Premiere Impressions – The Promised Neverland

After the disaster that was Darling, CloverWorks appears to have finally hit a stride, even if the surprise hit source material was pretty much a guaranteed smash.

That being said, it’s certainly being used to its full potential – this episode just flew right by because the pacing on display is already excellent and the atmosphere is engaging as hell, drawing you in but keeping you ready for the shoe to really drop. I went in blind (knowing that the manga would eventually get an adaptation) and do not regret it at all, even if I do feel that the story has shown its hand a little early, with this first episode being loaded with early twists to really get you set up for where the story is going. I won’t spoil anything here for the two or three people who have waited as long as I did to get started on this, but Pastel Memories needs to take some fucking notes here.

Can I also say that this looks phenomenal? The strong art style of the manga helps for sure, but Neverland looks gorgeous in motion and even when the true nature of the story rears its head, it’s shown in fluid, horrifying, highly unsettling detail. The one thing we see in this episode makes any monster from Junji Ito Collection look lazy in comparison, and speaks to how much you need the right team to really bring out potential in source material.

Watching this may have actually lowered my opinion on Boogiepop and Others, because this is how you make a horror show slap as hard as possible.

Premiere Impressions – Dororo

Finally, we’re getting a streak going of Good Stuff, though I should expect nothing less from a Tezuka adaptation.

And in one episode it managed to thoroughly capture the darker side of the master of manga’s storytelling, carefully balancing out what would, in most hands, be an edge overload, and turning it into an incredibly compelling Warring Period action drama that has one of the coolest fight scenes I’ve ever seen in just the first episode – guys, MAPPA has pulled all the stops out for this one.

Honestly the most noteworthy thing about this is how it’s managed to not get overlooked despite the mountain of obstacles against it – it’s licensed by Amazon, meaning they won’t promote it at all and the only way to find it will be to specifically search for it, it’s based on a manga from the sixties that Americans likely will never have heard of, and that brings with it the problem of being a trope codifier for ideas that have been played to death since it came out originally, and yet MAL lists it as the fourth most popular show of the season, and the third most popular good show at that, so impressively, this one might have a shot at lasting popularity. I can dream, can’t I?

Premiere Impressions – Endro~!

From the makers of Yuki Yuna is a Hero comes…a much lighter version of that story, I guess?

Well, it would be more accurate to say that Endro’s world is closer to that of DanMachi, but very lighthearted and fun. Everyone has an RPG class and there are schools to teach kids how to be adventurers and fight monsters, with the biggest kicker being that there isn’t a major villain in this world because said villain was defeated in the first five minutes of the show, after which the credits rolled, hence the title (short for “endroll”) and then the actual show began. The villainous Demon Lord is defeated and then reincarnates into the body of a cute monster girl who travels back in time and becomes the main character’s teacher before she rose up to become a Hero, and I know I’m losing you, but honestly it’s so cute that I can’t fault it for this concept. One of the keys to making a worthwhile Cute Girls show is earnestness, and that’s something Endro certainly carries.

I’m also pleased to report that Studio Gakumi hasn’t lost their production touch – it’s not going to wow anyone, but the look of this show is very solid and it presents us with pastel, color-coded characters without being so overwhelmingly bright that it hurts to look at (like Bloom Into You was). The animation itself is exactly enough to carry the show along despite clearly not having a tremendous budget (as this is an original story) and it’s got just enough polish to really stand out next to crap like Saintia Sho and Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka.

Look, I need something to tide me over until the return of Laid-Back Camp, and this will do just fine.

Final Thoughts – Rising of the Shield Hero

Wow, I was pretty okay with this one for like a good half hour before it became The Worst.

It’s interesting that three different high-profile and long-form isekai shows are airing at the same time this season, and this is definitely the one that goes for the edgy suffering angle most, though it’s doing so in a very poorly conscious manner. (It’s literally mentioned in this first double-length episode that the highest crime in the fantasy world is rape, though this is unfortunately explained in a situation in which the woman coming forward is very maliciously lying about it, so what a perfect show to air at the height of scandals like #KickVic!)

Which is a shame, because the straightforward concept was going alright for at least the first half of this premiere. I like the idea of an isekai hero who has a lot to overcome to even be at a baseline of power, without it being because of some stupid contrivance where his power cancels out everyone else’s or something dumb like that, but unfortunately after The Worst Thing That Could Happen, he rather immediately goes from Nice Guy Seeking Girlfriend to Edgy Antihero Threatening Merchants, which carries so much awful social connotation that I can’t see straight, but let me just say that the Red Pill crowd is really gonna embrace this one.

The more I think about this one, the angrier I get, and the fact that it is the single most popular show of the season (above even Mob Psycho 100 II) with an 8.5 rating on MAL and utterly wasting the talents of Kevin Penkin only motivates me more to give it my very first 1/10 of the year.

Premiere Impressions – The Morose Mononokean II

Yay! Mononokean is back! I mean it’s not exactly Mob Psycho but I was still definitely looking forward to this one.

Luckily, The Morose Mononokean understands that it’s been gone for three years and we might need a little catch up, but all of the recap is done so organically that you might not even notice it other than going “oh, right!”. It’s actually really nice that they managed to work in who our main characters are (a high school student, a caretaker to the spirits, and a Little Yokai Friend) and what their motivations are without explicitly cutting away to explain anything. While I would still recommend watching the original first since it won’t be enough for anyone jumping in here, it’s ideal for those of us who just need a quick refresher.

We begin with a trip back to the Underworld because the Legislator has an important job for our heroes, ~~filling his tobacco pipe because his arm is broken~~ completing an assignment he can’t do in time due to his injury. Apparently he has a habit of crying wolf when it comes to the phrase “SOS”, but he does genuinely have a good reason and is more than willing to pay, instantly causing Ashiya’s eyes to light up (because he’s got a debt to pay off, see, little refresher details!) and leading him and Designated Mascot Fuzzy to sprint off through the woods while Itsuki stays behind to help with paperwork. While this story is only half over by the end of the episode, Morose Mononokean has already drawn me back in with its light, charming atmosphere and strong story foundation, as well as our endearing leading men. I’m excited to see the continuing adventures!

Final Thoughts – W’z

I may not have watched Hand Shakers but that doesn’t mean I don’t have something to say about this project…which is that it’s really, really sad. Director Shingo Suzuki (and co-director Hiromichi Kanazawa, promoted from series comp for Hand Shakers) really seem to think they’ve got something in this concept that is just not there, and they’re throwing all kinds of money behind it but absolutely do not have the talent to actualize it into something watchable.

Let’s talk about the production for a second, because we don’t often get to see cases where the production value and directorial ambition are running high but are completely wasted on people with no talent to utilize them! We get a short fight in the beginning of this episode that easily illustrates this point – having the camera swing wildly around all over the place costs a lot of money in anime, and the animation actually doesn’t look half bad, but the editing is so incompetent (and the camera crosses the action line so many times) that it becomes so confusing to watch, I didn’t even realize there were more than two people fighting. I only realized it when I went back and rewatched that minute of the episode, but it’s also completely unclear what’s actually happening since it immediately follows a timeskip and appears to take place in The World That Never Was from Kingdom Hearts II. The individual cuts don’t look half bad but the directors (and the storyboard for that matter) are so awful at putting them together into a cohesive scene that it falls right the hell apart and you just get a vague sense of people swirling around the screen and swinging things at each other, but your eyes can’t quite digest it, hence why I didn’t notice their faces.

And, already knowing by reputation that the writing in this is going to be absolute trash, I see little worth sticking around for, but I did want to at least comment on what I could parse from the first scene.

2/10 for wasting perfectly fine art! Dropped after one episode!

Premiere Impressions – Boogiepop and Others

I’ll start by saying that, like many people, I’ve never seen Boogiepop Phantom, but I’m well aware of its reputation and have certainly heard a lot about it. Having not seen the previous adaptation, I can’t say how Others is doing in comparison, but the thing that I can compare it to is the very slow-burning premiere episode of Serial Experiments Lain, which is a bit more imaginative but otherwise carries a similar moody atmosphere.

They were also similarly confusing! It’s not enough to make me want to drop it, but the end of the episode left me seriously wondering what had happened in the last act – Boogiepop appears to tell the main character that apparently someone else took care of the monster hiding in the school, so he doesn’t need to be around anymore, but we don’t get a confirmation on the identity of the beast or who killed it, which I suppose will be the big mystery going forward, but it did come a little out of nowhere. I simply felt like the situation could have been visually explained a little better, even if the characters are in the dark about it.

What may actually end up doing this show in for me is the lazy production work – if a character isn’t important to a scene, they will not have a face or move at all, and the movement we do see is as minimal as possible. This is a damn Madhouse production with direction from Shingo Natsume, the man behind the first season of One Punch Man and both seasons of Space Dandy, the two best-looking TV anime ever created, so I have absolutely no idea why it looks more like it came from Studio Deen or something, Was ACCA a better indication of what he can really get out of his people?

The audience for this one seems to not have much patience for it, so time will tell if I wind up keeping it in my watchlist, but for now, I’m willing to tolerate it given that I just dropped three shows in a row that I liked a lot less.

Final Thoughts – Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka

Look, I gave Magical Girl Site way too much of a chance last year, I’m not falling for it again.

From the director of Strike the Blood comes yet another project that continues the reputation of LIDENFILMS as a studio that will take on basically any project with a staff for hire (their only projects in the last three years that I’ve actually finished being Boarding School Juliet and Hanebado, both of which were good-not-great) and this one continues the trend of magi-girl adaptations that just bleed edge all over your floor, except this has neither the engaging premise of Magical Girl Raising Project or even the Shadow the Hedgehog Hot Topic Try Hard syndrome that made Magical Girl Site at least a little interesting to watch.

Let’s start with the production! It’s awful. It’s not as bad-looking as Saint Seiya but it is another action show that clearly has no budget for action scenes, because there is very rarely motion happening onscreen and it pretty much always looks bad. The characters aren’t always hideous, but their designs are very inconsistent and every attempt to put the heroine in a flattering outfit makes her look hilarious (especially given that her bust noticeably changes size depending on her shirt). Even in an unrevealing school uniform, her shirt clings to her awkwardly and her skirt is so short that it would be showing her butt, except she doesn’t appear to have one. I don’t normally spend this much time criticizing fanservice, except that this is just such a failed attempt at it that it kind of ruins the rest of the show. If you’ve not seen the manga, every cover shows one of the magical girl characters with heavy clothing damage, hinting that this is trying to be gritty and sexy, and dear lord is it ever not.

Speaking of gritty! The story is handled so clumsily that I found myself laughing at the gratuitous gore seen in just the first episode – we see innocent people executed by gunfire near the end in a manner so comically handled that it makes Modern Warfare 2 look positively classy in comparison, as the horrible-looking villain dude just arms himself and his accomplices in the middle of the street and appear to be running around just shooting anyone they can find for completely unclear reasons. Conveniently, the main heroine gets PTSD flashbacks from seeing mascot characters, but not from the sound of heavy gunfire and screaming. Basically, what it seems to be going for is Madoka Magica meets Call of Duty, but without the writing of the former or the production value of the latter, so it just ends up being stupid and lazy.

3/10, dropped after one episode!

Final Thoughts – The Price of Smiles

Tatsunoko Production celebrates its 55th anniversary with an original project that looks like it was copypasted from A-1 Pictures and reads like discount Macross for kids, and I’m sorry, I’m really picky during Winter since it’s the only season I go “light” on, but this first episode was just not impressive. A lot of it was spent on a meaningless fight and setting up how hard it is ruling a country as a twelve year old princess, and I’m not down for it at all. Sure, there have been plenty of child rulers in anime, but they’re usually portrayed as either being proxies (like the Emperor in Akame Ga Kill) or highly intelligent, capable prodigies (like Sora and Shiro in No Game No Life), not just normal children who inexplicably appear to be making authoritative decisions despite having no desire or skill for it. I understand that the point of the show is that she doesn’t know that war is happening on her own border, but honestly, how much of a show can you really extrapolate from that?

The mech fights don’t look terrible, but given that they look about as good as the ones in Planet With, which I only tolerated because of the strong writing in the premiere, it’s not a good enough reason to give this show a pass.

5/10, dropped after one episode.

Final Thoughts – Saint Seiya: Saintia Sho

I’ve been debating for a while whether I could even justify doing Impressions for Winter since I’m so late on finishing last year, but I finally started with this early premiere from December, and twelve minutes in I decided that I needed to say something, because dear God, this is awful.

Let’s start with the most immediately obvious thing: this show looks like garbage. I don’t know how Gonzo has found the staff to produce three shows airing at the same time (this one, Hinomaru Sumo, and Conception) and this one definitely joins Conception in the produced-on-$10-an-episode club. It looks like a bad HD re-render of a show from the nineties, but the character designs are even worse. I don’t know whose idea it was to give every single character eyes that are way too far apart, but it looks hideous in practice and makes the entire cast look evil and ugly.

Next! This is an all-female iteration of a show that normally features a male cast, and apparently that means it’s Sailor Moon, if Sailor Moon had a tentacle rape scene halfway through the first episode! I can’t even begin to express how awful this is to sit through, it’s something that has to be seen to be believed, but when the main character’s sister shows up to save her, her creepy facial expressions make it look much more like she intends to finish what the tentacles started.

I can’t imagine why anyone would want to watch this, and looking at MAL (where it currently sits with a 6.10), it seems like most people agree with me. I’m going to be even less charitable, though.

2/10. What a rotten start to the year, enough that I almost want to just abandon it with last year’s dregs even though the majority of it is airing in 2019.