Quick Final Thoughts – DIVE!!

What is it with this season and exclamation points in titles?

I really don’t want to call this a Free! rip-off, but I don’t know what else to call it. So, I’m going to briefly compare the two to explain why I didn’t finish this show.

Ironically, the thing Free! has and DIVE!! does not is depth.

Free! was largely about swimming, yes, but it also placed importance on what was happening outside the pool. The characters’ personal lives are vital to the story. And here… Well, there are elements of that, but they aren’t at all important to the story and nearly 100% of the dialogue is about diving. It wants to be more ambitious than Fastest Finger First by injecting personal drama but it doesn’t work because whatever happens is usually resolved by the end of the episode or comes entirely out of left field. It can make you feel like you’re suddenly watching a different show.

So, it’s a better sports show than FFF, but it loses points for flopping hard in the drama department.

6/10, on hold after five episodes.

Quick Final Thoughts – Katsugeki/ Touken Ranbu

I admit that it took me a bit to get invested in this one, and I wasn’t really hooked until episode 6 or 7. But Katsugeki is at the very least a very well-made show. Ufotable is known for their very cinematic presentation, so it doesn’t surprise me at all that there’s going to be a movie version of this series. I’m actually looking forward to that; I want to see how it benefits from tighter pacing.

I couldn’t take Hanamaru because it seemed like such an odd choice for a cast so clearly oriented to an action show, and I can confidently say that these cute sword boys are much better suited to a serious story like this one. Even though it doesn’t really get ambitious until the second half, it ends up picking up a lot of interesting concepts – what happens when a sword meets its former master, especially when said master is about to meet their historically predetermined tragic ending? I ended up really liking the character of Horikawa, and I wish we’d seen more of his journey near the end, but if these guys get to continue their adventures beyond the movie, I’ll be along for the ride.

7/10.

Quick Final Thoughts – Gamers!

A very pleasant surprise.

Earlier this year, I really enjoyed Masamune-kun’s Revenge, and romcom nonsense runs strong in Gamers! as well. It’s a comedy of misunderstandings, which doesn’t always sit well with me, but it manages to pull off forward motion pretty well, since nobody makes any bad choices based on their assumptions. It doesn’t have the maturity that we ended up getting from Revenge, but it does have a welcome lightheartedness that keeps things fun, along with some great costume design.

7/10! This season was light on comedies and I’m glad we got at least one solid one. Maybe it’ll get a season two?

Quick Final Thoughts – Princess Principal

Way better than I even suspected from the pilot.

Anime Strike is becoming more and more important to have at this point for a lot of the best and most interesting shows, as frustrating as that is, and at first I was hooked by the aesthetic of this one, but Princess Principal drew me in further with a fantastic core cast and an appropriate amount of intrigue for a spy story, in addition to its amazing period setting. I wish we’d gotten more of a conclusion, but we’re at least left open to the possibility of a second season, and if we don’t get it, I’m pretty happy with what we got for a dramatic, epic finale.

I also wish the show would have decidedly paired its two leads, as it’s totally filled with subtext so overt it might as well have just been text, but it wasn’t nearly enough to diminish my enthusiasm.

Killer opening song, too, that totally suits the dramatic nature of the show.

9/10. And as a side note, I’m bringing Re:Creators down to a 9/10 as well, as I’ve been second guessing its perfect score. It’s still fantastic but I wouldn’t say it was better than PP.

Quick Final Thoughts – New Game!!

So, the thing that I love about New Game as compared to shows like Is the Order a Rabbit? is that it involves the forward motion I need to stay invested, and this one nails just the right amount to make me want to keep coming back. It even goes the extra mile to kick in some light drama towards the end to make the emotional payoffs feel sweeter.

It also helps that it’s not set in a school and features a cast of diverse age groups, and I’d place it happily with shows like Working! in the soft place in my heart that isn’t full of cynicism.

If you’re a fan of the warm fuzzies, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s not going to blow your mind, but it will take you into a happier world for a few hours, and I can’t ask for anything more than that.

8/10. Hopefully we get a third season, because I’m down for this as long as it goes.

Quick Final Thoughts – Fastest Finger First

I really don’t have a lot to say about this one. It’s certainly a topic I haven’t seen before, and it explores quiz bowl in a really interesting way, but it never rises above the standard level of sports anime tropes, so the concept was really the only interesting thing about it. It did have pretty decent pacing though, and if it gets a second season, I’ll be there, but if the idea of an anime about competitive quiz bowl doesn’t grab your interest all on its own, you probably won’t find anything interesting here.

Killer opening tune, though!

6/10, because it’s on the good side of average.

Quick Final Thoughts – Sakura Quest

I have my thoughts together much better here than I did for Re:Creators, which is good, because I’m sure my opinion here won’t be as widely shared.

I may have a soft spot for shows set in the countryside, but Sakura Quest more than earns praise from me. It’s a quiet, slow-burning experience that keeps things light-hearted, but is far, far more than the sum of its parts. The town of Manoyama is wonderfully realized, as are its people, reluctant to trust outsiders and apathetic to their town’s decline out of fear of losing their culture, and in depicting them, Sakura Quest shows a surprising and very welcome amount of ambition that more than justifies its double-cour runtime with pacing so smooth you won’t notice it, while throwing subplot after subplot into the air and managing to catch every one of them, and capping off with a finale that is both suitably madcap and endearingly sappy, and that brings me to the root of why I loved this show.

It’s not often that you see a show so well-executed, so grounded, and so polished, that also has absolute bucketfuls of heart, and as anyone following me knows, that’s something that will always be important to me.

10/10. Total dark horse, and more people should be talking about it.

Quick Final Thoughts – Classroom of the Elite

Wow, did I have high hopes for this one that just were not fulfilled at all. I was hoping for something a lot more intelligent or at least relevant to its concept than this, but seven episodes in and we’ve barely touched the fact that this is a special school and apparently everyone can survive just fine on zero dollars for an entire month because we skipped right over that potentially interesting idea for a student council trial that culminates in a high school aged gravure net idol almost getting raped, and this is immediately followed by a swimsuit episode.

It started with so many interesting things going for it, but I guess it just wasn’t meant to be. 4/10, dropped after six episodes.

Quick Final Thoughts – Re:CREATORS

So, this was kind of unbelievable. Honestly, this show is a perfect example of why I don’t include two-cour shows in rankings before they’re finished (or I’m finished watching them), because this would have blown past a lot of what ended up being really good last season, shows that I wanted to give attention like Atom or Tsukigakirei, and I stand by my perfect score for the latter. I don’t know that I could have thought clearly about something so much quieter and less bombastic if I’d been distracted by Re:Creators.

But, seriously, Ei Aoki and Hiroyuki Sawano, out from the shadow of Gen Urobuchi. This show was unstoppable from episode 1 and it deserves so much more recognition than apparently everyone in the anituber community can give it.

10/10.