who more or less lucked into the job and is instantly made the Team Butt Monkey. Aside from Doug (because his name is in the title) I don’t even remember anyone else’s name, though I can recall the garish character designs.

I was really hoping for more development by the end of Episode 10 but not much of substance has happened thus far and I’m not really invested enough to see what happens in the ramp-up to the climax, because I don’t think it’ll be anything particularly spectacular. It’s a shame, as an original Sunrise production, this one just needed a little more thought (and money) put into it and it could have been one of the better shows this season.

As it stands, I dropped it after ten episodes. 5/10.

Final Thoughts – Zombie Land Saga

A great show, maybe not a great idol show.

By now, pretty much anyone in the know about anime has heard about or seen Zombie Land Saga, particularly the big twist from the eighth episode that reminded me that there are indeed still shitty people in this fandom, but the fact is that it was a very, very good show and a great takedown of the genre that managed to lean in just enough to still have a great story to it. Saga is, very often, riotously funny, particularly any scene involving our new reigning Queen of Memes Tae Yamada.

And carrying easily the most diverse cast I’ve ever seen in an idol show (being that they aren’t all just really gorgeous women who go to the same school or something) works brilliantly in its favor, allowing Saga to lampoon biker flicks, 8 Mile, geisha stories, and more in the span of just twelve episodes.

In fact, my only problem with it is that they put very little effort into the thing that defines the genre, the actual performances themselves. I know MAPPA can do better than this, because even if the choreography is fine, the performances are almost all rendered in eye-bleedingly terrible CG that looks worse the more characters are onscreen, like the rendering machine had a crappy graphics card or something. It’s really, really a shame that the show’s most climactic moments are robbed of a lot of their impact by a recurring problem with the production that they really didn’t bother trying harder on – in the first half, we see the same performance twice, and despite likely already having all the render data for it, it still looks just as bad the second time when they had a chance to improve it the second time. I can’t help but remember how completely captivating the first skate routine in episode one of Yuri On Ice!! was two years ago and wondering what went wrong here.

So yeah, come for terrific comedy and a great cast (including Mamoru Miyano as…himself), but go watch Love Live! Sunshine! or The iDOLM@STER afterwards to see how this should have looked.

8/10.