Final Thoughts – DAKAICHI -I’m being harassed by the sexiest man of the year-
I’m so sick and tired of this happening.
BL as a genre has a problem, and that problem is rape. It’s everywhere. It’s all over the place. It’s honestly incredibly heteronormative, because it reinforces the long-debunked idea that in a relationship between partners, they must play the role of the dominant man and the submissive woman.
And I realize that the seme-uke relationship is pretty much built on this idea, but the utter falseness of the whole premise combined with the fact that shows like DAKAICHI want me to root for a relationship that began with one partner saying “no” and then being ignored just makes this entire thing intolerable.
And it’s the only explicit representation gay men tend to get in anime. Even in Banana Fish, Ash is seen as close enough to a woman that he gets raped constantly offscreen. The only way to save an animated gay relationship seems to be to keep everything implied, never actually show it, the way Yuri on Ice! does.
But if this is what I can get, then at least it’s slightly more palatable than Hitorijime, if only because the cast are adults and not high schoolers. I’m worried that if I keep watching this, though, I’m going to end up forgetting how it started, and give it a score higher than it deserves, so I’m dropping it for my own sake.
4/10.
Final Thoughts – UZAMAID!
1/10.
It’s a show that wants me to sympathize with a pedophile as she grooms a child. I recognize that my praise for Happy Sugar Life is going to force me to contextualize why this is awful forever and ever, but I shouldn’t have to explain the difference between a show about a girl who is insane because the people who raised her made her this way, and one about an actual lolicon who specifically discusses her preference for prepubescent girls.
1/10! I can guarantee that this will be the worst of the season.
Final Thoughts – Ms Vampire who lives in my neighborhood.
Just lacking in anything interesting.
Ms. Vampire looks to be more or less a grab at the audience of last year’s Dragon Maid, only without much of the imagination or originality, and the only real pull being that the lesbian element is pretty much full-text instead of being implied. The problem is that neither of the girls we met in this first episode are particularly entertaining (oh, the vampire can use Amazon.jp, what a twist! The human girl is obsessed with creepy dolls, how neat!). The jokes aren’t funny and you’ve heard them before. The look of the show is as blatant as you can get in terms of trying to copy those more successful than it.
Most importantly, i just have no interest in watching more than one episode.
I’m blaming this on the director, who somehow was behind all three seasons of the brilliant Bakuman., and both seasons of the famously forgettable Active Raid. He hasn’t made anything watchable since Castle Town Dandelion, and it may be time for him to hang it up if these are the junky kind of projects he’ll be handed from here on out.
5/10.
Final Thoughts – Bakumatsu
Look, it’s not trying, do I have to?
Bakumatsu is just so incredibly standard for a dating sim game. The only real distinction it offers is the fact that the heroine doesn’t seem to be present, but otherwise, this show is just plain oatmeal. It’s not the worst thing, but you know you could be eating something more interesting.
We have the story of two pretty samurai boys traveling to another timeline after trying to steal a mysterious pocket watch for reasons, and the two of them are of course a serious/goofball odd couple you’ve seen a thousand times. The background element of the giant tree is nice, but otherwise, the backgrounds look almost stolen from the underworld of The Morose Mononokean, and the characters are generic and unimaginative.
Basically, yeah, it just doesn’t seem like a ton of effort went into this. While it doesn’t look as bad as, say, Lord of Vermilion from last season, I’m tired of praising passable, C+ animation that does the bare minimum not to make me want to pull my eyes out.
Just skip it. 4/10.
Final Thoughts – Devilman Crybaby
I know I couldn’t possibly be more late here, but I couldn’t let the year end without talking about the big Netflix shows we got early on. This is the first.
This is one where, like Planet With, I don’t quite agree with a lot of the majority. I believe this show is great, sure, but the ending just carries absolutely no satisfaction, and I’m going to spoil it here. Given that I’m the last otaku on the planet to watch it, I don’t think that’ll be too controversial, but here’s your warning.
Devilman Crybaby is a 9/10. The missing point there is entirely because of the final episode. See, the pacing through the rest of the show is great – in nine episodes it got me emotionally invested in a lot of its characters with very smart, economical storytelling, and I was honestly impressed at how much weight the deaths in episode 9 had for having spent so relatively little time with these characters.
The show looks great, with a distinctive and undeniable style to it that could only have come from a project with the power and funding of Netflix and complete creative control. Modernizing Go Nagai’s work is turning out not to be incredibly easy (just look at the disastrous Cutie Honey Universe) and a commendable job is done here updating the story in the age of the smartphone.
But I can’t deny that episode 10 broke the spell for me. It contains a lot of major story jumps that should really have been spread out just a bit more so they had time to digest, but the problem with that is that the majority of the deaths needed to happen close to the end in order to have the proper weight (if, for example, Taro and his parents had died only halfway in, it would naturally carry less narrative importance because it was closer to the middle than to the climax).
That’s to say nothing of the ending. Just being likely intended to not be satisfying doesn’t make it less noticeable that in the sudden rush to the finish line, not only does every single character lose (and die), but we come away with what is either a Genesis story as the planet starts over (conflicting with the fact that the Genesis already happened at the beginning of the show – the birth of the devilman) or an extinction story (in which case, as the show implies there are literally no survivors, the story leading up to it and all the emotional investment feel wasted because there’s nothing to hope for). It’s like a weird, last-second shark jump that I understand was in the source material, but for all the modern changes made to the story, I wish Yuasa and Nagai could have collaborated on a better way to end the story.
That being said, I can’t deny that nine episodes of one of the most unique works in the medium are to be missed, so, like I said, I’m giving it that many points. Because I said so and I don’t want to die young.
9/10.
Final Thoughts – Lupin III Part 5
Look, I don’t know what else to tell you. Lupin is damn fantastic, it has been for years now, and this is the best iteration yet. Team Lupin are such absurdly good characters that you don’t mind their flaws, you just feel like you’ve known them for years.
And it helps to have perfect pacing and even a lot of unexpected societal commentary, which Part 5 has in spades. The major underlying theme is the effect technology has on the world, whether it’s the sudden, feverish obsession of Pokemon Go, the government-encroaching, terrifying might of Facebook, or the power held by people like Elon Musk who promise to make the world better and damn the actual consequences of their methods. All of it is handled expertly well, and framed around relevant character development and new recurring characters that integrate into the gang perfectly.
The show also still looks astounding, with incredibly fluid animation and hand-painted backgrounds. Every time TMS brings Lupin out of hiding, they make him look phenomenal, and deliver an awesome updated soundtrack full of Layton-esque horns and very clear shout-outs to his Western contemporaries.
I don’t know how many different ways to say that everyone of any taste should watch this show, so I’ll just conclude with the best one I can think of. Lupin III is Japan’s Bond, and it’s his world. We’re just living in it.
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.
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.
(A quick note: as of this writeup, shows comprising more than one cour are getting separated out and discussed at the end of the year, so Lupin Part V, My Hero Academia, Major 2nd, and Steins;Gate 0 will not be part of this list, though I’ll still be writing Final Thoughts posts for them as I complete them.)
What a mixed bag of a season for me to finally finish on time.
We had a few triumphs, sure, but this summer was pretty solidly running at a 6/10, with some high points but a lot of average-to-low stuff dragging it down. I was really hoping for better from several of the shows on this list, but overall this was a strangely weak summer with a bunch of disappointment. As before, I’ll mention what I skipped first.
* Attack on Titan Season 3, FLCL Progressive and Overlord Season 3 because I haven’t seen either of their previous seasons.
* Hi Score Girl, Back Street Girls and Sirius the Jaeger because they were picked up by Netflix. (I’m considering doing a Netflix writeup for the whole year at a later date)
* Free! Dive to the Future because I’m waiting for the release of the prequel movie that sets it up, and Funimation taking their sweet time with it instead of pushing it out before the show aggravates me.
Worst of the Season: The Master of Ragnarok and Blesser of Einherjar (1/10)
Two very similar and similarly terrible shows emerged this season, but of the two, I ultimately have to say that Master of Ragnarok was the more heinous. The writing in this show was, over time, consistently insulting to the point of near-parody. Not only have we already seen the concept of guy-with-smartphone-in-another-world before, but this one added in even more stupid harem nonsense than before and contrived a situation where everyone in his harem referred to him as either their father or their big brother, all while constantly wanting to fuck him. It also just looked flat-out awful and half-finished.
How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord (2/10)
Yeah, I ultimately had to bump Demon Lord to a 2 just in comparison to Master of Ragnarok, because even though I still loathe the idea of the harem being literally enslaved, from what I understand (I still haven’t even watched the entire first episode because what would I get out of it?) the world-building in the show has at least been passable and the plot isn’t total garbage. That being said, I won’t say much more on this one because I didn’t experience the whole thing.
Lord of Vermilion: The Crimson King (2/10)
The first entry on the list I straight-up forgot existed. It’s edgy garbage that doesn’t have the substance or production to make even the first episode worth finishing, and I do remember wondering if my VRV app was having trouble buffering it. Nope, the show is just a slideshow.
Music Girls(3/10)
Oh boy, did this one not even stand a shadow of a chance airing in the same season as Revue Starlight. Music Girls just struck me as having almost no effort put into it at all, aside from developing one of the ugliest art designs I’ve ever seen in anime. The first episode was boring as hell and was so generic that it makes me wonder how the director behind The Galaxy Railways ever ended up here. Did he wander in, confused, and they just drafted him into a garbage fire?
ISLAND (3/10)
If ISLAND had been spun as a satire of KyoAni Key adaptations like Clannad or Air, I would have probably thought it was hilarious, but instead this twelve-car pileup of cliches was meant to be taken entirely seriously. A man with amnesia washes up on a mysterious island in a town that dislikes outsiders, is really cool about the whole thing, and the girl he’s trying to meet might be a vampire because she never goes outside and is only awake at night? With no subtlety or nuance at all, and a huge age difference between Main Guy and the girls? It would have been better if they had been joking.
Dropkick On My Devil! (3/10)
Dropkick was a strange beast that I didn’t finish the premiere of because I could tell right away that it would be a low-effort, derivative comedy that should probably have been a short rather than a full-length TV series. It’s basically an even less original Gabriel Dropout! and I was not about that.
The Thousand Musketeers (4/10)
The Thousand Musketeers commits the sin of just not being interesting enough. We’ve seen what can happen when mobage adaptations are done well (we get Love Live! or Katsugeki/Touken Ranbu) so I don’t get why there are still ones that are just poorly animated snoozes. The Thousand Musketeers isn’t awful, but it has no excuses, and I do not understand for the life of me why HIDIVE tried so hard to push it instead of throwing all its weight behind Revue Starlight.
Holmes of Kyoto (4/10)
The first show on the list that I didn’t drop after the first episode, Holmes at least started with an interesting and chill premise but ultimately tried too hard to push a plot that didn’t make sense and didn’t have enough narrative stakes to get the viewer invested.
Seven Senses of the Re’Union (4/10)
The biggest disappointment of the season, Seven Senses got a running score of 8/10 on my midseason writeup before everything went very, very wrong. It’s been a full week since I’ve watched it and the ending still infuriates me just to think about it, but ultimately the story jumped the shark in episode 8 with a plot development that could have reasonably been recovered from had the finale decided to resolve literally a single thing instead of just pretending that killing a low-tier villain solved all of the cast’s problems.
Phantom in the Twilight (5/10)
Phantom is another show that just couldn’t keep me interested in it. Three episodes in, the production had not improved and the characters had run out of time to become interesting. Like I said in my writeup, it seemed to be aiming for a 6, and it should not have been rewarded for it. I still think this idea could have worked if given an Atlus makeover.
Angels of Death (4/10)
I had at least a little bit of hope for Angels, but ultimately I could just no longer stand main character Rachel or the inane story being told, clearly in an attempt to cash in on the unadaptability of Zero Escape. I still like Isaac as a character, but he couldn’t save a show that just faded into boring mush seven episodes in.
Unrated: Asobi Asobase -workshop of fun-
Like I said, I could see why this one got a lot of positive press, but it was just not for me.
Unrated: Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs
Another show that was just not going to be my cup of tea. If the TNA community wants it, that’s fine, but I wasn’t gonna try to pretend this was anything better or worse than it was.
Unrated: Planet With
I’m still embarrassed by this one, and my inability to see what everyone else seems to be seeing in it. I imagine I’ll revisit and reevaluate it later if only to resolve what feels like a black mark on my critical viewing.
On-Hold: Cells at Work!
Cells at Work! hasn’t done much other than not be what I was hoping for out of it. I typically cannot get into episodic shows because I don’t see what’s supposed to be hooking me, and with no overarching plot to speak of, it was doomed on part from the beginning. The first episode is still terrific, but I don’t want to watch it 13 times, you know?
On-Hole: Chio’s School Road
Of the comedies this season, Chio was the one I just never managed to make up my mind on. From what I’ve heard, it’s wildly inconsistent with its humor and that’s kind of scared me away.
AND NOW, the stuff I actually liked!
Harukana Receive (7/10)
Sometimes, a simple premise can work well with good execution. Harukana Receive didn’t try extra hard, but it didn’t have to, running at a consistent pace throughout to deliver a good story that isn’t made worse just by its lack of originality. If you miss Haikyu!, you’re better off with this than…
HANEBADO! (7/10)
A frustrating viewing experience where the matches are beautiful and most of the cast make no sense. The melodrama here is pumped up a little too high for the script to keep up with, and it results in a show where one of the main characters becomes more of a villain than the antagonists, despite the fact that the show still seems to be trying to get the audience to root for her. So, come for the visuals, but don’t expect the story to match in quality.
Grand Blue Dreaming(7/10)
A strange comedy that mixes typical situations with a large dose of alcohol and nudity, and comes away looking very unique and unrepentant in its stupidity. The best dumb shows are intentionally dumb, and any show with this many naked guys is absolutely in on the joke.
Angolmois: Record of Mongol Invasion (8/10)
It’s been a good while since I’ve seen a decent bloodfest, and this one follows in the tradition of samurai cinema by going over the top while telling a story of redemption in the face of hopeless odds. While the ending wasn’t perfect, the action is visceral and satisfying, and our hero Jinzaburou manages to be a credible badass.
Best of the Season: Tie
Revue Starlight (9/10)
Revue Starlight hit a few early bumps in the road that thankfully managed to be left in the dust in the second half, delivering a coded love story about two girls and what they will do to fulfill a childhood promise to each other. Distinguishing itself massively from others in the idol genre, Revue Starlight traded in musical numbers for dramatic, excellently-staged fight scenes where interpersonal drama can be resolved through creatively theatric swordfights and magical girl-style transformations. An absolutely worthy substitute to the unlicensed fourth season of Symphogear.
Happy Sugar Life (9/10)
A near-masterfully plotted thriller that expertly balances oversaccharine fluff with underlying violent tension, Happy Sugar Life is a story I’ve never seen before and an examination of psychopathy and the logical extreme of the very concept of moe. It stumbles only slightly in its ending and the over-the-top characters, but ultimately comes out way ahead of much of its seasonal competition.
Final Thoughts – HANEBADO!
A very attractive mess.
There’s no mincing words here – HANEBADO! looks gorgeous in motion. It is perhaps the best-looking show of the season outside of Attack on Titan or Revue Starlight, and while it can look a little wonky in the still shots, the matches are directed impeccably, with very ambitious camera placements forcing the quality animation to keep up, and it absolutely does.
But the story is all over the place, with characters going in very strange directions in the second half, and our protagonist going from a childish prodigy to a sociopath. The in-universe explanation makes sense – she gets it from her mom, who abandoned her for years in order to focus on the sport – but it makes it very, very difficult to root for her and pretty much causes the hero position to shift back to Aragaki by the final match, with Hanesaki’s team trying to snap her out of it and her cruelly brushing them off.
So character-wise, we have an unfortunate mixed bag that makes for a really strange show. The production team certainly tried hard and succeeded greatly, but the changes from the manga caused the story to become questionable, almost nonsensical, with a very inconclusive ending showcasing little growth on the part of the characters.
So, yeah, I’ll give it a 7/10 if only for the visual spectacle, but having few decent characters, I wouldn’t recommend it as much as Harukana Receive or Major 2nd.
The Arcane Archive 