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 – As Miss Beelzebub likes.

It’s cute, but that’s about all it is.

I’m kind of frustrated by the trend of shows that could have worked perfectly well as half-length or even quarter-length experiences being drawn out into half-hour shows they don’t have enough to fill. The one joke this show has is the concept, and if it were six minutes long, I could see it getting more creative about how it explores the idea each week, but this is literally more fluff than substance.

Oh, and the puffballs were completely taken from The Morose Mononokean; they look exactly the same.

4/10.

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.

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 – Steins;Gate 0

Steins;Gate 0 is insulting.

I said before that I was disappointed, and it only got worse and worse from there. In fact, with one pointless and stupid decision after another, the second half of the show is even worse than the first, consisting of lazy writing that rehashes the original in new and unexciting ways, utterly pointless death scenes that get undone minutes later (I mentioned before that Ruka had dropped out of the plot, that’s not quite true, 0 has one last insult to throw her way) and cheap production work.

And I wasn’t even that massive a fan of the original, but frankly this show should horribly piss off anyone with even the mildest appreciation for Steins;Gate. For one thing, once you become aware that the endpoint of this show is just getting Okabe to go back in time and get the True Ending from the original (hence the rebroadcast in advance), it becomes virtually impossible to get emotionally invested in anything that happens, because you know it’ll all be undone in the end, because Okabe will inevitably travel back to prevent it from even happening.

For another, the production is the worst effort I’ve ever seen from studio White Fox. It’s so flat, stationary and uninteresting that it becomes actively boring to watch just for the production alone. The only element of the production that works at all are the opening and ending sequences, because they found a killer opening way cooler than the show itself and didn’t replace it in the second half, thank God.

But the last thing is that the story itself is boring as hell, and it’s for a really obvious reason – the pacing on display here is Sword Art Online Phantom Bullet-tier garbage. It’s like the team felt that because the original ran two cours, this spinoff should as well, but the story of 0 could have comfortably been told in half the time it has. We spend so much time Developing Doomed Characters that the plot takes a major backseat for the majority of the runtime, and that wouldn’t work even if the story were any good. If Steins;Gate 0 had only been twelve or thirteen episodes, I might have been more charitable with it, but it just keeps going and going. The reality is that the story could have ended pretty comfortably without the overly predictable second half – you could even keep the first eight episodes completely intact if you wanted, and after that, have Okabe focus entirely on getting the time machine to go back far enough and recruit everybody to help him instead of the meaningless effort to stop World War 3 in a timeline where it’s bound to happen anyway (that being the point of the story).

I suppose that I’ll just be forever haunted by this thing’s MAL rating (sitting, three weeks after finishing, at 8.74, the 38th best-reviewed show on the site, though I admit that that’s fallen since the last time I looked a month and a half ago). This far after airing, a score doesn’t usually stray far from where it lands the week after it’s over, and the idea that so many people who love the original think this was anything approaching a worthy followup is disturbing to me.

Me? I’m comfortable awarding Steins;Gate 0 with a 4/10, and an honorary addition to the Hall of Shame despite it being two points too high. It has its moments, but they get drowned under a lot of really stupid, repetitive crap. I’m also dropping it 21 episodes in, because I don’t even care how it ends at this point.

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.

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.

Final Thoughts – Radiant

Haven’t we been here before?

Radiant is not particularly bad, there are quite a few things that actually work in its favor, but it is almost painfully generic as a shounen series. See, I get the feeling that this was confirmed to air in October because Black Clover was meant to finish last month, but then it was announced to continue indefinitely and now Radiant is just kind of stuck here being almost the same show, just with a more tolerable protagonist.

Unfortunately, tolerable doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to watch him for 21 episodes, because our hero Seth is basically just a carbon copy of Luffy, and if I wanted to watch One Piece, I’d be watching One Piece. Radiant is the story of a put-upon young boy apprenticing under a renowned person of the show’s theme (there, pirates, here, magic) and how in order to prove himself he steals something from his mentor and takes it farther than he can handle. It’s not a bad setup, but it’s just so much like everything I’ve seen before that I don’t have the interest (or the time) to watch it all again.

I do want to compliment the art design, though. It’s a well-animated show (I really like Studio Lerche, in addition to having made my personal favorite anime, they just seem like they put a lot of effort into projects that aren’t really deserving of it, like Classroom of the Elite). The bright aesthetic and set design are both awesome, and overall this is just a very well-produced premiere.

But there are simply too many other things to watch this season to spend my time on it.

MAL lists a 5/10 score as “average”, and I think that suits Radiant pretty nicely.