Updated Impressions – Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai

I’m really happy with how this one is turning out.

Bunny Girl Senpai is pretty quickly becoming the surprise hit of the season – it’s all the way up to #3 on the MAL seasonal chart, below Goblin Slayer and Sword Art Online, but above That Time I Was Reincarnated as a Slime, which is damn impressive considering that Slime
had nearly a year of English manga releases building up its momentum.
It’s not hard to see why, either – it’s essentially a much more
approachable Bakemonogatari or OreGairu, and it’s doing a
damn good job of it thus far with a main couple who are fully aware that
they like each other and do a lot of coy flirting when in private, and a
main character who is very outward about his perverse desires. It’s
honestly really refreshing, and at the end of this second arc six
episodes in, we’ve even already broken the hypotenuse off of the love
triangle!

The production here is great as well, not especially
surprising given the studio’s history and the fact that the director
also made Sakura Quest last year, a show whose spirit, charm, and originality led me to give it a perfect score. Bunny Girl Senpai
hasn’t quite gotten there yet, but it’s certainly aiming for a spot in
the Hall of Fame. What I would like to see from here on out is the
maintenance of the primary relationship now that it seems like another
wrench is about to be thrown into it.

Score so far: 8/10!

Updated Impressions – Girl in the Twilight

I can’t exactly say that I was expecting Doctor Who with magical girls, but I’m totally not complaining.

That’s the best comparison I can make to this story of exploring worlds other than these, and fighting off an ever-present threat trying to nuke entire universes. Thus far, Girl in the Twilight has followed a pretty reliable formula of spotlighting one girl at a time as she learns her true strength and gains her power, but with the nice added touch that it’s done so through two-part stories rather than trying to cram an entire concept into a single twenty-two minute episode. It gives the show a little more time to establish the individual timelines it explores, which is great considering that we meet the alternate-universe versions of the cast in each story.

I also want to highlight the CG battle scenes, because while there are certainly shortcuts taken (each one takes place inside of a bubble so that the majority of the work could go towards rendering the characters), the fights themselves are damn awesome and well-animated.

Honestly, this one surprises me with how few people are talking about it. Hopefully some of the HIDIVE titles from this season get more exposure now that they’re on VRV, because Sentai actually picked a decent crop this time around.

Score so far: 7/10.

Updated Impressions – Double Decker! Doug & Kirill

See, in contrast to RerideD, here’s a show that knows precisely how stupid it is, and uses it as a strength.

The best way I can really come up with to describe Double Decker is to imagine if Hirohiko Araki wrote Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It’s not perfect, but it comes pretty close to explaining the extravagant design and sense of comedy. Six episodes in, it’s still a pretty low-rent show, but the fact that it isn’t made especially well doesn’t really detract from what it’s trying to do, and now that the plot has actually begun, there’s much more of a hook present if the zaniness of the premiere didn’t get to you. Yeah, it’s definitely still a weird cop comedy about a division specifically assigned to cases involving drugs that look like Tide Pods, but it’s so tongue-in-cheek about the whole thing that it winds up being a fun watch anyway.

The characters in any comedy are what really sells it, and Double Decker delivers a pretty good cast as a vehicle for the jokes. The main character Kirill’s complete idiocy is something that even the narrator is willing to use for the sake of comedy, which is much more tolerable than if it tried to pass him off as being cool despite his lack of sense, and his energy is pretty infectious. Doug is a pretty decent deconstruction of the grizzled veteran partner type, being that he’s only grizzled in appearance and is in fact kind of an asshole, but in a way that would still make him fun to be around. The female cast so far are pretty slotted into character types, but they’re types that certainly work together, particularly when ganging up on their well-meaning but perverted boss.

One thing that I wish it would improve on, besides the production quality, is the consistency of the visual design. The modern-Western look works very well and looks cool when they actually use it, but certain parts of the city just look vaguely futuristic, and it’s a little bit jarring to watch the transition.

Sunrise definitely gets props for producing such surreal original series recently – ClassicaLoid was one of my favorite shows of last year, and this is exactly the right kind of show to get the bad taste of Gundam Build Divers out of my mouth.

Score so far: 7/10!

Final Thoughts – RerideD: Derrida who leaps through time

This went downhill fast, huh?

Literally in the second episode we basically nuke the cool tone of the first episode and set up something much more conventional, and much easier to pick apart. By episode three, characters are making stupid decisions, and so are the writers. There is a scene in which the main character’s bodyguard has a handgun before he starts chasing the assassin, but once the chase has begun the gun suddenly disappears entirely so that they can have a hand-to-hand fight and he can get injured, and we’ve totally killed the apocalyptic setting by showing how many people are just going through life as normal. Yes, I understand that ten years later, some kind of society would have formed, but the show has already completely written off the robot invasion as just being a nuisance rather than the world-ending disaster it seemed to be in episode one.

It just lost me so fast. I was really hoping for something much darker than this, but what RerideD ended up with was just a poorly thought-out mess that has cool ideas but can’t act on them. What a shame.

4/10.

Premiere Impressions – Fall 2018

Well, we’ve got another massive season of too many things to watch, so let’s get through this quickly, and then I have an announcement at the end.

Skipped

Tokyo Ghoul:re Season 2, Fairy Tail: Final Season, Ace Attorney Season 2 and A Certain Magical Index III because I didn’t watch the previous seasons (I’ve seen the first season of Index and decided the anthology format wasn’t what I wanted from the show).
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind because I haven’t watched Diamond is Unbreakable yet and don’t know when I’ll have time to (and I wasn’t thrilled by Stardust Crusaders).
Senran Kagura Shinovi Master because there’s no timeline where I, a gay man, like Senran Kagura.

Dropped

Xuan Yuan Sword Luminary for not being able to hold my attention at all, despite not looking all that terrible.
Uzamaid! for being actively offensive and utterly tactless.
Between the Sky and Sea for being stupid and lazy.
Bakumatsu for just being something we’ve all seen before.
Ms. Vampire who lives in my neighborhood for trying to copy Dragon Maid but lacking in charm, and also because I don’t want to keep typing out the dumb title
DAKAICHI for proving that BL hasn’t come that far since Yuri on Ice!.
Radiant for being pretty and not really anything else.
Gakuen Basara for being inaccessible to anyone without knowledge of the source material.
Anima Yell! for being the unfortunate victim of bad timing.
Ulysses: Jeanne D’Arc and the Alchemist Knight for looking like a Powerpoint presentation.
Conception and My Sister, My Writer because I know heterosexual porn when I see it.
As Miss Beelzebub likes. for trying to spread one joke over too much bread.

Watching

Double Decker! Doug & Kirill
The Girl in Twilight
Reincarnated as a Slime (x)
RErideD
Run with the Wind (x)
Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai
Zombie Land Saga
Bloom Into You
Hinomaru Sumo (x)
IRODUKU: The World in Colors
Boarding School Juliet
Goblin Slayer
Sword Art Online: Alicization
SSSS. GRIDMAN
Skull-face Bookseller Honda-San
Release the Spyce
Golden Kamuy Season 2
Merc StoriA
Karakuri Circus (x)
Tsurune

x – This show is going to run into next year, so it will not be appearing on the 2018 Final Thoughts roundup.

So, the announcement. It’s not the biggest deal, but it is a warning that I’m going to be considerably late on finishing this season and also starting the next one. Not only do I have a metric ton of shows to finish before the end of the year (because in addition to the fall premieres, I still have to finish Banana Fish and a whole bunch of Winter and Netflix shows I’m disgustingly late on (including my long-anticipated ClassicaLoid 2). I’m also moving at the end of the year, literally on New Year’s, so I can’t promise timely coverage for premieres for Winter 2019. That being said, depending on how the next few weeks go, we’ll see how much of those I can knock out before the end of the year. Onwards and upwards!

Premiere Impressions – Tsurune

KyoAni does two very safe shows in a row.

And I don’t really have a problem with that, but the problem with Kyoto Animation is that they have a lane that they stick to, and after a while, you can only sit through so many incredibly well-produced stories about high schoolers before you want them to try something else, you know? (Admittedly, I have been sitting on Violet Evergarden, but my point still stands for their broadcast fare.)

As for Tsurune, there’s ultimately nothing wrong with it, and archery certainly isn’t a sport that gets animated often (if only because it doesn’t tend to involve a lot of action), but I didn’t find too much to really love about this premiere other than the lavish visuals. DIrector Takuya Yamamura has had a direction credit in almost every single KyoAni production in the last decade or so, but this is his first time in charge, and he seems to be banking a lot on his team without really sticking his neck out too far. We have a pretty ordinary setup here about a cute sad boy being dragged into a club he used to be good at against his will, and his apparent drop in skill isn’t much of an interesting twist.

My point here is that in a year with as many strong sports shows as we’ve seen, Tsurune is starting itself off with a disadvantage, and considering how contentious many of this studio’s recent projects have been (see Myriad Colors Phantom World, Hibike Euphonium S2, and even last season’s iteration of Free! from what I hear), I strongly feel that KyoAni is in need of a more interesting project to work with.

That being said, I’m still gonna give this a few episodes before I actually drop it, if only because it was only boring in a meta sense. The characters are fine, the score is beautiful, and I want to see if it can do something interesting.

Final Thoughts – As Miss Beelzebub likes.

It’s cute, but that’s about all it is.

I’m kind of frustrated by the trend of shows that could have worked perfectly well as half-length or even quarter-length experiences being drawn out into half-hour shows they don’t have enough to fill. The one joke this show has is the concept, and if it were six minutes long, I could see it getting more creative about how it explores the idea each week, but this is literally more fluff than substance.

Oh, and the puffballs were completely taken from The Morose Mononokean; they look exactly the same.

4/10.

Premiere Impressions – Karakuri Circus

Quite a stylish premiere from a studio without much to its name.

From the same author and production team as Ushio & Tora, we have the story of an orphan boy running away to the circus, and it gets way more complicated and violent from there. See, there are these men in suits chasing him relentlessly, and it seems like literally nothing will stop them. His only protector at first is a man in a bear mascot costume who knows martial arts, but also can die if he goes long enough without making someone laugh, followed by a woman in a yellow bodysuit who claims to have known him years ago.

It’s all pretty wacky, but it’s presented with a fascinating tone of complete seriousness that manages to sell it anyway. This one will run for three cours, completely unpromoted by Amazon, so do yourself a favor and check it out.

Premiere Impressions – Merc StoriA

One of the cutest and most original concepts I’ve seen in a while.

Our main character is not a mighty warrior, but instead a healer who teams up with his new friend (a fairy who seems to be trapped in a floating mason jar) to help the local monster population with his magic, since healthy monsters don’t attack humans.

After sitting through Conception, the fact that this show features actual charming animation was like fresh air. The monsters remind me a lot of Digimon in terms of design variety, and altogether this looks like it’ll be a pretty fresh take on the young-hero-saves-the-village concept, finishing fights with kindness rather than might. We even get an easy-to-recycle magic sequence!

While it definitely gives off the impression of being meant for kids, Merc StoriA is still out there enough to get hooks in me, and I must say that since the other kids show I watched this year (Gundam Build Divers) ultimately disappointed me with how heavily it leaned on its age group’s most annoying habits, this one already looks like it’ll break the mold.

Premiere Impressions – Golden Kamuy Season 2

I mean, it’s still Golden Kamuy.

I don’t honestly know what to say here about the show itself aside from the fact that it doesn’t act like there’s been any break at all, so let me instead use this as a platform for a quick diatribe about the new way these studios seem to define (or undefine) “seasons”. See, Golden Kamuy here joins fellow fall offering Tokyo Ghoul:re as an ostensible “second season” despite the fact that the gap between the first and the second was only one cour (meaning that it was pretty obviously planned that way), but other shows like Food Wars still counted what should then have been its fourth season as part of its third, even though there was, again, a single-cour break between the first and second half. Now, we have Attack on TItan declaring that the second half of its third season will premiere in April, six months after the end of the first half.

This is ridiculous and convoluted and I hate it. I know this is unreasonable but it makes classifying what to score where to be very difficult, and with my new system, rather than two separate seasons, I’m declaring Golden Kamuy and Food Wars to be in the same boat – namely, that they are multi-cour shows and should therefore be judged against each other at the end of the year rather than contending with shows that only had three months to make an impression on the Best of Season roundup.