Quick Final Thoughts – KADO: The Right Answer

Or: How to throw it all away in one episode.

I have to wonder what the hell was going through the minds of the writers behind that finale, taking every point the show had been trying to make and tossing all of it in the garbage in favor of one of the hardest left turns I’ve ever seen. All KADO had to do was end well and I would have given it a 10/10 and Best of the Season, because that’s how well it was going throughout. It was a show I was really, really eager to watch more of every week. But a show as complex as this one can be totally unraveled by a terrible ending, unfortunately. Strong themes, fantastic character writing and deep philosophy don’t mean a damn thing if the show decides that none of it matters in the end.

I do however want to give credit to a few people working on this show for outstanding contribution: Tyler Walker, the ADR director, for absolutely fantastic visual effects throughout, and Mao Ichimachi for the theme song, which eschews the trend of synths and fake guitars to create something much more moody and appropriate for the tone of the show’s first eleven episodes.

5/10. What a disappointment.

Quick Final Thoughts – Aoyama-kun is a Clean Freak!

Holy hell, this show looks awful. This is easily some of the least fluid animation I’ve seen in the modern day, there’s way too many chibi-fied moments (just because it works for Yuri on Ice! doesn’t mean it works for every sports story…) that aren’t in service of anything at all, the character designs are boring as hell, and basically apart from the art style everything about the production just screams that there’s a good reason I’ve never heard of Studio Hibari, as every decent production they’ve ever made has been with the assistance of a much better studio (see: Kiki’s Delivery Service, Char’s Counterattack).

In addition to being boring to look at, nothing about the story or characters compels me at all. I don’t get how they thought this concept could sustain a full-length series. Sure, Aoyama is decent at soccer, but his lame gimmick is that he’s a germaphobe. This is certainly following in the vein of other shows where the main character’s gimmick is the source of entertainment (Tanaka-kun is Always Listless, Haven’t You Heard? I”m Sakamoto) but this one isn’t even a comedy. It just expects you to take it totally seriously as a story with a totally unrelatable main character who gets shilled by almost everyone in the show to the point of annoyance. If you don’t get my meaning, that means that the show tries to get you to like him by having the other characters constantly fawn over his awesomeness instead of giving him any likable traits, and it just doesn’t work at all.

2/10. Man, this season is not off to a good start.

Quick Final Thoughts – Hina Logic – from Luck & Logic

The concept of a school for magical girls hasn’t been done before, and it would have been nice to see an earnest shot at it here, but like its predecessor I ended up finding it to just be uninteresting in general. Any time the first episode looked like it might go somewhere interesting, it sidestepped in favor of more cutesy cute girls, and I already have the second season of New Game!! for that. 

It’s an oversaccharine slog that shows that there are many ways to screw up an interesting concept, including just not focusing on it at all (THE SHOW ITSELF decides to shit on its own concept by pointing out that they don’t actually need to keep training these girls), and by the end of the first episode, we already have a hot springs scene, in addition to an accidental groping or two (by another girl? Gasp! How scandalous!), so yeah, this one isn’t gonna be for me at the very least. None of the characters were endearing in the slightest, the heroine’s stupid airhead schtick is already wearing out its welcome, and I know I can get better in this genre by just waiting a little longer.

3/10.

Quick Final Thoughts – Grimoire of Zero

I sort of feel the same here as I did for Alice & Zoroku, but Grimoire at least engrossed me a lot more. I was much more invested here, but the plot of this one leaves something to be desired.

I’ll be explaining my scoring scale when I make my seasonal scorecard, which won’t happen until Atom the Beginning is over, but to explain that in brief here, most of my area of expertise is in plot, so that’s where the majority of a show comes in. If things like music, character design, production value etc. are good enough for me to actually notice, I take that into account. I really enjoyed Grimoire of Zero, which places it above a 5, but not as much as Re:Zero (which I mention specifically because White Fox was also responsible for that) because Grimoire simply doesn’t have as much going on under the surface, so it has to be less than the 8 I gave Re:Zero. I also already said I liked it better than Alice & Zoroku, so it should then be better than the 6 I gave to that show. 

So, my opinion on the actual show itself? The character dynamics and designs are very nice, and I like how much more effort went into the petting zoo people than was in SukaSuka, but by the end the plot becomes totally ridiculous and the twists become very predictable. I feel like just saying that muddies my own opinion though, when my instinct is to give it a 7.

So, 7/10. Definitely recommended, despite my own confusion, to anyone looking for a nice classic action fantasy without modern genre hangups. No alternate worlds, no harem nonsense, no RPG levels. If it continues, I’ll certainly keep watching.

Quick Final Thoughts – WorldEnd/SukaSuka

Not even slightly what I expected going into it. I want to write a full review of this show that wasn’t even really on my radar originally, but that’s probably a while away from actually showing up and I want to give this the attention it deserves.

Easily one of the best light novel adaptations I’ve ever seen, and that’s important. It takes a lot to stand out in that crowd, and be something besides what people expect you to be, and it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a viable action/romance that didn’t devolve into complete garbage. SukaSuka throws a lot of balls into the air really early, and manages to catch every single one of them, and most importantly, it actually ENDS. If we never get a sequel, that’s perfectly alright, because we’re provided with a great conclusion.

I want to say a lot more, but it’s going to take time to collect my thoughts on this one.

9/10, pending further self reflection.

Quick Final Thoughts – Yowamushi Pedal New Generation

I’ll probably eventually give the first season a full review, and my intro is probably going to sound similar to this. Sports anime can be pretty well divided by whether it’s grounded in reality (Baby Steps, Big Windup) or shounen fantasy (Haikyu, Kuroko no Basuke). I’ve greatly enjoyed both, but whether you’ll be able to enjoy the latter category is very dependent on your ability to buy into how incredibly serious the story and its characters are about high school sports.

And Yowamushi is among the damn best.

The ultimate goal of a shounen series (apart from potentially running until hell freezes over) is to present a strong good versus evil story with a protagonist you can root for, and I’ve said before that I’ve never rooted for any anime character the way I do for Onoda Sakamichi. But the thing about Yowamushi is that is really deftly passes that role around to whomever the episode is focusing on. This show has always been great at developing its main cast in such a way that really they’re all protagonists, and Onoda just happens to be the main lead. While he didn’t get a ton of great moments this season due to the introduction of new characters, those newbies were developed and fleshed out beautifully, and even the designated side characters from the first two seasons get a lot of excellent moments of meta character redemption (my biggest highlight goes to Sugimoto participating in the welcome race). And while this show is famous for its drawn-out races, that’s totally fine with the way a lot of people will end up consuming it – binging this show improves its pacing considerably. 

8/10. I won’t place it up for Show of the Season because it didn’t present a conclusion of any kind, and in fact the second half of the final episode is mostly setup for the next season, but I can’t wait to come back to these guys.

Quick Final Thoughts – Alice & Zoroku

MAL defines a rating of 6/10 as “Fine”, and that’s the best description I can think of for this show. There wasn’t anything I really disliked about it, and I was never bored, but it also never grabbed me the way I wanted it to. I strongly feel that it would have benefited from a second cour and if it does continue, I will probably keep watching, but what we got was just…Fine. 

The director was also responsible for Lostorage Incited WIXOSS (which I also gave a 6) and Flying Witch (8), so I was hoping that we’d get something tonally between the two, and I suppose it did work out that way, but this is the kind of show where I could see decent slice of life episodes breaking up the major story arcs in a 26-episode run, something like three arcs of six episodes broken up by several lighter stories in between.

The show also added more characters in the first arc than were really necessary, as we don’t even see one of the superpowered children for the entire second half of the show and the twins become largely irrelevant next to the main additions for the latter half. It would have been really nice to see everyone develop and then get one last story arc where everyone is involved.

I really don’t know what else to say about the show. I enjoyed it, I just wish there were more to like about it.

6/10

Quick Final Thoughts – Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend Flat.

Holy crap.

I liked the first season alright when I watched it last year, but this one kicks up the drama into a sweet spot and makes the story a priority, and it jumps up from the ill-defined meta genre to a proper story about four creative people and their struggles with their passion. It might not be Shirobako, but it’s at least My Youth Romantic Comedy is Wrong As I Expected, and that’s a high bar for high school dramas, even if it’s the show I most compare this one to already. 

It also helps that this is one of the best-looking A-1 shows I’ve ever seen, bumping up the production values from the first season and adding much stronger direction. Everyone might still have A-1 face syndrome but it doesn’t drive me nearly as crazy when the proper digital effects are used.

The ending was a little corny, but getting back to the show’s harem roots before the end was honestly a pretty good move, since at the very least it reminded us what’s at stake for everyone. 

8/10, and a pretty serious contender for Show of the Season.

Quick Final Thoughts – Akashic Records of Bastard Magical Instructor

This show turned out to be a total rollercoaster of quality. It’s nice to have a battle school story where the protagonist is a teacher, but he still spends literally the entire show rescuing female students and they’re the only students to get any dedicated screentime. The only reason it worked enough for me to stay with it is better-than-most world building.

I should know better than to expect much at this point because I initially had no interest in this show to begin with after just seeing the poster and the godawful character designs. No school would ever, ever, EVER make their female uniform a bared midriff and a skirt that only barely covers the underwear, especially since the male uniforms are “normal”. It’s distracting.

The plot is at least somewhat of of the ordinary since the school competition normally found in shows of this template is both non-combative and not the central plot focus, but by the end it goes totally off the rails and I nearly fell asleep when one of the female students was kidnapped for the third time in a twelve-episode show.

5/10. It will keep your interest but I was just mad by the end. Go watch Chivalry of a Failed Knight again.