Final Thoughts – Phantom in the Twilight

A lot of good ideas executed boringly.

I like the urban fantasy kitchen sink that Phantom seems to be going with, but the reality is that this show needs a lot more style. You wouldn’t necessarily need to even change anything else, just, just…

Yeah, that. Because the story is interesting, but the characters are flat, the aesthetic is boring, and the production is laughable. It almost seems like it’s just going for a 6/10, which I will not reward it for when I could be watching better shows.

Seriously, though, dump a Persona 5 bucket of paint on it and we might have something decent on our hands, rather than this Lipton tea bag of a show. 5/10, dropped after three episodes.

Final Thoughts – March Comes In Like a Lion Season 2

I’m not late! I have all year to finish the multi cour shows since I count them separately.

I had a lot of praise for the first season of March last year, most of which carries through for this one. Akiyuki Shinbo has created what is, directorially speaking, his masterpiece, with a deeply affecting, emotional work that maximize the effect of every individual shot to draw as much feeling as possible off of the screen. His habit of overloading scenes with visual information is toned down enough here to be more bearable than the sometimes headache-inducing Monogatari series, and it leads to an overall much more moving piece of artwork.

The story is absolutely no slouch, either, as a well-partnered work that explores all facets of humanity through the eyes of a lonely prodigy, and does it extremely well. The characters we meet are almost all very well-defined people with complex emotions and a lot going on in their lives, and the story gives them all more than enough room to demonstrate themselves to the viewer.

Honestly, the big issue March continues to face is its pacing, as some arcs just don’t stand up next to others and the final episode wraps up only one side-character’s plot, and we hadn’t seen him in ten episodes. I’m really hoping that this adaptation is merely waiting for more of the source material to be drawn (being a very strict and faithful translation of the manga to the point of the episodes being named and numbered by chapter), because completely cutting it off here will not give this show the legacy it should have, but overall it’s still certainly worth watching.

8/10, with a potential score bump if a third season ever comes.

Final Thoughts – Golden Kamuy

Enjoyable, but deeply flawed.

Everyone seemed to think that what was going to ultimately drag this one down would be its unfortunate use of CG, but the production honestly didn’t end up being much of an issue. No, the problem here is that this show has a massive tonal dysfunction.

At first glance, Kamuy is a fairly brutal, gory action piece, but once you’ve gotten into it, you will start to notice its fondness for lowbrow comedy. This would be fine, if not for the fact that the brutal action was constantly interrupted by dick and poop jokes, very often in the middle of what should be menacing, serious scenes. All I wanted was for the show to stay on focus and complete an intense sequence without a boner joke completely breaking my immersion, and it became increasingly difficult for Golden Kamuy to do so.

I don’t hate lowbrow comedy on principle or anything (hell, I’m certainly enjoying Grand Blue Dreaming) but when you’re trying to create an atmosphere of menace and danger, it’s just really, really distracting. Action comedies used to be a lot smarter than this (Soul Eater knew when it should be funny and when it should be creepy).

The other problem here is that the pacing is…strange. The show is a collect-the-Macguffins story where we don’t know how many Macguffins there even are, and the final episode would leave me recommending this to absolutely nobody if not for the fact that season two was announced after the credits.

I’ll probably watch season two, but I really hope we can see a little more restraint on the part of the writers and storyboarders to get a more focused experience.

6/10, complete.

Final Thoughts – Devils’ Line

HIDIVE at this point just has a habit of trying hard to push shows with awful production values, huh?

This one has a little less of an excuse for why I even bothered waiting to drop it for so long, because not only does it look bad, ther are few-to-no good ideas to begin with. Human-vampire love stories have been played out for over a decade now, and basically all this ends up coming off as is “edgy Twilight”, which is amazing considering how edgy Twilight seemed to think it was.

I thought this one might turn around, so I was optimistic about it, but at this point, I only watched two episodes and needed to either sit through it or give up, so I’m giving up, because I have more important things to get to. Here are some assorted thoughts based on the two episodes of material I saw.

1) Half of the scenes in this show are, in fact, a direct rip-off of Twilight.

2) The red-yellow eye effect looks utterly hilarious.

3) If the camera isn’t facing a character head-on, they end up looking badly off-model, in every single case.

4) Studio Platinum Vision seems to exclusively make vampire shows, because the only other production on their resume is Servamp, which I’ve been meaning to get to if only because it looks interesting.

3/10, dropped after two episodes.

Final Thoughts – Real Girl

I should be finishing this one, but I just can’t.

I’m so, so late to the party with my final thoughts about the Spring season, and it’s because of two HIDIVE shows I’ve just been putting off and off. This is one of them, and it’s entirely because of the production.

There’s no beating around the bush here; this show looks awful. It’s like watching paint dry, because the character designs, the locations, and the direction are all just boring as hell. I’ve loved shows with no budget before (see: Baby Steps), but this one just does not have the script to compensate for it, and it just comes out to a bland mush.

Which is a shame, because there’s totally something worthwhile here. Semi-realistic romances where the characters don’t waste the entire show just on the process of getting together are really coming into popularity now, but the studio just is not giving this the polish it should have had, and the money going towards the already-announced second season should probably have been funneled towards this one, because it just cannot stand up to A-1 Pictures’ Wotakoi or Doga Kobo’s Tada-kun Never Falls In Love, both of which aired last season as well and looked a damn sight better.

The studio behind Real Girl, Hoods Entertainment, is a total enigma as well. Their most notable project is Drifters from a few years ago, but aside from that they’ve pretty exclusively stuck to the ecchi or hentai genre, and everything outside that (besides Drifters) has been either mediocre (BlazBlue Alter Memory) or outright bad (Marchen Madchen). Curiously, they also made the OVA adaptation of the manga that would become Horimiya, a book I would really love to see properly adapted as a much more compelling love story.

But as it stands, Real Girl is relegated to being likely forgotten entirely, that future second season also doomed to the bottom of the seasonal MAL chart. This was never going to be great, but it could have at least been good.

4/10, dropped after seven episodes.

Final Thoughts – MEGALOBOX

The story of one man and his quest to punch a dude.

I know, I’m really late on this one, I’m almost done with the Spring, but this one was one I was almost afraid to finish. I was worried it would do something to ruin itself for me.

It did not.

MEGALOBOX has been the secret hit of the season, and for very good reason. The story is solid and classic in its setup and formula, the aesthetic is perfectly peak 90′s throughout, and the music is fucking incredible. But the fact that it really did manage to keep that up for all 13 episodes is the real miracle of this show. MEGALOBOX is undeniable from start to end.

And what an ending it was. Obviously I’m not going to spoil it, but I wouldn’t change a single beat of this story, and the ending was pitch-perfect in its tone and direction, and the choice to make things ambiguous (until they’re suddenly not) was genius.

I honestly don’t know what else to say about this one, because it’s so perfect that it denies any one element being highlighted over anything else, but I do want to give a shout out to the ending theme by Emi Nakamura, because I never wanted to skip past it.

So, I’ll end this completely disjointed and shamefully incoherent review with my pretty obvious score.

10/10. Not to be missed.

Final Thoughts – Magical Girl Site

I gave this one more than a fair shot.

MagiSite was one of the most widely mocked shows of the spring, with one image in particular (a pair of shoes so edgy that Hot Topic wouldn’t carry them for fear of getting sued) getting passed around like Halloween candy to drive the show’s notoriety up as edgelord crap to be avoided, but the reality is that the edge level here isn’t anything new, and I wouldn’t even say that it’s “trying too hard” in the same way that Akame Ga Kill was. In fact, I liked the premiere for setting up an immediately dark, no-holds-barred show that didn’t hide the blood and violence implied in worlds where people have crazy powers like this (see Re:Creators).

No, the problem here is that the writing just fails to distinguish it by making it a blended frappe of tropes from other currently-popular shows. The plot is very nearly the same as Madoka Magica, and that doesn’t disqualify it on its own, but unlike other lookalikes (primarily Yuki Yuna is a Hero), the writing just does not make up for it.

The central difference is the candidacy for being a magical girl (which is just being female and miserable, apparently, since one of the antagonists suffered nothing worse than a scar, and created all of her own problems very directly), and the fact that these characters were all pushed to the brink already, sort of justifies the dark actions a lot of them end up taking, though some of them are just straight-up crazy and were more or less just waiting for an excuse. I like a lot of this idea, and it could have made for a more promising show.

But the script is just terrible and brings up a lot of issues that don’t make sense. I’ll grant that there were times where I shouted at the screen only for a character to echo my thoughts when things don’t make sense, but you end up with plot holes when you contradict the motivations of your universe.

It’s nothing new for magical girls to be sacrificing themselves in the process of their actions, but here, using magic is slowly but directly killing the girls in question by aging them internally to the point where when examined by doctors, one of the first antagonists is said to be literally an old woman on the inside despite only being a teenager. This is in direct conflict with the fact that there is a magical girl whose power is to heal others, including being able to reverse magical damage on other girls. So what was the point, other than that they needed a few hospital scenes? (The girl herself is also cringy as fuck, because she’s an eyepatch-wearing extreme recluse who cuts herself, takes dozens of Xanax pills at once, and insists that she isn’t emo.)

This isn’t my only plot hole issue, either, because one of the most notable aspects of the premiere is that we are shown that the main character’s brother severely beats her every single day, but when she ends up in the hospital as well, apparently none of the doctors notice the signs of long-term physical abuse. How? She should be bruised all over her stomach and have a cracked rib or two she’s been suffering through, but if all that went away just because he didn’t hit her for a week, I guess the beating just wasn’t as bad as it looked?

The last issue I’ll raise is that when the Starter Villain I mentioned earlier gets her magic sticks taken away from her and gets the plot explained to her along with the main duo, they just go along with it and don’t seem to have an issue hanging around with her despite knowing she has murdered multiple magical girls in cold blood. What?

It’s frustrating, because it’s almost there. It’s almost to what I would call passable, if not enjoyable. There are moments where I was genuinely surprised by the direction (there’s a scene in the sixth episode where two characters, one of whom is Brother-san, are sitting at a table having a pleasant but two-faced conversation, and when the camera cuts to one’s inner monologue basically explaining that he’s being two-faced, I thought it was just a tell-not-show writing mistake since the audience is already aware, but it was followed by a juxtaposition of both of them being facetious and hiding secrets from each other), and the art is minimalistic but not the hardest to look at.

I can tell halfway in, though, that Magical Girl Site just isn’t gonna be able to manage enough of an upswing for me to give it even a seven, so I’m not gonna watch it flail around. 4/10.

Final Thoughts – Umamusume: Pretty Derby

This one gave me a lot more to talk about than I had imagined.

I had taken this as pretty much just being another KanColle, and it more or less is, but it is significantly better. It’s not absolutely amazing and I probably wouldn’t have finished it if it weren’t something I watched with my boyfriend, but it did manage to win me over.

That being said, I want to get the issues I had out of the way first.

The victory concert is still just as silly in episode 13 as it was in episode 1, and only barely justifies the entire cast getting to participate in a dance party ending. It also barely gets mentioned after the first few episodes, and that ending in episode 13 is the only time we see an entire performance.

The pacing in this one is really strange. The plot moves fast enough that there’s a major race in every single episode (usually taking up the final third or so), which makes it watch pretty quickly, but the plot has an absolutely insane number of timeskips. At one point we skip forward roughly nine months in the span of a single montage.

The school setting makes little sense and doesn’t really go anywhere, since it stops being relevant at all in the second half of the show aside from just a convenient place for all the characters to live together.

This is just an okay production from P.A. Works, whom I can’t blame for the crazy character designs but can totally blame for the prevalence of flat C.G. for anyone more than four feet away from the camera, including in the opening.

But I did genuinely enjoy my time with the show. The characters are all fun and defined, I’m a sucker for a go-getter girl protagonist like Special Week, I like that Suzuka ditched her aloof schtick once she made friends, and even though not all of them paid off, I liked the rivalries that formed between characters who raced together often. I think that Seiun Sky got shafted for the last race, but otherwise the show knows when to discard extra characters it doesn’t need, which is a pretty rare occurrence for a mobile game adaptation (I will remind you that iM@S Side M had TWENTY ONE characters of supposedly equal relevance, not even counting the staff members).

I also want to mention that I’m giving this one a whole extra point for the massive attention to detail regarding the horse characters, all of whom are based on real horses and all of whom more or less perform the same way. We see a few races that are basically stand-ins for real ones that actually happened (such as the Fall Tennoushou) and apart from certain relationships (Silence Suzuka may be parentally related to the real Special Week, we don’t talk about it) it’s an excellent recreation of real-life events in anime.

So, yeah, a strong 7/10. It won’t be for everyone, but it’s structured and executed pretty well and is a great watch for horse nerds. Now, where’s the MLP crossover we never knew we wanted?

Final Thoughts – Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs

I’m kind of impressed.

The first scene of this show is
tonally confused as hell, looking sad and dramatic while also getting
in several shots of the title character’s huge chest in absolute
cleavage. We then get a hint of supernatural action before, by the end
of the first ten minutes, we have seen the title character completely
nude, had her turn red and hit the main character with things, and then
met the entire rest of the harem who conveniently show up right when he
wakes up, in addition to learning all of their archetypes.

I’m
sure that this will be perfectly fine for some people, and to those
looking for harem comedy, this looks like a pretty classic example, but
I’m just not interested in this genre at all and probably won’t ever be.
These shows were not designed for people like me to be able to get
anything out of them.

That being said, I’m once again going to
leave this unscored, because I’m not dropping it out of distaste, more
because this just isn’t my kind of show. It’s not likely to be ambitious
or give me anything intellectually, it’s just meant to be enjoyed on
the level of fighting over which girl is best, and I don’t like a single
one of them.

So, yeah, pass.

Final Thoughts – Lord of Vermilion: The Crimson King

One of the worst serious productions I’ve ever seen.

Honestly, I might be letting it cloud my judgment because I was barely able to pay attention to the story at all. I was too distracted by noticing that there were more animation shortcuts than actual animation frames, particularly in the opening flash-forward scene, so the first impression I get from this show is that it’s basically a slideshow of still frames trying to pose as an edgy action series.

It also just looks generic as hell, and I was bored instantly. Dropped halfway through the first episode with a 2/10.