Final Thoughts – Fall 2018

This season dragged on me a lot, and I attribute that mostly to the fact that I moved right at the end and it put me way behind schedule, but also because a number of shows looked like they were going to really go the distance and wound up with one big disappointment or another.

That’s not to say that there weren’t gems – in fact there were a few – but this was yet another season where my “Hall of Fame” looked woefully light. That being said, I’d really like to get this over with since I have other shows to finish and three more lists to make for the year, so as usual, let’s start with the stuff I skipped entirely:

* Tokyo Ghoul re: Second Season & Gurazeni Season 2 because I didn’t watch either of their previous seasons.

* Senran Kagura Shinovi Master because Senran Kagura as a property is built entirely on half-naked girls with big boobs and that’s not going to jive with me.

Wow, that’s really it? Fall was the beginning of a lot of shows that won’t be finished until sometime in 2019, so the other shows I skipped will appear next year on the Multi-Cour list. So, moving right along, from bottom to top…

DROPPED

* WORST OF THE SEASON: TIE

UZAMAID!, My Sister My Writer (1/10)

We did have multiple entries into the Hall of Shame this season, with not one but two shows being offensive enough that they landed a 1/10 score from me, for an easily identifiable and familiar reason: actively glorifying pedophilia! That was pretty much UZAMAID!’s biggest problem, but My Sister My Writer aged up the target character in exchange for recycling the plots of OreImo and Eromanga Sensei, with all of the bullshit and none of the production values. Happy Sugar Life has even further convinced me that there is absolutely no excuse for this garbage anymore.

* Conception (2/10)

A video game adaptation that strips away the actual gameplay elements and focuses entirely on the main character figuratively fucking a lot of fantasy women to make world-saving babies, and it doesn’t even have the courtesy to look like it cost more than $5 to make.

* Ulysses: Jeanne D’arc and the Alchemist Knight (3/10)

I didn’t get far enough into this one to get to the real garbage (I’ve heard it’s another show I should probably throw in with the worst of the season) but the very first episode bored me to tears with its rote anime nonsense. I’m pretty well convinced that the only way I could ever find a Joan of Arc anime interesting is if it were an adaptation of the Level 5 PSP game.

* Between the Sky and Sea (3/10)

I can’t deconstruct this any better than Mother’s Basement did but it is just the most asinine thing I was subjected to for the whole season. Cute girls don’t fix a terminally stupid concept like “all the fish have moved into space and so now we train teenage girls to be astronaut fishers”.

* Bakumatsu (3/10)

I dropped this one an entire point from when I first reviewed it simply because I had entirely forgotten it even existed and cannot remember a single thing about it except that it was generic.

* As Miss Beelzebub Likes It (4/10)

I found this one’s first episode to be cute but entirely devoid of substance. Also, the poster still hurts my eyes to look at.

* DAKAICHI -I’m being harassed by the sexiest man of the year- (4/10) & Bloom Into You (4/10)

Proof that actual gay people just cannot have nice things, the most explicitly LGBT shows to be made in a while both suffer from the same problem: a supposedly sympathetic character having no ability to take “no” for an answer. True fact: not all gay relationships start with rape, and this is the kind of entertainment that fosters young people into not knowing how consent works.

* ReRideD: Derrida Who Leaps Through Time (4/10)

I guess everybody else saw this one coming before I did? It was the first post-premiere show I dropped because I thought the first episode showed an interesting setup, and the following episodes just completely abandoned the apocalyptic setting very quickly to show that society was pretty much fine, there were just robots roaming the earth like random D&D encounters. Man, sci-fi cannot catch a break these days.

* Ms. vampire who lives in my neighborhood. (5/10)

I can see why this might appeal to some but it’s basically just a low-rent Miss Kobayashi’s Maid Dragon and I wasn’t feeling especially charitable towards it.

* Double Decker! Doug & Kirill (5/10)

I really thought this one could get to be more interesting, but it failed to really commit to being either anime’s Brooklyn 99 (which, for the record, we have, it’s Blood Blockade Battlefront season 2) or being a serious tale about the dangers of Tide Po-I mean, drug usage, and wound up just being an uninteresting thud.

* The Girl in the Twilight (5/10)

This one really could have made it if only it had taken things a little more seriously and not made me wonder why the cast are even friends as they seem to have nothing in common. I can’t believe that the creator of this project was the guy who wrote the script for Punch Line, one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen.

* Tsurune (6/10)

I literally just finished my write-up for this, but I do not understand why the same company would make both this and a continuation of Free! airing in back-to-back seasons, it just makes this one look like a copycat even if it’s not a bad show.

UNSCORED

* Gakuen Basara: Samurai High School because I’m not familiar with the source material and that seems to be the barrier for enjoyment here.

SPECIAL

* Anima Yell! (6/10)

If you need a reminder, I dropped Anima Yell after the first episode because even though I enjoyed it, I found it too similar to Comic Girls and didn’t particularly want to go through the effort of finishing a show I was already pretty ready to score, even if it was going to be a positive one. I simply didn’t have time.

FINISHED (Note that Tumblr has completely broken and I’ve had to re-edit this portion a dozen times because it keeps randomly bolding paragraphs and losing GIFs, so if anything got lost here, I’m very sorry but there’s nothing I can do about it.)

* Boarding School Juliet (7/10)

A pleasant little romantic comedy that wasn’t what I was expecting from the first episode but was charming nevertheless. Would have been better without the involvement of attempted rape on school grounds in the premiere though.

* Release the Spyce (7/10)

A thrilling and surprisingly brutal little spy show that wound up being overshadowed by better shows with similar concepts but was a fun watch nonetheless, even if it dragged in the middle.

* Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai (8/10)

I stand by what I said before – this one would have easily scored higher with a better ending, but Bunny Girl Senpai is certainly the most approachable show of its genre and its strengths as a romance are not to be understated.

* Zombieland Saga (8/10)

Another Very Good show that could have been better with one simple change – it’s hilarious and very well-written, but those performance sequences are just awful to look at and the heavier focus on them towards the end did not help.

* Iroduku: The World in Colors (8/10)

A stunning treasure that needed a little more character work for the writing to really impress me, but with a very satisfying ending and a ton of visual creativity.

* Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san (9/10)

A fucking hysterical show scientifically grown in a lab to appeal to me, Honda-san could have been the new INFERNO COP, SAVIOR OF ANIME if more people had given it a chance.

* BEST OF THE SEASON: SSSS.Gridman (9/10)

I don’t know what else to say other than that this is easily the most criminally underappreciated show of the year. A lot of people seemed to be turned off by giant robots fighting kaiju, and those people are dumb.

And that was Fall! I’ve got a few Netflix shows left and I have to finish Classicaloid 2, and then I’ll be all done with 2018, so get ready, I’ve got a few more lists on the way!

Final Thoughts – Tsurune

Not an especially interesting offering from KyoAni.

Their big project this year, Violet Evergarden, makes Tsurune look so pedestrian by comparison that I can’t even put it into words. It’s not bad, the execution is alright, but it’s not memorable at all, and it’s because I’ve seen this show before. A kid who returns to his sport of choice after being absent due to some kind of mental hangup and is faced with a hostile teammate and a coach with a weird way of teaching?

I’m hardly the first person to say that Kyoto Animation themselves have made this show already, and it also got a third season this year (which I haven’t seen yet, for the record). And in a year with a lot of more interesting sports shows (to name a few, Major 2nd, Umamusume, Harukana Receive, hell, fucking Megalobox) I am feeling a lot less forgiving towards this one just phoning in an easy B-.

I’m also not finishing it, a decision I should have made long before it finished airing (three weeks late, I might add, a decision which baffles me). I’m willing to give it a 6/10, but not more of my time when I have other things I need to finish and it’s the very last Fall show on my list.

Final Thoughts – Merc StoriA: The Apathetic Boy and the Girl in the Bottle

I just couldn’t get into this one, I’m sorry.

It’s a very cute show, but there’s a reason I didn’t do an Update post on Merc StoriA, and it’s because I’ve just had little desire to go back to it. I did manage to go back and finish two more episodes, but the very lackluster animation and meandering plot makes it pretty unable to hold my attention, I can’t really stop myself from pulling out my phone while I have it on. That unfortunately means that I don’t have much else to say regarding its quality – I do still like the kid-friendly art style, but ultimately I don’t remember very much of what happens in this show and I think that says a lot considering that I just finished the third episode a few minutes ago. It leaves very little impression, but I might just not be the right audience for it.

5/10.

Final Thoughts – Girl in the Twilight

This soured on me pretty quickly, to be honest, and it’s probably because I watched Release the Spyce immediately before it, but in terms of cute girl action shows, this one just comes up a lot shorter in one really specific way – the cast.

See, the approach of doing character episodes leading up to a finale is a well-worn but perfectly fine way of doing things, however, in comparison, the cast of Girl in the Twilight comes across as boring and uninspired, and oddly elastic. They get development in their individual two-part stories, and then get re-Flanderized into easily digestible tropes instead of remaining complex. It makes the previous episodes seem less impactful in hindsight, since the only thing that really mattered was the girls getting henshin transformations.

Let me explain through comparison – Digimon Adventure featured a cast of children who began the show as, well, kids. They weren’t suited to working together and could barely function without adults present, and then over the first arc of the show, they each got an episode of focus in which they learned about their flaws and gained the power to literally evolve, with the arc ending in a big fight they all had to work towards. While a fight that they needed every single member for would take a while to come around (given that the final episode of the arc is actually the beginning of Takeru’s character arc and he loses his partner), by not trying to include every single character in every scene, it keeps everyone continuously growing – why waste time on undercooked character moments when you can just give it to the plot and let the focus character have the screentime they need? This approach would definitely have worked better for Girl in the Twilight, and it could have done with some fat-trimming. Maybe instead of the entire cast unnecessarily going to every single parallel world, it could have just been Asuka and the focus character encountering the alternate versions of their friends instead of overstuffing the story with extraneous characters because they’ll be important later.

It’s not the worst thing I’ve seen, but I’m so close to the end of Fall 2018 that I’m becoming less tolerant, frankly, and I’d rather just get on with it when all I’ve got left is Merc Storia and Gridman (and Tsurune, which still doesn’t end until next week.)

5/10.

Final Thoughts – Release the Spyce

It’s not Princess Principal, but it does know how to have fun.

Release the Spyce is the latest in a trend of cute-girls-doing-action-things shows (which I’m very much okay with, keep that going) and while it doesn’t quite live up to its most obvious contemporaries (Princess Principal and Yuki Yuuna), I’m pleased to say that it does present us with a solid cast and a very good time, with a lot of surprises piled into the last few episodes.

Don’t let the art style fool you – this is an honest-to-God action show with blood and death and swords that get used for their intended purpose, and while I was afraid by episode 11 that the production might be on the verge of collapse, it turned out that the director had been saving resources for the final fight in episode 12, which looks splendid and is exactly as well-animated as the action from the premiere.

I do want to say that the ending is a little bit contrived, and confusing given that over and over again Release the Spyce reminds its viewers that deception is the most important tool a spy has, and the third quarter lags quite a bit in the lead up to the last confrontation – more than once I found myself wondering when we were gonna get to this big thing that the characters all say is right around the corner – but standing as a fun piece of pulpy spy fiction, it’s meant to show you a good time, and it certainly manages.

7/10

Final Thoughts – IRODUKU: The World in Colors

A visual treat and a satisfying romance.

IRODUKU is one of the only time-travel shows I’ve seen in recent memory that gets the concept really right, and that might be because it goes in the direction of starting in the future and travelling back to the present time, creating a sensation almost like nostalgia for the late 2010′s. It also doesn’t focus very much on the fish out of water aspect of such a story – to its clear benefit – by instead honing in on the fact that main character Hitomi is essentially a long-term tourist. Everyone she makes friends with learns that she can’t stay very long…including the boy she falls for, the only one who might hold the secret to why she can no longer see color in the world around her.

Let’s start with the biggest postiive – this show is gorgeous. I don’t know what director Toshiya Shinohara – previously best known for the first season of Black Butler – pulled out of his ass to get the incredible post-production talent that worked on this show, but it pays off beautifully with the best-looking Fall 2018 show aside from Tsurune (which should be disqualified anyway just by virtue of being a Kyoto Animation show). If literally nothing else, watch the first episode just to marvel at the eye candy.

But I don’t want to discount the plot, either. IRODUKU manages to be the second drama this year focused on a high school photography club (hello Tada-kun) and shares a fair few similarities with that show, but here we get a much more consistently dramatic affair rather than a lighthearted comedy with a ramp-up at the end. IRODUKU’s mysteries are a very good hook into its tale of a girl whose depression has become a physical ailment, and while its solution is a little bit of a cop-out, it does manage to stick the landing by not taking the easy way to satisfaction and resolving its romance in the most dramatic way possible. It’s a very strong package that I hope I’ll remember for a while.

8/10!

Final Thoughts – DOUBLE DECKER! Doug & Kirill

It’s fun, but not especially memorable.

Ultimately, it seems like Double Decker is stuck between wanting to be two different shows with much, much better productions – Cowboy Bebop, and Blood Blockade Battlefront – and it does manage to get some of the fun out of both of them, but doesn’t really get the nuance of either.

Let’s start with that production, though. As I mentioned before, the art design is very cool for a setting that could be easiest described as “Westpunk New York”, but fairly often we end up going somewhere utterly normal looking and it just winds up reminding you that the rest of the show looks middling at best, and the more I watched, the more I grew to loathe the character designs, which look like Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s reject concept art, and – hot take here – the fact that the MacGuffins looks like Tide Pods just ends up making me unable to take them seriously.

The other thing robbing them of narrative strength is the fact that for all the harm they supposedly do, very rarely do the monstrous transformations caused by overuse of Anthem actually stick. Almost every time, we see the Villain of the Week looking totally normal again as they’re placed under arrest despite just going through Parasite Eve mutations, and while I understand that this is meant to be in keeping with the lighthearted tone of the show, it doesn’t really jive with the world of the story.

The cast isn’t much better by the three-quarter mark, either – the only character I’m likely to remember at all is Kirill, who admirably is not just a try-hard prodigy of police work, but an idiot who more or less lucked into the job and is instantly made the Team Butt Monkey. Aside from Doug (because his name is in the title) I don’t even remember anyone else’s name, though I can recall the garish character designs.

I was really hoping for more development by the end of Episode 10 but not much of substance has happened thus far and I’m not really invested enough to see what happens in the ramp-up to the climax, because I don’t think it’ll be anything particularly spectacular. It’s a shame, as an original Sunrise production, this one just needed a little more thought (and money) put into it and it could have been one of the better shows this season.

As it stands, I dropped it after ten episodes. 5/10.

Final Thoughts – Zombie Land Saga

A great show, maybe not a great idol show.

By now, pretty much anyone in the know about anime has heard about or seen Zombie Land Saga, particularly the big twist from the eighth episode that reminded me that there are indeed still shitty people in this fandom, but the fact is that it was a very, very good show and a great takedown of the genre that managed to lean in just enough to still have a great story to it. Saga is, very often, riotously funny, particularly any scene involving our new reigning Queen of Memes Tae Yamada.

And carrying easily the most diverse cast I’ve ever seen in an idol show (being that they aren’t all just really gorgeous women who go to the same school or something) works brilliantly in its favor, allowing Saga to lampoon biker flicks, 8 Mile, geisha stories, and more in the span of just twelve episodes.

In fact, my only problem with it is that they put very little effort into the thing that defines the genre, the actual performances themselves. I know MAPPA can do better than this, because even if the choreography is fine, the performances are almost all rendered in eye-bleedingly terrible CG that looks worse the more characters are onscreen, like the rendering machine had a crappy graphics card or something. It’s really, really a shame that the show’s most climactic moments are robbed of a lot of their impact by a recurring problem with the production that they really didn’t bother trying harder on – in the first half, we see the same performance twice, and despite likely already having all the render data for it, it still looks just as bad the second time when they had a chance to improve it the second time. I can’t help but remember how completely captivating the first skate routine in episode one of Yuri On Ice!! was two years ago and wondering what went wrong here.

So yeah, come for terrific comedy and a great cast (including Mamoru Miyano as…himself), but go watch Love Live! Sunshine! or The iDOLM@STER afterwards to see how this should have looked.

8/10.

Final Thoughts – Boarding School Juliet

Decent execution for a decent show.

Boarding School Juliet seems more like a High School AU of West Side Story than an adaptation of its namesake, but I’m always down for a well-executed romcom with a solid twist, and the idea that the two of them are leaders of rival houses that operate more like gangs is an appealing one that gets a lot of solid traction.

While I still consider the first episode the strongest, Boarding School Juliet had fairly consistent writing across the board with the cast acting reasonably and rationally, even if the details of the story don’t really match up at all – Inuzuka may be far, far more likeable than the original Romeo but his badassery is a pretty big change to the character and he’s got an older brother and a childhood friend attached to him, just for starters. Romeo and Juliet are a pretty decent shorthand for a pair of star-crossed lovers at this point but I’d really like to see this coding die out if it’s going to be used in name only.

That being said, it has the misfortune of being aired next to the best romance I saw all year – Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai – and in comparison it comes out looking very standard. The production was easily the best in the first episode and was just ‘good’ for the remainder of the show, and the side cast and main love interest are very well-worn tropes at this point that don’t have a lot of nuance to them, though I do like that tsundere Juliet defrosts over the course of the story and naturally progresses into being more openly loving towards Romio, given how often we see really static tsundere-type characters now. The story also gets to a pretty satisfying endpoint – it’s clear the plot isn’t over, but this does feel like a natural stopping point and I would walk away satisfied even without a second season.

All in all, not an amazing show but one that I would happily recommend to the Ouran set, at the very least. 7/10.

Final Thoughts – Goblin Slayer

Honestly, I haven’t watched or had an inclination to watch any more of this.

I stopped after six episodes as that’s my usual standard for writing an Update, and after one of you guys told me that it was, in fact, just going to be a wish fulfillment bloodfest where the title character never has to face consequences for being a murderous psychopath, I instantly lost all interest in it, because we already have lots of those. The side characters are mildly interesting but nothing I haven’t seen before, and I’ve yet to hear a single positive opinion on how the whole thing turned out, so…yeah, dropped after six episodes. It’s still not the worst thing I’ve ever seen but I don’t have the time or motivation to go back and finish it.

5/10, if only for its looks.