Final Thoughts – Dropkick on My Devil!

I’m on record for not really liking monster girls as a subgenre.

And this one is just particularly lame and low-effort. Some of the post-effects are nice-looking, but overall the lack of polish here on the characters is really awful. The comedy just isn’t very interesting (Asobi Asobase at least managed to make characters being rude to each other funny occasionally), the lead naga girl is annoying, and the whole thing just kind of comes across as a lazier Gabriel Dropout, which only barely managed to squeak by for me last year.

I don’t think my dropping of this one halfway through the first episode will be a terribly controversial decision.

Final Thoughts – Asobi Asobase -workshop of fun-

I…don’t really get this one.

It’s getting a crazy amount of praise, and I can understand that the comedy is funny… Sometimes. But most of the time, the off-putting art style and animation just didn’t click with me, and I can’t imagine sitting through a whole season of something that almost hurts my eyes.

I know I’m usually the guy saying “you gotta look deeper, see the auteurism, people just don’t get it” and this makes me kind of a hypocrite but it just comes across to me like an unholy child of Nichijou and Robot Chicken that they left behind a Burger King. I get why this will appeal to people and there’s a part of my brain that loves it, but I don’t think I can manage to engage myself with this when I struggled to get through the first episode like this.

Oh, props to the voice actresses, though. Probably some of the better performances in this subgenre.

I’m leaving this unscored because I don’t really think I should weigh in here given my attitude, and also because it would perfectly toe the middle line for me at a 5.5.

Quick Final Thoughts – The Thousand Musketeers

There’s something about this one I just don’t get.

Thousand Musketeers is just yet another run-of-the-mill mobile gacha game adaptation that spends its first episode throwing entirely too many name cards on the screen and being largely uninteresting, but it’s not the worst show I’ve seen this season.

What I don’t understand is its MAL score, which currently sits at an almost impossibly low 4.44/10, the MAL equivalent of a 2 or so. The similarly boring Touken Ranbu: Hanamaru sits almost two and a half points higher, KanColle cracks a seven, and both of those are basically the same show, so how did the public (or the less than six thousand people who chose to watch it) just decide this to be so poor? I’d give it a 4/10, which would be somewhere near a 6 on MAL, but how has the grading curve on this one come around to a score the show actually deserves for once?

There’s some interesting things to infer here, for sure, like that maybe HIDIVE subscribers are more critical of what they watch than Crunchyroll ones, or how shrinking the subject pool can skew results.

Oh, wait, I’m supposed to be talking about the show, right? It’s boring and won’t appeal to anyone but the most hardcore husbando hunters. Skip it.

Quick Final Thoughts – Music Girls

I’m on record as one of the biggest critical fans of idol shows in the US, having declared that Love Live! Sunshine!! was a masterpiece and giving the ahead-of-its-time original iDOLM@STER a 9/10, and even saying I liked Wake Up, Girls!’ plucky attitude with a 7/10 (though I elected to skip the second season thanks to the behavior of a certain individual), and I can safely say this is the laziest attempt at the girl group genre I’ve ever seen.

And I don’t really understand how any of this came together to begin with. Studio Deen isn’t the wasteland it used to be, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen something this hideous from them. The adults look relatively normal but the teenagers have too-small heads that make them look like Precious Moments dolls, and the music and choreography are paint-drying boring. And the director was behind The Galaxy Railways, an old favorite of mine, but doesn’t seem to have had a full directorial job since then (2003), so I have no idea how the hell he ended up at the head of this mess.

Oh, and the plot is just trash. It’s like someone threw Love Live! and Wake Up, Girls! into a blender and hit “bland puree”.

This is a show I would comfortably throw tomatoes at. 3/10. Skip it, you’ve got enough waifus to not want to sit through this.

Quick Final Thoughts – How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord

No. No no no no no no.

Absolutely not. No way. Not doing it. Not expending another thought on it. No. No no no no no no.

I’m not going to do it! You have to actively TRY to be this offensively awful. Clearly this must be a joke of some kind, right? Someone sat down to write and was like “what if Overlord, but garbage”, right? They thought “it’s okay if the hero enslaves women if he does it by accident”? “I don’t want my protagonist to have any distinguishing characteristics”?

The biggest shame is that the production work is good, with super clean designs and bright colors, but it’s completely meaningless when the story is not just lazy, but lazy squared. Lazy to the power of lazy.

1/10. Couldn’t even make it through the first episode.

Quick Final Thoughts – ISLAND

What a dull way to start Summer off…

This has to be one of the blandest visual novel adaptations I’ve seen, and it’s not that it didn’t have the potential to be interesting, but it just buries all that potential under massive loads of cliches and lets the plot carry the protagonist along.

That second problem is sort of a reverse-Another situation, where in that show, the protagonist contributed almost literally nothing to the plot and he just kind of bumbled through it like an idiot. In ISLAND, our boy Setsuna seems to have read the script, because he seems to run on pure plot contrivance fuel without us getting any idea what’s going through his head.

And in this very first episode, we’ve set up:
* Uncomfortable sexual encounters involving high school-aged or younger girls
* Amnesia
* Time travel
* Weird illness that doesn’t physically show (a.k.a. Soap Opera Disease)
* A shut in character
* Impromptu singing
* An insular culture who hates outsiders
* An incredibly vague goal for the protagonist that he can’t remember

It’s an awful lot to take in, or at least it would be if that wasn’t just an easy list of overused visual novel tropes, but either way the result is that I have trouble remembering what happened because it all just came out to be boring on the other side. The shows this most reminded me of were Eden of the East, Steins;Gate and The Lost Village, but it doesn’t have the script to be able to stand up next to any of those (and yes, I do totally count Lost Village as a great show because it’s supposed to be a stupid B-movie).

It’s just a twelve-car pileup of 2000′s-era visual novel trash with no sense of how to maintain tension or frame a scene. The art isn’t the worst thing, but it’s not interesting either, and I can’t imagine a world where it makes a turnaround. 3/10.

Quick Final Thoughts – Comic Girls

A nice little surprise.

I kept wanting to drop Comic Girls, to be totally honest, but every time I thought about it, it managed to pull me back in. It’s certainly not anything we’ve seen before, and it’s not even close to the same tier as Bakuman. or Shirobako, but it is a solid little artist comedy.

The production kept up from the first episode, too. While the animation isn’t amazing, the art style is very poppy and overall, the show is just really nice to look at. I also want to highlight Reina Ueda’s voice work as Fuura, because her comedic timing is on point and it brings out such a hilarious character.

I can also appreciate the ending. Comic Girls presents us with both a satisfying (if not a little undercooked) ending, and a sequel hook, which I think is a pretty decent way of bringing a story like this to a close, since it means the audience won’t be too torn up if another season never materializes.

So, 7/10 seems like a fair score here. It could have made some better choices (it’s kind of wasteful that Kaos is the only character who isn’t stable in her publication, and the reaction to the circumstances of the ending is underwhelming) but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Quick Final Thoughts – HINAMATSURI

Easily the funniest show of the season, and of the year thus far.

The biggest strength of Hinamatsuri is its ability to keep its comedy fresh by changing up its style on a frequent basis, though it does tend to keep absurdism at the bedrock of every episode. For example, one of the strongest outings was Episode 10, which goes so far into insanity as to basically become an It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia plotline where poor decisions just snowball into a massive mess that nobody really faces consequences for, but in a show like this, I’m perfectly willing to accept that.

The characters we get here are also pretty strong and tend to come with subversions built in to their archetypes, with the only sane character being one of the middle schoolers, or the deadpan girl being genuinely unintelligent. The most compassionately portrayed people in the entire show are homeless and living in a shantytown, which is honestly impressive, and at the center of things is Nitta and his crew of honest-to-god yakuza, who are shown as mostly being reasonable people except in the case of personal betrayal. Honestly, I would be surprised to come across a more interesting cast of characters this year.

A particular highlight goes to Anzu, who goes through the most shake-ups by far, and we can really get into her head each time we catch up with her. She becomes homeless while still forming her sense of independence, and while the people around her are wonderful to her, the things they teach her do not all translate to normal life, and we see that she has become uncomfortable with things like accepting selfish gifts or even getting food and shelter without working for it. Overall, she balances out by the end of the show into a very well-adjusted young woman, and seeing this growth manifest into an exploration of how she has become different from Hina is really sweet.

One thing holding this story back, though, is the final episode, which wraps up its plot halfway in and then goes to follow a side character for the rest of its run. I feel like this would have been better if we had gotten a proper goodbye to the main cast, and this story had been saved for an OVA. It’s not the worst thing, but it comes totally out of left field and introduces an entirely new subplot in the final twelve minutes of the show, just to justify the opening scene from the first episode, and even though we get to rewatch the completely badass action scene from that, it seems really, really rushed when this is only the third time we’ve seen this character, and the time skip involved just undermines the satisfaction of the actual ending and creates more questions. While this may have been the plan the entire time, it just doesn’t work, because it comes across as a pilot for another story.

Still, as a whole, this is a very solid additional mark in studio feel.’s resurgence, and I’m glad they chose to make this instead of the second season of Dagashi Kashi. It’s not as good as Tsukigakirei, but given the very negative response to the first episode of Island, it’ll probably be the best thing the studio makes this year, and a strong 8/10. (For the record, I did take off an entire point for the ending, because yes, it was a huge missed opportunity and could have been done far better.) I give it a strong recommendation for people who enjoy offbeat comedy (like the aforementioned Always Sunny) or want a righteous skewering of the kids-with-superpowers concept.

Quick Final Thoughts – Tada Never Falls in Love

It wasn’t spectacular, but it almost got there, and I’d still say it’s an improvement.

From the writer behind Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun, we have here a more down-to-earth romcom that leans a little less on the “com” but makes up for it with charm. And the most important element this has that its predecessor adaptation lacked, is an actual ending. That’s right, instead of one of the most famously frustrating endings to perfectly alright shows in recent memory, Tada-kun gives us a beginning, middle, and end instead of the maligned “read the manga” ending from Nozaki.

And getting there is still lots of fun, with a much more cozy cast of friends and the new foreigners to shake things up among them. While several elements of the cast are pretty rote at this point (the club member who is obsessed with an idol and can’t see that it’s really the girl sitting next to him who also has feelings for him being the primary offender), I really, really appreciate Ijuin out of the whole side cast. While he plays up being flirty with Alec, it’s his quality of loyalty to his friend that really makes him shine, and I was really happy to see it taken to its logical extreme in the final episodes.

I would like to say though that the last episode is a bit of a stumbling block. See, the key to the ending of a romantic comedy is almost always the confession of feelings, and generally there’s at least some tension over how things will shake out, particularly in situations where there is a third party involved to whom one of the main pair is already obligated. While I don’t object to the removal of the standard jealous disposable fiance, the issue of the engagement is just solved far too easily, and kind of makes me wonder why the show bothered with it when it could have just as easily gone with the equally played-out but more-satisfying “they can’t be together because she has to marry a noble” plot line. It wasn’t a huge problem, but it stuck out as being strange.

Oh, and the emotional climax is really abruptly interrupted by a sudden tonal shift before we finally get the obvious conclusion to the story. I’m not sure how I would have fixed this, but it’s very jarring, though it doesn’t take away from the actual final scene, which is very okay, if a little lazy.

Still, I can’t help but applaud this show for its consistently good production the entire way through. Quirky music and bright-yet-realistic color tones convey the perfect atmosphere rather than turning the entire show into a single large moeblob universe, as happens in Is the Order a Rabbit? (not that I hated that show, but the crazy pastels got really boring to look at by the second season), and although nobody’s design really stands out (they spend most of their time in school uniforms) I would like to highlight the in-universe photography as being quite good, while also looking properly high-school-level.

Overall, this show takes some very well-used building blocks and stacks them into a well-executed house. It’s not mind-blowing, but I feel comfortable with an 8/10, a score MAL classifies as “Very Good”. Check it out if you were disappointed by Nozaki-kun.

Quick Final Thoughts – Magical Girl Ore

Magical Girl “Eh”…

Six episodes in, and this show is making me just totally unsure of what I want from it.

It was going alright up until episode 5, which is 99% dedicated to a skewering of the way Pierrot makes its shows that just was not as funny or clever as it thought it was, followed by a hot springs episode. And given my own preferences, a fanservice episode featuring beefy dudes should be up my alley, but the intention of displaying a strange parody of homoeroticism is just utterly killed by repeated jokes and constant reminders that one of the characters involved is actually a girl who has been unwillingly transformed into a male.

The main protagonist Saki just baffles me. I understand the joke that she’s an aspiring idol who is completely untalented and only in it to get closer to her crush, but it’s so incredibly obvious that Mohiro, the object of her affection, is not into her and is very much attracted to her beefy male form that it makes it really difficult to get where she’s coming from. Oh, and her best female friend has directly confessed her feelings to Saki but is inexplicably willing to help her get closer to Mohiro, who is also her brother. It’s created this strange quasi-gay School Days love triangle that the show isn’t smart enough to find the right way out of.

And just in case I haven’t mentioned it enough, I am NOT a fan of queerbaiting like this. The issues of gender in this show are way, way more complicated than it’s willing to address, and by the time we get to the point where transformed!Saki and Mohiro end up seeing each other naked for an extended period of time (creating a situation where Mohiro has not consented to Saki seeing him this way but is unaware that it’s actually her), I was ready to throw my hands up and declare that I was just not up for this. Maybe if the main character had been, for example, a frail and unathletic boy transforming into a beefcake (since that tends to be a male self-ideal, compared to the female self-ideal of sexy curves and such that we see in magical girl transformation) I would be more up for this, but let’s face it, Japan has just not gotten to the point of accepting that yet.

I did think some of the jokes in earlier episodes landed, the opening is fun and bouncy, and the production isn’t the worst, but I don’t consider anything except my overall enjoyment to determine my score, and I think a 4/10 fits here, a below-average but not completely abysmal rating that communicates tastelessness and bad writing more than any other failing.