It’s time for a new general discussion thread! Hot takes, recommendations, questions, cautionary tales, all of it is welcome here.
As always, remember to be mindful of spoilers. If you want to know more about how to handle spoilers in this community, check the guide here (also linked in the sidebar).
Is it just me, or is the crop of isekai/light fantasy anime this season even worse than usual? I think I’ve watched nine premieres so far and gotten one good one (Zenshu), three mediocre-but-might-improve, one so-bad-it’s-kinda-fun-to-poke-fun-at, and four that were just dire. I’m almost afraid to check out the other four or five I’d intended to take a look at.
(Edit: can’t count, eheheh.)
Yeah, from perusing the discussion threads, it has been pretty lackluster so far. There are a couple high-profile returning series (Apothecary Diaries, Solo Leveling, 100 Girlfriends), but we will see how the rest of the new shows turn out as they make their premieres in the next week.
Strong agree. I watch one of everything, and this time it feels like a struggle to find anything worth continuing at all.
Maybe it’s time to make progress on my backlog…
The season’s picking up a little bit now, which is nice, but I’d like to take a moment to dump my reviews for all the stuff that didn’t get threads and I won’t be continuing:
Beheneko
This anime ended up being even bolder and more horny than I had imagined, and was more direct about its bestiality as well. Even so, it seemed like it had basically nothing else to offer, and it didn’t seem like it was willing to go far enough to satisfy the people who are into That Kind of Thing, so I gave it a 1/5. It sounds like I’ve since been proven wrong and it is willing to escalate, so hopefully y’all get the fantasy RPG version of Inukai-san’s Dog that you dreamed of
Bogus Skill [Fruitmaster]
OP power fantasy wish fulfillment slop with no particular strengths. It was very frustrating to watch the main character realize he can eat as many skill fruits as he wants and then not eat any of the giant pile he had sitting in his living room. I give it a 2/5. Also, I’ve heard that a more accurate translation of the title would be “Nutmaster”
Possibly the Greatest Alchemist of All Time
Extremely dull and painfully slow. It briefly teased that something interesting was going to happen when it cut to the heroes who were supposed to be summoned, but that scene lasted about 90 seconds and at the end of the episode they revealed it was a flash forward to a year in the future, so we probably won’t get more for a while. I give it a 1/5 and will probably never think about it again. The spider was very cute and good, though (until it talked).
Headhunted to Another World
I could feel the lack of budget in basically every scene of this anime, and that’s sort of impressive when the concept mostly calls for diplomacy scenes. The soundtrack also stuck out to me at a couple points as being the wrong tone for the scene. There’s just so little effort put in that it drags down what I’m sure is a perfectly fine story - if this seems interesting, probably check out the manga. 2/5.
Sorairo Utility
Sports anime is very much not my thing, same with CGDCT, but this was nice. It sort of bothered me that the main character goes around trying to find something she can be “the main character” at and “unlock hidden skills” or whatever, and no one thinks to sit her down and say, like “you have to make your own story by finding something you want to develop skills at”, but maybe we’ll get there. Overall, not great, but good enough. 3/5.
Sorairo Utility might not be my thing, but it at least is the kind of project that I like to see getting made. It was originally a single episode OVA that somebody out there believed enough in to turn around and produce into a whole show. I love the big name adaptations as much as the next person, but I like to see these more original, passion type projects as well.
Absolutely, I love to see original anime and wish there were a lot more! I actually will be watching a couple more episodes of it, since I like to give a little more leeway to new IP, but I don’t anticipate it actually sticking on my list past that since it’s such a genre anime that is not my genre (but anything can happen, since it’s anime original, lol)
I am keeping this post very brief as I am really not feeling very well at the moment. So, here are some super brief impressions on what I watched this past week:
- Tower of God Season 2 Finale - Even with a stronger end, a really big letdown over season 1. Unsure if I will continue if there is a season 3.
- Ameku M.D. - OK start. Willing to continue with this one if I find time, but a low priority.
- Pom Poko - Watched for the first time this past week while sick and it was kinda weird. Not sure if it was meant to be tragic, silly, or preachy about nature conservation. It ended up a bit of a mishmash of all three that wasn’t great. I did love the creative animations of the tanuki and their transformations though.
- Porco Rosso - Similarly watched for the first time this past week and I liked this one a lot more. Some really gorgeous animation and an interesting cast of characters.
- Rurouni Kenshin (Remake Season 2) - Watched the first couple episodes and I appreciate that they aren’t afraid to change up animation styles for impact from time to time. Also, I really like Misao, so it’s been fun.
- Natsume’s Book of Friends Season 7 - Watched a couple episodes and it’s the same as always. Each episode is just a bite of comfort food. It has been remarkably consistent over all seven seasons.
Just as a meta aside, I have been toying around with stuff for future versions of the voting stuff we just did for the awards and the async nature of web stuff is really breaking my brain. I am so used to writing scripts and stuff for work that just runs a bunch of data cleaning and analysis sequentially and I sit there while it thinks until it spits out the results.
That kind of thing just doesn’t work when you try to do things in a browser without making you constantly think that things are broken. Making this issue worse is that one of the api’s I am trying to integrate (animethemes.moe) is pretty slow to respond, usually taking ~0.5-1 second per query. So, I am being forced to learn async stuff and I kind of hate it…
I started watching a couple of shows:
- Akiba Maid War - It’s what it says on the tin. Super fun, humorous, well-written show.
- Zenshu - The English blurb for this show lies by omission. It cuts off the ending of the Japanese blurb! The cut off part reads something like, “While struggling with her storyboards, she loses consciousness. When she awakens she finds herself in the world of an anime she saw as a child, Tales of Destruction.” That’s right, it’s actually an isekai. They admitted it to the Japanese audience but deliberately hid this information from western viewers. The animation is superb, and I can see why they wouldn’t want to be lumped in with all the other generic isekai that are constantly being churned out, but I don’t appreciate being lied to.
The English blurb for this show lies by omission. It cuts off the ending of the Japanese blurb!
Depends on where you read it, I guess. Livechart’s blurb was complete as of yesterday, when I last reloaded the page.
Interesting. It’s missing on Anilist.co, MAL, and Crunchyroll but sure enough there it is on Livechart.
Huh. That looks to me like two of those copied an incomplete blurb from the third (I would guess that Crunchyroll made the initial error, since they’re the one with the commercial interest). Livechart says “[Source: MAPPA]” at the very bottom, so they went back to the original studio for their information.
Popping into the Zenshu thread and it seems like it might be one to try to check out this season. That bit about the difference between the Japanese and English synopses is pretty funny. Thanks for pointing it out.
This Season
Continuing
Zenshu - I wasn’t expecting that twist
Still holding out
Ameku MD - It could turn out to be like Ron Kamonohashi’s Forbidden Deductions, in which case I would drop it once I get bored
I’m Getting Married to a Girl I Hate in My Class - I’m finding it funny enough for now
I’m Living With a Otaku NEET Kunoichi?! - I’m finding it entertaining enough for now
Dropped
Momentary Lily - (Disclaimer: I have only watched the first half of the show before dropping it.) The show did not establish the backstory of characters. It also did not really provide context as to why the world is the way it is. It started off by introducing the girls who are essentially various character archetypes, then have them fight a monster that came out of nowhere. With a start like this, I can’t feel myself rooting for any of the characters. There’s no plot point that I’m hooked on either. It’s just a mess through and through, and simply not worth watching - unless you enjoy watching cute girls fight monsters.
Past Seasons
After procrastinating it for so long, I finally got around to watching the original 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam.
With the old-ass animation, lame-sounding music and mechs that don’t look cool at all, the only things the show has going for it are the story and it characters. And boy, did the story and characters carry the anime hard.
Now that I have watched it, I finally understand why Gundam fans place the Universal Century timeline and its characters on a pedestal.
It is the most “Gundam” Gundam show (duh, since it’s the OG). It stars a very likable protagonist - Amuro Ray - and his found family, a hotchpotch crew of rookie soldiers and civilians onboard a warship - White Base -, just trying to survive the war. They spent most of the show on the run from enemy forces, being pursuit mostly by an enigmatic yet charismatic masked antagonist - Char Aznable.
It’s got all the anti-war themes that it helped pioneered: child soldiers, killing of civilians, WMDs, etc. Heck, they even straight-up referenced Hitler at one point.
I can see how every Gundam shows (and Gundam-like shows) that came after drew inspiration from it. Out of those that I have watched, I find that Gundam SEED is the most similar. In fact, they are similar not just in terms of the story, characters and tropes but also in their main flaw (IMO): reused animations!
Personally, another benefit of watching it is that I finally get some of the Gundam memes. It’s like watching Lord of the Rings and coming across the meme scenes.
So, despite this being such an old anime - which I usually can’t be bothered with -, I ended up liking it so much that
- I binged it
- I’m giving it a score of 10 / 10
I’ve still got a long way to go with the rest of the Universal Century timeline. However, now that I have at least watch the OG, I will probably try rating the Gundam-ness of some shows that I have watched at some point.
I still won’t be buying the Gunpla of this show anytime soon. I prefer the modern looks of mobile suits from SEED, 00, Iron-Blood Orphans and Witch from Mercury.
Momentary Lily presented a (very thin) backstory about what happened to the world further on in the episode. It doesn’t make it any more worth watching. The hook at the end is the venerable “amnesiac character has MEGA POWERZ, but why?”, which doesn’t even really count as a twist these days.
After procrastinating it for so long, I finally got around to watching the original 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam.
One of us! One of us! Now that you’ve watched that, you can enjoy all the parts of UC Gundam where they actually had money and their animation director wasn’t in the hospital!
Watch enough Gundam and you are going to be ready for the newly announced Gunpla tabletop game.
Weekly ranking roundup:
- Anime Corner (Overall Fall Season Rankings) - Full Results - Season Winner: Bleach TYBW
- Reddit Karma - Weekly Winner: Bleach: TYBW
Credit to /u/Abysswatcherbel for making the chart for reddit karma and /u/Nooble5 for the Anime Trending chart.
A bit of a weird week on reddit as we are straddling seasons, but Bleach closed the season strong on reddit.
Similarly for the overall season rankings on AC, Bleach performed well as expected. Some things to note on the full results page is that they include a bunch of other awards as well as voter demographics. A couple things I found interesting:
- 18-22 years old is the peak of the age distribution of AC voters
- 83% - 18% male to female gender breakdown
- Surprisingly (to me), Asia was the best represented geographical region at 39% followed by NA at 27%
So, if you are ever wondering to yourself why AC votes the way it does, maybe it’s because the average AC voter is very different from the average lemmy user.
First up last week was the rest of season 2 of Non Non Biyori - Non Non Biyori Repeat. It was fine - not quite as good as season 1 IMO, but still fine. And I still like the manga better.
Next I cast about for something loud and frenetic as a complete change of pace, and boy did I find it. Dead Leaves (2004) It’s gloriously cel-shaded non-stop action. I could pull a lifetime’s supply of desktop wallpapers from its 50 minute runtime, and I have no doubt that it provided at least partial inspiration for a number of later works - most notably Kill La Kill and Redline. It has a semblance of a plot, but mostly it’s just an art design orgy.
Still in the mood for something unusual but looking for more plot, I gave a long-time resident of my TBW a shot Sonny Boy (2021). I only made it three episodes before I had to walk away. It’s an interesting premise (though famously already done by Drifting Classroom), but it has a flaw that particularly bothers me - aside from the three main characters and one other notable side character, every single character in it is an asshole of one sort or another. They aren’t even terribly plot-relevant assholes or assholes moving toward a redemption arc - they’re just assholes, for no particular reason other than to provide conflict.
So I went looking for something else and ended up clicking on MF Ghost. I didn’t even know it existed until relatively recently, and I didn’t expect a whole lot from it, but I liked Initial D back in the day and I’m a sucker for racing anime in general, so I had to do it. And I just started with the beginning of season 1 and binged it all the way through to the end of season 2.
It was fine all in all, but sort of odd. The animation is much, much better than Initial D, and the basic setup is different, but it somehow managed to follow pretty much the exact same formula, all the way down to the vague but earnest and unaccountably pretty MMC, his gonk best friend, constant droning commentary going into excruciating detail about cars and racing, lots of teeth-gritting declarations of a racer’s pride and recurring cries of “but my car is a 6.2 liter v10 with 900 horsepower, so he shouldn’t be able to beat me!” as the challengers inevitably get beaten. It was just the mindless entertainment I expected it to be, though at the pace the story is unfolding, it seems like it’s going to take at least a dozen seasons to really get anywhere, which is a bit off-putting.
Then I went back and finished Sonny Boy, which was okay all in all. More than anything else, most of the assholes were moved out of the story and the focus narrowed to the main characters who on their own were actually fairly compelling. The end was sort of vague and handwavey, but it was okay.
Then, to cap off the week, I went in search of something completely different and happened on a gem And @wjs018@ani.social - take note - you should go watch this ASAP. I guarantee you’ll love it. And anyone else with a liking for fluffy post-apocalyptic slice of life should check it out.
It’s listed as an OVA, but I’m near certain that what it actually is is a planned full season anime that was inexplicably cancelled while still in production, so they just released the existing two episodes on their own. It only really hints at the background story, just as if more was set to be revealed in later episodes, but then there were no later episodes. So what we got was two helpings of episodic iyashikei/slice of life, sort of reminiscent of Mushishi, with a dash of a Girls Last Tour sort of background (the difference being that the girls are time travelers and the stories are set in our era, with a few flashbacks to their previous and apparently post-apocalyptic life). And it’s sweet and charming and soothing, and well worth seeing, and it’s a shame there wasn’t more.
And I don’t really know what’s next, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to delve into my TBW.
Alright, reporting back from watching Escha Chron. You know me too well. This got me so curious as to what their story is and it pains me to know that there will never be more to it. If this were to have been a series, these two as the first two episodes were fine, but I do think it rolled out the worldbuilding a bit slowly. I would have liked to see more teases/flashbacks of Terminal earlier and some more information about who/what Albert is earlier to act as a hook. I really enjoyed it though, especially episode 2.
I’m pleased and not a little relieved.
And yeah - it’s a shame that there almost certainly won’t be more and that we got so little detail.
From the references in episode 2, it seems that they can travel more or less freely between the worlds, and were in the process of returning to Terminal when they got snowbound. I would assume that the original plan was to reveal some more details about Terminal and Albert, and likely some more of their own history, then shift back to our world for more interactions, and so on, and all the while maintaining that episodic structure.
If done well, it could’ve been pretty much the ultimate expression of iyashikei, since the specific thing that happens - the way in which Escha and Chron help people - is simply by seeing the value in them and in what they’re doing, and that’s apparently something that they’re not only especially well-suited for, since that value stands in such sharp contrast to Terminal, but something that actually materially benefits them and Terminal as well.
But oh well…
fluffy post-apocalyptic slice of life
I can’t find this streaming, so I am setting sail for this so hard… Thanks for bringing this one to my attention, it seems absolutely up my alley. I think you are right with your guess that this was planned for more. If you look at the official website, they still have a bunch of sections for things like merch, soundtrack, and story that are just placeholder text.
If you liked MF Ghost, I heard good things about Overtake, another racing series. I haven’t watched any of those shows though, so don’t take my word for it. @zabadoh@ani.social was the resident MF Ghost watcher, so they might be able to better point you in a direction.
I’ve never watched Overtake, so beats me…
As @Rottcodd@lemmy.world says, MF Ghost has is positives (racing, automobile geekery, and soundtrack), and minuses (any plot other than racing, not just failing the Bechdel Test but ripping it up and torching the shreds).
Wisely, the MF Ghost staff decided to limit the non-racing time to about half an episode when needed.
