Updated Impressions – Release the Spyce

It’s not quite Princess Principal, but it’s definitely trying.

And that’s not a negative at all – we may be waiting a bit for the movies to be released stateside, so I’ll happily take a very good knock-off at the moment to tide me over.

Maybe I should stop directly comparing them, but honestly the parallels are strong here, even if they end with the fine details. While I can still say I like the PP gang and setting better, Release the Spyce is not running far behind it in terms of decent action and a compelling cast. It’s skewing closer to being a cute-girls show, but it’s not doing a bad job of it. Really what it was lacking up until the most recent episodes was a real sense of conflict – while we’ve known from the beginning that there is a traitor among our group of friends, in practice up until now the show has mostly been focused on a light Villain of the Week setup, with none except Byakko really making any sort of impression. Now it looks like we’ve gotten past that stage, things can really start swinging.

The element where it really pales in comparison though is in the production. Spyce is far from a bad-looking show, but it is a little bit too generic for my taste – in fact, some of the design elements are actively working against it. For example, while the girls go by codenames while in spy-mode, they don’t do anything to hide their appearance, making it really implausible that the villains aren’t able to identify the girls with the most distinctive hairstyles in town. While they don’t have to necessarily be toned down and boring, it would have made a little more sense if they’d justified it somehow like what Persona 5 does (having the cast at least wear masks) or even what Immortal Hounds does (having the main character wear a light-reflective ribbon so her face can’t be clearly seen by cameras).

I also would have really appreciated a more effective villain – while they claim to be continually successful, the girls do keep fairly easily thwarting plans even while they’re being played by the traitor – and some justification for why these villains have to operate in Sorasaki to begin with, considering the hypercompetent vigilante squad roaming the streets at night.

Still, it’s been a lot of fun to watch so far, so I’m going to at least bump it up beyond just being enjoyable.

Score so far: 7/10

Updated Impressions – IRODUKU: The World in Colors

This didn’t really go where I was expecting, and maybe that was foolish of me, but I’m not complaining.

Six episodes in, IRODUKU has actualized into a gorgeously rendered romance with light fantasy elements, and some strong directorial decisions have made me wonder why more people aren’t talking about it. It’s not unpopular, it’s actually in the top ten of MAL’s Fall chart (sitting right above Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, in fact), but Amazon is also utterly awful at marketing their anime so maybe it’s more complicated than that.

In any case, the production from P.A. Works has definitely held up, with a sequence in the sixth episode being one of the most fascinating things I’ve seen this year and the background work and attention to detail being consistent highlights. The characters are definitely being played for realism, and that works well played against the magical elements of the show’s universe. The two lead characters are certainly strong as well, both being shy teenagers who have different problems and anxieties, and Hitomi’s status as reluctant time traveller combined with her personality make her an understated deconstruction of the manic pixie dream girl type you would expect her to be if you saw her leading man.

My one real problem here is actually that not much has really happened, which is fine when the character work being done is effective, but after Just Because! last year, I’m wary of any romance that is going to take until the last episode to materialize. Still, there’s reason for some optimism here as the sixth episode ends on a major story beat that looks like it might get things moving, so I’m going to keep watching and remain positive.

Score so far: 8/10

Updated Impressions – Boarding School Juliet

This is still impressing me more than I thought it would.

Boarding School Juliet isn’t some great revelation or anything – honestly, the first episode was still the best – but the dramatic elements it has set up thus far have at least made it intriguing, adding an action element to your standard romcom. I also like any version of Romeo who isn’t a whiny idiot.

And in six episodes, we’ve actually made a surprising and encouraging amount of progress – not only are the main couple still together, but their romantic rivals have mostly been informed already that they don’t actually have a chance, not to mention that the hypotenuse in Juliet’s love triangle is also a girl who explicitly has a crush on her. The handling of Hasuki has been a highlight, and she is easily my favorite character, being that she feels like a better-written version of Sword Art Online’s Suguha (a close lone friend to the main character who has long harbored feelings for him but will ultimately be turned down), because her personality is very well-established and she proves to be very good at calling Romio out on his bullshit and for lying to his friends.

My only real issue that I’ve encountered thus far is the fact that the trio that tried to rape the heroine in the premiere are being portrayed as just general asshole bullies. This is a touchy subject that wasn’t really given the gravity that it needed in the first place, and I really want to see some kind of acknowledgement in-universe that what they did was fucked up, but it seems unlikely.

Still, this is going pretty well so far and the production work by LIDENFILMS is keeping a pretty decent pace from the first episode, so I’m willing to give it some wiggle room.

Score so far: 7/10

Updated Impressions – Zombieland Saga

All RIGHT! Zombie IDOLS! Let’s GOOOOO!

This show Has No Chill and I am here for it. Zombieland Saga joins Revue Starlight as the most out-there ideas the idol genre has to offer, and thus far it’s doing pretty damn well for itself in terms of pure comedic genius. The timing in this show has made me laugh like a hyena more than once and it is brilliant.

Zombieland Saga also has the most diverse group of girls I’ve seen, though it helps that many of them have extreme personalities that would be overwhelming in a more grounded show. It’s almost like plucking a random set of Danganronpa girls out and throwing them into a unit, and it works shockingly well. Hell, by the second episode we’ve defused a lot of the tension involved in one of the most genius representations of catharsis I’ve seen in any anime, period. I won’t spoil it if you’ve not seen it but rest assured it’s probably going to be on a year-end list or something.

The one thing that bothers me, however, is that the performance we’ve seen (multiple times, with the same song) is rendered in low-framerate CGI and it just looks awful compared to the animation of the rest of the show. I can accept the choreography here because the entire point is that the girls don’t really know what they’re doing and their manager is completely unhelpful, so the amateurish stuff comes off cute, but not when it looks this bad. MAPPA can do better, especially since the song gets repeated multiple times over. Maybe they’ll fix it for the blu ray, but I’ll probably never know.

In spite of that, Zombieland Saga is definitely very high on my list for this season and I eagerly await the second half.

Score so far: 9/10

Updated Impressions – Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai

I’m really happy with how this one is turning out.

Bunny Girl Senpai is pretty quickly becoming the surprise hit of the season – it’s all the way up to #3 on the MAL seasonal chart, below Goblin Slayer and Sword Art Online, but above That Time I Was Reincarnated as a Slime, which is damn impressive considering that Slime
had nearly a year of English manga releases building up its momentum.
It’s not hard to see why, either – it’s essentially a much more
approachable Bakemonogatari or OreGairu, and it’s doing a
damn good job of it thus far with a main couple who are fully aware that
they like each other and do a lot of coy flirting when in private, and a
main character who is very outward about his perverse desires. It’s
honestly really refreshing, and at the end of this second arc six
episodes in, we’ve even already broken the hypotenuse off of the love
triangle!

The production here is great as well, not especially
surprising given the studio’s history and the fact that the director
also made Sakura Quest last year, a show whose spirit, charm, and originality led me to give it a perfect score. Bunny Girl Senpai
hasn’t quite gotten there yet, but it’s certainly aiming for a spot in
the Hall of Fame. What I would like to see from here on out is the
maintenance of the primary relationship now that it seems like another
wrench is about to be thrown into it.

Score so far: 8/10!

Updated Impressions – Girl in the Twilight

I can’t exactly say that I was expecting Doctor Who with magical girls, but I’m totally not complaining.

That’s the best comparison I can make to this story of exploring worlds other than these, and fighting off an ever-present threat trying to nuke entire universes. Thus far, Girl in the Twilight has followed a pretty reliable formula of spotlighting one girl at a time as she learns her true strength and gains her power, but with the nice added touch that it’s done so through two-part stories rather than trying to cram an entire concept into a single twenty-two minute episode. It gives the show a little more time to establish the individual timelines it explores, which is great considering that we meet the alternate-universe versions of the cast in each story.

I also want to highlight the CG battle scenes, because while there are certainly shortcuts taken (each one takes place inside of a bubble so that the majority of the work could go towards rendering the characters), the fights themselves are damn awesome and well-animated.

Honestly, this one surprises me with how few people are talking about it. Hopefully some of the HIDIVE titles from this season get more exposure now that they’re on VRV, because Sentai actually picked a decent crop this time around.

Score so far: 7/10.

Updated Impressions – Double Decker! Doug & Kirill

See, in contrast to RerideD, here’s a show that knows precisely how stupid it is, and uses it as a strength.

The best way I can really come up with to describe Double Decker is to imagine if Hirohiko Araki wrote Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It’s not perfect, but it comes pretty close to explaining the extravagant design and sense of comedy. Six episodes in, it’s still a pretty low-rent show, but the fact that it isn’t made especially well doesn’t really detract from what it’s trying to do, and now that the plot has actually begun, there’s much more of a hook present if the zaniness of the premiere didn’t get to you. Yeah, it’s definitely still a weird cop comedy about a division specifically assigned to cases involving drugs that look like Tide Pods, but it’s so tongue-in-cheek about the whole thing that it winds up being a fun watch anyway.

The characters in any comedy are what really sells it, and Double Decker delivers a pretty good cast as a vehicle for the jokes. The main character Kirill’s complete idiocy is something that even the narrator is willing to use for the sake of comedy, which is much more tolerable than if it tried to pass him off as being cool despite his lack of sense, and his energy is pretty infectious. Doug is a pretty decent deconstruction of the grizzled veteran partner type, being that he’s only grizzled in appearance and is in fact kind of an asshole, but in a way that would still make him fun to be around. The female cast so far are pretty slotted into character types, but they’re types that certainly work together, particularly when ganging up on their well-meaning but perverted boss.

One thing that I wish it would improve on, besides the production quality, is the consistency of the visual design. The modern-Western look works very well and looks cool when they actually use it, but certain parts of the city just look vaguely futuristic, and it’s a little bit jarring to watch the transition.

Sunrise definitely gets props for producing such surreal original series recently – ClassicaLoid was one of my favorite shows of last year, and this is exactly the right kind of show to get the bad taste of Gundam Build Divers out of my mouth.

Score so far: 7/10!

Final Thoughts – RerideD: Derrida who leaps through time

This went downhill fast, huh?

Literally in the second episode we basically nuke the cool tone of the first episode and set up something much more conventional, and much easier to pick apart. By episode three, characters are making stupid decisions, and so are the writers. There is a scene in which the main character’s bodyguard has a handgun before he starts chasing the assassin, but once the chase has begun the gun suddenly disappears entirely so that they can have a hand-to-hand fight and he can get injured, and we’ve totally killed the apocalyptic setting by showing how many people are just going through life as normal. Yes, I understand that ten years later, some kind of society would have formed, but the show has already completely written off the robot invasion as just being a nuisance rather than the world-ending disaster it seemed to be in episode one.

It just lost me so fast. I was really hoping for something much darker than this, but what RerideD ended up with was just a poorly thought-out mess that has cool ideas but can’t act on them. What a shame.

4/10.

Premiere Impressions – Fall 2018

Well, we’ve got another massive season of too many things to watch, so let’s get through this quickly, and then I have an announcement at the end.

Skipped

  • Tokyo Ghoul:re Season 2, Fairy Tail: Final Season, Ace Attorney Season 2 and A Certain Magical Index III because I didn’t watch the previous seasons (I’ve seen the first season of Index and decided the anthology format wasn’t what I wanted from the show).
  • Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind because I haven’t watched Diamond is Unbreakable yet and don’t know when I’ll have time to (and I wasn’t thrilled by Stardust Crusaders).
  • Senran Kagura Shinovi Master because there’s no timeline where I, a gay man, like Senran Kagura.

Dropped

  • Xuan Yuan Sword Luminary for not being able to hold my attention at all, despite not looking all that terrible.
  • Uzamaid! for being actively offensive and utterly tactless.
  • Between the Sky and Sea for being stupid and lazy.
  • Bakumatsu for just being something we’ve all seen before.
  • Ms. Vampire who lives in my neighborhood for trying to copy Dragon Maid but lacking in charm, and also because I don’t want to keep typing out the dumb title
  • DAKAICHI for proving that BL hasn’t come that far since Yuri on Ice!.
  • Radiant for being pretty and not really anything else.
  • Gakuen Basara for being inaccessible to anyone without knowledge of the source material.
  • Anima Yell! for being the unfortunate victim of bad timing.
  • Ulysses: Jeanne D’Arc and the Alchemist Knight for looking like a Powerpoint presentation.
  • Conception and My Sister, My Writer because I know heterosexual porn when I see it.
  • As Miss Beelzebub likes. for trying to spread one joke over too much bread.

Watching

  • Double Decker! Doug & Kirill
  • The Girl in Twilight
  • Reincarnated as a Slime (x)
  • RErideD
  • Run with the Wind (x)
  • Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai
  • Zombie Land Saga
  • Bloom Into You
  • Hinomaru Sumo (x)
  • IRODUKU: The World in Colors
  • Boarding School Juliet
  • Goblin Slayer
  • Sword Art Online: Alicization
  • SSSS. GRIDMAN
  • Skull-face Bookseller Honda-San
  • Release the Spyce
  • Golden Kamuy Season 2
  • Merc StoriA
  • Karakuri Circus (x)
  • Tsurune

x – This show is going to run into next year, so it will not be appearing on the 2018 Final Thoughts roundup.

So, the announcement. It’s not the biggest deal, but it is a warning that I’m going to be considerably late on finishing this season and also starting the next one. Not only do I have a metric ton of shows to finish before the end of the year (because in addition to the fall premieres, I still have to finish Banana Fish and a whole bunch of Winter and Netflix shows I’m disgustingly late on (including my long-anticipated ClassicaLoid 2). I’m also moving at the end of the year, literally on New Year’s, so I can’t promise timely coverage for premieres for Winter 2019. That being said, depending on how the next few weeks go, we’ll see how much of those I can knock out before the end of the year. Onwards and upwards!

Premiere Impressions – Tsurune

KyoAni does two very safe shows in a row.

And I don’t really have a problem with that, but the problem with Kyoto Animation is that they have a lane that they stick to, and after a while, you can only sit through so many incredibly well-produced stories about high schoolers before you want them to try something else, you know? (Admittedly, I have been sitting on Violet Evergarden, but my point still stands for their broadcast fare.)

As for Tsurune, there’s ultimately nothing wrong with it, and archery certainly isn’t a sport that gets animated often (if only because it doesn’t tend to involve a lot of action), but I didn’t find too much to really love about this premiere other than the lavish visuals. DIrector Takuya Yamamura has had a direction credit in almost every single KyoAni production in the last decade or so, but this is his first time in charge, and he seems to be banking a lot on his team without really sticking his neck out too far. We have a pretty ordinary setup here about a cute sad boy being dragged into a club he used to be good at against his will, and his apparent drop in skill isn’t much of an interesting twist.

My point here is that in a year with as many strong sports shows as we’ve seen, Tsurune is starting itself off with a disadvantage, and considering how contentious many of this studio’s recent projects have been (see Myriad Colors Phantom World, Hibike Euphonium S2, and even last season’s iteration of Free! from what I hear), I strongly feel that KyoAni is in need of a more interesting project to work with.

That being said, I’m still gonna give this a few episodes before I actually drop it, if only because it was only boring in a meta sense. The characters are fine, the score is beautiful, and I want to see if it can do something interesting.