Final Thoughts – Seven Senses of the Re’Union

This one frustrated me to no end, because it was one of the surprise highlights of the season in its first half, and then…

The storytelling essentially jumped overboard.

The big twist was exactly what I said it would be (that the game was obviously a front) but not only does very little ultimately come of it, it isn’t even something that comes up organically. Episode 7 gets the ball rolling in the department of major contrivances, but the beginning of episode 8 takes the cake. With no explanation for how it happened at all, we suddenly get thrust into a parallel timeline for ten minutes so Haruto has somewhere quiet so that he can have the major plot infodumped to him by a character that could absolutely have told him all of this information sooner.

And what follows isn’t an unsalvageable mess, but the sheer number of plot contrivances take this out of the realm of an eight or nine, bringing it down to something I would merely consider “watchable”.

Which is a shame, because I enjoyed a lot of the themes present in this narrative. The main cast met as kids and then went six years without speaking to each other, and they’ve all got a bit of arrested development to go with that, whether it’s feelings that were never realized, a desperate grab for as much power as possible, or a desire to take your tragic past and murder the hell out of it to avoid any self-examination. I liked the idea that the game in the title isn’t a standard RPG, but rather a playground for psychic powers (which is why the rules and limitations are so unclear – there aren’t any), making it more akin to a fantasy world that just happens to have a game on top of it.

But with the collapse of the narrative and the fact that it literally never answers the biggest mysteries of the show and never will… Yeah, I’m sorry. Skip it.

4/10.

Final? Thoughts – Planet With

I’m gonna be real, I feel like I’ve failed here.

And not in the sense that a show I was championing ended up making me never want to look at it again (yeah, I’m still not pleased about what happened to KADO) but in almost the reverse. I just do not understand the utterly rapturous praise heaped onto Planet With. I would say it was good, but hardly the best of the year or even the best of the season (though this season in general has been running pretty slim).

This show has never been able to capture me again the way its premiere did, and I’m just not sure why. It’s one of the most interesting, original productions I’ve ever seen with a writer I know is reliable, and yet I was just never able to fully invest in it. Was I just not in a good mood while watching? Was I not paying close enough attention? It’s totally beyond me, and I’m gonna take full responsibility for that and leave it entirely unscored even though I finished it. Maybe at some point I’ll be able to revisit it and see it through someone else’s eyes, but for now, I’m gonna chalk it up to a loss on my part.

Final Thoughts – Major 2nd

I really didn’t mean to review this right after Harukana Receive, because I feel like I’m gonna repeat myself a lot, but execution, execution, execution.

Let me get one issue out of the way first – Major ran for six seasons in Japan without ever once touching North America, and that’s not the ideal situation to be in going into its sequel. While sports anime generally bomb over here unless they star hot sad boys (see Free!, Haikyu) so I understand the reasoning, a lot of the emotional beats of this show are tied to the viewer’s previous experience with the characters who appeared in the original. I really hope that Crunchyroll license-rescues the original Major series now that years have gone by and they can likely get the entire series for a lump sum.

With that out of the way, Major 2nd is still a perfectly acceptable entry into the genre that seems to be building up a foundation for another long-running franchise that I must say I’m eagerly awaiting. While its problems are certainly easy to pick out (the teammates beyond the main characters are paper-thin, it doesn’t look especially impressive, and Daigo is kind of a brat in the beginning) I can’t exactly say that it isn’t good just because it can’t live up to Big Windup!. The characters that we did get are interesting (I repeat that I like the idea of a sports show where the main character isn’t the prodigy and doesn’t even know what position he’s supposed to be in, I like that the actual prodigy character is kind of detached about the entire thing because baseball is just an excuse to hang out with his friends, and I like that the grumpy team ace clearly has a reason to be grumpy all the time), the story is mostly predictable but with a few really well-done twists in the final few episodes, and I appreciate the start-from-the-beginning approach that it would appear the predecessor went for as well, going from the very start of these characters’ baseball careers.

So, in the likely event of another season, I would like to see a plot that doesn’t force our main battery duo apart for a majority of the season, I would like to see Urabe return to the story, and I want to see a little more of Daigo’s father.

Final score: 7/10.

Final Thoughts – Harukana Receive

Good execution is still everything.

A single-cour beach volleyball show was never going to be a genre classic (and I’d heavily argue that you need at least two cours to tell a decent sports story if you aren’t going to pace it like Umamusume) but Harukana Recieve nails the sweet spot of a cute-girls show with an actual plot, even if the bones of it are certainly nothing new.

But while I’ve absolutely criticized shows for their lack of ambition before, I want to be clear that execution is still the most important element, because it tends to be far more noticeable. A competently-told story with just a few decent ideas (like Kiznaiver) will, in my opinion, always win over stories with lofty ideas but no plan for seeing them to a satisfying conclusion (like Darling in the FRANXX).

So, as for Harukana Receive, it managed to be a story with relatable characters and a properly-paced, well-told story. That may seem like I’m damning it with faint praise, but it wasn’t going for anything more than that, and it met pretty much exactly the expectations I had going into it. I have no reasonable complaints aside from the overuse of the sand effect in post-processing and the fact that I really don’t like the color composition on the main duo’s bathing suits.

It even managed to deliver a genuinely good final episode that ended on a satisfying note while also setting up for a potential continuation, something that  a lot of projects like this avert in favor of ending in the middle of the story in order to make a last-ditch boost in manga sales. (I’m still very bitter about the ending of Baby Steps, okay?) While it didn’t go for any heartstring-pulling gut shots, I’m pleased with how this story ended.

Final Score: 7/10.

truepokefan:

truepokefan:

truepokefan:

truepokefan:

truepokefan:

truepokefan:

I’m taking Rowlet with me on my archaeological trip through Scotland and nobody is gonna stop me

Arrrived at the first hotel! Comfy!

Hadrian’s Wall!

Log canoe at the Scottisch Crannog Centre

Loch Ness!

Urquhart Castle (at Loch Ness)!

Stone Circle of Brodgar

Stirling Castle!

Digging site at Skara Brae, Orkney Islands

Flying back to Amsterdam, thanks for following our jouney! 😀

Source: truepokefan

Manga Review – That Blue Sky Feeling, Volume 1

A much more heartfelt and earnest romance.

And by the end of this first volume, we haven’t quite gotten there yet, but it certainly seems to be heading in that direction. That Blue Sky Feeling is probably one of the most deliberately slow-burning starts I’ve seen in queer romance manga, and in this case it’s more than welcome, because I’m finding a similar fondness for this as I had for Tsukigakirei last summer – feelings like this are complicated for young people, particularly if you’re dealing with LGBT people for the first time in your life, and even more so if you live in a country that still faces as many issues in that department as Japan, where the idea of “don’t ask, don’t tell” is certainly well in effect.

What we essentially have here is a realistic coming-of-age story about a boy – Noshiro – who has never really thought about romance or sex, wanting to befriend another boy – Sanada – who he knows is gay, simply because he’s alone all the time. What unfolds from there is a really well-paced story where a lot happens in just one volume, but the progression of the plot feels very natural, and our hero does not seem to have come close to realizing his own feelings yet, even though he can describe the way he feels about his new friend. The real highlight of the story is Sanada’s ex-boyfriend Hide, who takes on a mature mentor role to the adolescent struggles of Noshiro and Sanada, and winds up intentionally meddling in their friendship simply because he knows Sanada well enough to see that he’s unwilling to let his guard down, which is why he’s so frequently alone.

I honestly don’t have much more to describe the story other than telling you to go read it, but the artwork is incredibly soft and clean-looking. I very much like Noshiro’s character design, as his young-bara body type clues you in quickly that this isn’t a story meant for women to fetishize, like Hanger is, but instead is meant to be something more rational and thought-out. (Generally in BL stories written for a female audience, the boys in question will very rarely get to be more muscular-looking than the cast of Free!, since women often don’t get as much of a physical reaction from looks as they do from personality, so the fact that boys of Noshiro’s body type are implied to be Sanada’s turn-on is also pretty telling and I love this detail.)

Basically I can’t recommend it enough and it was one of the fastest manga purchases I’ve ever decided on. 9/10.

Final Thoughts – Holmes of Kyoto

The spell has been broken, and it did not take much longer than my last review.

Let me start with the most obvious problem here; the seventh episode is one of the ugliest messes I’ve seen in modern animation, with the episode being mostly comprised of off-model talking heads and panning shots, and the post-processing just can’t save it. Even the color palette has started to look completely dull as the tones on the screen just get closer and closer together, only making it more noticeable that the characters are being drawn incorrectly.

And while that is a problem that could, for all I know, be resolved by the next episode, I don’t see the plot recovering. We’ve gone from low-stakes art mysteries to a low-stakes, nearly parodic refitting of the Sherlockian characters into a story where nobody is likely to end up dead, and while that can work for a show with the childish excitement of something like Milky Holmes, it doesn’t work for something meant for adults, because it asks way too much in terms of investment for the quality of the show. I can’t possibly care about Moriarty when basically all he’s done thus far is act way too menacingly about his art forgery while the show tries to paint him and Holmes as bitter enemies. For this to have worked, Holmes of Kyoto needed far more dramatic stakes, and there just aren’t any.

3/10, dropped after seven episodes.