Final Thoughts – Girl in the Twilight

This soured on me pretty quickly, to be honest, and it’s probably because I watched Release the Spyce immediately before it, but in terms of cute girl action shows, this one just comes up a lot shorter in one really specific way – the cast.

See, the approach of doing character episodes leading up to a finale is a well-worn but perfectly fine way of doing things, however, in comparison, the cast of Girl in the Twilight comes across as boring and uninspired, and oddly elastic. They get development in their individual two-part stories, and then get re-Flanderized into easily digestible tropes instead of remaining complex. It makes the previous episodes seem less impactful in hindsight, since the only thing that really mattered was the girls getting henshin transformations.

Let me explain through comparison – Digimon Adventure featured a cast of children who began the show as, well, kids. They weren’t suited to working together and could barely function without adults present, and then over the first arc of the show, they each got an episode of focus in which they learned about their flaws and gained the power to literally evolve, with the arc ending in a big fight they all had to work towards. While a fight that they needed every single member for would take a while to come around (given that the final episode of the arc is actually the beginning of Takeru’s character arc and he loses his partner), by not trying to include every single character in every scene, it keeps everyone continuously growing – why waste time on undercooked character moments when you can just give it to the plot and let the focus character have the screentime they need? This approach would definitely have worked better for Girl in the Twilight, and it could have done with some fat-trimming. Maybe instead of the entire cast unnecessarily going to every single parallel world, it could have just been Asuka and the focus character encountering the alternate versions of their friends instead of overstuffing the story with extraneous characters because they’ll be important later.

It’s not the worst thing I’ve seen, but I’m so close to the end of Fall 2018 that I’m becoming less tolerant, frankly, and I’d rather just get on with it when all I’ve got left is Merc Storia and Gridman (and Tsurune, which still doesn’t end until next week.)

5/10.

Final Thoughts – Release the Spyce

It’s not Princess Principal, but it does know how to have fun.

Release the Spyce is the latest in a trend of cute-girls-doing-action-things shows (which I’m very much okay with, keep that going) and while it doesn’t quite live up to its most obvious contemporaries (Princess Principal and Yuki Yuuna), I’m pleased to say that it does present us with a solid cast and a very good time, with a lot of surprises piled into the last few episodes.

Don’t let the art style fool you – this is an honest-to-God action show with blood and death and swords that get used for their intended purpose, and while I was afraid by episode 11 that the production might be on the verge of collapse, it turned out that the director had been saving resources for the final fight in episode 12, which looks splendid and is exactly as well-animated as the action from the premiere.

I do want to say that the ending is a little bit contrived, and confusing given that over and over again Release the Spyce reminds its viewers that deception is the most important tool a spy has, and the third quarter lags quite a bit in the lead up to the last confrontation – more than once I found myself wondering when we were gonna get to this big thing that the characters all say is right around the corner – but standing as a fun piece of pulpy spy fiction, it’s meant to show you a good time, and it certainly manages.

7/10

Final Thoughts – IRODUKU: The World in Colors

A visual treat and a satisfying romance.

IRODUKU is one of the only time-travel shows I’ve seen in recent memory that gets the concept really right, and that might be because it goes in the direction of starting in the future and travelling back to the present time, creating a sensation almost like nostalgia for the late 2010′s. It also doesn’t focus very much on the fish out of water aspect of such a story – to its clear benefit – by instead honing in on the fact that main character Hitomi is essentially a long-term tourist. Everyone she makes friends with learns that she can’t stay very long…including the boy she falls for, the only one who might hold the secret to why she can no longer see color in the world around her.

Let’s start with the biggest postiive – this show is gorgeous. I don’t know what director Toshiya Shinohara – previously best known for the first season of Black Butler – pulled out of his ass to get the incredible post-production talent that worked on this show, but it pays off beautifully with the best-looking Fall 2018 show aside from Tsurune (which should be disqualified anyway just by virtue of being a Kyoto Animation show). If literally nothing else, watch the first episode just to marvel at the eye candy.

But I don’t want to discount the plot, either. IRODUKU manages to be the second drama this year focused on a high school photography club (hello Tada-kun) and shares a fair few similarities with that show, but here we get a much more consistently dramatic affair rather than a lighthearted comedy with a ramp-up at the end. IRODUKU’s mysteries are a very good hook into its tale of a girl whose depression has become a physical ailment, and while its solution is a little bit of a cop-out, it does manage to stick the landing by not taking the easy way to satisfaction and resolving its romance in the most dramatic way possible. It’s a very strong package that I hope I’ll remember for a while.

8/10!

Final Thoughts – DOUBLE DECKER! Doug & Kirill

It’s fun, but not especially memorable.

Ultimately, it seems like Double Decker is stuck between wanting to be two different shows with much, much better productions – Cowboy Bebop, and Blood Blockade Battlefront – and it does manage to get some of the fun out of both of them, but doesn’t really get the nuance of either.

Let’s start with that production, though. As I mentioned before, the art design is very cool for a setting that could be easiest described as “Westpunk New York”, but fairly often we end up going somewhere utterly normal looking and it just winds up reminding you that the rest of the show looks middling at best, and the more I watched, the more I grew to loathe the character designs, which look like Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s reject concept art, and – hot take here – the fact that the MacGuffins looks like Tide Pods just ends up making me unable to take them seriously.

The other thing robbing them of narrative strength is the fact that for all the harm they supposedly do, very rarely do the monstrous transformations caused by overuse of Anthem actually stick. Almost every time, we see the Villain of the Week looking totally normal again as they’re placed under arrest despite just going through Parasite Eve mutations, and while I understand that this is meant to be in keeping with the lighthearted tone of the show, it doesn’t really jive with the world of the story.

The cast isn’t much better by the three-quarter mark, either – the only character I’m likely to remember at all is Kirill, who admirably is not just a try-hard prodigy of police work, but an idiot who more or less lucked into the job and is instantly made the Team Butt Monkey. Aside from Doug (because his name is in the title) I don’t even remember anyone else’s name, though I can recall the garish character designs.

I was really hoping for more development by the end of Episode 10 but not much of substance has happened thus far and I’m not really invested enough to see what happens in the ramp-up to the climax, because I don’t think it’ll be anything particularly spectacular. It’s a shame, as an original Sunrise production, this one just needed a little more thought (and money) put into it and it could have been one of the better shows this season.

As it stands, I dropped it after ten episodes. 5/10.

Final Thoughts – Zombie Land Saga

A great show, maybe not a great idol show.

By now, pretty much anyone in the know about anime has heard about or seen Zombie Land Saga, particularly the big twist from the eighth episode that reminded me that there are indeed still shitty people in this fandom, but the fact is that it was a very, very good show and a great takedown of the genre that managed to lean in just enough to still have a great story to it. Saga is, very often, riotously funny, particularly any scene involving our new reigning Queen of Memes Tae Yamada.

And carrying easily the most diverse cast I’ve ever seen in an idol show (being that they aren’t all just really gorgeous women who go to the same school or something) works brilliantly in its favor, allowing Saga to lampoon biker flicks, 8 Mile, geisha stories, and more in the span of just twelve episodes.

In fact, my only problem with it is that they put very little effort into the thing that defines the genre, the actual performances themselves. I know MAPPA can do better than this, because even if the choreography is fine, the performances are almost all rendered in eye-bleedingly terrible CG that looks worse the more characters are onscreen, like the rendering machine had a crappy graphics card or something. It’s really, really a shame that the show’s most climactic moments are robbed of a lot of their impact by a recurring problem with the production that they really didn’t bother trying harder on – in the first half, we see the same performance twice, and despite likely already having all the render data for it, it still looks just as bad the second time when they had a chance to improve it the second time. I can’t help but remember how completely captivating the first skate routine in episode one of Yuri On Ice!! was two years ago and wondering what went wrong here.

So yeah, come for terrific comedy and a great cast (including Mamoru Miyano as…himself), but go watch Love Live! Sunshine! or The iDOLM@STER afterwards to see how this should have looked.

8/10.

Final Thoughts – Boarding School Juliet

Decent execution for a decent show.

Boarding School Juliet seems more like a High School AU of West Side Story than an adaptation of its namesake, but I’m always down for a well-executed romcom with a solid twist, and the idea that the two of them are leaders of rival houses that operate more like gangs is an appealing one that gets a lot of solid traction.

While I still consider the first episode the strongest, Boarding School Juliet had fairly consistent writing across the board with the cast acting reasonably and rationally, even if the details of the story don’t really match up at all – Inuzuka may be far, far more likeable than the original Romeo but his badassery is a pretty big change to the character and he’s got an older brother and a childhood friend attached to him, just for starters. Romeo and Juliet are a pretty decent shorthand for a pair of star-crossed lovers at this point but I’d really like to see this coding die out if it’s going to be used in name only.

That being said, it has the misfortune of being aired next to the best romance I saw all year – Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai – and in comparison it comes out looking very standard. The production was easily the best in the first episode and was just ‘good’ for the remainder of the show, and the side cast and main love interest are very well-worn tropes at this point that don’t have a lot of nuance to them, though I do like that tsundere Juliet defrosts over the course of the story and naturally progresses into being more openly loving towards Romio, given how often we see really static tsundere-type characters now. The story also gets to a pretty satisfying endpoint – it’s clear the plot isn’t over, but this does feel like a natural stopping point and I would walk away satisfied even without a second season.

All in all, not an amazing show but one that I would happily recommend to the Ouran set, at the very least. 7/10.

Final Thoughts – Goblin Slayer

Honestly, I haven’t watched or had an inclination to watch any more of this.

I stopped after six episodes as that’s my usual standard for writing an Update, and after one of you guys told me that it was, in fact, just going to be a wish fulfillment bloodfest where the title character never has to face consequences for being a murderous psychopath, I instantly lost all interest in it, because we already have lots of those. The side characters are mildly interesting but nothing I haven’t seen before, and I’ve yet to hear a single positive opinion on how the whole thing turned out, so…yeah, dropped after six episodes. It’s still not the worst thing I’ve ever seen but I don’t have the time or motivation to go back and finish it.

5/10, if only for its looks.

Final Thoughts – Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai

One of my favorites of the season, stopped just short of really being great.

Bunny Girl Senpai takes a very literal look at how it feels to be a teenager, as teenage problems begin to manifest themselves in the real world and break the laws of the universe.

I’m very, very impressed by the execution of this concept, because it falls into almost none of the traps I’d expect from a show that only really has one male character surrounded by lots of girls – not only is Sakuta’s relationship with his girlfriend established early enough to effectively kill a harem, but the rest of the female cast have absolutely no romantic feelings towards him, and they’re already connected to him or his friends somehow. The writing in this show is honestly masterful – every single important concept is set up at least a full episode before it becomes plot-critical, the characters remain consistent and there are no stupid romcom lewd misunderstandings. Everyone leans towards acting like sane, rational people and it makes it a million times easier to get invested in the drama, because all of it comes from a place of realness – it reminds me a lot of Tsukigakirei with a little more fantasy thrown in.

Oh, and of course there are the unavoidable comparisons to Oregairu and Bakemonogatari.

I’ve already praised it a lot in my previous write-ups, but I want to temper expectations, because there’s one thing Tsukigakirei had over Bunny Girl Senpai, and that’s a satisfying ending. While Bunny Girl’s isn’t bad enough to taint the entire experience and I didn’t foresee it the way I did After the Rain’s, it does come very abruptly after an emotional climax and cut the end of the last arc very short. It was a bit of a sour note on top of what otherwise would have easily been a Hall of Fame show, but as it is, I still enjoyed Bunny Girl Senpai enough to happily award it an 8/10.

Final Thoughts – Bloom Into You

Let’s face it; the problem lies with the source material.

I mentioned in my updated impressions post that my only real issue with Bloom Into You is that it doesn’t concern itself with Yuu’s consent; not only is Touko still pursuing her aggressively despite Yuu firmly giving her a no, but the show itself wants me to think that this is acceptable simply because Touko is damaged and with the understanding that the two of them will inevitably end up together anyway. I thought we’d gotten mostly past this, but as of episode 9 – three-quarters of the way into the series – Touko is still cornering Yuu and demanding a kiss, not listening to her protests.

I object to this on principle.

I don’t care how the story ends at this point; I can’t root for Touko at all anymore. Despite still being a well-animated production (though the bright aesthetic still hurts to look at, honestly) the story has completely lost me.

Dropped after 8.5 episodes. 4/10.

Final Thoughts – Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san

So good it makes me cry a little.

I often say that the work comedy genre works better in condensed form like this, and Honda-san proves me right more than any other example thus far. It doesn’t give much room for jokes to go on for too long, and it doesn’t wear out its welcome.

And what comes out on the other end is a perfectly distilled comedy with little extra fat and a lot of great jokes. While American bookstores certainly don’t operate in quite the same way (having each bookseller be in charge of a specific section is a pipe dream in the U.S. and is both encouraged by the company and discouraged by management), a lot of the humor is handled the same way, and it’s always nice to see a work-com focus on retail (most of them are restaurant-focused), as I feel like it conveys a pretty good sense of what it’s like to be behind the counter.

But the jokes being good isn’t that surprising – in a season that saw the long-awaited return of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, Honda-san managed to be the biggest meme generator of the fall – I’d actually like to focus on the strengths of the production. Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san takes strong advantage of its minimalist art style by exaggerating visual emotions on the characters’ expressionless faces, but even without that, the voice work is strong enough that you can almost see the expressions anyway. The faces don’t change much, but based on the way Honda speaks, you could swear that skull is smiling, or exhausted, or scared. It’s incredibly impressive in a show created on such a small budget and demonstrates how much passion was put into it.

So…aside from one or two gags I didn’t find particularly entertaining, I have no complaints and no problems heavily recommending this one, particularly if you do enjoy books or work in a retail space.

9/10!