Merry Christmas to all celebrating it! I hope you all have a wonderful day! ^o^

Today marks a big day for me. As of this morning, I have finally beaten Super Castlevania 4, on the game's 32nd birthday. Equipped with maxed-out hearts and health, a fully upgraded whip and boomerang cross (or as I call it, the Jesusrang), and my own reflexes and wits, I learned Dracula's attack patterns and kept Simon going towards victory. After just five or so tries (and thanking all that is good for Virtual Console save states), I made it past the accursed flames Dracula sends out, and after enough successful hits, ol' Drac became desperate. I took one hit from his lightning pillars due to a bit of overconfidence, but with just one piece of Simon's health bar remaining and a final fateful toss of the Jesusrang to Dracula's head, the deed was done. Dracula was defeated, and I got to watch that glorious ending. Light flooded into the chamber to finish the fiend off, Simon grabbed that one final boss orb, the castle fell and the credits rolled, and all the while, my hands were shaking and I was grinning like an idiot while getting all teary-eyed. And lemme tell ya, it really set the mood for the rest of my day. :'3

Happy Halloween, everybody, and happy birthday to one of the greatest games ever in the Castlevania franchise! Enjoy all the treats you care to eat, watch movies and videos you still need to see before the month's end, play some thematically appropriate games, perhaps take part in your favourite Animal Crossing game's Halloween activities, tune into your favourite streamer's channel, etc.--whatever your Halloween rituals are, have a fun, safe and spoopy day! ^o^

Fuuko Izumo is cursed with "Unluck". She brings misfortune to anyone who touches her, and the scale is proportional to how long they had physical contact. She's saved from a suicide attempt one day by Andy, a strange man who can't die. He hopes to figure out a way to use Fuuko's misfortune to finally bring him death. The unlikely pair team up to complete missions given to them by the Book of Revelations, but if they or any of the other negators in their union fail, the book might punish humanity.

"It gets better, trust me" is one of the most common refrains around Undead Unluck's early goings. I can attest to that sentiment as somebody who's read a good bit of the manga. Several frankly shitty elements in the manga's first couple volumes are quickly excised, disappearing from the material so abruptly and staying gone so completely that folks wondered if this adaptation would just go ahead and alter the start of the story to better align with what the series becomes. That didn't happen, so we're getting the unfiltered Undead Unluck experience, for better and worse.

Undead Unluck is a story that I absolutely would've dropped after the first two chapters if I read it weekly in Shonen Jump. The opening chapters casually blend suicide with handsy groping for laughs as we watch Fuuko get caught up in the violent adventures of Andy, an undead man with a perpetual shit-eating grin. Fuuko is cursed with "Unluck", where anyone who has direct physical contact with her exposed skin is doomed to suffer unfortunate circumstances, which in no way sounds like something out of an American comic book franchise that starts with the letter X. Meanwhile, Andy is very much tired of his immortality and hopes to use her to cause a disaster so catastrophic that there's no way he can come back from it. Additional wrinkles in Andy's plan soon show up, including an explanation as to why both parties have these powers in the first place, but the story's insistence on framing the main duo's relationship as one that could devolve into assault or even rape at any time took all the fun out of it.

Apart from the fact that Fuuko would really rather not die, despite the story opening with her suicide attempt, the main goal here is to get Fuuko to have strong enough feelings for the Undead half of the titular duo that she can slam him with an especially virulent stroke of badness. Because as much as Fuuko would like to not be dead, Andy pretty desperately does. This is entirely because his power is to constantly regenerate from any and all deadly injuries, and after over 200 years, he's about done. Since Fuuko's bad luck is proportional to how long her skin is touched for and how emotionally charged the action causing the person to touch her is, Andy figures that if she falls in love with him and they bang, he'll get slammed with enough badness to finally kill him once and for all. As you can probably guess, this means a lot of Andy groping Fuuko to generate worse luck. Fuuko is perpetually mid-wail about her situation and it's not particularly comfortable reading or viewing, even though it's clearly meant to be funny. That Andy can't seem to keep his pants on is a little more humorous, mostly because of the enormous censor bar that implies an impressive amount of dick, but also because that black panel is basically just part of his character design and practically becomes its own recurring character after awhile. Considering that the rest of his design incorporates such imagery as a sword occasionally plunged through his chest and what looks like a card stuck in his forehead, nudity seems like the least of his concerns.

So yeah, Undead Unluck has one of the worst, most unendearing starts of just about any Shonen Jump series ever, and a lot of that holds true for the anime. I hate the gross way the series indulges in invasive fanservice towards Fuuko, using the nature of her powers as an excuse for Andy to constantly violate her personal space and grope her for cheap gags. I hate how that comedic dynamic means Fuuko's worth as a character gets reduced to her boobs multiple times in this premiere. I hate that the pair's dynamic is essentially Wolverine and Rogue but with 1,000% more sexual harassment. I hate that Andy's design gives him a permanent Dreamworks Face and he's constantly mugging through every last second of the episode. An episode that ends with our heroine making a "comedic" escape from the male lead because he's stripped down and is loudly demanding they have sex.

It sucks because there are some cool ideas even in these early bits. I love the unique way Andy uses his regeneration powers, utilizing the morbid cartoon physics of his very physiology to pull off stuff like turning his bones into weapons, shooting his fingertip like a bullet and blowing off his regenerating feet over and over to make bloody jet boots. Similarly, Fuuko's "Unluck" is a cool concept even outside of its potential in battle, even if it is literally just lifted from X-Men with little alteration, and the way it fuels her self-loathing is an effective emotional hook. I still can't stand Andy in this earlier part of the story (and even after he improves, I still can't stand his one stupid expression constantly plastered on his face), but seeing Fuuko so happy to have her hair cut and finally have somebody she doesn't have to keep her distance from for their own safety is genuinely sweet. Combined with this adaptation's ambitious direction and great animation, there's a ton of potential here to make something unconventional and unique this season.

However, it's hard to tell anyone the show is worth sticking with when it changed nothing about the manga's terrible start. Cool powers and engaging character writing are shallow compensation for sitting through the noxious character dynamic and juvenile groping gags. If those hurdles leave you undeterred, you'll probably have a good time before long. For everyone else, it's probably gonna be a harder call. Unlike so many other shows people have made the claim about, Undead Unluck DOES get better, but it may be too little, too late for the uninitiated.

Is my birfdae! ^o^

Alissa is a witch who lived alone in a forest, until she found an abandoned baby and named her Viola. Alissa raised Viola for 16 years, but Viola grew beyond Alissa's imagination. The series focuses on the parent-and-child relationship where appearances are deceiving as to who's the parent and who's the child.

I'm of two minds on the unexpected double-length premiere of The Family Circumstances of the Irregular Witch. On the one hand, the second episode was key in winning me over. Everything in episode 1 was fine, occasionally funny and altogether pleasant to watch, but it was the opening of episode 2 that endeared me to this cast and got me invested. On the other hand, this is a style of comedy that's probably best left to watching one episode at a time and letting the pleasant vibes and sensible chuckles digest, because even a second helping felt a bit like overdosing.

This seems to be a season of coincidences--not only did A Returner's Magic Should Be Special and Tearmoon Empire premiere on the same day as each other, but we also got two series premiering on the same day that take place in a fantasy setting where someone finds and adopts an abandoned baby in the forest. That's the only similarity between this show and My Daughter Left the Nest and Returned an S-Rank Adventurer, however, because unlike Angeline, Viola has exactly zero intention of ever leaving home. She's very attached to Alissa, and apparently it's supposed to be funny that she's such a mama's girl when she looks much older than her 223-year-old parent at 16. People develop differently and have different figures! Ha ha, that's so funny! Let's show Viola's huge breasts a lot so everyone understands how funny that is!

The thing is, this show isn't without potential. Did it need to be a double release of the first two episodes? No, because seeing both at once doesn't dramatically increase the likelihood of knowing whether or not this is a series for you--it's very much a "what you see is what you get" sort of show. And when we set aside how possessive Viola is of her mother, they have a charming relationship. Flashbacks to Viola's babyhood show how Alissa has always been determined to do her best, as well as her reasoning for adopting the little girl herself rather than finding her some kindly human parents (humans and witches are somehow different species in this world): She was worried that humans wouldn't be able to handle Viola's magic power or the fact that she doesn't know instinctively how to control it. She's doing what she believes is best for Viola. Her relationship with her human friend Lira is also really nice, and Lira has always done her best to be supportive, even being Viola's wetnurse, since she was still breastfeeding her own baby when Alissa found Viola. Also, all the points in the world to Lira for ripping up Alissa's outdated-ass parenting books--not breastfeeding Viola herself doesn't make Alissa any less her mom.

Overall, I still enjoyed myself. These are simple gags based around the basic premise of a childlike mother and her very adult-looking daughter getting up to magical shenanigans, and they generally hit more often than they miss. I enjoyed the look of the series, and it got me to laugh several times. Yet even with just one episode, it felt like the gimmick was running out of steam and we needed something besides "Ha ha Viola's got big boobs" to fuel the punchlines. Thankfully, the sequence exploring Alissa's early struggles with parenthood and the support from Lira was earnest and funny enough to refresh me. I also dig that Lira is tall and muscular without anyone making jokes about it.

I'm less enthused with the extended introduction to Fennel. His shtick of crushing on Alissa and Viola constantly interfering got old quickly and just kept going. Similarly, when the show is just rapid-fire skits, it starts to feel like a series of shorts stitched together. Viola's mommy issues start to wear a bit thin too, which isn't a great sign if this isn't your genre in the first place. Viola's summoned phoenix is great if only for the disconnect between his deep voice and the fact that he looks like Uramichi-oniisan drew him. There are some decent sight gags, like Viola's "special" mandrake roots, and the voice cast is clearly giving it their all. This is good enough if you're in the mood for a goofy comedy, and if the camera can leave Viola's boobs alone for once, it may turn out to be straight-up good. If the show can be more like that segment with Lira, balancing comedy and sweet sentiment more evenly, I think we've got a real charmer on our hands. If it can't, well, it gave us some hot girls, so it's still a net positive.

In a land dominated by the formidable Shadow World, most of humanity has been destroyed. To rescue the planet from impending doom, six brave heroes fight a perilous battle...and fail miserably. But there's a glimpse of hope when Desir, the last surviving party member, is suddenly sent back in time! Now armed with knowledge of the grim future, can he alter the course of history and save the world?

If you go into this expecting subtlety, I regret to inform you that A Returner's Magic Should Be Special may disappoint you. This is the story of a guy named Desir who desires a different outcome for the battle against the confusingly named dragon Boromir Napolitan, and so he ends up 13 years back in time, where he has a chance to do it all over again, including with his love interest Romantica. All we need now is a villain named Evilo, and we're all set to go.

Hilarious names aside, there isn't much to make me feel like recommending this. It really wants to be dark and edgy, and I can't say it's doing a particularly good job. We open with what turns out to be the final battle of the last remaining six people to fight against Aragorn Carbonara in the Shadow World that's slowly taking over the plot's equivalent of Earth, but it's hard to feel much for any of them. We're told an awful lot, mostly about how Desir has lost many people he cared about, but none of that does anything to earn our sympathy. There's a brief mention of it being too bad Desir's a commoner, a lot of jovial death flag-raising chatter, and then suddenly Desir moves from "dragon food" to "waking up ten years ago", and that's that. It's hard to be invested in his shock and determination when we know so little about him and what he's been through.

This premiere peaked in its first half, which is not a great sign because that first half was already not that good. It was a generic RPG fantasy battle against a clunky CGI dragon and featured some truly terrible action animation. Following that, it was a bunch of expository dialogue about how this world's magic works, all while vaguely hinting at the pasts of the characters we just barely met. Still, the idea of starting at the end and catching up with the lives of the other characters once there was room to take a deep breath was an intriguing idea...that the show promptly throws out so it can be High-Fantasy Tokyo Revengers instead. And if that premise sounds interesting too, I promise you this premiere does not execute it well either. Not only is our protagonist painfully slow to pick up on the fact that he's leapt back in time, but everything about his past is painfully generic. His companions were nothing to write home about, but they were still eons more engaging than the paint-by-numbers students he encounters at this dully realized magic school. You'd think this whole gimmick would be a chance to flesh out Desir's character or demonstrate the relationships that he was grieving the loss of in the future, which would possibly get us invested in his NG+ playthrough. Instead we introduce some random rich snob to be a stock jerk character and then end on the cliffhanger of Desir meeting his dead girlfriend. Y'know, the one we know exclusively through a sad flashback?

This may be just the wrong place to start the series. Where the source manhwa begins is almost a moot point, because even if it opens in the same place, not enough plot resources are employed to make this engaging. Everyone's a stock character, and even the disaster isn't that alarming, not the least because it doesn't look that good. Gimli Bolognese (I'm starting to really have fun with this name) is a big, awkward mess of a dragon, and his powers aren't clear beyond "destructive". The character designs aren't much better, and the settings are so bland that they could be the anime equivalent of stock footage. Simply put, there's nothing you haven't seen done better, or at least differently, somewhere else.

It's interesting that A Returner's Magic Should Be Special premiered on the exact same day as Tearmoon Empire, as both are fantasy anime that revolve around their central character being "reborn" into the body of their younger self so they can use their knowledge of future events to avert a terrible catastrophe. One area of difference I can immediately highlight between the two is their pacing. In Tearmoon Empire, we got the gist of the heroine's situation and saw her flung back into the past in just under four minutes. Nice and economical. Returner's Magic, on the other hand, takes nearly three times as long to get to the main hook of its story. Now, you could argue that the two shows tell very different kinds of time travel stories and Returner's Magic has the spectacle of the big fight with Legolas Pescatore to consider. I would counter that with two key facts: The first is that the dragon fight isn't all that amazing to begin with, and the second is that 12 whole minutes is a hell of a lot of time to take up in a 23-minute episode.

The point is, Returner's Magic gambled too much on the idea that we'd be spellbound by watching the climactic battle between a team of heroes we know nothing about and a goofy-looking CGI dragon who is literally named after ketchup spaghetti and I don't think it's even supposed to be a joke. It doesn't help that we're treated to such hilariously self-serious lines as "Of the 150 million people who fought him, only six of us survived." That just makes it all the more difficult for me to suddenly start caring once our hero finds himself back in his old school, only to spend the rest of the episode on a literal walking tour of the place while reminding us, the audience, that he's gone back in time. The show also looks bad--the animation is stiff at the best of times, and it's marred by a terrible filter that dulls the colours of everything onscreen and gives the whole episode a sickly mottle to its visuals. It makes just the act of looking at it a chore.

Now, all of this isn't to say that there's absolutely no potential here. Unfortunately, if I've learned anything about these light novel and web novel adaptations that we've gotten in recent years, it's that a good lot of them have no fucking idea how to begin a story with any sense of grace or subtlety. The quasi-modern fantasy setting of Returner's Magic is cool enough, and I could see the story picking up once we get past the exposition stages and start truly developing the characters, but as first impressions go, this show stumbles pretty damn hard right out of the gate.

So, should you watch this? Well, it's at least worth a look, I guess, but I will say this episode is not a good start. Here's hoping it can pick itself up soon. Although at least it's got a fun potential naming gag in Boromir Napolitan.

Oh wait, sorry--Samwise Putanesca.

The life of an adventurer isn't always a glamorous one. Belgrieve found this out the hard way when a deadly encounter robbed him of his leg and the ability to pursue his dreams not long after setting off for fame and fortune. But fate wasn't finished with him--while gathering herbs in the wilderness, he discovered an abandoned baby girl and named her Angeline after deciding to raise her as his own. Angeline grew up to become a top-tier adventurer in her own right, yet after venturing out into the world and making a name for herself, fame, fortune and power hold no allure for the accomplished S-rank adventurer. Her heartfelt wish is for nothing more than to see her father again.

This premiere always feels like it's just short of being really good. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of things to like about it. While the setting seems like a generic-ass fantasy world, the down-to-earth, lived-in way it's presented creates a cozy, believable setting. The characters are simple but likeable, carried by delightful vocal performances. The premise, helpfully provided in full by the title, is a solid twist on the typical adventure narrative. I came out of this having a perfectly fine time, and in a leaner season, I could easily see myself very eager to watch the next episode right away.

And yet there's just something missing, a small absent piece in every element that keeps it from working as I know it should.

Some series throw you in at the deep end. This one slowly wades into the water like the story is freezing cold and it's afraid to get wet. That's a convoluted way of saying that the first episode of My Daughter Left the Nest and Returned as an S-Ranked Adventurer is entirely setup, and not even particularly interesting setup. Its primary function is to introduce us to Belgrieve and Angeline, Ange for short, and how much they miss each other after Ange left their village for the city five years ago. And that's about it, really.

Belgrieve was an up-and-coming adventurer forced to retire early when he lost his leg. In his sorrow, he returned to his hometown and acted as a village guard and all-around handyman. But finding a baby in the woods and raising her is what truly heals him, giving him a new purpose in life. However, as much as the story is about Belgrieve, it's also about Ange, who sees her father for who he truly is, not the washed-up adventurer he believes himself to be, but a man of endless kindness and a pillar of his society. The running gag of the episode is that while she longs to return to his side, she keeps getting caught up in adventures that prevent her from returning home. While she complains constantly about this and is incredibly frustrated by it, she never abandons those in need, because she believes she's doing what her father would've done and doesn't want to appear lesser in his eyes, even though there's no chance of that happening.

It is nice to see how close they are in what I'm assured is a completely familial way, and they have a warm relationship. Belgrieve is entirely supportive of his daughter's choices--t's not necessarily what he envisioned her doing, likely because of what happened to him, but he'll allow her to do what she wants. Ange's desire to adventure is almost certainly because she worships her dad. When she's not anxious about getting home to see him, she's busy telling people all about how awesome he is. Which makes it a little suspicious that no one else seems to have heard of "Belgrieve the Red Ogre".

While that could indicate that she's built him up in her mind, a few places seem to contradict that. First off, he taught her everything she knows, which speaks well to his depth of knowledge, and we also see him teaching local kids and doing what looks like an excellent job of it. He may not be as amazing as she thinks he is, but he also could be much more than most people know, which is the more interesting possibility. But even if he's just some washed-up aging dude, there's a real sense that to Ange, he'll always be a hero, and that's very sweet.

Honestly, it's a little baffling to me that this show goes so far out of its way to brush over Belgrieve raising Ange and forming that loving relationship with her, all so that Ange can go out and kill time with a bunch of lame side characters and the same kinds of "Generic MMO Fantasy RPG Hero's Guild" quests we've seen a million times before. I get that there's the whole "My Daughter Left the Nest" part of the title to live up to, but while Belgrieve's self-doubt and solitude make his segments somewhat interesting, they aren't enough to carry the whole story. Ange, for her part, has little character at this point outside of constantly complaining that she can't make it home to visit her dad and telling grand gushing stories about him. Maybe she and the story flow will improve once things get properly moving, but who's to say just yet?

It'd be nice if this at least looked better to help boost interest in continuing from here. We barely see any action, just barely animated shots of Ange jumping towards the action, and this has one of the worst-looking walk cycles I've seen in recent memory. The horses also aren't too well drawn, although they do look better than a few others from past years, but trust me, that's faint praise. This certainly isn't without promise, but its bland introduction and limited animation aren't helping it. Since I truly want to enjoy this more and see it not squander its potential, I can only hope this one passes the three-episode test.

Ron Kamonohashi was once regarded as a genius at the top detective training academy, but after a fatal mistake, he was expelled and forbidden to become a detective. Years later, police officer Totomaru Ishiki knocks on Ron's door seeking help on a serial murder case. He finds Ron, now a dishevelled recluse, who agrees. Together, this mismatched team begins solving their first mystery.

Ron Kamonohashi's Forbidden Deductions was always going to suffer due to being a detective story airing right after the unreasonably fantastic Undead Murder Farce. Sure, that series was far more supernaturally inclined than this largely mundane one, but it knew exactly how to build engaging, complex mysteries while presenting them with theatrical flair. By comparison, this show's debut caper is far more bare-bones in its presentation and far less sophisticated in constructing its whodunnits and larger character mysteries.

Honestly, if you've seen any Sherlock-inspired detective drama from the last 20 years, you've seen everything this premiere has to offer but done way better. In this rendition of the familiar formula, we see a brilliant but quirky detective paired with a bright-eyed police investigator to solve crimes, and he does so by taking a brief look at the corpse and figuring out everything offscreen. There's no visible process of deduction or theorizing either. Ron looks at the body for a few seconds, has the whole case solved in his head instantly, and then leads his hapless Watson around until they find the culprit. And unlike actual good procedurals like Monk or Criminal Minds or The Mentalist or, well, Sherlock, there's no chance for the audience to think about the mystery for themselves or concoct theories, so all that's left is to watch this guy smugly declare his brilliance and explain clues we never saw so that his deductions can be dramatically surprising. Solving the crime is so limp, and the crime itself so needlessly convoluted, that it only acts as a preamble to the reveal of Ron's "fatal mistake" at the end.

That mistake is also pretty underwhelming, though that's mostly down to presentation. The idea of a detective who doesn't just chase down criminals but actively pressures them to kill themselves as pennance is undoubtedly potent. Yet here, it happens so quickly, and with a hint of the supernatural that feels wildly out of place, that it doesn't land at all. The direction and pacing of the episode are so neutral that there's no weight or sense of drama, and that completely undercuts the twist's intended gravitas. The resolution with Totomaru saving the suspect from Ron could work better if they'd emphasized his selfless nature rather than making him a hapless sidekick to Ron, but as-is, it lands with a dull thud. When discussing this, including the fact that Ron has killed multiple people this way, you'd think they were discussing a particularly boring sporting event from the characters' body language and the musical score. It's a tonal misfire that left me uninterested in further following the characters or story.

The production is alright, at least--they've adapted Akira Amano's designs very well, and while there's not a ton of fluid animation, it works just fine for what this episode calls for. Unfortunately, there's no sense of atmosphere to complement our supposed genius' sleuthing, and that leaves us with a weak mystery that's boring to watch. Maybe this'll get better now that the character introductions are out of the way, but this first case is a total flop and doesn't leave me interested in watching more. I think this is one of those anime where I might pick it back up later on if I suddenly hear a lot of good things about it, but otherwise, my verdict stands at "not interested".

Dragon hunters, warriors armed with special silver weapons who kill their prey for bounty. Lowest among their ranks is Ragna, who forms an improbable partnership with the young genius Leonica, a master dragon hunter with more kills to her name than almost any other. All Ragna wants is to stay by her side, but his dream is shattered by an attack from the deadliest dragon imaginable.

I was going to open with some pithy remark like "Man, this anime would've been perfect if I were still 15 and jotting down edgy Final Fantasy fanfic ideas in the back of my notebook during class!", but given how I never fell for Elfen Lied when it was new, at which point I was a teenager, I'd honestly think that even back then, I would've had the good sense to recognize that Ragna Crimson is pretty fucking lame. Maybe that's vanity on my part, but to my teenage self's credit, Ragna Crimson goes out of its way to present itself as a grimdark fantasy that would make even some stuck-in-the-past emo mallrat holed up in the province's last decaying Hot Topic take pause and go "Okay, buddy, you seriously don't need to try so hard."

This isn't even the kind of gratuitous, exploitative schlock that could make for an entertaining night of drunk or high riffing with your buddies. No, Ragna Crimson is the kind of wannabe edgelord bait that thinks all it has to do is toss in a couple of slightly gorier-than-usual death scenes and slather every other shot of the episode in a hideous coat of brown and red colour filters and it'll be a Mature Anime For Grown-Ups(TM). It'd be one thing if this tale of time travel and dragon slaying at least had some real teeth to it, but it strictly limits itself to the levels of bloodshed and melodramatic tragedy that could appeal to its target audience while still allowing it shelf space at the front of a bookstore's YA Fantasy section. In other words, it's lacking in any of the over-the-top ultraviolence that I like to see from stuff like my Berserks and my MadWorlds, and what limited spectacle it does attempt just looks bad. The whole show objectively looks pretty bad.

That means the only thing Ragna Crimson can hang its hat on is its storytelling chops, and, uh... Let's say the poor thing sure does try, for whatever that's worth. Its attempts to earn our sympathy and emotional investment colossally backfire though, since all of that effort goes into one specific character: Leonica, Leo for short, the precocious but improbably deadly little dragon-slaying daughter-sister-waifu-loli-thing that Ragna spends all of his time doting on. Her goofy flesh-fang and incessant cuteness should clue you in to exactly what kind of role she serves in this story, and I'm sorry, but it doesn't work for me. When the vast majority of a double-length premiere is focused on getting me to care about and potentially mourn a manipulatively blatant mascot, only to leave me feeling ripped off when the cute loli doesn't end up dead after they practically spell out that she will, something has gone horribly wrong.

Everything Ragna Crimson tries to do, from its art to its story to its general vibes, ends up feeling like a pale imitation of other shows that weren't even that good to begin with. At the end of the day, while this premiere is too fundamentally boring to be particularly offensive or infuriating in its badness, I still can't think of one reason to recommend or continue watching it. And no, this definitely didn't need to be a double-length premiere.

Keitaro Gentoga is a college freshman who hates ghosts. Unluckily for him, he has a knack for attracting spirits. Two years ago, this connection had led to him receiving a spiritual injury on his right hand, with his friend getting caught in the crossfire. The event caused him to become a shut-in, leaving him with very poor social skills. Fortunately, Keitaro is slowly starting to mingle with society, thanks to the help of his childhood friend, Eiko Hozuki. As part of his rehabilitation, Keitaro takes on the part-time job of a private tutor, and his first pupil is none other than Eiko's little cousin Yayoi. Besides being a child prodigy, there's another peculiarity regarding Yayoi--she has a spiritual constitution, just like Keitaro. However, unlike Keitaro, she yearns to encounter spirits, hoping to find the ghost that took her mother away. As Yayoi and Eiko drag Keitaro to haunted spots, his part-time job seems to be straying further and further away from its original purpose.

Combining genres is rarely a simple task, especially for those opposed by nature, because if you succeed at one, you often fail the other. A good example of this is a horror comedy. Generally speaking: if you're laughing, you're not scared, and if you're scared, you're not laughing. Of course, everyone should know by now that there ARE proven ways to do horror comedy. One is to make the horror aspects so utterly excessive that it becomes funny. Another, often much harder path is to find the humor at the point where the two genres collide. Dark Gathering is this type, and it premiere balances both tones perfectly.

Both of the show's elements are built around subverting expectations. For the comedy bits, we get typical light-hearted setups played straight, but with horror moments serving as the punchlines. Then, on the other side of things, we see standard tropes subtly twisted, becoming horrific in the process. So on one hand, we get a cute, deadpan girl nonchalantly strangling her clearly possessed stuffed animal. On the other, we see the childhood friend character's eyes go dead and soulless and her smile become anything but warm and innocent as she watches her friend do something that could kill him.

I'm always down for a spooky anime, regardless of the time of year, and Dark Gathering has a solid baseline level going for it. It's not outright scary, for the most part, but it's got those earnest Halloween-y vibes that I love. Little touches like the distorted sounds that Yayoi's captured spirits make are great, and I always dig it when anime go for the "local urban legend" type of haunting, like the jacked-up phone booth that Keitaro gets dragged to during his inaugural mystery. Top all of that off with the promise of far darker and stranger mysteries to come, what with Yayoi's menagerie of haunted-ass stuffed animals, and you've got yourself a damn good start for a show!

Best of all, there are a lot of visual oddities that add to the horror ambiance even in the lighthearted scenes. Eiko is constantly wearing gloves with no explanation as to why. Yayoi's eyes, which at first appear to have skulls in them just for cute stylistic purposes, are revealed to look that way to those in the world of the story, with each eye having two pupils. This visual sense of unease helps the show switch from comedy to horror and back without much trouble. To put it frankly, it's fantastic how well it works.

The main downsides would be the production values of the series, which are, y'know, fine, but horror depends on consistent atmosphere more than almost any other genre, and if the quality of the visuals, direction or sound design falters even slightly, the whole illusion can be ruined. Dark Gathering is basically operating with no wiggle room whatsoever, which is a shame. I can imagine a version of this show that really sinks its teeth into the audience, if only it had a bit more style and flair to spare. Still, I'm on board for at least another few episodes, and if the show can keep the spine tingles coming, I think we'll have a reliable one to follow for the season.

In the end, this is a surprisingly fun first outing with more than a few good laughs and surprisingly frightening moments mixed in. More than a few mysteries are lurking in the background that set this show up as one that has both monsters-of-the-week and an ongoing plot, and I'm hooked enough to see where this goes.

{Atuhor's Nose: This was supposed to go up yesterday, but I'm dumb, so you get a double feature today.}

It's the end of the 19th century. A vampire's wife is murdered, and the detective known as the "cage user" is called in to solve the crime. But there's more to the detective and the curtained birdcage he carries... After all, when solving a case involving a monster, it might just take one to know one.

I wish there were a more elegant way to put this, but the manga for Undead Girl Murder Farce is batshit insane. You get a taste of that in the first two episodes of its anime adaptation, but by rearranging the order of events, some of the lunacy is lost. The manga starts with the events of episode two, then goes back after the vampire case to explain where Aya and Tsuguru's partnership began. It works both ways, but I prefer the manga's take because it makes for a more immediately intriguing tale. And frankly, the manga does a better job of hiding the truth about Aya being a severed head in a birdcage. Starting the show knowing all about her takes away some of the fun.

Comparisons aside, this is still absolutely wild. The opening theme gives us a taste of what makes it that way, as we can spot Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, the Phantom of the Opera and other characters from 19th and early 20th century literature. Then consider that one of the vampire children is named Raoul, not to mention a mysterious Englishman with an M on his cane who's behind both the theft of Aya's body and the creation of Tsuguru as a half-oni. This takes place in a world where the characters of popular gothic fiction are real, nicely indicated by the dates and the statement that vampires began to be persecuted after the death of Dracula. That ups the stakes for the Godard family, whose matriarch has just been stabbed through the heart with a silver stake, because it speaks of the increased danger vampire families in Europe face. Aya is Count Godard's best hope because, as an immortal being herself, she's the least likely to be prejudiced against his family.

The show thus far is admittedly a little too self-conscious in its presentation. It deliberately uses theatrical staging for its scenes, which feels needlessly extra, especially when all that's happening is Aya and Tsuguru talking. The framing of scenes tends to be very good, with plenty of clues that require pausing and taking a closer look or breaking out a French/Dutch-to-English dictionary to double-check. The historical accuracy isn't quite as spot-on as the literary references--I don't care how remote it is, a noble's actively populated castle in 1898 would probably have at least gas lights. But this may be just the right sort of insanity to keep me coming back.

Undead Murder Farce has easily been the most attention-grabbing premiere of the new season, and judging by the lengthy list of high-profile seiyuu playing these famous literary characters, it'll keep that energy up. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.

After Demon Lord Thor is slain at the hands of a lone human warrior, humans rejoice over the end of his reign of terror. Over in the Demon Realm, an intense tournament is held to determine the new bearer of the title, and it's drawn in the unlikeliest of contestants: Helck, a man who claims to hate humans but is one himself! Doubtful of Helck's intentions, Vermilio, one of the "Four Heavenly Kings" who oversee the realm, seeks to uncover what Helck is truly after. With the entire role of "Demon Lord'' at stake, the fate of the demon world may very well rest on her shoulders.

I don't have any stakes in this betting pool, to coin a phrase, but I know some people were looking forward to Helck. I'm pretty tired of demon lord narratives overall, but I'm willing to overlook their overdoneness if they have a decent comedic twist, like Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle. "Big human himbo with a tragic past wins over the hearts and minds of the demon population through a combination of strength and sheer likeability" seems like it has the potential to be a winning enough story to keep me interested, provided it's well made. The show has a director with experience dating back to the 90s and past involvement in a good number of shows I've enjoyed (including being a storyboard artist for Azumanga Daioh, Di Gi Charat, Jubei-chan, Strawberry Marshmallow, BNA and Paranoia Agent and the director of Miniskirt Space Pirates, Martian Successor Nadesico, The Demon Girl Next Door, Atom the Beginning and Lord Marksman and Vanadis) and the endorsement of people whose taste I trust.

To my friends told me they were looking forward to this, I'm sorry, but the highest praise I can give Helck's premiere is that it's...okay. The animation is okay--a bit stiff and limited, but at least consistent and nice to look at. The humor is okay--not offensive or anything, but not quite enough to make me laugh. The writing is okay--there's some decent foreshadowing of things to come, but there wasn't a lot of wit or warmth to it. It was perfectly acceptable, but that's not really the greatest compliment a show can or should hope for.

As someone unfamiliar with the manga, I don't know exactly who to blame, but my biggest complaint is the poor delivery of the jokes. The episode is made up mostly of a single run-on gag: Vermilio is upset that a human hero is doing well in the tournament to determine the next demon lord and suspects he has an ulterior motive. She and head tournament manager Hon (played by Akira Ishida cast wildly against type) try to change the competition to one he can't win, but then he excels against their expectations. In response, Vermilio yells and screams a lot and sometimes makes explosions. Hey, it was considered funny when Lina Inverse did it 30 years ago, it must be just as funny now, right? Except these jokes are delivered flatly and without any comic timing or energy, as if it doesn't realize it's supposed to be humorous.

We've all seen far more stories about demon lords--defeated, undefeated, reincarnated, etc.--than might be strictly healthy for anyone. However, Helck still manages to find its special niche within the genre: What if the guy in the running to be the next demon lord was a human? Maybe it's not completely innovative, but it's a good enough tweak to the formula, and there's something bizarre and joyful about watching a guy who looks vaguely like a periwinkle-haired He-Man effortlessly making his way through competition after competition with a big dumb grin on his face and a whole lot of charm. Even the demons are rooting for him to win the tournament!

But as fun as this concept is, it suffers a little in its execution. My biggest peeve is how Vermilio screams 90% of her lines. You could argue that it makes sense in context--she's in charge of the tournament set to find the one who'll replace Thor, and that's a tremendous amount of responsibility. Thor's been dead for three months, so he must be replaced--that's barely a mourning period for the fallen. And given that he was killed by a human hero, having Helck as the frontrunner for his role isn't a great look for the young demoness hoping to get ahead, especially once she figures out that Helck's brother was the one who took Thor out. So she's got every reason to be so pissed off. But that doesn't make it any funnier when she starts doing her screamy firebreathing routine.

The episode also tries to cram too much into a 23-minute premiere. We're introduced to a few too many characters and the progression of time is a bit unclear--like, when did Vermillio have time to send a spy out to learn about Helck? Because it looks like there aren't enough hours in the day for her to become suspicious, dispatch a spy and have that spy report back. We don't have a firm grasp of how long the tournament has been going on either, and there's some disconnect between the goofiness and the sense that there's something deeply wrong in the human world. It actually would've done a lot of good to make this a double-length premiere, to give equal weight to both the silly elements and the serious ones.

With a more skilled presentation, I could see this situation being fairly compelling. There are hints of tragedy behind Helck's hulking exterior--he's intensely misanthropic and is wanted for killing his own younger brother, the hero who killed the demon lord. He may be a big loveable goof, but something dark must be lurking beneath the surface for him to have ended up in this position. Something is very wrong here, and I'm curious to know what.

Honestly, despite the show's issues, it's still mostly fun. It'll probably benefit from having a second or third episode to better grasp how it'll handle things going forward. It's got just enough potential to make it worth giving it that chance. Who knows, it might turn out to be an 11/10 Helckin good boi, could be a fren.

{Atuhor's Nose: This was supposed to go up yesterday but I forgor <:3 Note that the original posting date on the submission version later on will reflect this.}


Here's the deal: There's this guy named Ryota Sato, he's from Japan, he gets overworked to death and reincarnates into a generic RPG fantasy world with stat windows and crap, and then he meets a chipper girl named Emily Brown who's got low stats. Ryota's vital stats are low too, and his level is capped at 1, but he's got S-rank drop stats, which means monsters give him a lot of stuff. Some of that stuff helps him get stronger vital stats, which means that Ryota, in essence, is overpowered even though he's stuck at Level 1.

There, I just explained in three sentences what My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even at Level 1 takes an entire episode to cover, and I saved you a precious 23 minutes of your life to boot. Go forth now, and use that liberated time to explore nature, spend time with your loved ones, try out a new recipe, catch up on your favourite video game you've neglected for awhile, or even just watch a better show than this one. Almost any show will do, provided you avoid keywords like "skill", "level", "reborn", "overpowered", and so on. You're welcome in advance.

I'll save you the spiel, this is another bland, poorly produced batch of near-identical isekai filler. It looks bad animation-wise, the characters have little to no personality outside of explaining things to the protagonist, and the setting is more boring "video game mechanics and UIs taken 100% literally" bullshit, complete with goddamn stat screens. So instead of harping on all the same shit, I want to use this part of the review to talk about how goddamn mortifying the thematic message of this series is. Characters dying from overwork only to be reincarnated into video game worlds where they can make it through life on NG+ Easy Mode is a standard of the subgenre and often part of the explicit appeal. These are ostensibly escapist stories for the many disillusioned working adults who want something simple and indulgent for their entertainment, where they can imagine themselves going on adventures, meeting improbably sexy girls, and briefly forget about the dehumanizing drudgery of an exploitative, thankless workplace. I can sympathize with that much, even if this particular escapism feels increasingly hollow and patronizing.

However, there comes a point where these stories become so blatant about that message that it becomes morbid, and this one crosses that line. It's all well and good that Ryota is happy to finally have a life where his effort pays off and he has people to share his good fortune with, but watching him sob into a young girl's chest while she comforts him by saying that this new afterlife is his reward for working so hard... That just made me feel sick. Perhaps unintentionally, it was the only moment of this show that felt sincerely, intensely depressing. Is the message here really that if you struggle for long enough at a soul-draining, hope-destroying job with no chance for anything better, you'll be richly rewarded in the otaku afterlife once you drop dead from overwork or, God forbid, speed the process along, if you catch my drift? Jesus, that's grim. I hope that's just an accident of poor writing, because if it's intentional, it makes this show distressing to sit through. And really, there's something VERY telling about the fact that overworking to the point of death has become an often-used trope in isekai stories. I mean, what greater condemnation of modern Japanese society can there be than the idea that doing constant hard, manual labour in a fantasy world, often with your life on the line, is not only the better option, but a literal escapist fantasy? Some of the show's more comforting aspects are swinging for a Helpful Fox Senko-san vibe, but then it swerves straight into borderline propaganda territory, seemingly positing that the people who come home from their horrible dead-end jobs to watch anime should keep working harder with the prospect of an RPG-themed overpowered reincarnation as a reward. It's like an exploitative religion if the heaven they were promising was just repeatedly killing Leaf Rabbits in the fields outside Narshe for eternity.

Ryota is clearly still suffering from his past life. Having a proper, hot meal with another person is such a novelty to him that it causes him to break down and cry. Then, to repay Emily for her kindness, he decides to find her a house and pay the rent for her indefinitely so she doesn't have to keep camping out in the dungeon. This is how much having someone listen to his woes means to him. Unfortunately, while his heart is in the right place, he's so conditioned by his past life that he falls into old patterns, overworking himself massively for Emily's sake, despite her never asking for nor expecting any kind of repayment.

But while the character work for Ryota is above average and makes me genuinely feel for him, the same can't be said for the rest of the cast. We know next to nothing about anyone else who shows up, including Emily, who Ryota is literally living with before the end of the episode. The remaining focus is just introducing us to the world, its levelling system and how Ryota's cheat skill works.

There's also something particularly unsettling about how the female characters have been written that goes hand-in-hand with the frictionless writing. Emily instantly and eagerly starts waiting on Ryota the moment she moves into their new house, like they're in a prettied-up fantasy version of one of those "free room for pretty girls" Craigslist ads. I know these shows are primarily wish fulfillment for a generation of men who feel they've been left out of a narrative of economic and familial security that may have always been a fantasy in the first place, but they aren't all so brazen about it. The way Erza Monsoon, the receptionist at the guild hall, tries to ask him out makes me think of how particularly stupid, mediocre guys assume service workers are flirting with them when they're just trying to do their jobs. Then there's Eve Callusleader, a girl in a Playboy bunny suit who bops him on the head in a cheaply-animated, zero-impact way for being low-level, and then shows up at his door and professes her love out of fucking nowhere. True, they're not slaves or falsely accusing him of rape, but they still feel like more insidious versions of how some men see women as prizes to be won rather than human beings trying to navigate the world in their own ways.

So yeah, Ryota's harem is already building up. If the opening theme is to be believed, more girls will keep being introduced. Ryota and Emily have a nice enough relationship, I suppose. That he gets her a house as a repayment for giving him a hot meal is a little over the top, but that seems in line with what we know about his personality so far. Regretfully, none of this is interesting enough to make this easy to pay attention to, and the visuals are sterile and lackluster, particularly the dungeons. Even if you're into this brand of isekai, this should only be your last resort. Its jokes about no one being able to pronounce Ryota's incredibly simple name for some reaon and a dungeon that only Japanese people can benefit from (seriously, it's the "Nihonium" dungeon) are nowhere near enough to prop this up.

There's really a lot of wasted potential here. The story of a guy who can get rare drops but never level up could make for a creative story. As he'd be unable to kill monsters alone, it could be centered around his social interactions and how he works to find a group of people who'll work with him and not exploit him. Of course, in this story, he just finds a magic seed that lets him upgrade his stats directly, which means he does level up for all intents and purposes but in a different way than most. Thus the majority of the inherent dilemmas and drama are stripped away instantly.

The idea of a world where literally everything comes from dungeons is insane, by the way. People with high drop rates for plants replace farmers. Those with high drop rates for weapons replace smiths. Basically, all jobs outside the dungeon would be the infrastructure for those going into it. Fully exploring this thought experiment would honestly make for an interesting fantasy story. What kind of government would arise in such a world, and what kind of culture, art and religion? And since everything comes from the dungeons, how would technology advance, or would it at all? Then, on the isekai front, you could look at what would happen if someone from our world taught people how to farm, breaking the dungeon-industrial complex's stranglehold on the agricultural economy in the process. It's a playground for ideas. It's just unfortunate that it's used in this anime as nothing more than a single passing line to explain why slimes drop bean sprouts.

While Ryota is a slight step above many isekai protagonists, the rest of the show is not, to the point that I couldn't help but think about how some of the ideas in it could benefit from being explored correctly in a more cleverly written story. So it should go without saying, but overall, this is one I won't be picking up this season.

Springtime at Kimberly Magic Academy, when new students begin their first year. One boy, clad in black robes with a white cane and sword strapped to his hip, approaches the prestigious school. This young man, Oliver Horn, must form a bond with a katana-wielding girl named Nanao Hibiya if he's to survive the dangers he'll soon face at this school that's anything but what it seems.

Y'know, when I heard people say Reign of the Seven Spellblades was just Anime Harry Potter, I figured they were referencing the Western-style magic school and fantasy creatures, lazily dismissing it in the same way some people stupidly did with Little Witch Academia as if Harry Potter invented and patented the idea. I didn't realize the similarities went as deep as having a boy with red hair and Literally Anime Hermione get into an argument about whether or not enslaving sentient magical creatures is okay that could've easily been lifted from one of the Harry Potter books. A fight against a rampaging troll is a bonding experience. The headmistress, who's basically a big-tittied Bayonetta-voiced Rule 63 Dumbledore, makes a vaguely threatening speech at the entrance ceremony, followed by a feast. And those robes? Yeah, tell me those aren't directly inspired by the wizard boy movies. It doesn't stop there--we've even got some shockingly half-assed naming conventions on par with naming your one Asian character two surnames--although I can't decide if "Azia" as the name for this world's version of Asia is better or worse than naming a Japanese magic school "Mahoutokoro" just yet. A magic school, might I add, that looks a little too much like Hogwarts for it to be a coincidence. There are some aesthetic differences, like the kids wielding shortswords instead of wands, and one of our major characters is a samurai transplanted from the aforementioned Azia, but I could fully believe that this series started life as the author's old Harry Potter fanfiction.

That's not a diss, by the way, just an observation of the energy this show comes out of the gate with. It carries all the enthusiasm of a young writer wanting to show you their super cool OCs and wastes no time bringing our ragtag group of spellcasters together. After they're together, a lengthy portion of the premiere is spent on formal introductions that, while a bit dry, do give us a good idea of the friendship these kids will share. They're simple, distinct archetypes that are likeable enough and get along pretty well, with only the nerdy Peter being too uptight to join the friend group outright. They aren't an amazing ensemble yet, but they are endearing enough to carry a solid magic school adventure. I'm genuinely interested in seeing more of them, and finding out what Oliver's whole deal is. The most intriguing aspect is the school's extremely lax attitude towards students reaching horrific magical ends in the pursuit of power, which ensures that plenty of danger and hijinks await.

Besides Headmistress Esmeralda's ominous speech about only 80% of students making it out alive, the script mostly keeps things pretty light. True, the cast doesn't get much to do besides expository dialogue and introducing themselves, but they each felt distinct without being a database-style trope checklist. The whiffs of personality we get here and there are pretty appealing. Oliver's a gifted magician, but his talent for making up and modifying spells on the fly can be chalked up more to creativity than general overpoweredness or being reincarnated from some uber-powerful sage or demon lord or some shit. Meanwhile, Nanao comes through as a person whose bright personality is half sincere and half a facade to conceal some dark trauma.

In fact, there's a strong sense of something darker rumbling just under the surface. I'm sure I get that impression partially because all the key art is of the characters standing in dark places with serious expressions, rather than the chill vibe this first episode gives off, but foreshadowing a dark turn while keeping things light on the surface takes a degree of storytelling skill that I've found rare in light novels and their adaptations. Sure, it's Basic McBitch competence for most media, but the bar here is on the floor, people.

Speaking of low bars, I was also surprised by the general lack of fanservice, even at moments ripe with opportunity. Esmeralda's got huge bonkhonagahoogs, sure, but there's also an unsexualized bath scene that focuses on the scars all over Nanao's body, further emphasizing the violence she's endured, rather than having the camera glued to her tits, which we do get tantalizing glimpses of without overdoing it.

The visuals are a mixed bag for me. While the show is more polished than many other magic school series, some of that polish feels a bit misapplied. I like that the backgrounds are vibrant and eye-catching, since that goes a long way to making this world feel legitimately magical, but something in the compositing is off, making everything feel just a bit too distant from the character art. There are many outdoor scenes where the cast looks like they're standing in front of a greenscreen and some glaring digital effects during Esmeralda's speech. What magic we've seen is rendered well enough, and I'm thankful to have not seen any stock magic circles so far, and EXTRA thankful for the total lack of goddamn stat windows. The character designs work, but they all feel cookie-cutter for their prescribed personality. Overall though, it's at least an above-average production and certainly off to a better start than most of the other fantasy series this season. Or most of the other series this season in general.

No, let me end things on a better note here--the show's got enough energy and decent writing to carry me along, and I did have a good time with it, so I don't want to backhandedly compliment it by saying it's better than the worst of the season. I can only give it a hardy recommendation by saying it makes a decent diversion. It's not arresting or original enough to be required viewing, but if you like some magical adventures, this one seems like a solid enough way to spend your time, and I'll be watching more of this one whenever I find the time.

This "story no one knows about a girl everyone knows" reimagines Yoshiko Tsushima, the chuunibyou school idol otherwise known as Yohane, as a fortune teller in another world. The story is set in Numazu, a scenic harbour town surrounded by the sea and mountains. Since she was a little girl, Yohane has never fit in and has always felt apart from everyone in town. Her aspirations and proper place in this world could lie elsewhere.

While this is a spinoff of Love Live Sunshine, Yohane the Parhelion - Sunshine in the Mirror is completely accessible to newcomers. There are a few in-jokes throughout for established fans like myself, and having a preexisting attachment to these characters certainly doesn't hurt, but the writer doesn't assume you're familiar with the regular version of this show's cast. You could wander into this premiere without ever having heard of Love Live and still come away understanding and probably enjoying it. This is both a strength and a weakness of the premiere, honestly.

The weakness stems from how standard many of the plot beats are here. While it's different for a Love Live entry since there's no central school or larger idol group, it still treads familiar ground. You have the aspiring musical star protagonist, the rural town she's trying to escape for a life of show business, and an inevitable lesson about cherishing one's friends waiting for her. The fantasy setting adds a bit of spice, but it's mainly in the aesthetics. The setting is just Japan with some magical decor tacked on, and there hasn't been much worldbuilding so far. So while you don't need to already like the franchise to get into this, you do need a taste for idol fare, because this is more of a musical than a fairytale adventure.

That said, if you're down for an idol show where the complicated costumes are made by magic, this one should serve you well. Yohane was never my favourite character in Love Live Sunshine (that honour goes to my beloved gluttonous chibi procrastinator Hanamaru, zura), but the writing here does a great job of shaping her into a likeable, funny, emotionally compelling lead. Perhaps because it generally assumes we know this cast already, the show takes its time doling out character introductions, allowing Yohane and her talking dog companion Lailaps, who's apparently also her sister, to build a connection all their own rather than immediately bringing in the rest of Aqours' fantasy counterparts. We see them banter, argue and pick apart why Yohane is so set on leaving her hometown. She's prickly and prideful, but also a loveable loser who's compensating for her insecurities. It's a surprisingly grounded way to translate her chuunibyou gimmick into an actual fantasy world while maintaining what made her work as a character in the first place. When she started talking about feeling like a failure no matter where she went, I did feel for her in a way disconnected from her original incarnation.

The show also looks excellent, as expected of a Love Live production. The usual character designs perfectly complement this lushly illustrated world. The animation carries a lot of charm yet remains restrained to match the more laid-back comedy and pacing, while still delivering some classic Love Live comedy in key moments. The central musical number is solid, but I particularly love the return of the music video-style visuals introduced in the Nijigasaki anime. It works well to get us into Yohane's head while providing more striking and abstract imagery than a more straightforward stage performance. It's also a great way to showcase that Aika Kobayashi has what it takes to be this show's central songstress.

While perhaps not as significant a genre shift as some might've hoped, this premiere accomplishes the more important task of being a good episode in its own right. This is a relaxing and welcoming return with their personalities intact if you're a longtime fan looking to revisit the Aqours crew, but this might be a more inviting entry point if you're a total Love Live newbie or someone put off by the main franchise's signature high energy.

Highschool student Wataru Sajo has a crush on his gorgeous classmate Aika Natsukawa. Aika finds him to be a nuisance, but he dreams of her mutual love every day and continues to approach her. One day though, he suddenly wakes up from this "dream". In order to get back his sense of reality, he recognizes his position and stays away from Aika. But now, for some reason, Aika is completely shaken by this.

I've said it a thousand times before, but shows like The Dreaming Boy is a Realist force me to reiterate just how difficult it is to make things like chemistry and romantic compatibility work in an animated medium. Like many a terrible romcom I've reviewed before it, The Dreaming Boy is a Realist seems to fundamentally misunderstand the difference between replicating a bunch of stale cliches and archetypes and actually crafting a story and characters that are able to get the audience to feel the love that's supposed to be in the air. This, as you can imagine, makes for a very grating viewing experience.

The big hook is that Wataru has apparently spent months clinging to Aika, who constantly rejects him, both of them freely calling him a stalker, and he's finally decided to stop doing that. This is, for some reason, shocking and upsetting to everyone else, including Aika, who I guess actually does like him but was too tsundere to admit it. Because that's a wonderful message to still be pushing to impressionable young viewers in 2023, right? It's such a bizarre setup that I spent much of the episode thinking there had to be some supernatural twist. Like maybe the opening sequence with the random soccer ball turning into fireworks was literal and not just a terribly conveyed metaphor. Perhaps there were some shenanigans going on where suddenly the whole world revolved around this annoying schmuck constantly bothering the prettiest girl in class. That would honestly make more sense than the paper-thin, easily resolved premise that was actually happening onscreen.

And yet, here we are. The actual hook of this is that accidentally playing hard to get will apparently trick girls into liking you, no matter how much they insisted they hated you and demanded you leave them alone beforehand. Who needs a romance with actual personality, chemistry, compatibility and affection when you can just arbitrarily have characters be in love despite not even enjoying each other's company? Animosity = love, the golden rule of most romcoms in general! Yeah, this rule must be a Korok Seed, cause it's a friggin' golden turd. This episode also features a half-baked subplot where a random girl starts pretending to flirt with Wataru, much to Aika's blank-faced chagrin, because she wants to make her boyfriend jealous for saying another girl was “his type” or something. To be fair, that's the kind of petty, poorly considered stuff actual teenagers get up to all the time. To be unfair, nobody here talks like an actual teenager, and petty teen drama isn't worth making TV shows about anymore.

Usually in a romcom like this, the lead protagonists start out at odds, maybe even actively disliking each other, which is meant to make their inevitable union that much sweeter. It really doesn't, but I can only imagine that's the intention nonetheless. But since all the other one-note gimmicks have already been used up dozens of times over by other shows, the only personality trait that Dreaming Boy could come up with for Wataru is that he self-identifies as a stalker. Thankfully, he isn't, like, a literal danger to his love interest's safety or anything, he's just an annoying shit who won't stop talking to her and following her around, no matter how many times she begs him to stop. To the show's credit, the whole point of this first episode is Wataru finally learning the incredibly difficult lesson of "Don't be an obnoxious weirdo", but this has the counterintuitive effect of highlighting even further just how boring and lame a protagonist he is, and how fundamentally mismatched he is with Aika. As for the love interest herself, she somehow has even less personality. It's already hard enough to write an actually likeable tsundere character, but it seems the author of this story thinks all it takes is for her to harbour a deep and honestly very justified dislike of the main character.

I've made a lot of jokes about AI-created anime lately, especially when it comes to the isekai and magic highschool stuff, but now there's another up-and-coming genre I can use that bit for: An unremarkable protagonist ends up dating the most popular girl in his class because reasons. The Dreaming Boy is a Realist has the ignoble distinction of feeling like the first of those to be produced with as little human effort as possible. I don't mean visually, or even in terms of its basic plot--those were clearly produced by human hands, albeit ones that were either unskilled or lacking in time, resources and originality. The animation has the same slightly glowy sheen to it that I've come to associate with poorly managed productions trying to disguise flat, off-model animation. The most remarkable thing about the character designs are the school uniforms that use two clashing shades of blue. And only a human mind would choose to insert a completely extraneous plot about a girl breaking up with and getting back together with her boyfriend, just so the vaguely irritating protagonist can have someone to bounce his thoughts off of.

But that music... Usually the worst I can say about background music in anime is that it's unremarkable or kinda just there, but here, it sounded like it came from a royalty-free music library conceived in the depths of Hell to distract and annoy me as much as possible. I refuse to believe that anyone actually paid money for this crime against my ears. It's also mixed way too loud, meaning that the already annoying generic soundtrack sometimes becomes genuinely painful to hear.

And holy shit, the dialogue, it lacks ANY humanity or wit, considering how much of it is about how the whole school is rooting for Wataru to stalk this girl who keeps telling him to fuck off. However, even if it had any, it would've been completely obscured by the shockingly bad translation. I know that sometimes localizers like to play fast 'n loose with their scripts and end up making them wildly inaccurate, and sometimes they just make mistakes because they're only human and that's expected now and then, but that's not what's happening here. This is borderline incomprehensible. The sentences tangle around one another, attempting to replicate proper English sentence structure and never quite managing it. It reads like someone genuinely just copy-pasted the Japanese script into Google Translate and then only did the bare minimum to make the result sound like human speech. And to make matters worse, it's all punctuated like someone spilled a bucket of commas and semicolons and barely bothered to clean them up. "I feel like somewhere in my heart, there's a me who's cooled off, from being rejected too much." Like, what in the name of ass is this fuckness? It genuinely took effort to figure out what these characters were trying to say half the time. If you didn't grow up reading thrice-translated manga scans, it might take a bit longer to wrap your head around. That is what basically every line of dialogue in this premiere is like. It made every minute of this a chore to get through, as a bunch of boring teenagers strung together labyrinthine paragraphs to express such emotions as "I like this girl" or "I'm angry with my boyfriend" in the most inefficient ways possible.

You know these things are bad when they distract me from a story that reiterates some of the most truly heinous tropes, ie. a girl getting mad when the boy who won't leave her alone finally listens when she tells him to get out of her face because she was only pretending to dislike him to mask her true personality and she actually loves being stalked and objectified. Yeah, there's nothing redeeming about this one. I'm not gonna call this the most unpleasant show of the entire summer, because we're less than a week in and there's still two GoHands anime to suffer through, but The Dreaming Boy is a Realist sucks hard all the same.

Based on a completed shojo fantasy romance manga, Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts is only a retelling of Beauty and the Beast on the surface--it's actually much closer to dragon bride legends. Sariphi is a human girl raised to be given to the beastfolks' king as the required sacrifice to maintain peace between their peoples, and Leonhart, the eponymous king, is in fact beastly. But the expectation is that he'll eat her rather than that she'll subdue him, and when he makes a very different choice, it's clear that the members of his court are not pleased.

It's a shame this show got hit with such bad timing. Between the relatively late premiere, releasing next to the long-awaited second season of the far more established The Ancient Magus' Bride, and following on the heels of the far less interesting The Tale of Outcasts from last season, it became pretty easy for this one to slip through the cracks. Admittedly, I didn't have many expectations for it, yet within minutes of this episode starting, I was hooked.

That mostly comes down to Sariphi. Maybe this was my fault. Everything I'd seen from promo material suggested she was a wilting flower who'd charm her would-be executioner through sad puppy-dog eyes, but her very first line threw that notion out the window. Despite being quite literally raised as a sacrifice for the beast king, she proves nonchalant about the whole thing. There's undoubtedly a sadness to her predicament, but that makes her unflappable, relentlessly casual banter with her captor all the more charming. She sees right through his bluster, but rather than mocking him, she appreciates that all his posturing is for maintaining peace. It's a strong dynamic that immediately pulled me in, and Sariphi is brought to life brilliantly by a measured and charismatic performance from Kana Hanazawa. I do have to admit that said performance surprised me--I didn't expect a downtrodden vocal performance, but I also wasn't expecting her to be so bouncy. It's not a bad choice though, and it does help to make her appeal as a character evident early on.

Leonhart is a bit more stock but performs the "beast" half of this story with enough nuance to complement Sariphi. While he's sometimes stern and even threatening, there's never a sense of malice behind any of it. It's clear that he understands the political power of intimidation and utilizes it as best as he can to maintain his kingdom's precarious peace. Even before we discover the twist to his nature, it's clear that a vulnerable and compassionate personality is behind it all. Rather than the beast being "tamed", this story is about him finding the support to step out from behind his defenses.

Between Sariphi cheerily scampering around and Leonhart opting not to eat her, both are messing with their expected role. Playing with how things are "supposed" to be is upsetting to those who aren't expecting it, and that concern has been at the forefront of Leonhart's mind for most of his life. He always assumed that if his people knew the truth of his heritage (one that's important for the series' romance endgame), they'd reject him, and he's made immense efforts to hide it. When Sariphi learns his truth, she's not the least bit upset and in fact praises him for being strong despite what he's always thought of himself. If it looks like Leonhart is carrying her around like a plushie for comfort, that's not entirely wrong; Sariphi's words do more effective beast slaying than a thousand swords, and she's done a number on his inner monsters.

This is the main takeaway from the episode and the series as a whole: Sariphi and Leonhart help make each other feel like they have a place to belong. Sariphi was raised to be the "extra", a child her parents always intended as a sacrifice, and she's looking for acceptance just as much as Leonhart is. They recognize each other as fellow lost souls.

My one complaint about the premiere is that it moves a little too fast for its own good, jumping from scene to scene without letting any moment's lingering emotions breathe. That's probably so they can get to the new status quo at the end of the episode quicker, but it left the episode feeling a bit scattershot. Overall, it does an excellent job of establishing our leads as likeable and well rounded, giving them an endearing dynamic to follow. Much like Otaku Elf, this one has a lot to offer that isn't readily apparent from the synopsis, and I definitely recommend it so far.

Goro Amamiya is a gynecologist at a remote rural hospital. Four years ago, he became a fan of preteen idol Ai Hoshino when a young, terminally ill patient shared his enthusiasm, so it's hard to hide his shock when a 16-year-old Ai shows up, 20 weeks pregnant with twins. Goro's efforts are for naught when a stalker fan of Ai's kills him, but his story isn't over yet, as he's reborn as one of Ai's twins, and his sister may also be someone he once knew.

This is an instance where I have to try really hard to separate what the first episode of a series manages to accomplish from what I think the series as a whole is going to be, because it's clear from the start of Oshi no Ko that this beginning is not necessarily indicative of the way the rest of the story will play out. Its gargantuan runtime, which got it a theatrical release that's been running since mid-March, is largely an effort by Doga Kobo to preserve the narrative's twists and turns to establish what its central premise will eventually become, which is an approach I can respect, at least on paper. However, the execution of that narrative left a lot to be desired. The funniest part about it is that I don't even think the series needed to go to such lengths to preserve the impact of the premiere's last few minutes.

Now, I'm not going to spoil what happens at the very end, though to be honest, I knew what was coming from the get-go, and I think that it's the only thing that got me through to the end of this unwieldy beast. Otherwise, you're instead stuck with the preceding 80 minutes that revolve around the first twist, which is impossible not to spoil because it's literally the basis for the whole premise of the series: After the idol-obsessed doctor is murdered, he finds himself reincarnated as one of the two twins of his all-time favorite teen pop-idol, Ai Hoshino, who he just so happened to have as one of his patients. Now living his life as Aquamarine Hoshino, our hero discovers that his new sister Ruby is also a reincarnated idol obsessive with ties to his former life, namely the 12-year-old patient who sparked his love of Ai in the first place, which leads to all sorts of shenanigans as the two navigate their new lives as the children of their beloved Ai. And no, I don't understand how one of these souls apparently waited four years to reincarnate while the other instantly zipped to Ai's womb.

Here's my biggest problem with this premiere: Despite being structured as one gigantic episode, nothing about it felt like anyone behind the scenes considered whether or not the story being told should be given the runtime of a feature film. Once the good doctor finds himself in his new body, the whole premiere becomes an essentially linear chronicle of his and his sister's second chance at childhood, with plenty of attention paid to the details of Ai's idol career, the managerial side of her pop stardom and how other entertainment industries intersect with the music business. The "reborn as a baby with the adult mind and memories intact somehow" schtick is mostly played for the usual jokes about diaper soiling, breastfeeding and creeping out adults by being unnaturally smart. These gags aren't all that funny and do not help endear us to either of the protagonists. Open note to all anime that have been doing this lately, by the way: It will never not be creepy to have these adult men in baby bodies reason out the ethics of sucking on their moms' tits while pretending to be dumb little babies. Ai herself is fine as a character, her ditziness is actually especially charming. I can appreciate the story's attempts to explore her emotional motivations for wanting to be a mother at such a young age, but she's not given that much space to become a compelling character on her own.

In short, much of the story before the climactic revelation of the episode was never more than perfectly functional, and it was often simply boring. This might've been tolerable if the episode were edited down to even half its runtime, but this premiere is nearly an hour and a half long, and I only began to get interested in what it was trying to do in its final ten minutes. That is a problem, no matter how you shake it. Could Oshi no Ko become a legitimately compelling mystery-drama? Sure, I could see that happening. Aquamarine gets some compelling motivations in those final moments, and Ruby's character gets the most interesting characterization throughout (although there's no guarantee that the show will do anything with that promising material). This first episode only made me less interested in discovering whether that proves to be the case though, which means that it failed to do its job as a premiere, which is a real shame. So while this is far from a flop in my books and I'll likely check back in on it some other time, it still didn't manage to get onto my priority watching list for the season.

Koito Koganei works as an attendant at Takamimi Shrine. Local rumors claim that a deity dwells within the shrine, but the actual resident is an immortal elf who found herself stuck here over 400 years ago. This elf is also a total shut-in who won't go outside and has developed a taste for video games.

Well, this sure was a pleasant little surprise. Going in with just the promo material, I figured I was in for a gimmicky gag series about yet another fantasy creature discovering the bewildering world of modern technology. I was prepared for endless scenes of "lol elf lady get iPhone"-level jokes. Instead I got a remarkably charming and cozy dramedy that got some genuine laughs out of me while quickly transcending its own gimmick with solid character writing.

On the surface, the first episode of Otaku Elf, known in Japan as Edomae Elf, appears to be a lighthearted comedy about the titular elf, Elda, who resides as the goddess of a shrine in Tokyo, and her miko friend Koito. It does all the things a good pilot should, introducing us to the characters, the setting and the basic comedic conflict, ie. that Elda is a nerdy shut-in leaching off the goodwill of the people in the area, and Koito is constantly exasperated with her over this. But that's just the set dressing--it's not really what the whole episode is about. The deeper question in this episode is "Why have the people in the neighbourhood deified Elda, a foreigner who publicly admits to having no divine powers whatsoever?" I mean, if her blessings are meaningless, why pray to her and give her offerings? Hell, why even give her the time of day if she does nothing but sponge off the community? This is the question that plagues Koito throughout the premiere.

What Koito starts to learn is that Elda does give something back, something priceless, although Koito may be too young to understand the full extent of it. It stems from the fact that Elda is immortal. The old lady who runs the local electronics store says she likes Elda because her existence means that some things in this world never change. Elda is a lodestone of sorts for this woman's life. And she's right. When everything goes crazy and nothing makes sense, when you're wrecked by pain and turmoil, there is a comfort to be found in the fact that your deity is not only provably, physically there, but also appreciates you, regardless of whether she has any divine powers or not.

There's even more to it than that. Elda isn't just immortal, she has a fantastic memory. While she doesn't go out much anymore, she still meets every child born in the area at least once and then proceeds to receive their offerings in the following decades. That means that even after you're long dead and everyone who ever knew you is as well, Elda will remember you and think of you fondly. This is a version of Beowulfian immortality. As long as your legend remains, you're never truly gone. You will always exist within her heart, which is easily something worthy of a lifetime of worship.

Granted, in the beginning, there are a few jokes about Elda being obsessed with games and being an energy drink-chugging couch gremlin. However, those are short, fast and more of a springboard for developing her friendship with Koito. It also helps that, despite being a recluse who spends all day gaming, Elda doesn't have a selfish or self-entitled personality. She genuinely appreciates the offerings given to her, and the people giving them appreciate her. It makes Elda quirky and inconvenient to work with, but nowhere near the kind of insufferable character that the title and base premise might bring to mind. In the same vein, Koito gives her grief for getting distracted from her deity duties without being a stone-faced taskmaster. She generally seems to give Elda the space she needs, and while the two have conflicting personalities, there's a clear friendship there that makes it all work.

I also really like the way the series treats its supernatural elements. Not only does everyone know about Elda, but there doesn't seem to be any facade about her being omnipotent. Instead the community reveres her for her reassuring presence, an unchanging constant across the centuries who, even in a distant way, makes them feel more stable. Yet, at the same time, being a constant in an ever-changing world is part of why Elda secludes herself, choosing to isolate in a nest of distractions so as not to be crushed by the inexorable passage of time. Solid, clever character building comes naturally from the world the series has built. Koito recognizing Elda's humanity (for lack of a better word) makes for a genuinely effective resolution to the premiere.

The only thing I don't get, however, is the show's seeming insistence that Elda's lifestyle is not the ideal existence we all wish we could have. We have a stunningly beautiful lady of ancient prowess who spends her days drinking Red Bull, applying custom paint jobs to anime model kits and playing Switch and VR games. She doesn't even necessarily have to go outside and interact with people that might make her feel weird about her ears or, heaven forbid, do boring work.

If anyone remembers the now decade-old series Gingitsune, an underappreciated furry anime gem if ever there was one, this reminded me a lot of that. The cute artstyle makes the characters appreciably squishy while allowing for very expressive animation. The music and voice acting are soothing and sweet without being saccharine, making the whole viewing experience pleasant. It's not knock-your-socks-off material, but it's a damn good time. Honestly, I don't know if the following episodes can be (or should be expected to be) so profound, but I'm completely on board. I look forward to seeing more ways Elda gives meaning to other people's lives, and I'm genuinely invested in seeing her connect more deeply with the people who worship her. That is, if Koito can get her out of the house.

Liza Luna has been dispatched to Earth by the space empire Azatos. At first she thought it would be fine to destroy Earth, since she believed it to have a low level of civilization. However, after stopping at a cafe, she encounters a cat and is shocked by her cuteness, which changes her entire outlook.

Liza Luna is my hero. Sure, her show's just okay so far and probably would've made a better short, but when she fires an alien artillery blast down on the people who starved, abused and abandoned a kitten, she made the time I spent watching Too Cute Crisis worth it.

I know this is a comedy and we're not supposed to take anything we see too seriously, but can I just say that this show has a pretty decent sci-fi premise? Humans, being humans, are egotistical enough to believe that if aliens came to Earth, it would be entirely because of us, like we're somehow special. This show's setup is basically that humans aren't special, not even a little, but the diverse amount of life here is, in that the animals of Earth are generally far cuter than the lifeforms on an infinite number of other planets these aliens have visited.

The amazing catharsis of watching Liza do what I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing upon animal abusers, however, this is a very okay show. The premise that aliens from the Azatoth Empire are surveying planets and have just shown up to decide whether or not Earth gets to stick around, a fate ultimately decided by Liza's newfound love of cute animals, is fun enough. Liza mistakenly wandering into a cat cafe--and the show NOT going for the low-hanging fruit of having her assume it's a cafe where people go to eat cats--is a decent hook, and her total meltdown when she encounters toe beans for the first time is one of several fun moments. The problems are largely that the art isn't fully up to the task of showing the intense cuteness Liza sees and there's not enough plot to fill out nearly half an hour, the latter of which results in the good moments getting lost in the drawn-out nature of the whole production.

Things don't quite pick up until the third act, when Liza and her new friends from the cat cafe, Seiji and Kasumi, find an abandoned, dying Scottish Fold kitten in the rain. Up to that point, this anime has one joke: Liza encounters an animal and freaks out about its cuteness overload, then does the same thing for each new thing she learns about the animal until she eventually passes out from overstimulation. For one video or a short series, it's funny enough, but I can imagine that 12 full-length episodes of this pattern will get old quickly. That said, it may be worth watching further because now that Liza has a kitty of her own, her adventures in cuteness may be much more targeted and take on a different tone. Hopefully the addition of new characters and stories will help deliver some new jokes too. But even if this premiere doesn't do it for you, stick around for the ending theme with pictures of what I'm hoping are the pets of people who worked on it. Even with six kitties of my own, I never get tired of looking at pet pictures.

A door to another world opens up before Yuuya Tenjou, a young man who's been brutally bullied all his life. This alternate reality grants him access to all sorts of things, like cheat skills and a portal that lets him travel between his old and new worlds. Can the class loser turn his life around back home through his experiences in other worlds?

To be honest, the fact that I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World and Became Unrivalled in the Real World Too seems to actually kinda try makes it even more irritating. The show's self-serious direction, coupled with the fact that we spend an extraordinary amount of time with the fat, unattractive, depressed pre-isekai'd version of our protagonist, gives you the impression that it thinks very highly of itself, as if it's telling the real version of the same old power fantasy that the other shows didn't have the guts to depict. Then, after all that, the premiere just devolves into the same inane montages of JRPG menu stats, language learning and instant buff bod transformations that we see in every single one of these terrible series.

I can't believe I'm about to say something positive about The Fruit of Evolution, but at least that godforsaken blight upon the world understood that it's become impossible to treat the cheap isekai power trip formula with any seriousness--you either handwave the setup as a necessary but perfunctory evil, or you confront the whole core of your premise as the fundamentally stupid joke it's become. Watching Yuuya wallow in dramatic self-pity for nearly an entire episode is neither entertaining nor emotionally moving. It merely reinforces the toxic subtext that so many of these shows peddle, intentionally or otherwise, that to live as a nice yet not particularly attractive or popular regular guy in the everyday world is a fate worse than death. Sure, he doesn't have a fateful encounter with Truck-kun, but his new body and superpowers are his one-way ticket to living a happier, more fulfilling life all the same, and I'm sure the rest of the season will go on to have him exercise his newfound power on all sorts of monsters, demon lords, busty witches, etc. In a different series, I could see myself getting on board with the fact that Yuuya is seemingly going to be hopping back and forth between Earth and multiple different fantasy worlds, because that is novel to me at the very least. Given how poorly this premiere was executed though, I can't imagine sitting down to watch more.

We, as a society, have got to stop letting Shin Itagaki direct things clearly beyond his level. The man has demonstrated across every project he's run since Berserk 2016 that he cannot direct action fantasy to save his life. He reliably makes the worst possible choices in framing, blocking and editing to deliver claustrophobic, indecipherable car wrecks. Anyone who watched the later episodes of So I'm a Spider, So What? knows what I'm talking about, and every bad decision from that series has been transplanted here, only without Aoi Yuki to make it more tolerable. Watching this episode--as in, just the act of visually consuming it--was physically exhausting.

Though maybe I'm being a little too harsh, since Itagaki's signature style at least gave me something to hold my attention--the writing was certainly never gonna manage that much. Yuuya has one of the most tired, hackneyed backstories ever. His entire character arc is that everyone in the world hates him for being fat and ugly, and everyone beats and harasses him at literally every opportunity for the crime of existing. But the story doesn't actually sympathize with him, because if it did, the solution wouldn't be for him to magically become slim and hot. Instead it's all just buildup to make the people in his life (besides his eventual harem, of course) as detestable as possible while wringing the audience for pity through his suffering of all the abuse, and it leaves Yuuya with less depth than The Ugly Barnacle.

Of course, his rise to power and hotness is even more shallow. Yuuya joins a long line of isekai Melvins who just stumble into superpowers, literally being handed them the second he walks into the first fantasy land. You can tell that even the show is immediately bored by this, because it speeds through his skill acquisition so quickly that you never have time to read the dozens of stat screens and JRPG menus that constitute his training montage. That doesn't make those endless text boxes any less annoying, but it highlights just how meaningless it all is. These aren't important or considered skills meant to flesh out his character, they're a bottomless vault of cheap OP abilities to pull from so that Yuuya never has to struggle or really earn anything. We've all seen this a million times before.

In the hands of another director, Cheat Skill would be a flavourless waste of 22 minutes. Here, it's still just as bland, but delivered with the clarity of a half-remembered fever dream.

One lonely, gloomy fifth-grade student is the target of her classmates' endless bullying. That is, until a new kid arrives on the scene. Friendly Takada is as clueless as he is well-meaning, but somehow possesses the magic ability to start drawing "Shinigami" Nishimura out of her shell. As these gradschoolers experience all the fun of a childhood summer together, from going to the pool to picking sunflowers to watching fireworks, an unusual friendship blossoms.

I wasn't sure going in how to feel about the idea of a lighthearted comedy about a kid being relentlessly bullied. I mean, I know kids are dicks, and I know this because "kid" is "dick" spelled backwards, and they often don't truly understand the full scope of what they're doing and the harm it causes, but the fact remains that these ones have turned Nishimura into a social pariah because of...what, the fact that she looks like a genderbent GeGeGe no Kitaro? This poor girl's been a verbal punching bag for years and she just takes it, having accepted it as normal. That's some heartbreaking stuff right there and not exactly what I'd call a situation ripe for comedy.

The central joke of the whole show is that Takada, the new transfer student, doesn't realize that everyone is bullying Nishimura. He hears the pejorative nickname they've given her, “Shinigami,” and thinks she must have cool, dark superpowers like the shinigami characters he's seen in anime. And even when she tries to explain it to him, he doesn't understand. He's such a simple-minded sweetheart that he simply cannot believe that he exists in a world where everyone would bully a girl for literally no reason. It's far more likely in his mind that she has out-of-control superpowers and they're trying to protect themselves with their own.

Despite the "clueless" in the title, that's not quite the case here. It's just that Takada sees the world as a better place than it actually is. There's not a single negative thought in his head, so he's not afraid to say exactly what he thinks about any given situation, something that baffles the bullies. He's never embarrassed and has nothing to hide. Moreover, he also has the physical talent that kids value, meaning he has popularity outside of those who actively bully Nishimura. And most importantly, he doesn't respond how the bullies expect him to even when they do target him, which is already forcing some serious introspection upon these gradeschoolers.

I know this is supposed to be a heartwarming show with Takada standing up for Nishimura time and again without realizing how much his actions mean to her, but... Let's be real here, this is like THE saddest of escapist fantasies, "What if the relentlessly bullied kid got a friend?" At least part of my figurative score is for the ending theme's imagery, because art references aside, it captures exactly what most of my gradeschool years felt like: Desperately running, looking for an exit that was always somehow just out of reach. Nishimura's position as the kid everyone bullies for whatever reason is painfully familiar to me, and I could see that making this a difficult story for some people, because it does understand what it feels like to be that kid. But there's one shining beacon in all of this, and that's Takada. Takada is aggressively friendly, and Nishimura really wants to believe hiskindness but can't quite bring herself to. Although it isn't said outright, the implication is that she's been burned by false fronts before and couldn't handle that being the case this time. Her attempts to fend him off are clearly painful for her. Meanwhile, Takada is framed as "clueless" because he appears oblivious to what's really going on, but there are moments when we have to question that. The way he handles lead bully Kitagawa is either brilliant or the best application of non-understanding possible, and watching Kitagawa flail around for a response is pretty damn cathartic.

My recommendation does come with a warning for its frank depiction of bullying, which we see exactly zero adults doing anything about (sadly very true to real life), but the heartwarming factor outweighs it. It's worth getting through the bad to see the good that Takada brings to Nishimura's life.

Kyotaro Ichikawa, a boy barely clinging to the bottom rung of his school's social ladder, secretly believes he's the tortured lead in some psychological thriller. He spends his days dreaming up ways to disrupt his classmates' peaceful lives and pining after Anna Yamada, the class idol. But Kyotaro's not nearly the troubled teen he pretends to be, and it turns out Anna's a bit odd herself.

Hey, who's got two thumbs and is a huge dumbass who managed to not realize a new anime season had started? This guy!

While there are many flavours of romcoms, most of them tend toward the sugary-sweet side. The Dangers in My Heart is decidedly not one of those. With our male lead's opening monologue being about how he's filled with dark fantasies, even expressly saying he wants to kill the object of his affection, you might think this was some kind of morbid, twisted take on romance a la Angels of Death. However, as this premiere went on, it became clear that this wasn't the case. Rather, this is a show built from the ground up on pure, undiluted cringe humor.

You get lots of chuni characters in anime, who cover a wide spectrum of embarrassment, but I struggle to think of a recent one that feels quite as authentic as Kyotaro. He spends his free time reading books with blood spatter depicted on the cover and monologuing about how he's got a sick, twisted mind that intimidates those around him, which is absolutely the reason nobody talks to him at school. He constructs elaborate fantasies about being a murderer who's going to kill the prettiest girl in class and have his way with her corpse, only to shrink into a corncob the moment she makes eye contact. If he didn't have to wear a uniform, you know he'd have a different skull t-shirt on every single day of the week. Boy even has the stereotypical emo fringe. As somebody who knew edgy little dumbasses like this growing up, I got a lot of laughs at seeing the brutally honest way this episode kept peeling back his defense tactics to expose the embarrassed kid hiding behind them.

However, that shockingly authentic portrayal is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I can appreciate just how true to life it feels. On the other, the show's portrayal pulls no punches in how genuinely shitty teenagers can be. It makes no attempt to dance around the fact that Kyotaro is buying magazines with Anna's pictures in them for the express purpose of jerking off to them. The other boys in class brazenly make gross, immature, deeply disrespectful remarks about the girls in their class, quite often within earshot. All of that is certainly true to life, and we're at least partially supposed to be laughing at the characters in question, but being stuck inside the head of an authentic teenage boy feels like a punishment awaiting me in Hell should I play enough of my cards wrong. I imagine a lot of people will be put off by this particular brand of humor, and I can't blame them for bailing out.

At least Anna is endlessly charming. While everything we see of her is filtered through Kyotaro's perspective, it paints the portrait of a loveable goofball who's very fun to watch, even while it's kinda uncomfortable just how much watching Kyotaro is doing without her knowledge. If nothing else, seeing her awkwardly fish for recognition at the bookstore got the biggest laugh of the episode from me, alongside her startlingly great cat noises. There are hints that she's got more going on than the friendly ditz most of their classmates treat her as, and ideally she'll be the sugar that makes the bitter cringe go down easier. It also helps that she's indeed incredibly beautiful, with some seriously huge tits. Really, she's some immediate top-tier waifu material all around.

Altogether, it makes for an interesting premiere, albeit not one that's easy to recommend. At the very least, I'm curious to see where it goes from here, as there's a lot of room for our leads to develop. That being said, I wouldn't blame anyone for not wanting to stick around.

What? No, I didn't completely forget to post a review for this show's first few episodes and then suddenly remember when the show was almost halfway done! Are you crazy? Ha ha ha!

Buddy Daddies was easily one of my most anticipated shows of the season. PA Works delivered one of my favourite originals last year, Akiba Maid War, and I was primed for another comedic followup. Buddy Daddies has mostly met my expectations, but not every shot taken meets its mark.

The premise isn't exactly unique--in fact, it's very Hollywood. There are plenty of comedy-action films based squarely on the concept of a man in a violent line of work who ends up responsible for a child of varying age. Examples go back over 30 years and include the likes of Kindergarten Cop, The Pacifier and My Spy. A naive kid throwing a hit in disarray or complicating the hardened action hero's plan only to reintroduce him to his emotions later has been mined to death by studio execs. Buddy Daddies isn't subverting any expectations, but doing something original and doing something well aren't always synonymous.

Buddy Daddies mostly does it well. At the start, we meet our primary duo, Kazuki Kurusu and Rei Suwa, in the midst of completing a hit on Christmas Eve, and quickly learn that they're also the guardians of 4-year-old Miri, the daughter of a human trafficker they offed while Kazuki was dressed as Santa. Kazuki still has a soft spot for kids and was once an expectant father. Rei is more cat than human and sleeps in a bathtub. The pair of assassins live together in a pretty luxurious apartment and are now saddled with Miri, who firmly believes Kazuki is her actual dad, and admittedly there is more than a passing resemblance.

Neither adult is outright mean to Miri even though she's a wrench in what was a well-oiled killing machine. She's a nuisance in ways that are very typical for her age, insisting on playing when the grownups need to get something done, wanting to "help" with tasks that are outside of her abilities, etc., and she isn't above incessant tantrums to get what she wants. Most of her antics walk that difficult line between cute and obnoxious, which is perfect because while most kids are adorable, it's that exact same energy that makes them exhausting. However, Buddy Daddies stretched my suspension of disbelief a bit too far in episode 2, where Kazuki and Rei have to take Miri along on a hit. Most of Kazuki's infiltration attempt goes according to plan until Miri gums it up. This culminates with Rei walking through a wide-open courtyard with a rifle and opening fire through glass doors. Then at least half a dozen mobsters return fire all at once but fail to hit him despite the fact he has no cover and is approaching them in a steady straight line. Kazuki and Miri escape by running through the line of fire and also not getting hit. Meanwhile, Miri has absolutely no reaction to the gunfire at all.

I actually started to wonder if I'd bet on the wrong horse. Miri's total lack of reaction to gunfire, or really the show's insistence on only allowing her to be happy or sassy, became too convenient. It would ruin the shenanigans if she started crying her eyes out because the gunfire was hurting her ears. I'm not saying the show needs to go that far, but it wouldn't hurt for her to be a little scared, given the seriousness of the situation she's in.

Fortunately, episode 3 shifted gears and added some much-needed emotional weight. The narrative wants to communicate the idea of what makes someone a parent and affirms that blood relationships aren't necessary. We get a better idea of who Kazuki and Rei are, what they're missing from their lives, and the kind of life Miri had prior to her "adoption". Kazuki is an orphan who, much like Adrian Monk, apparently lost his wife to a car bomb, with the added blow this time of said wife being pregnant. Rei appears to have come from a mafia family and suffered some pretty terrifying grooming from his father. Both men have some deep-seated issues around the concept of family, and it's Miri, who doesn't even know she was abandoned, that teaches them both what it means to be a dad.

I'll admit I got a little choked up in certain parts of this episode, although it was hardly doing anything profound. We have a traumatized guy sleeping in a bathtub so he can fake out any would-be intruders and another man who won't let go of (nor admit to) his dream of everyday family life. Kazuki tries to reunite Miri with her mom, but she's a drunk working in a club whose only allegiance is to her boss, who smacks her around. There's nothing but resentment in her voice as she recalls daily care for her child. She internalized Miri's happy interactions with her as mockery.

From a production standpoint, Buddy Daddies consistently ranges from nice to exceptional. The action sequences in the first episode were stellar but could've been more memorable and well utilized in the second. Miri's variety of humorous faces aren't Anya tier but are equally cute and expressive. I'm a big fan of the show's score, which appears to be influenced by old buddy cop features. The backgrounds are colourful, and I'm impressed with the thought that went into designing the layout of Rei's expensive condo.

Since I still need to catch my ass up, I don't know where Buddy Daddies will go from here--I can only guess we'll eventually see the return of the hitman introduced in episode 2. Now that Miri and her two new dads are firmly established, I'm hoping they up the action and present some more narrative to chew on.

It's come to my attention that retired actress Melinda Dillon, best remembered by me and probably many others as Mrs. Parker in the greatest holiday film ever made, A Christmas Story, has passed away. Not only that, but so has James Kaposztas, a veteran Otakon staffer and pioneer of the Western anime fandom who made history way back in 1982--when he was a 21-year-old college student, Kaposztas hooked up two VCRs to each other and used scenes from Space Battleship Yamato synced to "All You Need is Love" to create the first AMV ever. He was also one of the earliest adopters of cosplay in the American anime community. Dillon was 83 and actually died on January 9, news of her death only being made public recently, and while I couldn't find an exact age listed for Kaposztas, simple math tells me he was at least 61, and he died just yesterday.

Rest in peace, Melinda and James. You'll always be missed, and certainly never forgotten. ;w;/