Revue Starlight – Episode 2

Just as crazy as the premiere, and it’s still shiny as hell, so I’ll take it.

For real, this show is so off-the-wall for something in its genre and I’m digging the crap out of it.

Our second episode sees hero Karen trying to get information about what’s happening to her and the other girls, and, completely failing that, using her Protagonist Determination Power, resist the attempts of the other characters to kick her out of the plot. I’m still impressed by the school scenes and just how realistically the performance school is portrayed when there’s no giraffe onscreen, and blown away by this episode’s crazy battle sequence, with props falling and mysterious stage crew people all over the place.

The character drama is also impressive for just how quickly it’s managing to unfold. It’s helped by shorthand knowledge of how these stories usually unfold, but at the end of this episode, I have a complete understanding of why Junna acts the way she does, because not being able to catch up is a painful experience.

Seriously, I wish HIDIVE would get their crap together so I can watch this on my Chromecast, it deserves a bigger screen than I’ve got for it.

Final Thoughts – MEGALOBOX

The story of one man and his quest to punch a dude.

I know, I’m really late on this one, I’m almost done with the Spring, but this one was one I was almost afraid to finish. I was worried it would do something to ruin itself for me.

It did not.

MEGALOBOX has been the secret hit of the season, and for very good reason. The story is solid and classic in its setup and formula, the aesthetic is perfectly peak 90′s throughout, and the music is fucking incredible. But the fact that it really did manage to keep that up for all 13 episodes is the real miracle of this show. MEGALOBOX is undeniable from start to end.

And what an ending it was. Obviously I’m not going to spoil it, but I wouldn’t change a single beat of this story, and the ending was pitch-perfect in its tone and direction, and the choice to make things ambiguous (until they’re suddenly not) was genius.

I honestly don’t know what else to say about this one, because it’s so perfect that it denies any one element being highlighted over anything else, but I do want to give a shout out to the ending theme by Emi Nakamura, because I never wanted to skip past it.

So, I’ll end this completely disjointed and shamefully incoherent review with my pretty obvious score.

10/10. Not to be missed.

Final Thoughts – Magical Girl Site

I gave this one more than a fair shot.

MagiSite was one of the most widely mocked shows of the spring, with one image in particular (a pair of shoes so edgy that Hot Topic wouldn’t carry them for fear of getting sued) getting passed around like Halloween candy to drive the show’s notoriety up as edgelord crap to be avoided, but the reality is that the edge level here isn’t anything new, and I wouldn’t even say that it’s “trying too hard” in the same way that Akame Ga Kill was. In fact, I liked the premiere for setting up an immediately dark, no-holds-barred show that didn’t hide the blood and violence implied in worlds where people have crazy powers like this (see Re:Creators).

No, the problem here is that the writing just fails to distinguish it by making it a blended frappe of tropes from other currently-popular shows. The plot is very nearly the same as Madoka Magica, and that doesn’t disqualify it on its own, but unlike other lookalikes (primarily Yuki Yuna is a Hero), the writing just does not make up for it.

The central difference is the candidacy for being a magical girl (which is just being female and miserable, apparently, since one of the antagonists suffered nothing worse than a scar, and created all of her own problems very directly), and the fact that these characters were all pushed to the brink already, sort of justifies the dark actions a lot of them end up taking, though some of them are just straight-up crazy and were more or less just waiting for an excuse. I like a lot of this idea, and it could have made for a more promising show.

But the script is just terrible and brings up a lot of issues that don’t make sense. I’ll grant that there were times where I shouted at the screen only for a character to echo my thoughts when things don’t make sense, but you end up with plot holes when you contradict the motivations of your universe.

It’s nothing new for magical girls to be sacrificing themselves in the process of their actions, but here, using magic is slowly but directly killing the girls in question by aging them internally to the point where when examined by doctors, one of the first antagonists is said to be literally an old woman on the inside despite only being a teenager. This is in direct conflict with the fact that there is a magical girl whose power is to heal others, including being able to reverse magical damage on other girls. So what was the point, other than that they needed a few hospital scenes? (The girl herself is also cringy as fuck, because she’s an eyepatch-wearing extreme recluse who cuts herself, takes dozens of Xanax pills at once, and insists that she isn’t emo.)

This isn’t my only plot hole issue, either, because one of the most notable aspects of the premiere is that we are shown that the main character’s brother severely beats her every single day, but when she ends up in the hospital as well, apparently none of the doctors notice the signs of long-term physical abuse. How? She should be bruised all over her stomach and have a cracked rib or two she’s been suffering through, but if all that went away just because he didn’t hit her for a week, I guess the beating just wasn’t as bad as it looked?

The last issue I’ll raise is that when the Starter Villain I mentioned earlier gets her magic sticks taken away from her and gets the plot explained to her along with the main duo, they just go along with it and don’t seem to have an issue hanging around with her despite knowing she has murdered multiple magical girls in cold blood. What?

It’s frustrating, because it’s almost there. It’s almost to what I would call passable, if not enjoyable. There are moments where I was genuinely surprised by the direction (there’s a scene in the sixth episode where two characters, one of whom is Brother-san, are sitting at a table having a pleasant but two-faced conversation, and when the camera cuts to one’s inner monologue basically explaining that he’s being two-faced, I thought it was just a tell-not-show writing mistake since the audience is already aware, but it was followed by a juxtaposition of both of them being facetious and hiding secrets from each other), and the art is minimalistic but not the hardest to look at.

I can tell halfway in, though, that Magical Girl Site just isn’t gonna be able to manage enough of an upswing for me to give it even a seven, so I’m not gonna watch it flail around. 4/10.

Final Thoughts – Umamusume: Pretty Derby

This one gave me a lot more to talk about than I had imagined.

I had taken this as pretty much just being another KanColle, and it more or less is, but it is significantly better. It’s not absolutely amazing and I probably wouldn’t have finished it if it weren’t something I watched with my boyfriend, but it did manage to win me over.

That being said, I want to get the issues I had out of the way first.

The victory concert is still just as silly in episode 13 as it was in episode 1, and only barely justifies the entire cast getting to participate in a dance party ending. It also barely gets mentioned after the first few episodes, and that ending in episode 13 is the only time we see an entire performance.

The pacing in this one is really strange. The plot moves fast enough that there’s a major race in every single episode (usually taking up the final third or so), which makes it watch pretty quickly, but the plot has an absolutely insane number of timeskips. At one point we skip forward roughly nine months in the span of a single montage.

The school setting makes little sense and doesn’t really go anywhere, since it stops being relevant at all in the second half of the show aside from just a convenient place for all the characters to live together.

This is just an okay production from P.A. Works, whom I can’t blame for the crazy character designs but can totally blame for the prevalence of flat C.G. for anyone more than four feet away from the camera, including in the opening.

But I did genuinely enjoy my time with the show. The characters are all fun and defined, I’m a sucker for a go-getter girl protagonist like Special Week, I like that Suzuka ditched her aloof schtick once she made friends, and even though not all of them paid off, I liked the rivalries that formed between characters who raced together often. I think that Seiun Sky got shafted for the last race, but otherwise the show knows when to discard extra characters it doesn’t need, which is a pretty rare occurrence for a mobile game adaptation (I will remind you that iM@S Side M had TWENTY ONE characters of supposedly equal relevance, not even counting the staff members).

I also want to mention that I’m giving this one a whole extra point for the massive attention to detail regarding the horse characters, all of whom are based on real horses and all of whom more or less perform the same way. We see a few races that are basically stand-ins for real ones that actually happened (such as the Fall Tennoushou) and apart from certain relationships (Silence Suzuka may be parentally related to the real Special Week, we don’t talk about it) it’s an excellent recreation of real-life events in anime.

So, yeah, a strong 7/10. It won’t be for everyone, but it’s structured and executed pretty well and is a great watch for horse nerds. Now, where’s the MLP crossover we never knew we wanted?

Angels of Death – Episode 2

I’ve shifted my idea of what this series is going for.

Episode two sees Rachel and Bandage Guy – now known as Isaac, or Zack – starting to work together in a twisted symbiotic relationship. Zack isn’t very smart (he can’t even read) or good at anything that doesn’t involve murder, but he wants desperately to be free from the strange building the two are trapped in. Rachel, meanwhile, appears to have entered a full dis-associative state, spending the entire episode dead-eyed and acting not at all much like a horror protagonist anymore. She’s the key to helping Zack escape, and in return, he will grant her wish to die.

So, rather than full-on horror, we’ve transitioned to light horror-themed mystery. Like I said in my first impression, I’m far more intrigued by how the relationship between these two characters will play out, and solving the mysteries the plot sets up – why can’t Rachel commit suicide? Why does Isaac have to be the one to kill her? What exactly is the nature of the building they find themselves in?

Also, is friendly Doctor Daniel actually dead?

This whole thing looks pretty heavily inspired by Danganronpa, but without aping either the premise or setting, so we’ll have to see if its story can ultimately compete. I’m rooting for it.

First Impressions – Summer 2018

We’ve got another busy season here, so let’s get right into it.

I won’t be covering Attack on Titan Season 3 or Overlord Season 3, because I haven’t seen either of those shows’ previous seasons, and I also won’t be covering Free! Dive to the Future even though I want to, because Funimation still has yet to release the prequel movie that sets up this third season and I want to go in with full context to something as surprisingly intelligent as this franchise is.

I also won’t cover Sirius the Jaeger, High Score Girl or Back Street Girls because they’ve been doomed by Netflix to not be cared about by people who watch seasonal shows. (This hurts, I was really excited for Sirius.) Zoids Wild went completely unlicensed, but considering the previous show aired on Toonami a thousand years ago, I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

My favorite premiere of the season was Planet With, because pretty much anything that reminds me of Punch Line is probably gonna get a pass in my book, and this brand of weirdness that just keeps me guessing right from moment one is right up my alley.

To recap, I also made it past the first episodes of:
* Angels of Death
* Cells at Work!
* Grand Blue Dreaming
* Hanebado!
* Banana Fish
* Seven Senses of the Re’Union (!)
* Happy Sugar Life
* Chio’s School Road (!)
* Harukana Receive
* Holmes of Kyoto (!)
* Angolmois: Record of Mongol Invasion
* Phantom in the Twilight (!)
* Revue Starlight

Anything with an (!) next to it is more or less on probation. If it hasn’t either maintained its quality or hooked me completely in 3 episodes (as is tradition), I’ll be dropping them. I’m also watching Master of Ragnarok and the Blesser of Einherjar, but explicitly not recommending it. We’ll see if I can make it through the whole thing.

We also have several holdovers from last season that are finishing up:
* Major 2nd
* Lupin III Part 5
* Steins;Gate 0
* My Hero Academia Season 3

The last show was Persona 5 the Animation but I’m now officially dropping that one because I don’t really see a need to go back to it, the conversation around it pretty much stuck with “you don’t need to watch it if you’ve played the game” and that’s exactly the impression I got.

Speaking of dropping, I put down Asobi Asobase and Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs for simply not being my thing, but the shows that I truly didn’t consider to be worth my or anyone else’s time were:
* Island
* Dropkick on My Devil!
* Lord of Vermilion: The Crimson King
* Music Girls
* The Thousand Noble Musketeers

The worst premiere I saw this season was far and away How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord!, where I didn’t even last five minutes because the show jumped directly off a cliff into the bounds of tasteless, shameless, and really specific pandering. Why it’s the fourth most popular show of the season (above every single show I kept aside from Angels of Death) I do not understand.

Overall, this is looking like another promising season. To those wondering, I haven’t totally finished spring shows yet, so those reviews should be coming soon. Keep an eye out. I’m also going to make another attempt at weekly coverage for Revue Starlight and Angels of Death (the least and most popular shows in my list), so the next thing you see should be my review of episode 2 of Angels. See you soon!

Final Thoughts – Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs

I’m kind of impressed.

The first scene of this show is
tonally confused as hell, looking sad and dramatic while also getting
in several shots of the title character’s huge chest in absolute
cleavage. We then get a hint of supernatural action before, by the end
of the first ten minutes, we have seen the title character completely
nude, had her turn red and hit the main character with things, and then
met the entire rest of the harem who conveniently show up right when he
wakes up, in addition to learning all of their archetypes.

I’m
sure that this will be perfectly fine for some people, and to those
looking for harem comedy, this looks like a pretty classic example, but
I’m just not interested in this genre at all and probably won’t ever be.
These shows were not designed for people like me to be able to get
anything out of them.

That being said, I’m once again going to
leave this unscored, because I’m not dropping it out of distaste, more
because this just isn’t my kind of show. It’s not likely to be ambitious
or give me anything intellectually, it’s just meant to be enjoyed on
the level of fighting over which girl is best, and I don’t like a single
one of them.

So, yeah, pass.

First Impressions – Grand Blue Dreaming

What an amazing bait and switch.

This chill-looking “diving” show has turned out to be a screwball meme-comedy sure to launch a thousand GIFs. This is the kind of absolute nonsense that I’m totally down for.

The main characters are all adults, too, so I don’t feel particularly ashamed of ogling the insane number of hot bara guys that spend nearly this entire episode with absolutely nothing on. If you thought Free! was shameless with its fanservice, you haven’t seen anything yet, but the reason it works for me is because the characters involved are totally okay with being in the buff for pretty much no reason. 

And the adult comedy is hilarious. The fact that the nudity in the show is played for laughs makes it work pretty much all on its own as the show sells it over and over, along with an extended sequence of alcohol jokes that aim this show pretty squarely for the adult crowd.

So, uh, yeah. I won’t pretend I like this show for purely intellectual reasons, but it’s doing pretty much everything I can think of correctly, so we’ll see if it holds up.