Final Thoughts – Happy Sugar Life

See, sometimes I can have nice things.

Happy Sugar Life was, from the beginning, a complicated show. As of this final episode, we have come back around to the first scene – a mutual suicide by way of jumping from a burning building. And, while I’m not sure I’ve fully processed the ending, I also can’t think of a better one, because if Satou had survived then the show’s message would have failed dramatically.

Everyone gets punished for their sins.

The characters in this show are nearly all insane, and nobody escapes entirely unscathed, whether it’s Satou for her selfishness costing an innocent life, Mitsuboshi for his deceitfulness, or Asahi for his desire to take his sister back to her abusive home life purely for his own desire. I appreciate that their sins weren’t all weighed equally in the end, and that their individual victimhood led them to these dark places.

This show kept me right on the line the entire way through, by subverting my expectations as an anime viewer. Every time the viewer comes close to sympathizing with our irredeemable heroine, we get harshly reminded that she is a psychopath who will burn it all down in order to keep her fantasy alive.

The one thing harshing my buzz about this story is Shio herself, and her ultimate reduction into being more of an idea than a character. She is something that our trio of nutjobs are chasing for different reasons – Satou to fulfill her need for sexless love, Mitsuboshi for nearly the opposite reason (very nearly admitting multiple times that he wants her intimately), and Asahi because he believes that a “complete” family can make him happy again. I would have liked to see at least a more hopeful ending for Shio herself, though.

But honestly, Happy Sugar Life has been a crazy, nerve-wracking ride since the very first scene, repeated here: wedding music played during a death scene. Satou’s castle crumbles, and, as often happens, its ruler goes down with it instead of facing reality. I’ve never seen anything like Happy Sugar Life, and I’m so glad that we got a great ending for it.

9/10.

Final Thoughts – Revue Starlight

It wins “Most Improved” by a country mile.

I was pretty unsteady on this show when I tried to cover it weekly, but by the halfway point it had managed to recover the intrigue of its first episode and ramp up the story in a very satisfying way. I’m really impressed by how much better this managed to get, all leading up to an incredibly satisfying ending which takes the show in a different direction than I had expected, in the best way.

It also remained gorgeous throughout, despite a troubled production, and several scenes in the last few episodes were nothing short of breathtakingly animated. Even the CG work doesn’t disappoint, running at the correct framerate and managing to still look lifelike even though it’s noticeable. I want to especially declare the fight scenes here to be some of the best of the year. Even though the victor is often precluded, the bouts themselves are often mesmerizing, which is great considering they replace the more traditional musical numbers. Revue Starlight absolutely manages to make its drama work.

Studio Kinema Citrus made a name for itself last year, and while Starlight certainly isn’t as popular as Made in Abyss, it shows that that project was not a fluke. This is a production team that knows what it’s doing, and I cannot wait to see what we get out of them next.

9/10!

Final Thoughts – Angolmois: Record of Mongol Invasion

A terrifically bloody throwback.

If you know much about Asian history (or can extrapolate from the story of Mulan), you should be able to tell how this story is going to end as soon as it begins. This is not a battle our “heroes” were ever going to win, and in the end, what we get is more akin to a classic samurai redemption story for our protagonist Jinzaburou. Exiled from Japan for his past crimes, he and his fellow prisoners wash up on the shore of Tsushima and get drafted into the battle to defend the island from the coming Mongol threat.

Like many samurai stories, this one is bloody as hell, with the body count soaring as the plot goes on, and we learn more about why Jinzaburou was exiled, who he used to be, and what he’s really fighting for in defending a land that rejects him. The fight scenes in this show, particularly when the action is one-on-one (the final fight being a particular highlight) are beautifully choreographed, tying Jinzaburou’s canine aesthetic together with an animalistic sword style and genuinely cementing him as a man not to be fucked with.

What I would have liked to see from this series, however, is a slicker production (I would have loved to see this as made by ufotable) and the ever-present filter on the screen toned down just a tad, as it became distracting in more than a few places and distorted a few of the backgrounds. I also wish that the princess of the island were given a little more characterization to justify her role as the deuteragonist, because I was disappointed to see her become a tsundere when in front of our hero.

But, all-in-all, Angolmois is certainly a stand-out in what has, overall, been a pretty disappointing summer in comparison to the ridiculously packed spring.

8/10.

Final Thoughts – Seven Senses of the Re’Union

This one frustrated me to no end, because it was one of the surprise highlights of the season in its first half, and then…

The storytelling essentially jumped overboard.

The big twist was exactly what I said it would be (that the game was obviously a front) but not only does very little ultimately come of it, it isn’t even something that comes up organically. Episode 7 gets the ball rolling in the department of major contrivances, but the beginning of episode 8 takes the cake. With no explanation for how it happened at all, we suddenly get thrust into a parallel timeline for ten minutes so Haruto has somewhere quiet so that he can have the major plot infodumped to him by a character that could absolutely have told him all of this information sooner.

And what follows isn’t an unsalvageable mess, but the sheer number of plot contrivances take this out of the realm of an eight or nine, bringing it down to something I would merely consider “watchable”.

Which is a shame, because I enjoyed a lot of the themes present in this narrative. The main cast met as kids and then went six years without speaking to each other, and they’ve all got a bit of arrested development to go with that, whether it’s feelings that were never realized, a desperate grab for as much power as possible, or a desire to take your tragic past and murder the hell out of it to avoid any self-examination. I liked the idea that the game in the title isn’t a standard RPG, but rather a playground for psychic powers (which is why the rules and limitations are so unclear – there aren’t any), making it more akin to a fantasy world that just happens to have a game on top of it.

But with the collapse of the narrative and the fact that it literally never answers the biggest mysteries of the show and never will… Yeah, I’m sorry. Skip it.

4/10.

Final Thoughts – Major 2nd

I really didn’t mean to review this right after Harukana Receive, because I feel like I’m gonna repeat myself a lot, but execution, execution, execution.

Let me get one issue out of the way first – Major ran for six seasons in Japan without ever once touching North America, and that’s not the ideal situation to be in going into its sequel. While sports anime generally bomb over here unless they star hot sad boys (see Free!, Haikyu) so I understand the reasoning, a lot of the emotional beats of this show are tied to the viewer’s previous experience with the characters who appeared in the original. I really hope that Crunchyroll license-rescues the original Major series now that years have gone by and they can likely get the entire series for a lump sum.

With that out of the way, Major 2nd is still a perfectly acceptable entry into the genre that seems to be building up a foundation for another long-running franchise that I must say I’m eagerly awaiting. While its problems are certainly easy to pick out (the teammates beyond the main characters are paper-thin, it doesn’t look especially impressive, and Daigo is kind of a brat in the beginning) I can’t exactly say that it isn’t good just because it can’t live up to Big Windup!. The characters that we did get are interesting (I repeat that I like the idea of a sports show where the main character isn’t the prodigy and doesn’t even know what position he’s supposed to be in, I like that the actual prodigy character is kind of detached about the entire thing because baseball is just an excuse to hang out with his friends, and I like that the grumpy team ace clearly has a reason to be grumpy all the time), the story is mostly predictable but with a few really well-done twists in the final few episodes, and I appreciate the start-from-the-beginning approach that it would appear the predecessor went for as well, going from the very start of these characters’ baseball careers.

So, in the likely event of another season, I would like to see a plot that doesn’t force our main battery duo apart for a majority of the season, I would like to see Urabe return to the story, and I want to see a little more of Daigo’s father.

Final score: 7/10.

Final Thoughts – Harukana Receive

Good execution is still everything.

A single-cour beach volleyball show was never going to be a genre classic (and I’d heavily argue that you need at least two cours to tell a decent sports story if you aren’t going to pace it like Umamusume) but Harukana Recieve nails the sweet spot of a cute-girls show with an actual plot, even if the bones of it are certainly nothing new.

But while I’ve absolutely criticized shows for their lack of ambition before, I want to be clear that execution is still the most important element, because it tends to be far more noticeable. A competently-told story with just a few decent ideas (like Kiznaiver) will, in my opinion, always win over stories with lofty ideas but no plan for seeing them to a satisfying conclusion (like Darling in the FRANXX).

So, as for Harukana Receive, it managed to be a story with relatable characters and a properly-paced, well-told story. That may seem like I’m damning it with faint praise, but it wasn’t going for anything more than that, and it met pretty much exactly the expectations I had going into it. I have no reasonable complaints aside from the overuse of the sand effect in post-processing and the fact that I really don’t like the color composition on the main duo’s bathing suits.

It even managed to deliver a genuinely good final episode that ended on a satisfying note while also setting up for a potential continuation, something that a lot of projects like this avert in favor of ending in the middle of the story in order to make a last-ditch boost in manga sales. (I’m still very bitter about the ending of Baby Steps, okay?) While it didn’t go for any heartstring-pulling gut shots, I’m pleased with how this story ended.

Final Score: 7/10.

Final Thoughts – Holmes of Kyoto

The spell has been broken, and it did not take much longer than my last review.

Let me start with the most obvious problem here; the seventh episode is one of the ugliest messes I’ve seen in modern animation, with the episode being mostly comprised of off-model talking heads and panning shots, and the post-processing just can’t save it. Even the color palette has started to look completely dull as the tones on the screen just get closer and closer together, only making it more noticeable that the characters are being drawn incorrectly.

And while that is a problem that could, for all I know, be resolved by the next episode, I don’t see the plot recovering. We’ve gone from low-stakes art mysteries to a low-stakes, nearly parodic refitting of the Sherlockian characters into a story where nobody is likely to end up dead, and while that can work for a show with the childish excitement of something like Milky Holmes, it doesn’t work for something meant for adults, because it asks way too much in terms of investment for the quality of the show. I can’t possibly care about Moriarty when basically all he’s done thus far is act way too menacingly about his art forgery while the show tries to paint him and Holmes as bitter enemies. For this to have worked, Holmes of Kyoto needed far more dramatic stakes, and there just aren’t any.

3/10, dropped after seven episodes.

Final Thoughts – The Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar

Yeah, I bailed on this idea pretty quickly.

I was expecting Master of Ragnarok to be ridiculous, as its first episode presents, but what I get instead is boring. Like, there’s a plot happening here and everything, but I could not possibly be bothered to care.

I gave up early, too. I only made it through the second episode before deciding that this endeavor was just not worth my time when I’m already basically obligated to watch Sword Art Online Alicization next season (because the community discourse will inevitably focus heavily on it), and I already knew I was gonna give this a bad score.

That being said, I would like to explain my score in slightly more detail here. I’m giving The Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar a 2/10. By all rights, it’s unwatchable, and that might lead people to wonder why I didn’t give it the same 1/10 I gave shows like How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord or In Another World With My Smartphone, and that’s because that score is reserved for shows that I consider not just bad, but offensive. At some point I’ll be talking more in detail about the Hall of Shame, but I don’t consider Ragnarok to be on that level of awfulness because the concept could have been saved by just making different decisions over the course of its creation.

Basically, what I mean is, there is a timeline somewhere where The Master of Ragnarok exists and is at least decent. I cannot imagine such a possibility for Angel’s 3Piece!, so it’s a 1 instead of a 2.

2/10, dropped after two episodes.

Final (?) Thoughts – Cells at Work!

There’s nothing wrong with this show; on the contrary it’s actually very good and well thought-out. No, unfortunately, this one is going on hold because my primary fear from the first episode came true; Cells at Work! is a fully episodic work with little to no continuity between episodes, and such things have a tendency to completely lose my interest.

As much fun as it is, I still have to watch ClassicaLoid 2, so Cells is just going to have to wait until I get around to it sometime in the future. It still gets a recommendation from me, though, for what it’s worth.

Final Thoughts – Angels of Death

If anyone was wondering why I gave up again on weeklies, yeah, this one just utterly lost my interest.

Five episodes into its run, Angels just seems way too willing to just emulate 999, and that’s not what I’m here for. In the fifth episode, we finally caught a glimpse of Zack’s background (basically the only thing keeping me invested) and it was just so corny (it involves his parents calling him a “tool” while villain-laughing) that I couldn’t take it even a little seriously. At this point, we haven’t learned anything new about Rachel, and I don’t get the feeling that whatever revelation her character provides just won’t be worth the wait, particularly when this show inexplicably has a whole extra month to run.

Ultimately, I should have listened to the advice of others, but it may have just been seeing the premiere right after the abysmal ISLAND that made me think I liked this one more than I really do, when Happy Sugar Life seems much more ready to give me what I’m looking for if I really want a creepshow this season.

4/10, dropped after five episodes. Gonna go watch some Harukana Receive to lighten the mood.