Final Thoughts – Conception

So, like, we all know at this point that as a series, Conception is just bad, right? Like, the games are genuinely mediocre at best and boring at worst, and the whole thing comes across as strange, creepy fetish wish-fulfillment.

That’s certainly still true of this adaptation. Like, the main couple are abducted by some magic portal and transported into a weird cavern, and they both declare that this situation is less important than talking about the heroine being pregnant, which is a contrived setup because she’s gonna have her magic demon baby right there and then, in one of the most hilariously poorly-animated scenes I’ve ever seen. The demon is defeated, and suddenly neither of them feel the need to talk about the fact that a giant monster just emerged from the heroine’s mouth.

In short, these characters make no sense. At least they protest the suddenness with which they have the fate of the world thrust upon them, but the fact of the matter is that this show was pretty much doomed from the start. It’s nice to see sex-positivity in anime, but the strange, alien way this show treats sex, along with the fact that it essentially treats the heroine as a waifu factory, kind of washes that out.

The pacing is also ridiculous, which is because in “obscure” JRPG’s like this one or Etrian Odyssey, the setup is given to you all at once at the beginning, and this one couldn’t adapt properly if it didn’t present everything in this episode at once.

That being said, the fact that Mahiru is essentially forced into sex regardless of how she feels about it is creepy as hell and sends this show into a realm so schlocky that I honestly feel like Conception would have been better adapted as a six-episode hentai OVA or something. It’s a level above the 1/10′s I’ve given thus far, but it also looks utterly awful, so I’m not okay giving it anything higher than a 2/10.

Final Thoughts – My Sister, My Writer

I know this one’s already been dragged through the mud, but how is this not just the two most famous Tsukasa Fushimi stories blended together and then made even trashier?

Maybe that was the idea, but OreImo never got Kirino so nude that she needed nipple censors. This is garbage on every level, and even before the censors show up, I hated this even more than My First Girlfriend is a Gal!, but they do pretty easily sum up the mentality on display here. See, a while ago, there was this gratuitously censored ad for a random mobile game on YouTube, and when the uncensored version came around, there were no nipples at all, it was just cleavage bouncing around as the girls fought with magic. This reminds me of that. There is a scene in this premiere where the main character fantasizes about his little sister’s breasts, right before another scene where he points out that his coworker looks like an elementary schooler. Her perfectly flat chest and normal tanktop suddenly balloon out when the camera goes for a porno POV shot of her, and not in a funny way, more an unintentionally funny way. It also censors her very covered nipples, because obviously she’s not wearing something that would expose her, because she’s at goddamn work.

This nearly challenges UZAMAID! in terms of sheer tastelessness. I would still call that one worse (if MAL would let me give a 0/10, I would have) but this one still deserves a 1/10 and consignment to the garbage bin of history.

Final Thoughts – Anima Yell!

What a surprise!

I mean that completely, as the first piece of music is an acoustic version of a BEMANI track I’m familiar with, set to a well-animated if not incredibly impressive cheer routine.

This is gonna be a new one for me. I’m dropping this after the first episode, but it’s not because I didn’t like it well enough. The story is paint-by-numbers for sure, but I do still consider having heart to be an effective method for hooking a viewer.

It’s mostly that I just have way, way too much already to watch this season and I don’t have room for it. If I hear amazing things about it, I’ll probably revisit it later, but if I don’t, I’m pretty comfortable leaving this at one episode and still giving it a 6/10. It’s not Anima Yell!’s fault for happening to come in the same year as Laid Back Camp and Comic Girls, both of which also starred pink-haired newcomers with boundless enthusiasm making friends with a blonde girl and a dark-haired girl.

It’s kind of a shame, but as you’ll hear from me when I post my Fall Impressions masterpost, it’s a necessary sacrifice. 6/10!

Final Thoughts – Ulysses: Jeanne D’Arc and the Alchemist Knight

Good lord, this is half-finished.

I mean that quite literally; the art looks fine right up until anyone moves, which is why it’s a good thing that most of this episode is taken up by talking heads. The in-between frames here are sorely lacking and it causes all of the animation to look incredibly choppy. It’s really problematic when the show employs moving backgrounds that look more like the characters are being badly inserted over a green screen (which, I suppose, is the case, but still).

The story isn’t anything special; honestly though I find the idea of a Joan of Arc adaptation tiresome. We already got the definitive Japanese adaptation of the story with Level 5′s Jeanne D’arc, a game that sorely needs a rerelease.

I don’t want anyone to think I’m just dropping it because of the overdone story, though. The production here is just not up to snuff in any way, and by the middle of the episode, characters are already going off-model. (I also can’t get over the fact that their arms appear to be three inches around at most.)

Basically? It’s awful-looking and boring, and you can skip it. 3/10.

Premiere Impressions – Release the Spyce

A ton of fun with a great soundtrack.

Release the Spyce pretty immediately cements itself in the modern genre of cute girls doing action things (see Girls und Panzer, Yuki Yuna is a Hero, Sabagebu!) and is looking pretty good thus far. While a sizeable amount of this episode happens at nighttime, the daytime aesthetic of bright colors reminds me most of Mikagura School Suite, and I have no issue with that at all. The nighttime uniform outfits that the girls wear look like they could have come from Trails of Cold Steel.

I know I’m rambling a bit, but the production here really is a highlight. It’s not an especially gorgeous show, but the music is on point and it creates the illusion of a much more visually fluid show, sort of the way that Kajiura’s score makes the action scenes in Sword Art Online feel much cooler than they usually are.

The plot is not too far behind, though. It’s a little crazy, but the whole teenage girl special-ops concept was done very well in last year’s Princess Principal and I’m willing to accept it at this point if I can get something so interesting out of the experience. I’m not saying that this looks like it’ll be quite that good, but for now, it looks like HIDIVE really picked well this season, considering that the only simulcasts they have for fall that I’m not watching are Tonegawa and Gakuen Basara.

Premiere Impressions – SSSS. Gridman

It’s Trigger, how is this so far down the seasonal popularity chart? Did FRANXX really do that much instant damage to their reputation?

Well, at least for now, Gridman looks like a return to form. Not everybody is gonna be as into this as I am, but it’s been a while since we’ve gotten a Super Robot show not explicitly for kids, and this one is shaping up really nicely so far.

Like I’ve said many times, execution matters more than originality. While the setup for the episode seems pretty standard (boy with amnesia starts hallucinating a robot on a computer screen that’s telling him to embrace his destiny), I have a feeling, based on the end of the episode, that there’s gonna be a good ol’ Trigger twist coming up in the near future.

I appreciate the fact that we’re essentially starting with only four characters to keep track of (five if you include Rikka’s mom), since a number of Trigger properties have tossed much more into the mix and come out of the gate struggling a bit to get us invested in all of them (Darling and Kiznaiver are especially guilty of this, though I’m not sparing Kill La Kill from this criticism either). We get a bit more of an idea about what they’re about, and while Main Kid Yuta is pretty archetypical for the genre, I like that Rikka isn’t immediately coded as a tsundere as would be normal for female characters in her position.

Basically, if you want more Trigger without A-1/CloverWorks’ involvement, this is what you’re gonna get this year. Get into it!

Premiere Impressions – Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san

I think I’m in love.

This show seems so specifically designed to appeal to me that I cannot help but imagine it to be some kind of divine intervention. By virtue of my own bookseller bias, I’m gonna take it out of the Best of Season running right now, but honestly it’s so perfectly hilarious that I can’t think of anything else to say about it content-wise.

One thing I’ll highlight aside from the spot-on perfect comedy is that I like the heavily destylized parody covers of popular titles like Gakkougurashi and Boruto: Naruto Next Generation, being that I recognize them from my own job.

But really, you’ve already seen plenty of GIFs of this at this point, so if you haven’t watched it, you’re doing yourself a disservice – I mean, if nothing else, it stars a Spooky Scary Skeleton at the height of Halloween season.

Premiere Impressions – Sword Art Online: Alicization

Thanks to the double-length of this premiere and the fact that I’m not expecting much out of this but am choosing to watch it simply because I’m afraid I’ll be out of the loop if I don’t…I’m gonna compile my thoughts here in order as I watch.

* Sword Art Online does not deserve to look this good. The production has improved dramatically from SAO2.

* They’re really taking advantage of this double-runtime, because the first scene is boring and goes on forever, and basically consists of an extended infodump of the grand tradition of this series being awful at delivering exposition.

* Kirito displays far more personality in the first ten minutes of this episode than he has in the last forty. I also like child!Kirito’s costume design.

* I understand the need to establish that we are in a strange and unfamiliar universe, but the characters drop way too much jargon in the first quarter of the episode for me to remember, and nearly all of the Proper Nouns are presented without context, so they’re pretty much meaningless.

* About twenty minutes in, I realized that the director must have changed, and Tomohiko Itou has been replaced by Manabu Ono, most recently responsible for The Asterisk War and The Irregular at Magic High School, which is…unfortunate, though they are both pretty much slaves to source material anyway (which is why Itou’s best work was done with shows like Silver Spoon or Death Note). This might have something to do with the ridiculous and terribly unnecessary 52-episode length of this season, since Itou directed Ordinal Scale last year, so I can’t imagine A-1 wanted to just drop him from the franchise.

* I’m not sure why Ono appears to be very fond of shots of characters’ shoes, but the same exact angle has been used four times in the first half of this episode alone.

* Of course, within thirty seconds of our first sight of Sinon, she gets a crotch shot. Klein cannot save this scene. Also, as cool as Asuna’s GGO outfit is, it seems even less practical than Sinon’s.

* There’s a composited action shot essentially recycled from the Ignite opening of the previous season, and the background still looks just as fake as the characters float over it.

* I’m still confused over the benefits of PKing in Gun Gale Online – do you get everything the other person owns? Nobody would ever play this game.

* We’ve already got a cafe scene! Though, given that it involves every major character and not just two people infodumping at each other, this one isn’t quite so bad.

* I had already heard about the blatant, disbelief-shattering ad for Fatal Bullet, but I’m disappointed that the scriptwriter didn’t (or wasn’t allowed to) mention the Squad Jam from Gun Gale Online Alternative, especially since there’s an acknowledgement of the events of Ordinal Scale.

* Why the hell is Sinon visiting her attempted rapist in the hospital like they’re still friends? We could have just never mentioned Shinkawa ever again and the script would not have suffered for it because the audience should not care about what happened to him after his arrest; girls should not be friends with dudes who tried to murder them.

* Now that I’m thinking about it, why are we playing GGO? DIdn’t we establish that switching between games resets your character?

* It’s hilarious that Sinon teases Kirito about the possibility of him cheating on Asuna when she is by far the girl who has gotten the closest to him out of the Rejected Waifu Club.

* The stupid Fluctlight thing seems to be an attempt by Kawahara to reclaim the original central theme of the story (that real life and virtual life can be blurred together and can be equally important), but it’s so ridiculous for a show like this to suddenly declare that the human soul is scienceable that it just comes across as being really clumsy and easy to screw up. I do think that the element of accelerated time perception is an interesting one, though, and would actually be great in real life – being able to play a game for hours, while only a few minutes have actually gone by.

* I will also point out that right after the bar scene I gave a pass to, we get a second one that I do not give a pass to, for the exact reason I mentioned – it’s just three characters dumping exposition at each other. Kawahara is really, really bad about this, and these two scenes together comprise almost fifteen minutes of runtime.

* Asuna still refers to Heathcliff/Kayaba as “the commander”, which is still dumb. He is personally responsible for as many deaths as happened in real life on 9/11, and should not be treated with any respect by anyone at this point.

* Kawahara still defaults to villains who are comically insane, though I suppose that this one is still pretty much just the leftover Death Gun who we knew was insane, so this isn’t quite as poor a decision as it could be.

And that’s it! I admit that I didn’t hate the overall episode and, after watching it, I get why this needed to happen all in one sitting, but the frustration mostly comes from the fact that Kawahara is a bad author who doesn’t learn from his mistakes. The first half was quite a bit stronger than the second, if only because of the inherent mystery of Underworld, and the second half is a whirlwind of Kawahara’s worst habits as a writer.

That being said, because Alicization will be the longest show I’ve covered on this blog, I’ll be writing an Updated Impressions post on it every six weeks or so, just to force myself to keep up with it (because if I fall more than ten episodes behind, I know for sure that I’m gonna give up on it).

Here’s to an entire year of this…

Premiere Impressions – Goblin Slayer

So going into this, the first thing to be aware of is that the first half of this premiere is brutal, yet more or less predictable garbage.

Our heroine teams up with a generic party of heroes that inevitably end up getting savagely killed (and raped, onscreen) by the goblins they adventure to fight. It’s obvious from the moment they set out that none of them are going to survive, and that makes it hard to really be upset when it happens, but luckily it also means that Goblin Slayer only wastes the bare minimum of development on them until the title character shows up.

So, based on that, Goblin Slayer can be described as a fantasy series in the modern vein of Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, where it’s essentially an MMO world, except it’s not actually an MMO and the universe just works like an RPG. However, Goblin Slayer’‘s world is less Final Fantasy, and more Dark Souls. It’s damn brutal and terrifying, and while civilization still exists, venturing outside of it is dangerous to the point of needing a license to do so.

The second half of the episode follows through on this, with the hero being a pragmatist who has analyzed the environment and takes all necessary precautions for fighting in a dark, narrow cave. He takes no prisoners and does what he has to do. This instantly sets him apart from most fantasy protagonists, shying far away from idealistic, wide-eyed Chosen One-types.

I’m actually eager to see where this is going, though. The latter half of the episode is very strong and unlike much that I’ve seen before, and aside from having a problem with the animation of Goblin Slayer himself (whenever he’s not in close-up, he’s rendered in CGI), this one is shaping up pretty nicely.

Final Thoughts – Gakuen Basara: Samurai High School

I don’t have anything against this one aside from the fact that I feel like I’d appreciate it more if I’d played the source game.

Gakuen Basara is kind of fascinating because it’s literally a High School AU of Sengoku Basara, and that makes the premise pretty much hilarious to begin with, but unfortunately the number of references to the game make this really inaccessible to new fans. You’ll get the gist of the plot, but I feel like the majority of the enjoyment of this show will be recognizing the characters you already knew applied to this new scenario, and obviously that means if you didn’t play, you probably shouldn’t start here.

I’m leaving this one unscored for exactly that reason, though.