I have spoiled myself enough to know that there’s a conflict and story coming in the last few episodes of the show, but having just finished episode eight, I’m just really bored, and evidently so are the characters, given that said episode revolved around the princess convincing Mao to kidnap her so she can watch Yulia save her. The problem I face with Endro! is that it’s cute and I like the idea well enough, but that idea sort of ran its course and it spins its wheels a lot while running out the clock, so we can have the usual Dramatic Two-Part Finale Where Something Actually Happens, but in the intervening time…
There’s been no character development for any of the four party members, at all. The show won’t admit that Mao is its main character by virtue of being the only one with any kind of arc, while Yulia and friends have been static basically the entire time. I just don’t find it very stimulating, honestly, and I don’t feel invested enough to make it to those last few episodes when I could be finishing The Morose Mononokean or Mob Psycho, or catching up with my massive backlog of older shows.
For a brief moment, the show looked like it was going to gain a cute yuri angle as the princess fell in love with her hero, but that hasn’t actualized into anything at all, just like every other idea presented, so…meh.
It only took two more episodes of Girly Air Force for me to lose all interest as the plane-girls put their philosophical differences aside and began fighting over who gets to partner up with the protagonist, and suddenly I just do not care. (We also introduce another girl, like five episodes before the end, who seems to be much more of a plot device than an actual character, as she takes on the appearance of the girl whoever sees her is closest to…which, really?)
I’m sure there’ll be some re-escalation of the dramatic stakes in the last few episodes, but I’m just not really invested enough anymore to want to see them. I still think this show had some potential, even if it lacked originality, but at this point I don’t think too many people would care if I just dropped it, and I’m not having fun anymore, so I’m gonna do just that.
5/10. Probably the last casualty of the season, considering that all I have left are heavy-hitters and The Morose Mononokean, but hopefully I’ll knock the rest out in the next few days!
Oh, I know, I know I already talked about this show, but this was something I, as a reader of the manga, was looking forward to, and I have words.
If I was insulted by the final episode of the show itself, this was pretty definitely the nail in the coffin for this adaptation for me. For those who don’t know, each volume of the manga came with an extra all-text chapter, hilariously recounting the events from the perspective of Veldora the Tsundere Dragon Lord, observing from within Rimuru and eventually joined by Ifrit.
This “special episode” takes full advantage of that story structure by making this…a recap episode. For a season that already ended, two weeks ago, featuring maybe thirty seconds of new animation. (Oh, and a lot of clips from the first episode, which, displayed against everything else, really illustrates how much better that premiere looked than the rest of the show.) The new dialogue isn’t even funny, and the whole thing is cobbled together as lazily as I could possibly imagine.
Seriously? You could have had a 24th episode to properly set up your next season while trying to provide some sense of a satisfactory stopping point, and instead, Studio 8bit, you ended the show early to give us this bullshit? This should have been so easy that a thousand shows have already done it – just make a weekly web series running along the show, three minutes per episode, with super deformed characters, and you’re good, but instead we got this tenth-assed mess.
The best horror show to come around in a long time is not without its faults.
We all know The Promised Neverland is good and scary, it was easily the most anticipated show of the season – save for maybe Mob Psycho – and the manga was flying off of store shelves long before the adaptation was even announced. So, yes, it’s a very effective slow-burn of horror with great production work, much better than the director’s previous attempt at a show with such a tone – The Perfect Insider – and you’ve heard plenty of people tell you to watch it. I’m one of those people, but I do want to make sure that in the boatloads of positive hype this show has generated (and will continue to, since it’s getting a second season), I get the opportunity to talk about a few of its mistakes.
Mistake #1 – This story does not seem to know how to keep its own secrets. We get shown far too much too soon, and – minor spoiler – in the last episode, we get several shots of the once-terrifying demons, fully lit, in broad daylight. The mystery of what they look like is just very suddenly taken away, and mystery is pretty important for a continuing horror story.
Mistake #2 – Lying to the audience. A very large portion of the last few episodes are spent enacting the big plan they’ve been building to the whole season, and over and over again, the show goes with “you’re going to pretend that this is the plan, but really this is the plan” in the effort to keep a specific character in the dark, and by the end, it gets to the point where I can see a sizeable portion of the audience getting apathetic because there’s so many different deceptions happening at once, and it’s hard to keep up.
Otherwise? By the end, the story has pivoted much harder to the dramatic side over the horror tone it had for most of the run, and I’m eager to see if it’ll swing back around at the beginning of the next story arc. Hopefully the studio can keep up the aesthetic of the show now that we’ll be outdoors more often and probably more lit than the frequently dark first season.
My Roommate is a Cat is a pretty good rebound for director Kaoru Suzuki, previously best known for Dive!, a transparent attempt to get in on the Free! fujoshi crowd that bored me and didn’t make its characters look mature enough that anyone should be ogling them in swimsuits anyway. Roommate gives me much more Sangatsu vibes, actually, what with its intensely antisocial protagonist, and though it’s not nearly as artsy – Studio Zero-G is relatively new and has only made one other show I’ve wanted to finish, Grand Blue Dreaming, so that’s probably to be expected – it’s a nonetheless enjoyable work that I came away wanting a little more from.
The production on the show is actually pretty okay-looking for the most part, particularly the fluid animation given to the titular cat Haru. It’s clear that the studio knew she would be the big draw, and they wisely gave her shots the most love and attention – but I still think that the strongest element at play is just the realistically depicted cat. Cats in anime are often pretty docile or overly cute – see Luna from Sailor Moon, Chi from Chi’s Sweet Home, etc. – but Haru is an intensely temperamental little hellion that tears up the house, gets mad at strangers, and doesn’t understand why her owner is so bad at eating.
Basically, she’s a real cat, and that in and of itself makes her interesting, because we get to live in her head for a good chunk of each episode and view what goes on in her house from her perspective, for frequently funny results. If you don’t know this, cats generally don’t think much of their owners’ intelligence, with most of them seeing us as just really big cats who are bad at being cats, hence why many cat owners get “love presents” – our felines are trying to feed us, since we won’t go out and hunt for ourselves. Just watching that play out from the cat’s perspective is entertaining in its own right.
That being said…
I don’t think that a full-length TV series was the right way to go about this one. I feel like a shorter, perhaps twelve-minute series told entirely from Haru’s perspective would have been better, while letting details like her owner’s behavior and living conditions tell owner Subaru’s story in the background – as it is, the formula of half of each episode being the human/cat point of view gets a little too repetitive, and can come across as padding the runtime occasionally if Haru doesn’t have anything to add to what’s happening. Just a thought, though.
As it is, My Roommate is a Cat is a charming little show that carries a pretty obvious recommendation for pet owners, but needed to stray from the formula a little more for its own good. 7/10.
Run With the Wind initially seems like a pretty obvious show to make in this day and age – sports stories starring hot guys are very in – but is kind of surprising in a few ways, starting with its source material. It’s not based on a light novel, like Free!, or a manga, like Haikyuu!, but instead a singular, normal-length novel published over a decade ago. (It was later adapted into a manga, for the record, which was concluded in 2009.) Having a finite work with an already-plotted beginning, middle, and end works wonders for the pacing – I tore through this show in three days – and, bonus, means that this is a finished story. There won’t be a sequel – we get the whole thing in one go, and that’s honestly satisfying in and of itself.
It’s also set at a college, not a high school, which is always fine by me – having seen so many of these works set in high school, the idea of following characters with more freedom and capacity is novel by itself, and it also solves the problem I sometimes have with the dramatic weight placed on things like a third-year’s final tournament – in a show like Yowamushi Pedal, the graduates could (and do) just move on to competing in college and starting from the bottom, but for our secondary protagonist Haiji, this is his last year of school. He’s not at the level of being an Olympian, so this really is it for him, and it gives extra meaning to his desperation to get a group together to run the world’s most grueling race.
Background: The race depicted, the Hakone Ekiden, is real, and it’s so brutal that it ends a lot of runners’ careers before they even reach the finish line. But it’s also the pinnacle of college-level track, and something many aspire to participate in, and so Haiji gathers up our cast of underdogs and sets off to whip nine newbies and one disgraced prodigy into a team fit to take on the champions.
What follows is a gorgeously-produced and very honest depiction of the sport of cross country running. Comparisons to Yowamushi Pedal are apt – Run With the Wind does not shy away from just how much of a task it is to get a normal person ready to run a 20k, and what kind of toll it takes on people.
But that plays pretty well to its advantage, too – we become more invested as we watch the characters train, and improve, and suffer, in order to achieve this singular goal. We get to watch their motivations develop into a team mentality – some of these characters have been living together for years, others are complete strangers – and ultimately form into a band of brothers.
All of this positive buildup probably leads you to think that I’m about to give Run With the Wind a perfect score, but unfortunately, there are elements that detracted enough from the experience that I can’t leave them aside. A few members of the team never quite actualize into memorable individuals – two of them are identical twins with a crush on the same girl, and it’s not until late in the game that the show commits to having them interact with other people individually to try and differentiate them, and even after 23 episodes, I absolutely could not tell them apart. Another – the glasses-wearing Yuki – never manages to develop a subplot, merely having him act against the optimistic Haiji for the first half of the show before he gives in and fights for the team’s goal.
My other big issue involves a bit of a spoiler, but in shows like this, it’s usually pretty obvious that we’ll get to see the team make it into The Big Tournament, so I don’t count it as too much of a spoiler that yes, Kansei does get to run the Ekiden over the final few episodes. My issue comes with a major adaptational change – the protagonist in the novel is Haiji, but the protagonist in the anime is the previously-mentioned prodigy Kakeru. Reframing him as the the hero works just fine, right up until the end, where the dramatic buildup of the race fizzles, because Haiji is the character who runs the final leg of the race. From a screenwriting perspective, this was the wrong choice – despite Kakeru being the main character we’ve followed the whole time, his character arc concludes before the deuteragonist’s, downplaying its importance because it doesn’t come last. When they changed the point of view character, the race should have been changed so that Kakeru ran the final dash to the finish against the reigning champion – it would have been similar to Yowamushi Pedal, but I still think it would have been better than not following through on the biggest change from the source material. As it stands, the end of the race is a little underwhelming.
That being said, the epilogue is satisfying enough of a finale that I’m more than willing to give Run With the Wind a 9/10 and a strong recommendation to everyone.
It’s finally here! I’m so close to being done with 2018 (…mostly. We’ll get to it) that I can taste it, but in the meantime, this list is gonna be weird, because there will be things that were already on other lists since I revised my rules of what should be classified how. This post is specifically for any show that ended in 2018 and lasted longer than 13-ish episodes (including shows that aired a second season during the same year or within six months of finishing the previous one), which means that there’s about as much on it as a usual season of shows, but they all had more time to impress – or disappoint me. I’m doing a better job in recent seasons of getting to everything, but last year there were unfortunately things that I missed (I was burned out in the winter) and just have to leave aside for now because I can’t wait any longer for these lists.
Anyway! As usual, let’s start with what I skipped!
* The Seven Deadly Sins: Revival of the Commandments, The Disastrous Life of Saiki Kusuo S2, Cardcaptor Sakura Clear Card, Garo: Vanishing Line, and Mr Tonegawa: Middle Management Blues because I haven’t seen their previous seasons or parent works. (Yes, even Cardcaptor Sakura. Y’all can shoot me later.)
* Hakyuu Hoshin Engi, Beatless, and Basilisk: The Ouka Ninja Scrolls because by the time I was rounding things up, I hadn’t heard a single positive thing about any of them.
Next comes what I dropped –
WORST OF THE YEAR: Steins;Gate 0 (4/10)
What a fucking mess this show was. Aside from a very noticeable downgrade in production talent from its predecessor, the plot meanders and flirts with maybe actually happening this time before just dropping out again, over and over, to the point where I was perfectly willing to drop it two episodes from the finish line because it was such an insult to fans of the original. (Also, continued disgusting mistreatment of the transgender character.)
Gundam Build Divers (4/10)
Taking the Build series from being a well-written kids show to an averagely-written kids show that hides itself in decent mech designs.
Katana Maidens (4/10)
I remember so little about this show, and granted that I did drop it after one episode almost nine months ago, but what I did remember was that it gave me strong KanColle vibes with laughably inconsistent animation and flat characters. Meh.
Darling in the FRANXX (5/10)
This should probably be lower on the list, but I got out of Darling while the getting was good, sixteen episodes in. I understand that future episodes of the show cemented it as crappy right-wing nonsense in addition to pushing worldbuilding out of its fortieth-story window, but the moment it lost me was much sooner, when the crazy yandere female lead was reduced, almost instantly, to Good Anime Waifu as a reward to the protagonist for going against his friends with his selfish motives.
Persona 5 the Animation (5/10)
In addition to not actually finishing in 2018, Persona 5 just did not give me a single reason to watch it when I’d already finished the source game, with middling-to-bad visuals (thanks to the switch from Production I.G. to A-1 Pictures, and not even the team that created the much better-looking Day Breakers OVA before the game was released in the U.S.) and phoned-in music, which is especially unacceptable in a Persona adaptation. Also, we all absolutely called that the studio couldn’t tell the story of the entire game in just 26 episodes.
Record of Grancrest War (6/10)
There’s people that like this one a lot, but I didn’t see much that interested me in the first two episodes. I’ve heard better things about the manga.
Golden Kamuy (6/10)
I had problems with the first half of Golden Kamuy that the second half simply didn’t fix, and it became difficult for me to keep watching – the show still interrupted almost every fight scene with a dick joke, but still wanted to maintain a serious and occasionally frightening tone – and those things simply don’t go together. It needed to either spend more time being funny, or keep its lowest-common-denominator humor out of the fights.
Next, I have two shows that are (potentially permanently) On Hold, simply because it’s time for me to move on and I don’t have the time or energy to marathon them when the Winter shows are starting to wrap up:
Kakuriyo: Bed & Breakfast for Spirits, because even though I initially dropped it, I’ve heard a lot of good things since and I want to eventually give it another shot.
Yowamushi Pedal Glory Line, because despite the fact that I still enjoyed the previous season, this one started right in the middle of my burnout and I only heard bad things about it. I’ll get to it eventually, but it’s a shame that this series has been on a clear trend downwards since its revival.
And finally, the stuff I finished!
The Ancient Magus’ Bride (6/10)
Keep in mind that this is here entirely on the merits of its aesthetic and its side characters – in the end, Ancient Magus’ Bride is a Beauty and the Beast story where the beast gets what he wants without learning to be less of a dick or even apologizing for his clearly wrong actions.
Major 2nd (7/10)
Always pleased to have even just Good sports shows around, and this one is a very effective reboot of a classic series that’s never made its way stateside (man, the underperformance of Big Windup! really did a lot of damage to this genre in the West). With good character development and a decent second-generation premise, Major 2nd has the potential to be the beginning of a solid baseball story, assuming that it gets a needed followup.
IDOLiSH7 (7/10)
I dropped IDOLiSH7 when it first aired, and though I wound up enjoying it after I was very strongly urged to revisit it, the problems it started with never quite left it behind – that is, it has an okay cast of characters but doesn’t present even passable performance sequences, and if you’re going to include big song-and-dance numbers, they have to be good, or you may as well just be UtaPri.
ClassicaLoid Season 2 (8/10)
In 2017, I gave the first season of ClassicaLoid a near-perfect 9/10, and while this season gives us a satisfying conclusion to the story, it does things both a little better than the first, and also not quite as great. It’s story is much more well-integrated over the runtime so it doesn’t happen all at once in a few chunks, and the jokes that work are still absolute genius, but there’s simply too much that doesn’t quite land correctly, and a little too much immature humor, for it to reach the same lofty Hall of Fame heights as the first season. Still, one of the most underrated shows I’ve ever seen.
My Hero Academia Season 3 (8/10)
God, Izuku in that onesie is too damn cute.
My problems with Hero Academia are frustratingly persistent – the show is at its best when the students are competing with other students, because outside of last season’s Stain (a villain whose motivation is specifically related to the world of MHA), the villains are just not at all compelling and they all seem a little too generic for their own good. I just want Horikoshi to be a little bit less predictable of an author and do a little less reading of the Standard Shounen Playbook. Luckily, when it works, it works magnificently.
March Comes in Like a Lion S2 (8/10)
March remains director/auteur Akiyuki Shinbo’s most accessible work, and one of his masterpieces, as a well-paced and marvelously moody story of a depressed shogi prodigy learning to be a normal teenager before his youth completely passes him by, and the fantastic characters that surround him with their own complex problems and motivations. I just really, really hope it gets a third season eventually, because this one did not leave off on a satisfying conclusion.
Speaking of which…
Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma S3(9/10)
It’s almost a shame that My Hero Academia became hugely popular purely based on its accessibility to American audiences, because Food Wars pretty squarely deserves to be the reigning Shonen Jump king – each season has only improved on the previous one, and this one was based entirely on a continuing arc that could only have happened in the universe of this show, Fighting Food Fascism. That being said, it also leaves off right in the middle of the arc (because it had almost caught up to the manga), meaning that we have to hope that it can remain relevant long enough for there to be enough source material for another season. I’ll be crossing my fingers until they snap.
Banana Fish(9/10)
Yes, this has risen a point since my review, but Banana Fish still deserves to be thought of as both a complete masterwork of crime fiction, being fantastically paced and expertly plotted in the use of its many, many twists, and a work that disappointed the side of me that hoped that, in adapting it into the modern day, MAPPA could have managed to get the author to let them depict what is clearly a queer relationship with the authenticity and legitimacy that it deserved. It’s still amazing, though, and Amazon should be pushing it with their most lavishly-made originals. At least it was the last noitaminA show they’ll get to totally bury.
And, finally, the one you all saw coming.
BEST OF THE YEAR: Lupin the 3rd Part V (10/10)
Lupin is, quite simply, one of the pinnacles of the medium. A simple idea that can (and did) go in thousands of different directions, handled by highly creative writers and an animation staff that has been knocking it out of the park for years, despite the fact that it is criminally (heh) unrecognized in the West. To put it simply, there’s a very, very good reason that it’s been around since the 70′s.
Okay! All I have left to do is finish Dragon Pilot (waiting on a friend) and we can get the last two lists out of the way! We’re almost done…
For the majority of its run, I was totally prepared to give Slime a solid 7/10. While the show is entertaining and the production is spirited (…to start, anyway), it still falls victim to basically all of its genre’s worst habits. If the ending had been good, I would have probably bumped that up to an 8.
That changed right around episode 20, when it became clear that That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime wasn’t sure where it was going for the finale and veered very, very far off track, leading to one of the most downright insulting last episodes I’ve ever seen.
But I’ll get to that.
Now, since people seem to have mistaken Slime for anything even remotely unusual for the isekai format, I’d like to dispel that idea.
Let’s look at our protagonist, Rimuru Tempest.
Is it interesting that Rimuru is actually a slime? Oh, sure, and it makes for some pretty great comedy, but that’s not really the right question. The right question is: does it ever matter that Rimuru is a slime? The answer is yes, but it literally only ever benefits him, and he is never once held back by the limitations of being a monster.
Rimuru Tempest is almost a parody of Kirito-style heroes, because he is so hilariously overpowered that pretty much nothing can ever touch him, and he outclasses the majority of the creatures he meets by the third episode. The problem is that unlike, say, Saitama, Rimuru is a happy-go-lucky hero who is completely infallible and goes through absolutely no character development – he is exactly the same character in the final episode as he is in the first.
He has infectious energy and is very likeable, but being likeable does not make it okay for him to completely lay waste to all of the narrative stakes.
And not only doesn’t he ever make a wrong decision or face any consequences, but his attitude of complete and immediate forgiveness of all wrongdoing against him (ironically making him more Christ-like than Kazuto Jesus Kirigaya himself) mean that not a single other character really ever has to face consequences, either. The only character that he ever kills outright literally couldn’t be stopped any other way because the villain had manipulated him, and while eating him, Rimuru explicitly tells him that he’s devouring his sins, too, allowing him to rest entirely in peace. All other villains are instantly forgiven and given offers of friendship.
At least the ones whose plots are actually resolved Sorry, we’re getting there.
The series just runs along neatly, introducing fun new characters and leaving them in the background shortly afterwards, up until the last four episodes, where Rimuru completely ditches the town he spent the whole series building to go be a teacher to his friend’s former students and save them from exploding because they have too much magic.
The story essentially pulls a soft reboot, four episodes before it ends.
This final arc would maybe have been okay in a longer-running show as something that happened in the middle, but it is neither of those things, and thus it becomes a complete waste of time – all sense of escalation and stakes are dropped entirely, and the villains of the show don’t show up again until the stinger of the final episode. After four episodes spent playing Hogwarts professor, the show just…ends. Like, it just stops right in the middle of the plot, with absolutely no satisfaction of any kind – we don’t even know who the show’s actual villains are, and the show cuts off at least one episode short of a normal runtime to make room for side story episodes…
But that’s not even the worst thing.
No, the worst thing is the two consecutive montages that take up most of the last half, the first one a flashback and the second a window into what’s been happening in the city. Rather than doing proper setup for a future followup, the show wastes its audience’s time with a sad-final-episode insert song clip montage that isn’t even sad because not a single sad thing has happened.
It’s one of the worst finales I’ve ever seen, and while it isn’t quite as disappointing as KADO, it is most certainly insulting enough to drag this show’s score down significantly, all the way down to…
A 5/10. Yes, I’m prepared to defend that. What a massive disappointment.
I really feel like that first episode was more of an indicator of what was to follow than it seemed – it looked great but didn’t tell us much about the characters, and four episodes later, that’s more or less still what KOTOBUKI is in my opinion.
It’s rare for a show that relies on CGI to also look very good when it’s being traditionally animated, so I do want to start by giving KOTOBUKI credit for that – there’s plenty of character to its animation, even if the inconsistency with which it employs that CG is rather jarring from time to time, and the flying sequences still look great pretty much every time.
But there’s still the problem of it being yet another show going after Princess Principal’s formula, and not quite getting all of the elements down. The visual direction is undeniably great, but I’m just not invested in any of these characters because the show hasn’t quite established a point of view character or even really given me a good idea of who any of the girls are and what they’re doing in a mercenary flight corps when several of them don’t appear to even be adults yet.
That being said, if you’re a visuals-before-writing sort of viewer, by all means check this one out, because it’s still a stunner only a step behind Land of the Lustrous, and the number of people who haven’t checked it out yet shocks me seeing as it’s probably the best HIDIVE had to offer this season. (I swear, Sentai was doing so much better for licenses when it was working with Amazon…)
It’s very cute and has a lot of good ideas, but it’s just not gripping me the way I want it to yet.
To put it plainly, what I’m looking for out of the second half of Endro~!
is plot. We’ve set up this very Pratchett-esque setting where the
princess falls for the hero even if the hero is a girl and NPCs stand
outside to warn the party about the danger of the nearby dungeon with a
dead-eyed stare into the void, but by the end of the third episode, the
Demon Lord herself has effectively given up on her own plot and resigned
herself to being a teacher, and I’m having trouble dealing with the
lack of conflict that decision has brought to the story. The Hero’s
Party rarely fights amongst themselves and the only real story we’ve
gotten is that of what actually happened in and before the first part of
episode one…So where exactly is it going?
I have some hope that
Mao will un-abandon her plans to seize power, or her even more powerful
counterpart shows up and kidnaps the princess, or something a little
more interesting than this pleasant little plot-vacuum happens to pull
my opinion up, because halfway through, Endro~! is coasting instead of developing its characters, and I’ve dropped shows for less than that.
The Arcane Archive 