I don’t have anything against this one aside from the fact that I feel like I’d appreciate it more if I’d played the source game.
Gakuen Basara is kind of fascinating because it’s literally a High School AU of Sengoku Basara, and that makes the premise pretty much hilarious to begin with, but unfortunately the number of references to the game make this really inaccessible to new fans. You’ll get the gist of the plot, but I feel like the majority of the enjoyment of this show will be recognizing the characters you already knew applied to this new scenario, and obviously that means if you didn’t play, you probably shouldn’t start here.
I’m leaving this one unscored for exactly that reason, though.
Radiant is not particularly bad, there are quite a few things that actually work in its favor, but it is almost painfully generic as a shounen series. See, I get the feeling that this was confirmed to air in October because Black Clover was meant to finish last month, but then it was announced to continue indefinitely and now Radiant is just kind of stuck here being almost the same show, just with a more tolerable protagonist.
Unfortunately, tolerable doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to watch him for 21 episodes, because our hero Seth is basically just a carbon copy of Luffy, and if I wanted to watch One Piece, I’d be watching One Piece. Radiant is the story of a put-upon young boy apprenticing under a renowned person of the show’s theme (there, pirates, here, magic) and how in order to prove himself he steals something from his mentor and takes it farther than he can handle. It’s not a bad setup, but it’s just so much like everything I’ve seen before that I don’t have the interest (or the time) to watch it all again.
I do want to compliment the art design, though. It’s a well-animated show (I really like Studio Lerche, in addition to having made my personal favorite anime, they just seem like they put a lot of effort into projects that aren’t really deserving of it, like Classroom of the Elite). The bright aesthetic and set design are both awesome, and overall this is just a very well-produced premiere.
But there are simply too many other things to watch this season to spend my time on it.
MAL lists a 5/10 score as “average”, and I think that suits Radiant pretty nicely.
Premiere Impressions – Boarding School Juliet
Way different and way better than I was expecting.
From the title, I was prepared for a boring Ouran ripoff (like Shomin Sample), but was not expecting an actual Romeo and Juliet story. Now, I absolutely despise Romeo and Juliet, but this one has some teeth to it.
We have a boarding school that plays host to a war by proxy of two nations, where the very first scene is a badass gang war (and the last a dramatic swordfight), and the leader of the Black side (Romio) has long fostered a crush on the leader of the White side (Juliet). By the end of the episode, true to the inspiration, we’ve moved much faster than expected, with the two of them already having it out in a Shakespearean duel as they discuss their feelings, and deciding to try a secret relationship. Romio knows that Juliet is the strongest person he’s ever met, and wants to devote his life to helping her achieve her goals.
This is a pretty excellent hook, even if along the way we do have to sit through Romio rescuing her from a rape ambush that goes largely unpunished. Hopefully that gets addressed, because otherwise this was an incredibly strong premiere!
It’s like a better version of Myriad Colors Phantom World!
It’s a gorgeous, but quiet tale from P.A. Works that sort of mixes Phantom World and Celestial Method in its style, except with a much more compelling visual aesthetic and a more intriguing mystery about a mage from the future who has gone colorblind.
The aesthetic design and worldbuilding of the future she comes from would be enough to sustain me here, but the real kicker is that her grandmother sends her back to our time (when she herself was a teenager) to find a way to solve her problem, and quite a bit of this first episode involves our heroine Hitomi having to acclimate to a past without automation, where they still use paper money, where you still have to hold your phone to talk to someone.
The design sense here is fantastic, bringing P.A. Works’ A-game with great dynamic lighting design and post-processing effects, creating a stunning work of art that becomes almost enrapturing in the last scene, where both the viewer and Hitomi get a surprise breakthrough in her predicament.
I may have had more to say the first time I wrote this post (Tumblr ate it after it posted too early), but this is absolutely a positive review – it’s a shame that Amazon is going to bury it with no promotion.
Final Thoughts – DAKAICHI -I’m being harassed by the sexiest man of the year-
I’m so sick and tired of this happening.
BL as a genre has a problem, and that problem is rape. It’s everywhere. It’s all over the place. It’s honestly incredibly heteronormative, because it reinforces the long-debunked idea that in a relationship between partners, they must play the role of the dominant man and the submissive woman.
And I realize that the seme-uke relationship is pretty much built on this idea, but the utter falseness of the whole premise combined with the fact that shows like DAKAICHI want me to root for a relationship that began with one partner saying “no” and then being ignored just makes this entire thing intolerable.
And it’s the only explicit representation gay men tend to get in anime. Even in Banana Fish, Ash is seen as close enough to a woman that he gets raped constantly offscreen. The only way to save an animated gay relationship seems to be to keep everything implied, never actually show it, the way Yuri on Ice! does.
But if this is what I can get, then at least it’s slightly more palatable than Hitorijime, if only because the cast are adults and not high schoolers. I’m worried that if I keep watching this, though, I’m going to end up forgetting how it started, and give it a score higher than it deserves, so I’m dropping it for my own sake.
4/10.
Final Thoughts – UZAMAID!
1/10.
It’s a show that wants me to sympathize with a pedophile as she grooms a child. I recognize that my praise for Happy Sugar Life is going to force me to contextualize why this is awful forever and ever, but I shouldn’t have to explain the difference between a show about a girl who is insane because the people who raised her made her this way, and one about an actual lolicon who specifically discusses her preference for prepubescent girls.
1/10! I can guarantee that this will be the worst of the season.
A very effective prologue for the tale of a sport that hasn’t gotten its due in a long time.
The setup here is nothing new, but as always, it’s all in the execution. A good sports show needs three things at the beginning.
1) A likeable protagonist. (This is where I feel that Ace of Diamond fails out of the gate.) Hinomaru falls squarely into the time-honored hot blooded redhead archetype, and honestly, it’s not broken, so why fix it?
2) An established rival. Here we have a squad of delinquents with a silver-haired leader who loses badly to Hinomaru and will inevitably come back to challenge him again, even if he joins the team.
3) A twist. Hinomaru shares one with Haikyu’s Hinata; they’re both very short, but Hinomaru is literally too short to be considered for professional sumo, so he has a hurdle to overcome by proving himself.
I’m happy to say that not only does Hinomaru check all three boxes, it’s also already been confirmed for a full two-cour runtime, meaning we should hopefully get enough time for a satisfying and inevitable tournament arc with some sort of resolution. Because of the subject, Hinomaru Sumo is inevitably going to be under-watched outside Japan, but I’m here to say that missing it would be a lot of wasted fun.
Premiere Impressions – Bloom Into You
This is all very, very gay, and I’m living for it.
After NTR, after Citrus, finally we have an honest-to-God, heartwarming yuri romance that doesn’t have to involve questions of consent, and I am just so very ready for it. Studio TROYCA is also continuing its streak here of fantastic-looking productions (barring perhaps IDOLISH7, which I have yet to sit down and finish).
The setup is actually pretty clever, too, as it steals the traditional slice-of-life scenario of an indecisive girl getting dragged into a club she wasn’t particularly interested in. In this case, though, what she finds is a group of mostly rational, normal people just doing their jobs and drinking tea. It’s weirdly refreshing to see a student council that’s exactly what they would be in real life, minus the fact that you have to walk through a forest to reach the club room.
I quite like our couple, too. They’re not particularly out there, but I’m very much ready for a depiction of an average high school lesbian romance, with all the confusion and awkwardness that goes along with that.
The one thing I’m kind of concerned about is the backpedal near the end of the episode, right after the climax. It makes it seem a little cheap to come right up to the line of a love confession and then just have someone declare that they weren’t really sure what they were doing and just take back the whole interaction. But it also isn’t exactly uncommon in immature romances like this one, so I’ll let it slide.
HIDIVE just needs to champion this over all its other shows this season and maybe it can turn its bad habit of backing the wrong horse around!
Final Thoughts – Ms Vampire who lives in my neighborhood.
Just lacking in anything interesting.
Ms. Vampire looks to be more or less a grab at the audience of last year’s Dragon Maid, only without much of the imagination or originality, and the only real pull being that the lesbian element is pretty much full-text instead of being implied. The problem is that neither of the girls we met in this first episode are particularly entertaining (oh, the vampire can use Amazon.jp, what a twist! The human girl is obsessed with creepy dolls, how neat!). The jokes aren’t funny and you’ve heard them before. The look of the show is as blatant as you can get in terms of trying to copy those more successful than it.
Most importantly, i just have no interest in watching more than one episode.
I’m blaming this on the director, who somehow was behind all three seasons of the brilliant Bakuman., and both seasons of the famously forgettable Active Raid. He hasn’t made anything watchable since Castle Town Dandelion, and it may be time for him to hang it up if these are the junky kind of projects he’ll be handed from here on out.
5/10.
Final Thoughts – Bakumatsu
Look, it’s not trying, do I have to?
Bakumatsu is just so incredibly standard for a dating sim game. The only real distinction it offers is the fact that the heroine doesn’t seem to be present, but otherwise, this show is just plain oatmeal. It’s not the worst thing, but you know you could be eating something more interesting.
We have the story of two pretty samurai boys traveling to another timeline after trying to steal a mysterious pocket watch for reasons, and the two of them are of course a serious/goofball odd couple you’ve seen a thousand times. The background element of the giant tree is nice, but otherwise, the backgrounds look almost stolen from the underworld of The Morose Mononokean, and the characters are generic and unimaginative.
Basically, yeah, it just doesn’t seem like a ton of effort went into this. While it doesn’t look as bad as, say, Lord of Vermilion from last season, I’m tired of praising passable, C+ animation that does the bare minimum not to make me want to pull my eyes out.
The Arcane Archive 