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.

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 – 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.

Premiere Impressions – Boarding School Juliet

Way different and way better than I was expecting.

From the title, I was prepared for a boring Ouran ripoff (like Shomin Sample), but was not expecting an actual Romeo and Juliet story. Now, I absolutely despise Romeo and Juliet, but this one has some teeth to it.

We have a boarding school that plays host to a war by proxy of two nations, where the very first scene is a badass gang war (and the last a dramatic swordfight), and the leader of the Black side (Romio) has long fostered a crush on the leader of the White side (Juliet). By the end of the episode, true to the inspiration, we’ve moved much faster than expected, with the two of them already having it out in a Shakespearean duel as they discuss their feelings, and deciding to try a secret relationship. Romio knows that Juliet is the strongest person he’s ever met, and wants to devote his life to helping her achieve her goals.

This is a pretty excellent hook, even if along the way we do have to sit through Romio rescuing her from a rape ambush that goes largely unpunished. Hopefully that gets addressed, because otherwise this was an incredibly strong premiere!

Premiere Impressions – IRODUKU: The World in Colors

It’s like a better version of Myriad Colors Phantom World!

It’s a gorgeous, but quiet tale from P.A. Works that sort of mixes Phantom World and Celestial Method in its style, except with a much more compelling visual aesthetic and a more intriguing mystery about a mage from the future who has gone colorblind.

The aesthetic design and worldbuilding of the future she comes from would be enough to sustain me here, but the real kicker is that her grandmother sends her back to our time (when she herself was a teenager) to find a way to solve her problem, and quite a bit of this first episode involves our heroine Hitomi having to acclimate to a past without automation, where they still use paper money, where you still have to hold your phone to talk to someone.

The design sense here is fantastic, bringing P.A. Works’ A-game with great dynamic lighting design and post-processing effects, creating a stunning work of art that becomes almost enrapturing in the last scene, where both the viewer and Hitomi get a surprise breakthrough in her predicament.

I may have had more to say the first time I wrote this post (Tumblr ate it after it posted too early), but this is absolutely a positive review – it’s a shame that Amazon is going to bury it with no promotion.