Quick Final Thoughts – Food Wars: The Third Plate

Food Wars continues to flatten shonen competition under its ridiculous boot.

My issues with its main competitor are on the books, and what Food Wars has over it is pure consistency. After an iffy first episode way back in its first season, this series’ writing has been firing on all cylinders and has kept me totally invested for years. While it has not gotten any less wacky (particularly with reaction shots), the way the show plays so totally earnestly gives it major points. The show can make you totally buy into the fight against food fascism by simply not giving you the option to write it off – I can buy that our characters’ issues are as big as they seem.

And I cannot get over how well Yukihira Soma is written as a main character. Sure, he fits the “cocky underdog” mold to a T, but he doesn’t pull wins out of his ass with the power of friendship, he does so with a lot of know-how, experience, preparation and experimentation, and tends to completely humiliate his opponents for underestimating himself and his family, and he’s not even infallible! We do see him suffer crushing defeats of his own, and it’s never because his rivals were cheating.

Of course, it’s not a 10/10 experience unless it’s got a satisfying conclusion, which is unfortunately not something this series has ever presented, with this particular iteration ending mid-tournament, but it’s just because J.C. Staff ran out of material to adapt. It’ll be a bit before we see The Fourth Plate simply because the author has to keep the manga going.

9/10, though. If you haven’t gotten on this train yet, you’ve got a lot of fun ahead of you whenever you choose to catch up.

Quick Final Thoughts – Lostorage conflated WIXOSS

Better than incited by a country mile.

I really can’t overstate that while the previous season of this show wasn’t necessarily bad, the pacing was truly glacial and the deuteragonist was making idiotic decisions for the sake of the plot.

conflated tosses almost all the issues out the window and brings back the original generation characters to team up with the newer cast and give us what seems to be a proper franchise finale, in a tightly-plotted 12 episodes that present a believable story and wrap up nearly every loose end, and a lot of the ridiculous edge of the prior seasons is sanded down into something way more palatable.

While there are still problems – the rules of the game are still totally unclear and it makes for a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh-esque deus ex machina moments, and some major characters are heavily underutilized (Chinatsu and Iona get the worst of it), series staples like great music are still here, and Kiyoi works excellently as the protagonist. As a culmination of three prior seasons and a movie, conflated is the best WIXOSS has to offer, and I have no problem giving it a 9/10.

Quick Final Thoughts – Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku

It comes closer to just being The Big Bang Theory than I would like.

Honestly, I enjoyed this one, but it was absolutely not as good as Recovery of an MMO Junkie. While I appreciate the very grounded comedy, and was flabbergasted at the fact that the main couple are dating by the end of the first episode, they barely seem into each other throughout the series even though they’re framed as being a good couple. The main cast also never quite gels together as friends, and most of the time just end up split off in coupling pairs.

I also have a problem with the story structure, or more accurately, the complete lack of one. The relationships depicted end the show in pretty much the same state as they were in episode 2, and the story simply does not move. The show introduces a major character in the penultimate episode that we only barely get to know, and there is absolutely no build up or climax at any point. I recognize that everyone depicted are adults at this point so showing them totally transforming into better people wasn’t going to happen, but they all are almost entirely static.

And yet, I still found things to like here. For the most part, the show is drawn (drawn, not animated) very well, and while most of the reference humor got light chuckling from me, there was a throwback Vocaloid joke that made me genuinely laugh enough that I had to pause the show.

I also enjoyed the chemistry that the couples have with each other. While I never got the sense that Hirotaka and Narumi are really in love with each other, their dynamic as friends still totally works and watching them butt heads is interesting. I also really liked Koyanagi and Kabakura’s relationship; they give off a great, natural vibe of a couple that have been dating for a while and don’t feel like they need to impress anyone.

I also adore Naoya, despite not being introduced until the second half of the series. I could instantly understand his relationship with his brother and what they’re like as siblings, and I love his earnest-but-airheaded personality, which usually gets applied to women in shows like this. I wish his love interest had appeared sooner than the second to last episode.

7/10. Recommended for the romcom set (who got several shows to work with this season; we’ll get to it) and fans of The Big Bang Theory.

jammyscribbler:

jammyscribbler:

In case you hadn’t heard, SUE, the world’s biggest and most complete T-Rex skeleton, has come out as non-binary. This is both exquisite news and relevant to my interests so I had to draw something to welcome our new and righteous leader to the NB community. Apologies if it’s not 100% anatomically accurate,I had to simplify it a little bit so some details were lost (Would people like stickers of this?? I kind of want to make stickers of this.)

please don’t repost without permission!

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A Pride Month reminder that you can now get this on stickers, t-shirts and much more in my store!

Source: jamscandraw

Quick Final Thoughts – A Place Further Than the Universe

I guess I have a habit of procrastinating on shows that are definitely going to make me cry.

And this one accomplished that in spades, thanks to its brilliant ability to make you completely invested in its characters. These four girls are as well-developed a team as Houkago Tea-Time (and will remind you a lot of them), and their story is flawlessly constructed to draw the right emotions out of you.

And my God, does every element here work together to punch you in the gut. I watched the last two episodes back to back, and cried over and over again. What these girls find when their journey is over is a lot more than any of them could have expected, and made for a pitch-perfect finale. I might end up talking more about this one in the future, because it’s one of the most deeply affecting stories I’ve ever experienced.

10/10. A masterpiece.

Quick Final Thoughts – Caligula

I don’t understand, I really don’t.

I mean that in all sorts of ways, primarily the fact that the cast seem to frequently forget that the story is happening. I don’t understand how we go from trying to escape brainwashed imprisonment to “let’s go to a theme park opening” in the span of a single episode. I don’t understand how a show with this opening features exactly one action scene in the first five episodes, and it’s right at the beginning.

And I don’t understand how this came from the mind behind Persona 1 and 2.

This might actually be a more inept video game adaptation than Persona 5, because that might at least be interesting and make sense if you haven’t played the game, Caligula is a tonal disaster that sets up an interesting idea and then gets bored of itself.

It also still looks terrible, up to and including the boring, generic character designs. This show has absolutely no sense of consistent style.

I honestly hoped this would go somewhere cool, and it led to me watching more of it than I needed to.

3/10, dropped after five episodes.

Quick Final Thoughts – Gundam Build Divers

Way to go nowhere fast, man.

The first episode set up a pretty neat cast (at least concerning the side characters), stakes, and started with a cool battle, and then over the following five episodes, proceeded to do absolutely nothing. This spinoff was always a kids show, but that’s never been this obvious, where the plot of a Gundam show of all things has completely stalled and become Pokemon, with easy-target cheaters as the villains, and totally unmemorable amalgamations of other kid heroes as protagonists.

Honestly, this show takes the idea of a Gundam MMO and totally wastes it by just using the setting as an excuse for different locales and being really inconsistent with rules like the avatars not getting tired, which was a major plot point in episode 4 that was totally dropped when the characters were exhausted by a desert trek in episode 5. It needs some spice very badly, but it looks like we’re just doing another tournament. Hell, I know people make jokes about it, but imagine if these characters DID get trapped in the game SAO-style? It could be like Infinite Ryvius with giant robots or something. It’s not original, but it’s an idea, and that’s more than “let’s take a new setting and just do the exact same thing as last time” that we seem to be building to.

Honestly, though, most of these were problems from the start (especially the lame carbon copy kids) and I blame myself for giving it more than one episode out of some hope that we’d get cool shit out of it.

4/10, dropped after five episodes.

Quick Final Thoughts – Last Period: the journey to the end of despair

Honestly, this show just isn’t as smart or funny as it thinks it is.

Five episodes in, and my biggest issue is that the first episode had pretty much everything the show has to offer. Ordinarily that’s great, but I’m speaking literally – most of the jokes (especially calling and Choco breaking the fourth wall and explaining jokes) have just been repeated every episode, and everyone’s favorite part (the Team Rocket trio Wiseman) are relegated to the background with just tiny bit roles.

And the plots are pretty stupidly cliched, too, as we basically just reuse stock sitcom plots (winning the lottery, getting a gambling addiction, etc) that play out exactly how you think they’re going to as soon as you find out they’re happening. Obviously our main trio will just end up broke again.

And the characters mostly suck and have no distinguishable personality traits from one another. The show I compared this to before was Konosuba, but the main cast there were loads more memorable by this point, and the universe was more or less consistent.

It’s pretty clear that this is gonna follow the standard episodic comedy format and the plot will kick in in the last two or three episodes, but I don’t think I could stay interested that long.

The production is still holding up, and it’s not exactly boring, but I don’t see myself remembering it a year down the line.

5/10, just on the bad side of average.

My Hero Academia Season 3 – Episodes 3-4

See, now we’re really getting into the swing of things. The plot kicked into full gear really quickly, just in time for me to remember what’s truly good about this show.

While we start off with another training camp sequence of the kids doing fairly obvious exercises in the name of improving their Quirks (and I grow more and more suspicious that U.A. is just a front for people who like watching kids hurt themselves), an unassuming tradition (the test of courage) quickly becomes the real jumpoff point for the arc’s conflict, between the classes and the followers of Stain.

This is a pretty excellent decision as the camp routine was getting a little boring and out of hand, though I would really have liked to see more of the other groups reacting to the emergency, though we do get a couple moments to care about Class 1-B. Rather, in the fourth episode, the focus shifts almost entirely to Izuku and Kota. While I don’t feel that the emotional payoff we get here was deserved just yet, the action works really well, though this can only leave me concerned for Deku’s future as he returns to the tactic of breaking his body in order to fight.

Kota on the other hand is a bit of an obvious character, and I don’t feel like he’s as interesting as the show wants us to think he is. The standoffish kid who hates the heroes for traumatic reasons is a pretty well-used trope at this point, but he also isn’t as annoying as he could be and that’s helpful in getting me to empathize with him.

I do question the very early climax when the arc is clearly just getting started, as it really screws with story structure when you disrupt the order things are meant to happen (we should still be comfortably in the “rising action” stage), so we’ll see how they handle the buildup of the rest of the story. It’s already made a huge improvement from where it started, though.

Score so far: 7/10