Quick Updated Impressions – Steins;Gate 0

I’m disappointed in a lot of things.

I’m disappointed that, fifteen episodes in, this show has only barely presented a plot, and only one truly great episode (the eighth). I’m disappointed that it somehow currently carries an 8.9 on MAL and is the 19th highest rated show on the entire site, simply because it’s Steins;Gate.

I’m really disappointed that this production as a whole has just utterly collapsed. Let’s start with a brutal but honest statement about the visuals here: 0 looks boring. Where the original carried great direction and decent production, this time we get substandard talking heads with no dynamic or symbolic elements of any kind. This is probably one of White Fox’s worst production jobs, if not the worst.

The story does not fare any better, with brief pieces of interesting ideas interspersed with unoriginal filler, whether it’s a rehashed sitcom plot in the middle of what should be a very tense, dramatic situation, or an excuse to show Faris deliberately groping the bustiest girl in the show without her consent. Lots of subplots are brought up that have just gone nowhere (Amadeus, which the opening builds up to be central to the narrative of saving Kurisu, just seems to have been a way to heighten the dramatic narrative of episode eight, because she immediately becomes irrelevant two episodes later, Suzuha is basically exiled to the lab roof for the entire first half of the show, and Ruka is explicitly kept out of the loop, only for it to not matter when they disappear from the plot right afterwards). It’s pretty obvious at this point that 0 could have pretty easily been good with 13 episodes if only to force the pacing to hurry the hell up.

At this point, I’m still watching because I want to see if the ending can at least salvage this up to a 7, because right now…

Score so far: 5/10

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?

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.