Final Thoughts – Kakegurui

A waste of a pretty good production budget.

Kakegurui pretty quickly presents itself as one of Mappa’s best-looking shows, but I do not for the life of me understand why this specific show got so much hype around it while it was airing, because its tone problems are immediate and seemingly insurmountable. I was almost willing to forget my prejudices at the door (being one of the many people who saw Mother’s Basement brutally take this one down) and give it a proper go, but Kakegurui runs on two things – sexuality and gambling, and it flushes both of them down the toilet right away.

The sexuality aspect was always going to be lost on me because I’m not attracted to women and get no excitement from watching them sadistically (metaphorically) go at it, but the gambling just goes right out the window in the very first matchup, which happens very quickly – you would ordinarily see a show with the “psychological” tag at least taking its time, but halfway through the runtime of the premiere, we’re already almost done with the first gambling event, and our protagonist has pretty clearly been playing her opponent from the very beginning. After seemingly losing everything, she casually presents the room with $100,000 and dresses down the girl on the other side of the table, an alpha bitch who has been low-key cheating, beating her easily and demonstrating that she was in control the entire time.

While I’m fine with overwhelming shows of force by protagonists proving themselves in a first episode (it’s a staple of shonen and sports shows, after all), in a show primarily focused on the thrill of gambling, we immediately make Jabami’s stakes unclear, which might be okay if it didn’t set the tone of what I already know to be a future of her pulling massive amounts of money out of her ass at the drop of a hat and proving that she never really loses. That sounds boring as hell to me, so I’ll be leaving this after episode one, thank you.

Final Score: 4/10.

Final Thoughts – Forest of Piano

Weird flex, but okay.

So, some backstory. Forest of Piano was produced by what is supposedly Studio Gainax back from a long slumber, but is in actuality a subsidiary studio operating as Gainax, hence why it’s labelled improperly on MyAnimeList – it would be inaccurate to say that Gainax itself worked on this.

And that’s not to say that it looks bad or anything – there are certainly oddities about the production and I wouldn’t say that I really like the motion-capture CGI scenes of the pianists – but more that it shouldn’t carry the pedigree of the studio that Anno built. Indeed, I feel like Gainax would have injected a little more personality into this one.

What we have here is an adaptation that’s essentially presenting itself as a prestige piece in execution, a very classy story that spends a significant amount of its runtime in a concert hall, but which carries with it a lot of outdated tropes that grind on a lot of audiences, most notably the utterly constant character shilling.

See, our main character Kai is a genius of the piano, and while I don’t mind that in and of itself, the fact that it is commented on by every individual character multiple times per episode is incredibly grating because at a certain point it makes me stop believing them. See, this kind of thing can certainly happen in real life, but the story paints Kai as basically a god come down to earth to bless the people with his piano skill, and when there’s this much shilling going on, it has the effect of turning anyone against him into a philistine who wants to hold him back, or someone who simply doesn’t understand how amazing he is.

I will say that this aspect didn’t completely stop me from enjoying Forest of Piano, and indeed I will more than likely watch the second season when it comes out next year. The earnest exploration of classical music paints it as a strange and interesting contrast to ClassicaLoid, and the show is very good at atmospheric sound when presenting its performances, often transforming any venue into the titular forest to beautiful effect. What I’m hoping for out of the next season is something more personal, though – in Kai’s meteoric rise, we very often are not really presented with what music even means to him – why does he pick the pieces he does for the Chopin competition? And I would like to see a better exploration of the side characters, most especially Ajino, as by the end of this first half I am pretty unsure of what his role in the story even is at this point. The show also pretty clearly sets up several characters in the final few episodes that are meant to carry more weight than they do simply because of their limited screentime. I want a more fleshed-out cast that aren’t just constantly bowing to Kai Ichinose.

Final Score: 6/10.

Final Thoughts – Aggretsuko

A pretty shining example of Netflix throwing their money at the right horse.

Eight months divorced from the flood of Aggretsuko thinkpieces, I finally managed to sit down and watch all of it over the course of an evening, and I came away with something not only satisfying, but incredibly impressive. It starts with such a simple premise and then works its way outwards into a series of incredibly relatable stories and characters.

You wouldn’t think that what looks like an extended series of Flash animations would cohere nearly as well as the first season of Aggretsuko, and indeed I wouldn’t have been surprised if this had merely been an episodic series revolving around challenges at the office, but instead the narrative closely follows Retsuko’s personal life and turns her into someone that pretty much anyone my age can relate to – she hates her boss who thinks he’s the best thing since sliced bread, she doesn’t know what she wants to do for the rest of her life, and she has to secretly hide her incredibly extra aggressive side from the view of the people it’s directed towards. And if that had been the extent of the joke, again, I wouldn’t have been surprised, but she actually branches out and makes new friends whom she can trust with her secret and whom are older than her, but very supportive. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that dynamic play out in a work comedy before, but it’s very nice to see how quickly things develop and how the status quo doesn’t ever really go away, but it does prove pretty flexible.

There are elements that hold the show back. While the Flash-style animation is used to pretty decent comedic effect, it’s not great at conveying a lot of visual clues. The metaphor used in the last few episodes ends up needing to be focused on a lot just to make sure the audience remains aware of it, and the ending is enough of a cop-out that it wouldn’t terribly surprise me if the next season fully disregards it, but if we can keep the continuity ball rolling, Aggretsuko could be a steady and highly enjoyable franchise that I’m looking forward to seeing more of.

Oh, and a side note, I do like that Netflix seems to be using the same renewal treatment for its original animations as it does with its fully in-house productions, so if the industry could get into that habit of not leaving people desperately in suspense for years at a time, that would be pretty great.

Final Score: 8/10 (9/10 if the ending actually matters next season.)

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.

Final Thoughts – My Hero Academia Season 3

In real life, I can come off like I dislike MHA, and that’s not really correct.

I don’t hate it at all, as a matter of fact I like it a lot, which is why it bothers me so much when I see it at the level of just an average shounen romp when I know how good it’s been. The second half of the last season and the first half of this one were running at a steady 7/10 and it was bumming me out when compared to the fact that it delivered one of, if not the most effective tournament arcs I’ve ever seen, and it frustrated me that MHA was getting a ludicrous amount of recognition (looking at you, Crunchyroll Awards) when compared to Food Wars, which I felt had only gotten better and better since its premiere and has consistently presented me with fresh ideas and new ways of delivering its weird brand of action.

I was very thankful, then, when the Provisional License Exam arc rolled around and we finally got a return to the excellent character writing that I know this show is capable of. The second half of this season didn’t quite meet the level of quality that the Sports Festival arc brought to the table, but the sense that the plot was finally moving again in a meaningful way did wonders for my sense of investment.

I think the other half of the problem is that I have not latched on to the League of Villains the way I know a lot of people have, and that’s mostly because now that Stain is gone I just find them deeply derivative and uninteresting compared to the students focused on in the best moments of the story. I recognize that the show needs a greater-scope villain, but I don’t care about any of them nearly as much as I care about Bakugo’s character arc, since we don’t have nearly as much insight into him as we do into Deku. I also didn’t really care for Ochaco’s subplot about developing a crush on Midoriya, since even though it isn’t exactly a drain on screentime (it gets only a few minutes, total) it doesn’t ultimately go anywhere since she just decides not to tell him, meaning we’ll be on the hook for a while here if it ever actually comes to a head.

Thankfully, All Might gets a much-needed character rerailment as the natural conclusion of his subplot, and finally realizes (in one of the more touching moments) just how irresponsible he’s been regarding his training (and surrogate parenting) of Izuku, to the point where in his freshman year of high school he’s already one injury away from permanent retirement. All Might is forced to own up to his failures to Midoriya’s mom, who is rightfully furious of his mostly-reckless endangerment of her son. Deku’s mom is one of the most under-represented in the show for how much impact she has ultimately had on her son, particularly because she is an excellent foil to Endeavour, being a mother who wishes every day that she could do more for her son, as opposed to a father who expects more and more from Todoroki. It was really relieving that we got to see her feelings acknowledged once the plot completely removes her from Izuku.

I also really liked the other schools introduced to us during the exam, because I find the competing ideologies present in the new cast to be a much more interesting source of conflict than bad guys who are evil because they are evil. I’m not the biggest fan of the author’s Kubo-esque habit of introducing new characters in large groups when the show is already aware that the audience can’t remember everyone in Class 1-A (because there are name cards in every episode), but as long as they’re still as effective as Yoarashi and Shindou (both of whom are fantastic foils), I’m down.

Ultimately my biggest fear is that My Hero Academia, by nature of its seasonal run over just constantly airing, and the amount of progress made in 63 episodes, will end with the cast either still in high school, or at graduation. That might work for Assassination Classroom (because the central theme of the story was that Koro-sensei was preparing his students to live better lives in the future), but I’m far more fascinated by what these kids will look like ten years from now. I don’t see Academia pulling a Shippuden-style time skip, so we’ll have to see how far this goes.

(Yes, I’m aware of how ridiculously successful this property is, but Naruto wasn’t exactly failing when Kishimoto decided it was time to finally call it quits.)

In the meantime, I’ll continue to examine MHA through its already-confirmed fourth season and hope that it continues this upswing, as we potentially finish freshman year.

I should at least mention the production here if only to say that Studio Bones is still doing an excellent job as per usual, and in an industry where the new season of One Punch Man was shopped to another studio so that Madhouse could produce more of Overlord (a show which, let’s face it, does not need their expertise nearly as much), it’s nice to see a studio willing to go in for the long haul on a show that could run this long. It’s made MHA a pretty good comparison to Boruto, a show I tried multiple times to get into but couldn’t because Pierrot dropped the ball right after the first episode and it looks terrible because of the year-round approach in comparison to the seasonal handling in MHA.

8/10, I’m eager to see where we go from here.

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.

Updated Final Thoughts – IDOLiSH7

You guys strongly suggested I give this one another shot, so I finally got around to it. While I wouldn’t say it was “great” (more on that in a bit), I will say that I liked it.

IDOLiSH7 is a good-looking production that has better character writing than any male idol show I can think of, and that’s at least partially because a) it isn’t completely overstuffed with characters compared to its runtime, and b) because unlike UtaPri, it’s melodramatic but without completely shattering your suspension of disbelief.

I can appreciate this one for a lot of reasons – for one, the heroine isn’t obviously a stand-in for an otome protagonist, she’s a character in her own right who manages the group and has to deal with their frequent screw-ups, and none of her employees are in love with her for no reason. I also like that the group (like the boys of Side M) are a mix of different ages and backgrounds, some of which actively contribute to the plot. I really like that the rival group TRIGGER (no relation to the studio) aren’t evil, they’re competent and are not responsible (and actively condemn) their company’s dirt-throwing behavior. Basically, if you’re looking for a legitimate, continuous drama about the idol industry, this one isn’t a bad choice at all.

The problem is that the shiny production completely stops once you get to the actual performance aspect. We never, ever get to see a complete performance (the show likes to feature the first few measures and then just transition to individual still shots or something), the largely forgettable songs are often just background music for montages, and the choreography we do get to see is really lackluster and rendered in poor-framerate CGI. This is still my biggest problem with this show – an idol-genre work needs this element especially to display a lot of effort, and IDOLiSH7′s just don’t, at all. There’s a sequence near the end where the title group’s dance expert is watching TRIGGER do really basic show choir steps and commenting on how difficult they look, and I legitimately had to force myself not to burst out laughing.

So, ultimately, IDOLiSH7 comes across as a good drama with tacked-on, lazy performances. I’m glad I watched it, and I’ll probably watch the upcoming second season, but if you’re really craving some decent male-idol genre goodness, this year was kind of lacking for you, and I’m sorry. Next year we get extra seasons of this, StarMyu, and B Project, so we’ll have to see how that goes, considering I’ve never been urged to finish either of the other two.

6/10.

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.