Quick First Impressions – Holmes of Kyoto

Charming, but I’m not sure how long it can keep it up.

Here we have a very relaxed take on the title concept, with the added bonus of not contriving the plot so that the character is the real Sherlock, but rather, that’s just a nickname given to him for his ability to Sherlock Scan people, and he works in an antique shop, using his keen eyes to appraise pieces and the people who bring them in. It’s not the worst idea, and in practice it’s a pretty soothing, albeit very slow watch.

That being said, the production here sucks, and given the pedigree of studio Seven (not to be confused with Seven Arcs), which apart from I Can’t Understand What My Husband is Saying (which was a short series), made their name with a) complete garbage like My Wife is the Student Council President and King’s Game the Animation, and b) an awful lot of hentai.

Basically, this one’s a complete tossup and I have no idea what to expect from the most normal thing this studio has ever attempted to do, but it might be worth finding out if you’re feeling overstimulated.

Quick First Impressions – Cells at Work!

I waited on this one, because it was already getting positive buzz.

But honestly, it was very good, with the most imaginative representation of the body I’ve ever seen, and hilarious ideas and biology jokes that sold me on the concept. I really don’t have much to say that others haven’t already – the platelets are cute, White Blood Cell is awesome, really, this was a lot to pack into a premiere.

The strange part, really, is that this watches like an American TV pilot – it tells a complete story, without any real extra hooks. If you told me this was a one-episode OVA, it would have left me more or less satisfied. So I’m totally not sure where this is going, but we’ll see if it manages a hook in episode two. I have high hopes.

Quick First Impressions – Phantom in the Twilight

Really interesting for a mobage production.

To clarify, the studio behind this (Happy Elements) makes mobages, but this isn’t directly adapted from any of their projects, though it certainly watches like a dating sim show, albeit one with a refreshingly small pool of suitors. It reminds me a lot of Code:Realize, though it’s already at least more visually interesting, and the fine details of the inherited-ancestral-magic setup have some originality to them.

The protagonist has a go-getter attitude you don’t often see in shows in this genre (at least not in female leads), and I appreciate how immediately different the three men she meets are, as well as the fact that rather than swooning and declaring our hero the chosen one, they actively try and keep her away from the danger, even if the audience knows this won’t be a long-lived idea.

Essentially, it’s nothing spectacular, but it looks at least solid. I consider anything from a 6-10 to have at least been worth watching, and this falls pretty comfortably in the 6 range.

Quick Final Thoughts – The Thousand Musketeers

There’s something about this one I just don’t get.

Thousand Musketeers is just yet another run-of-the-mill mobile gacha game adaptation that spends its first episode throwing entirely too many name cards on the screen and being largely uninteresting, but it’s not the worst show I’ve seen this season.

What I don’t understand is its MAL score, which currently sits at an almost impossibly low 4.44/10, the MAL equivalent of a 2 or so. The similarly boring Touken Ranbu: Hanamaru sits almost two and a half points higher, KanColle cracks a seven, and both of those are basically the same show, so how did the public (or the less than six thousand people who chose to watch it) just decide this to be so poor? I’d give it a 4/10, which would be somewhere near a 6 on MAL, but how has the grading curve on this one come around to a score the show actually deserves for once?

There’s some interesting things to infer here, for sure, like that maybe HIDIVE subscribers are more critical of what they watch than Crunchyroll ones, or how shrinking the subject pool can skew results.

Oh, wait, I’m supposed to be talking about the show, right? It’s boring and won’t appeal to anyone but the most hardcore husbando hunters. Skip it.

Quick First Impressions – Planet With

I don’t think this was the best premiere I’ve seen yet this season, but it was definitely the one that most made me want to watch the next episode right this second.

Okay, there’s so much to unpack here, and I don’t want to spoil too much of it, so as vaguely as I can describe it, we have a boy who’s roommates might be evil, crazy UFO’s that look like lucky cat statues, ancient mechas that get invoked super-Sentai style, and it’s from the mind that brought you Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer. Watch it, and tell your friends, because the fact that not even 8,000 people have this on their MAL lists, yet Demon Lord is the fourth most popular show of the season, is a crime.

Quick First Impressions – Chie’s School Road

From Diomedea, potentially the weirdest show of the season.

I have no idea at all what to expect here. The director made Desert Punk, Black Cat, and Rosario+Vampire, but also run-of-the-mill trash like Sky Wizards Academy and My Little Monster, so I’m not sure what to say about consistency.

The only thing I can really think to compare this to is Nichijou, but it’s not quite there. Basically, the premise is that we have a girl who mimics things she sees in games (like Assassin’s Creed) when she realizes it could be advantageous in real life, like roof-running when she’s late for school because of a road closure.

A lot of the gags go on entirely too long, but there’s a pretty ingenious moment where she manipulates a snotty businessman into being a stepping stone in revenge for him insulting a nearby mother and child.

That being said, the production side here is strange. Diomedea has never been known for good-looking artwork, but what we have here is almost embarrassing. There’s no fine detail to be found anywhere, there’s a weird gag-boobs joke that gets repeated but doesn’t seem to have a punchline and isn’t animated well enough for the full Gainaxing effect they were going for, and the animation as a whole is very choppy. That being said, it isn’t bad enough to make me have to stop watching.

I’ll give this one three episodes to really hook me.

Quick Final Thoughts – Music Girls

I’m on record as one of the biggest critical fans of idol shows in the US, having declared that Love Live! Sunshine!! was a masterpiece and giving the ahead-of-its-time original iDOLM@STER a 9/10, and even saying I liked Wake Up, Girls!’ plucky attitude with a 7/10 (though I elected to skip the second season thanks to the behavior of a certain individual), and I can safely say this is the laziest attempt at the girl group genre I’ve ever seen.

And I don’t really understand how any of this came together to begin with. Studio Deen isn’t the wasteland it used to be, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen something this hideous from them. The adults look relatively normal but the teenagers have too-small heads that make them look like Precious Moments dolls, and the music and choreography are paint-drying boring. And the director was behind The Galaxy Railways, an old favorite of mine, but doesn’t seem to have had a full directorial job since then (2003), so I have no idea how the hell he ended up at the head of this mess.

Oh, and the plot is just trash. It’s like someone threw Love Live! and Wake Up, Girls! into a blender and hit “bland puree”.

This is a show I would comfortably throw tomatoes at. 3/10. Skip it, you’ve got enough waifus to not want to sit through this.

Quick Final Thoughts – How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord

No. No no no no no no.

Absolutely not. No way. Not doing it. Not expending another thought on it. No. No no no no no no.

I’m not going to do it! You have to actively TRY to be this offensively awful. Clearly this must be a joke of some kind, right? Someone sat down to write and was like “what if Overlord, but garbage”, right? They thought “it’s okay if the hero enslaves women if he does it by accident”? “I don’t want my protagonist to have any distinguishing characteristics”?

The biggest shame is that the production work is good, with super clean designs and bright colors, but it’s completely meaningless when the story is not just lazy, but lazy squared. Lazy to the power of lazy.

1/10. Couldn’t even make it through the first episode.

Quick First Impressions – Harukana Receive

See, HANEBADO? It’s easy to just pick a sport that naturally involves revealing outfits.

Seriously, though, while this wasn’t jaw-dropping, this is a solid premiere outing that throws four characters at us and gives the audience an immediate idea of what they’re like. We see a short match play out with the standard moment-of-protagonist-inspiration, and it leaves a nice idea of how things will play out.

One thing that does stand out is the production, because this show looks fantastic. Studio C2C doesn’t have a lot under its belt, but it does have SukaSuka, which I happily awarded a 9/10, and here, they seem to be going more successfully for a Kyoto Animation aesthetic than most recent attempts I’ve seen.

So, while not particularly ambitious, Harukana Receive at least looks like it’ll be a fun ride.

Quick First Impressions – HANEBADO!

Wow. The potency of the melodrama in this single episode has me totally hooked.

I’m always thankful for the summer crop of sports shows, and while I’m kinda stumped about the fact that Haikyu hasn’t gotten a fourth season yet, badminton is already looking like an excellent replacement. The opening sequence is wonderfully tense, gorgeously animated, and absolutely brutal, in a Serena Williams kind of way, and it’s followed by twenty minutes of solid, relatable drama, taking a look at what happens when someone’s thirst for winning has outpaced their talent.

That being said, there were elements here that I really wasn’t a fan of. We have an alumni coach that is just a blatantly stolen character, combining Haikyu’s Ukai with Umamusume’s Trainer, and his first impression is (albeit in a PG way) molesting a teenager. He doesn’t seem to be the absolute worst, but this leads into the other negative, which is the pretty shameless fanservice. While I understand that male-focused shows like Free! tend to have this element as well, it’s usually understandable. Here, though, we get lots of girls with improbably huge busts for being athletes, and skirts so impossibly tight that they’ve somehow ridden up to contour to the girl’s butts. I’m not a fan of acting like clothes work this way (and that includes Food Wars’ Erina apparently having a chef jacket that’s tailored to cling perfectly around her chest), and it just completely conflicts with the mood.

Overall though, this is one I’m really excited for. It’s been too long since I’ve felt the hype this genre brings (while I’m still watching Major 2nd, it took an entire cour to get to the first actual game). Getting hopeful for this one.