Final Thoughts – Between the Sky and Sea

A-1 Pictures didn’t make this, but you’d be forgiven for immediately thinking so.

Seriously, I don’t know why but TMS Entertainment have copied A-1′s trademark polish and stupid face template to a ‘t’ here, and it results in a show that looks much better than it is. Mother’s Basement was tweeting the other night about moe bingo, and it took me about ten seconds to realize that this was the show he was talking about.

Everything here is generic to a fault, meaning that the character designs are fine, but absolutely not anything even remotely original, up to and including a perky girl dressed as a gothic lolita for no apparent reason. There’s no subtlety to be found here.

And I don’t usually like to single out staff members that aren’t the director (everyone else is just trying to do their job), but Karin Takahashi, voice actress for the main character Haru, is just not ready for the big leagues. I never bothered to watch any of Black Clover, but I have a pretty similar impression of this girl’s voice as most people do to Asta’s. She either shrieks or goes irritatingly monotone all the time, and it makes me hate a character who isn’t even necessarily that bad.

I should at least mention that the concept is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard and I’m fairly sure that they’ll never bother to explain it, and I do not know why space fishing seemed like such a good idea that they threw this much weight behind it, but based on the fact that it already has a MAL score of 5/10, it seems that the community has already realized that this one is a junker out of the gate.

3/10.

Premiere Impressions – Girl in the Twilight

Didn’t I already watch this? No, that was Phantom in the Twilight? Whatever, this is way better.

From an original concept by the author of Punch Line (one of my favorite people in the industry), we have an inverse-isekai story, where a girl from our world meets her badass alternate-universe counterpart. It’s not as crazy as Punch Line or Zero Escape, but it’s an interesting idea filled with mystery, as the audience pieces together exactly what happened in Asuka and alt-Asuka’s past.

I’m pretty excited for this one, all things considered. It looks quite nice (I really like the costume design so far) and even though we have certainly seen this girl group before, they are distinctive enough and act like a proper group of random friends. It doesn’t take much to get me not to drop a show after one episode, you know?

Premiere Impressions – Run with the Wind

If I can’t have more Haikyu! yet, I’ll take this for sure.

I feel like it’s been forever since we’ve had a Production I.G. TV series, but they always come busting in with crazy good animation to make everyone else look bad. This first episode just looks amazing, and if we’re to see a lot of running in the near future, hopefully it looks better than Prince of Stride Alternative (dunno how Madhouse managed to screw that up!).

We have a pretty typical but still funny setup – in his desire to form a track team, a university student has convinced nine other boys of similar age to move into a strangely convenient apartment building where two meals are served and the rent is only $300…because it’s actually the dorm for the Kansai University track team, and their rental agreements are also club commitments, and he wants very badly to run again.

Our cast is already shaping up nicely, with ten distinct pretty boys and a lot (a lot) of shipping potential. The first episode just lets each of them run with one personality trait each, and with such a big introduction, that’s fine for now, and we can safely assume they’ll each be getting a spotlight in future episodes. (Hey, it’ll be easier to deal with than iDOLM@STER Side M, where there were almost twice as many characters as there were episodes.) I’m really looking forward to seeing how this plays out.

My one worry, though, is the director, who has a long history of working as Episode Director and Storyboarder as is common, but whose most recent television director gig was Joker Game.

Basically, please, don’t let this be Joker Game.

Final Thoughts – Xuan Yuan Sword Luminary

Pretty, yet boring.

Seriously, the aesthetic of this show is very cool, with Chinese influence all over the place and wooden automatons crawling through canyons, but I found it very difficult to pay attention. Xuan Yuan is the best-looking Chinese co-production yet, but it has sort of the opposite problem of Phantom in the Twilight.

I just don’t have very much to say here, other than that you can safely skip this one.

Premiere Impressions – RErideD – Derrida, who leaps through time

What a way to start Fall!

Surprise! Out of nowhere, four episodes of a brand new show premiere early on Crunchyroll before the season even starts, and while I was initially worried about what that might mean for the quality of this show, my fears were totally unfounded. RErideD is already shaping up to be something great.

We haven’t seen a decent science fiction story in a while with a tone like this – very dour and grounded, yet with a fantastical element. The ill-fated KADO had a cube with an alien inside, and here, we have time travel and the robot apocalypse, which of course is brought on purely by greed. I don’t consider that a spoiler since it’s obvious from the beginning that that’s where things are going, but let me summarize this episode anyway, because a lot happens in it.

1) A researcher discovers a fatal bug in his automated robots that activates when they are deployed en masse in combat.

2) He goes to his boss with this information, and his boss rejects his request to recall so that a patch can be implemented.

3) Said researcher retreats from work and goes to visit his old friend for said friend’s daughter’s birthday, for which he gives her flowers.

4) The daughter confronts him about giving up on researching time jumping, and he tells her it’s impossible.

5) Later that night, the researcher finds out his friend’s daughter has been hospitalized due to some sort of accident related to her own time travel experiment.

6) Even later, the researcher’s friend calls him and tells him to get his shit together because his boss is trying to hunt him down and kill him for discovering the bug.

7) The two get into a car accident that traps the friend and gets him killed by the boss and his hit squad, and the researcher flees on foot.

8) The researcher stumbles into a strange facility and, without thinking, steps into a cryo chamber without setting a time limit on it. While he is frozen, a woman (I’m guessing the friend’s daughter) visits him and places a pocket watch where he’ll find it when he wakes up.

9) The researcher awakens and steps outside in the future, where the city he knew has been destroyed by the robots he created after the bug caused them to turn on the human population.

It’s a lot for a premiere, but it sets up a ton of potential going forward, and the direction keeps up, especially once night falls and we get a ton of emotionally-lit, dramatic shots (I’m very fond of the aesthetic of snow falling at night…).

Basically, this has me pumped.