Final Thoughts – Lost Song

What a weird show.

Lost Song, for its first half, is a pretty enjoyable if not particularly original JRPG story where magic is performed by select individuals who can use the power of song to heal others and harness the elements. It almost reminds me of a Tales story, especially since in the second half, the tone shifts enormously and becomes a lot more mind-screwy, and it all wraps up in a messy, epic, enjoyable finale that doesn’t make a ton of sense but manages to be pretty thrilling anyway.

An original story brought to you by LIDENFILMS and first-time director team(? I think they’re two people, I can’t find a consistent listing) Junpei & Morita (whose only other credit is series composition on Occultic;Nine, interestingly), Lost Song appears to be almost entirely Morita’s vision, given that he is personally given most of the important credits. Luckily Lost Song manages to look decent if not spectacular, though the dynamic lighting usually works well in its favor, and the abundance of sky shots look beautiful, though the design isn’t going to turn any heads. The music is also relatively average, with the exception of the in-universe singing, which sounds excellent, especially on the part of debut actress Konomi Suzuki as Rin. That being said, I did switch to the dub halfway through, and wound up enjoying it due to the fact that Yukari Tamura seems very miscast as Finis, taking her airheaded aspects and playing them up in her performance of a character that is given a great amount of importance in the story. Melissa Fahn winds up sounding a lot better in comparison. Thankfully, Netflix didn’t dub the music or anything, so I got to enjoy Suzuki’s vocal performance anyway.

This is the best middle-card Netflix show I’ve seen yet, and I’m curious to see what the already announced “new project” might be, though we’ll have to wait until February for more information on that. I’m not really sure where it goes from here aside from a few easy predictions, but I’m excited to see more.

Final Score: 7/10

Final Thoughts – Back Street Girls -GOKUDOLS-

What on Earth were the licensing people smoking?

I would understand if Crunchyroll got this one, because they literally try to license everything, but I’m truly baffled over why Netflix would selectively license a show with such an offensive concept. For those who don’t know, Back Street Girls is about three Yakuza men who are forced on a whim by their boss to undergo sex reassignment surgery into teenage-looking girls in order to become idols.

You read that right.

Particularly with the current political climate surrounding trans people in the U.S., this show is a complete P.R. nightmare to release. It’s trying to be a comedy, but I was so disgusted by the concept that nothing was funny at all, because what kind of fucked-up person still tries to pass this off as a joke?

And what in the seven hells is Chiaki Kon doing directing this? This is the woman who directed Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni, and I have to imagine she was desperate for work or something, because Back Street Girls also looks like garbage.

I refuse to give this any more of my time.

Final Score: 2/10.

Final Thoughts – Kakegurui

A waste of a pretty good production budget.

Kakegurui pretty quickly presents itself as one of Mappa’s best-looking shows, but I do not for the life of me understand why this specific show got so much hype around it while it was airing, because its tone problems are immediate and seemingly insurmountable. I was almost willing to forget my prejudices at the door (being one of the many people who saw Mother’s Basement brutally take this one down) and give it a proper go, but Kakegurui runs on two things – sexuality and gambling, and it flushes both of them down the toilet right away.

The sexuality aspect was always going to be lost on me because I’m not attracted to women and get no excitement from watching them sadistically (metaphorically) go at it, but the gambling just goes right out the window in the very first matchup, which happens very quickly – you would ordinarily see a show with the “psychological” tag at least taking its time, but halfway through the runtime of the premiere, we’re already almost done with the first gambling event, and our protagonist has pretty clearly been playing her opponent from the very beginning. After seemingly losing everything, she casually presents the room with $100,000 and dresses down the girl on the other side of the table, an alpha bitch who has been low-key cheating, beating her easily and demonstrating that she was in control the entire time.

While I’m fine with overwhelming shows of force by protagonists proving themselves in a first episode (it’s a staple of shonen and sports shows, after all), in a show primarily focused on the thrill of gambling, we immediately make Jabami’s stakes unclear, which might be okay if it didn’t set the tone of what I already know to be a future of her pulling massive amounts of money out of her ass at the drop of a hat and proving that she never really loses. That sounds boring as hell to me, so I’ll be leaving this after episode one, thank you.

Final Score: 4/10.

Final Thoughts – Forest of Piano

Weird flex, but okay.

So, some backstory. Forest of Piano was produced by what is supposedly Studio Gainax back from a long slumber, but is in actuality a subsidiary studio operating as Gainax, hence why it’s labelled improperly on MyAnimeList – it would be inaccurate to say that Gainax itself worked on this.

And that’s not to say that it looks bad or anything – there are certainly oddities about the production and I wouldn’t say that I really like the motion-capture CGI scenes of the pianists – but more that it shouldn’t carry the pedigree of the studio that Anno built. Indeed, I feel like Gainax would have injected a little more personality into this one.

What we have here is an adaptation that’s essentially presenting itself as a prestige piece in execution, a very classy story that spends a significant amount of its runtime in a concert hall, but which carries with it a lot of outdated tropes that grind on a lot of audiences, most notably the utterly constant character shilling.

See, our main character Kai is a genius of the piano, and while I don’t mind that in and of itself, the fact that it is commented on by every individual character multiple times per episode is incredibly grating because at a certain point it makes me stop believing them. See, this kind of thing can certainly happen in real life, but the story paints Kai as basically a god come down to earth to bless the people with his piano skill, and when there’s this much shilling going on, it has the effect of turning anyone against him into a philistine who wants to hold him back, or someone who simply doesn’t understand how amazing he is.

I will say that this aspect didn’t completely stop me from enjoying Forest of Piano, and indeed I will more than likely watch the second season when it comes out next year. The earnest exploration of classical music paints it as a strange and interesting contrast to ClassicaLoid, and the show is very good at atmospheric sound when presenting its performances, often transforming any venue into the titular forest to beautiful effect. What I’m hoping for out of the next season is something more personal, though – in Kai’s meteoric rise, we very often are not really presented with what music even means to him – why does he pick the pieces he does for the Chopin competition? And I would like to see a better exploration of the side characters, most especially Ajino, as by the end of this first half I am pretty unsure of what his role in the story even is at this point. The show also pretty clearly sets up several characters in the final few episodes that are meant to carry more weight than they do simply because of their limited screentime. I want a more fleshed-out cast that aren’t just constantly bowing to Kai Ichinose.

Final Score: 6/10.

Final Thoughts – Aggretsuko

A pretty shining example of Netflix throwing their money at the right horse.

Eight months divorced from the flood of Aggretsuko thinkpieces, I finally managed to sit down and watch all of it over the course of an evening, and I came away with something not only satisfying, but incredibly impressive. It starts with such a simple premise and then works its way outwards into a series of incredibly relatable stories and characters.

You wouldn’t think that what looks like an extended series of Flash animations would cohere nearly as well as the first season of Aggretsuko, and indeed I wouldn’t have been surprised if this had merely been an episodic series revolving around challenges at the office, but instead the narrative closely follows Retsuko’s personal life and turns her into someone that pretty much anyone my age can relate to – she hates her boss who thinks he’s the best thing since sliced bread, she doesn’t know what she wants to do for the rest of her life, and she has to secretly hide her incredibly extra aggressive side from the view of the people it’s directed towards. And if that had been the extent of the joke, again, I wouldn’t have been surprised, but she actually branches out and makes new friends whom she can trust with her secret and whom are older than her, but very supportive. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that dynamic play out in a work comedy before, but it’s very nice to see how quickly things develop and how the status quo doesn’t ever really go away, but it does prove pretty flexible.

There are elements that hold the show back. While the Flash-style animation is used to pretty decent comedic effect, it’s not great at conveying a lot of visual clues. The metaphor used in the last few episodes ends up needing to be focused on a lot just to make sure the audience remains aware of it, and the ending is enough of a cop-out that it wouldn’t terribly surprise me if the next season fully disregards it, but if we can keep the continuity ball rolling, Aggretsuko could be a steady and highly enjoyable franchise that I’m looking forward to seeing more of.

Oh, and a side note, I do like that Netflix seems to be using the same renewal treatment for its original animations as it does with its fully in-house productions, so if the industry could get into that habit of not leaving people desperately in suspense for years at a time, that would be pretty great.

Final Score: 8/10 (9/10 if the ending actually matters next season.)

Final Thoughts – Hero Mask

What a baffling way to start a show.

I don’t have a ton to say about this one, since I’m absolutely dropping it after a terrible premiere that wasn’t even the fun kind of garbage-y terrible, mostly just a this-all-could-have-been-avoided kind of bad. It’s incompetent rather than insulting.

First things first, I noticed right away that the editing in this show is awkward as hell and a lot of cuts end quicker than they need to. This was an ONA, there was no need to keep a strict episode length, so I don’t get why nothing has any time to land, it just keeps moving from scene to scene in a really awkward way that makes it difficult to follow along sometimes.

Second, we’re starting in medias res, and while that’s definitely not a flaw in itself, here it seems more like a way to just skip the entire beginning of a story – a named and supposedly important character dies in the very first episode, and the scene is framed in such a way that we’re supposed to be shocked and emotional, but the actual reaction is more along the lines of “I barely know who this person is, and now suddenly she’s dead, so why was I meant to care?”. Ordinarily, this would be accompanied by some sort of audience surrogate character, but not in Hero Mask, and I can barely tell what’s supposed to be happening at all.

The production also looks bad even for Pierrot standards. They tend to go for crowd shots but didn’t have the sense to even just make them bad CGI, and the lack of inbetweens makes them look choppy and awkward, especially with the level of detail they’re going for.

Lastly, the very first impression the show makes is one of the most boring openings I’ve ever seen, which in contrast is strictly CGI and consists of a paper-folding visualizer just counting upwards with a dull instrumental track behind it.

I do not understand why Pierrot was the one given this project. I’m not seeing a lot of potential here regardless, but this sort of prestige-mystery is not their bag and it seems like they’re trying to make a 12-episode budget stretch for 15. No wonder I’d heard barely anything about this one until right before it came out.

3/10, dropped after one episode.

Updated Impressions – SSSS. Gridman

TRIGGER returns to glory with their personal take on one of the oldest genres in Japanese television.

So, speaking as an adult, I loved Power Rangers when I was a kid (I started watching right around Ninja Storm) but, trying to go back in now, I can’t stand how cheesy it all comes across as. It’s something that I just can’t put nostalgia goggles on for and can’t sit through comfortably because it just feels so immature. While Power Rangers certainly started in Japan (and I’ve not been able to really give Super Sentai shows their own shot due to them being largely unavailable here), the fights against giant monsters at the end of every episode were more or less their own separate genre, with their most recognizable entry being the Godzilla franchise.

Of course, there was also Ultraman, which even briefly tried to be A Thing when Saban got a hold of it and started airing it in the U.S., but having tried that, the entire thing seemed really silly to me. What I wanted was something much less episodic and more tight. These shows go on for over fifty episodes just to keep perpetually airing, and though they do tell a story, most of them could be effectively told in half (or even less) of that time. (I recognize that I have totally enjoyed shows like that – Brave Beats, for example – but usually they have a pretty distinct personality to get me really hooked.)

Thank God for TRIGGER, coming along and doing exactly that, telling a tightly-plotted story about fighting giant monsters in only twelve episodes, while giving it just the slightest bit of maturity to make it way more palatable for adults. Every genre staple is accounted for – lots of different monsters that do different things, lots of toyetic attachments to the main robot hero, and a reset button that undoes all the destruction after every attack so this doesn’t turn into a disaster story – but it’s all presented in a way that won’t make adult viewers think of it as lazy writing.

Speaking of lazy writing, though, something that happened late in the sixth episode is tripping me up here, though, and it hurts me to mention it because the creative direction of the sequence in question was genius. In the sixth episode, there exists a really terrible infodump that frankly drew comparisons in my head to Another, one of the most poorly-written shows I’ve ever seen, and it really harshed my buzz, so I have to give out yet another 7/10 thus far.

Updated Impressions – Goblin Slayer

Definitely held up the way I was hoping for.

The tone of this show has gone back and forth between the Dark Souls vibe it was giving me for the first few episodes, and a dark take on something like DanMachi, but thus far I’m pretty hopeful for this series sticking the landing, and I’ll tell you what I’m basing that on.

Thus far, the characters have been explicitly stopped from framing Goblin Slayer himself as some kind of hero, and pretty much everyone that actually goes adventuring with him will understand by the end that he’s goddamn crazy. He doesn’t fight goblins because he’s altruistic, he does it because he’s a vengeful psychopath trying to rack up a body count. Luckily for society, his attitude pretty much only extends to goblins, but what I’m really looking for out of Goblin Slayer (which will get it an 8- or 9/10 if the rest of the show can hold up, for the record) is to get a proper follow-through on that idea. I want to see the man really acknowledged as the crazy murderer he is. If that doesn’t happen, it will sour my opinion on this one considerably.

You may have noticed that I won’t be giving this one a perfect score even if it does everything I want it to, and that’s simple – the director still tries way, way too hard to push the TNA every chance that he gets. While I get that some elements of this are from the source material, actually seeing them played out is just distracting, and we absolutely did not need any graphic rape or implied rape, particularly when the women’s (and it is always women, because every monster sees them as a sex object first) savaged body is framed for titillation. This is an element that gets on my nerves in any show at all, because I don’t understand the reason you’d want to put it into a broadcast show. Speaking pragmatically, there is already plenty of actually-explicit hentai out there to pander to rape fetishists, so I don’t really get why they would come to something that can’t show anything happening.

That’s currently dragging on me a lot, so for the moment, it’s getting a 7/10.

Updated Impressions – Bloom Into You

Being perfectly honest, I almost dropped this one.

I gave it the traditional three-episode-try (even though I don’t really subscribe to that way of thinking, hence why I drop most things after one or even half of one episode) and at the end of the third episode, Bloom Into You had completely lost its hook in me by making Nanami utterly insufferable with her constant pestering of Yuu about her unrequited love for her, not developing any of its side characters, and not making any real plot progress. I am happy to report that the following three episodes made a pretty decent recovery, but I want to stress that episodes two and three are very boring and off-putting.

Still with me? Good.

The second quarter of the show manages a rerailment by recontextualizing Yuu’s refusal to reciprocate Nanami’s feelings as explicitly being her uncertainty over whether she can feel that way about anyone, and does a great deal to flesh out other members of the student council into at least two-dimensional people. We’ve at least reached the level of “good”, but there are still issues I’m having here with the way this show is produced.

Normally, TROYCA make excellently-animated shows, and Bloom Into You isn’t an exception to that, but the aesthetic of this show is, while somewhat stylized, very boring. The average color trends somewhere around beige-orange, and it doesn’t work because the show doesn’t lean into this filter the way that, say, No Game No Life does. It just perpetually looks like the sun is setting in the background of every scene.

Bloom Into You still has a bit of a hill to climb in my head before I would strongly recommend it, but it is at least still doing better than NTR or Citrus, so there’s hope yet.

Score so far: 6/10