Let's talk anime.

So Dragon Ball Super is popping off right now. For those of you who aren't worried about spoilers and enjoy your anime fights, this is a good one:

Spoiler:

The Ultra Instinct awakening fight has got to be one of the all time best in the series, maybe the best of all time. I'm liking the new form, even if it's just regular Goku with gray eyes & (sometimes) gray highlights in his hair. The new fighting style is cool & very feral looking, matching the name.

Dragon Ball super is so weird for me. It has a dozen things I don't like and think are rather dumb. Then it'll have a moment that makes me feel like a kid on Sunday morning again. So I keep watching.

So I would tell everyone what my first impressions have been this season. But I've been *gasp* gaming instead of watching anime. I am pleased and amused to see the large number of "reverse harem" and Bishounen shows on Crunchyroll this season.

Here are a few I have checked out:
The Ancient Magus' Bride - Ok, I've actually already seen the first three episodes when Crunchyroll did theatrical screening of them a while ago. It was great! Has it's own pace, but is enchanting and captivating. As people have pointed out, though, it does start off with slavery, though it really doesn't seem to have much to do other than bringing the characters together, the Magus' insistence that she will be her bride aside (something he brings up regularly but doesn't seem forceful about (well, I guess she doesn't seem to have the choice to leave him (I probably should stop talking now...))).

Love is Like a Cocktail - I have mixed feelings about this one. Seems like it's mostly about a guy trying to get his wife drunk because she acts incredibly cute when she is drunk.

Konohana Kitan - DOGGIRLS! *ahem* Seems like a cute moe series.

Urahara - This one seems interesting, but I think it's riding the ride between being incredible and being a mess. A trio of girls who run a fashion/pastery store in Shinbuya's Harajuku area are enlisted to help fight off culture stilling aliens. It's one I'll really have to see more of to decide if I like it or not.

King's Game - I have to wonder which direction this one will take. It's a death game anime, not shying away from gruesome depictions, with a class of 32 forced to follow the commands of the "King" or they will be killed. I'm sure it will be a murder-fest, but I'm not sure if it will just be about them trying to mean the commands and survive, or if it will dig deeper into trying to escape the game and put and end to the king.

Recovery of an MMO Junkie - I am forced to assume from the Crunchyroll title (the original title translates to "Recommendation of a NEET" with "Recommendation of the Wonderful Virtual Life" being seen as the translation in the Anime itself) that the series will slowly move away from the MMO most of the meaningful events of the first episode takes place in. It seems like it'll be a love story between the female lead and the character she develops a relationship with in a new MMO she has just joined. I thought it was cute and funny with some heartfelt moments, but also some heavy-handed foreshadowing.

Probably won't continue:
Sengoku Night Blood - A girl is transported to a fantasy world filled with vampires and werewolves, so apparently share the names and affiliations of famous people during the (as the anime title implies) the Sengoku period of Japan (the unification of Japan, Oda Nobunaga and all that). So, yes, it looks like it's basically Twilight set in old Japan. Just didn't hold my attention.

Dies Irae - What the heck did I just watch. I kinda get that it's a superpowered/supernatural and violent battle anime set in a not-quite-but-definately-is Germany right around the start of WW2. But then there is the whole reincarnation, or alternate world, or maybe visions of the future montage that was just confusing as heck. Not a great start to getting me interested...

Mantid wrote:

But I've been *gasp* gaming instead of watching anime.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/okp66FD.gif)

Mantid wrote:

proceeds to list multiple shows

I WAS RIGHT!

I've been reading the Ancient Magus Bride manga and liking it, despite the slavery and forced child marriage thing.

CptDomano wrote:
Mantid wrote:

proceeds to list multiple shows

I WAS RIGHT! :lol:

Have you seen how many shows I usually watch a season?

Taharka wrote:

I've been reading the Ancient Magus Bride manga and liking it, despite the slavery and forced child marriage thing.

I like how they don't try to sugarcoat it or present it in the best terms in the anime. Elias is definitely a well-meaning owner and he tries to care the best way he knows how for Chise. He does care, though we're not quite sure why. So theoretically, this is the best case example for benign slavery that you could have. But the story is told from Chise's point of view and she's obviously ambivalent about the entire thing. Not quite black and white "I hate being a slave" because Elias does protect and care for her in ways she herself cannot. But the idea that she's literally owned by someone doesn't seem to sit quite well with her, and us by extension. It's a subtle sort of horrific.

Even the faeries aren't Tinkerbell faeries. She attracts them and they "like" her, but what they coax her to do isn't entirely portrayed as going to be beneficial for her, and they have an explicit animosity for Elias, though he does suffer them around his home.

When you phrase it like that, I'm not sure why I/we like it. Seems like everyone kinda ambivalently hates each other.

So, there is some decent stuff showing up this season, but I'm really surprised to see Amanchu! (The scuba anime) show up. That show really just tanked for me because it was so slow. The first episode of this season finally has some actual scuba diving, so I'm finally interested and love the scuba fan service.

Now that's interesting.

The second episode of the second season of Kino's Journey retells the Colesseum story, but with updated animation, a different storyboard, and a different focus. It bears noting that while in the second season, Kino's gender (she identifies female) is more clearly communicated to us, the audience, it seems as if she is still consistently mistaken for male in the world itself, and I'm sure that the ruse is intentional, probably for her protection.

Recommendations for a Wonderful Virtual Life is shaping up to be "You've Got Mail," only with less Hanks and Ryan, and more NEET-ness, Japanese social mores, and MMOs.

LarryC wrote:

Recommendations for a Wonderful Virtual Life is shaping up to be "You've Got Mail," only with less Hanks and Ryan, and more NEET-ness, Japanese social mores, and MMOs.

Ugh, that's a recipe to be the very definition of a guilty pleasure.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

So, there is some decent stuff showing up this season, but I'm really surprised to see Amanchu! (The scuba anime) show up. That show really just tanked for me because it was so slow. The first episode of this season finally has some actual scuba diving, so I'm finally interested and love the scuba fan service.

FYI, that episode of Amanchu! is just a bonus episode from the DVDs, not the start of a new season.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

So, there is some decent stuff showing up this season, but I'm really surprised to see Amanchu! (The scuba anime) show up. That show really just tanked for me because it was so slow. The first episode of this season finally has some actual scuba diving, so I'm finally interested and love the scuba fan service.

Ha ha, scuba, tanked.

Didn’t catch it in the first episode (not sure why) but it seems like most of the King’s orders in King’s Game amount to sexual harassment to assault (first episode included not going to sleep and a kiss, the other orders given out include things like a guy groping a girl’s chest to ordering two character to have sex). Might have to re-evaluate my first impressions of the series.

I've been hearing things about a fantastic Dragon Ball Super double episode.
Is this confirmed?

Oh yeah that was discussed above. 2 eps were available on Crunchyroll and I thought it was a mistake but it must have been a double.

Goku has a new form.

Mantid wrote:
tuffalobuffalo wrote:

So, there is some decent stuff showing up this season, but I'm really surprised to see Amanchu! (The scuba anime) show up. That show really just tanked for me because it was so slow. The first episode of this season finally has some actual scuba diving, so I'm finally interested and love the scuba fan service.

FYI, that episode of Amanchu! is just a bonus episode from the DVDs, not the start of a new season.

Rats!

So, Land of the Lustrous is kinda weird, but after watching episode 2, I'm sold. It's like anime mixed with Frank L. Baum. It also has the whole moon legend thing which is in Princess Kaguya and something I really, really like. I've even decided that I like the CG animation aspects. I actually think it's a really gorgeous show to watch.

I watched the first two episodes of Food Wars for the season and am curious if other long-running shows spent five or more minutes flashing back to a Blu-Ray exclusive special. It would actually explain why the last Autumn Election finalist appeared out of nowhere the prior season, and they merely did a better job catching folks up here.

I feel like a Blu-Ray exclusive should be an extra that doesn't really impact the story, but Food Wars seems to leave some valuable content for the discs. Rather frustrating.

Here's what I've watched lately:

Re:Creators is entertainingly meta. The premise is that a bunch of fictional characters from different genres show up in the real world, and hijinks ensue as their expectations from their respective settings clash together. The result is basically Anime: The Anime. I would point to this moment from episode 2 as capturing the series as a whole pretty well, in which the magical girl character basically beats the crap out of the action-girl protagonist from a less child-like series.

Given that these characters have been brought over from stories, they eventually start fighting each other with the rules of narrative causality (more or less), and really I found the whole thing just delicious.

The Saga of Tanya the Evil was a delight. A heartless and purely rational Japanese HR manager is killed and reincarnated (with memories and personality intact) as a girl in a sort of fantasy World War 1-era Germany. This reincarnation was inflicted on her by a being that insists that it is God, whom the protagonist insists cannot possibly exist, and therefore must be something else.

There's something about watching an 11-year-old girl behave with pure, calculated rationality in the midst of a terrible war that is at once horrifying and compelling. Watching her rail against God, sometimes to his face, just seals the deal.

There's a whole genre of "ordinary person is reincarnated in fantasy word" anime. Tanya the Evil is sort of an antidote to most of these. Most of these stories are an excuse for the audience surrogate main character to go to a magical world and get awesome magic powers that show how awesome they are. Tanya the Evil is a show in which the main character exists to get ground into the dirt by God, personally, and then rises to meet that challenge. (Another antidote to this genre is Konosuba, which takes this as the premise of a comedy.)

As for current series, Kino's Journey is still pretty great. Watch it.

Finally, Blood Blockade Battlefront is back! I had no idea this was coming. Blood Blockade Battlefront & Beyond has reminded me of why I liked the first series so much. The total chaos of the city is a delight to watch.

I watched Darkstalkers OVA which was terrible. The show just didn't make much sense. Most anime based on fighting games are bad but this was really bad.

Just started Parasyte which is a pretty good so far. Would have been better without the fan service or tropes. Oh look the main guy accidentally grabs a girl's boob. I haven't seen that before. The show is mostly body horror but not scary. The show gives you some stuff to think about. The aliens don't have empathy and so far just kill to live.

I might continue with Berserk. I guess it has a Halloween tone. I haven't started the new season.

Baron Of Hell wrote:

Just started Parasyte which is a pretty good so far. Would have been better without the fan service or tropes. Oh look the main guy accidentally grabs a girl's boob. I haven't seen that before. The show is mostly body horror but not scary. The show gives you some stuff to think about. The aliens don't have empathy and so far just kill to live.

Don't worry, that tropey fan-service is front-loaded. I don't know why it's there (evidently the original manga didn't have something like that). Best guess is that it's to try and draw the modern anime crowd expecting that sh*t, because as time progresses the tropes are left behind and it feels much more like a 90's anime before that stuff was pretty standard.

MightyMooquack wrote:

Re:Creators is entertainingly meta. The premise is that a bunch of fictional characters from different genres show up in the real world, and hijinks ensue as their expectations from their respective settings clash together. The result is basically Anime: The Anime. I would point to this moment from episode 2 as capturing the series as a whole pretty well, in which the magical girl character basically beats the crap out of the action-girl protagonist from a less child-like series.

Given that these characters have been brought over from stories, they eventually start fighting each other with the rules of narrative causality (more or less), and really I found the whole thing just delicious.

I Googled this expecting it to be based on a Light Novel or something, but nope. Original animation. Don't know why there's so much crap beginning with "Re:" these days, but that clip was interesting enough I figured I'd check it out. Only it's exclusive to Amazon, which means it probably requires Anime Strike, and I don't feel like paying extra cash for that.

Hurray!

The most interesting thing this season to me has turned out to be Land of the Lustrous. It's just completely unique and fascinating. I really loved episode 3 this week. It may not be the best anime this season, but it's the one show that actually does something original, so it's worth watching for that. It reminds me of the reboot of Casshern Sins for some reason, although it's completely different. It just has that vibe.

So I watched a few first episodes tonight and might watch one more before bed.

Drifters - Going to watch this with my brother, I think, but definitely the most interesting of the shows I watched. No real fan-service, bloody, and a curious premise that doesn't involve a blank protagonist cipher. It's also a little odd, and it seems to encapsulate two new trends this season (or perhaps the past few years?): going back to Nobunaga times and a man that sounds and looks like a woman. At this point I don't even want to call it "crossdresser" and androgyny is viewed differently over there and mother f*ck is it a minefield. I kept failing to acknowledge it about Akiba's Beat in the JRPG thread because I didn't even know how to discuss it. No one seems to raise an eyebrow at it in Drifters so I suppose that's positive? But regardless, this whole paragraph of nothing boils down to the fact that I'll easily watch three episodes before determining if I should progress, as I am intrigued and feel this could be my kind of jam.

Black Clover - More and more I'm getting the feeling I should ignore anything Crunchyroll e-mails me to hype up. For some reason it made me think of Orphen, an anime I bought so I could watch a fantasy-based show and then sold after watching the first DVD because it was so gosh darn boring. Here the protagonist is like Deku from My Hero Academia in that he lacks special abilities in a world where special abilities are normalized. In this case, magic. He has no magic but everyone else does. Unlike Deku, he's a conceited little sh*t that's like Naruto but turned up to 11 and screams in the most annoying manner for half the f*cking episode. I didn't even make it five minutes in before I was tempted to shut this sh*t off. Finally, when he has to face reality that he has no magic, deus ex machina delivers upon him some chosen one bullsh*t of power... oh, but it's demon power! WhhooooOOOoooOOO! And in the end it makes me just want to watch more My Hero Academia and bask in how wonderfully executed Deku is as a character with a similar premise. I might try and do it the favor of watching three episodes before judging, but I really don't like the protagonist.

Sengoku Night Blood - Sooooooo I am totally not the target audience for this. This is an anime intended for women, probably fujoshi, and now I know what it must be like being a woman watching something like Sword Art Online and thinking "Why is this f*cking douchebag treated like he's a Golden God?" The premise is a girl gets sent back to a Sengoku era alternate fantasy world where key historical figures dress fashionably in wonderful pastel colors and fight each other as if they were torn right from a musou game. We know literally nothing about the girl except she left a coffee or lunch date with a friend, tapped on her cellphone, and suddenly she's in another world. A world where she's special and happens to adapt really well to the goings-on surrounding her. She's a female Kirito is the best I can imagine, only she's special in every way but her ability to fight. But who knows! She's volunteered to do that after seeing men sliced in f*cking half the first time in her life. This is an anime for girls to self-insert and fantasize not only which guy is most f*ckable, but which guys will be f*cking each other. And y'know what? That's fine. After all, Sword Art Online exists. But I'd much rather rewatch Vision of Escaflowne, where the female protagonist was way better established and she responded realistically to suddenly being flung into a random fantasy world.

Based on their descriptions I also added Garo -Vanishing Line-, Juni Taisen: Zodiac War, and Taisho Mebiusline Chicchaisen. I don't have much hope for any of these at this point.

EDIT: I just got an e-mail from Crunchyroll for Juni Taisen: Zodiac War similar to that which I received for Black Clover. I am suddenly having many, many second thoughts about giving it a try.

ccesarano wrote:

Sengoku Night Blood - Sooooooo I am totally not the target audience for this. This is an anime intended for women, probably fujoshi, and now I know what it must be like being a woman watching something like Sword Art Online and thinking "Why is this f*cking douchebag treated like he's a Golden God?" The premise is a girl gets sent back to a Sengoku era alternate fantasy world where key historical figures dress fashionably in wonderful pastel colors and fight each other as if they were torn right from a musou game. We know literally nothing about the girl except she left a coffee or lunch date with a friend, tapped on her cellphone, and suddenly she's in another world. A world where she's special and happens to adapt really well to the goings-on surrounding her. She's a female Kirito is the best I can imagine, only she's special in every way but her ability to fight. But who knows! She's volunteered to do that after seeing men sliced in f*cking half the first time in her life. This is an anime for girls to self-insert and fantasize not only which guy is most f*ckable, but which guys will be f*cking each other. And y'know what? That's fine. After all, Sword Art Online exists. But I'd much rather rewatch Vision of Escaflowne, where the female protagonist was way better established and she responded realistically to suddenly being flung into a random fantasy world.

Ehhh... I'm a dude and I was under no illusions Kirito was anything more than an empty vessel. Although I was probably about 10-15 years older than the dudes SA:O was aiming at when I watched it so maybe that was the "problem." (Prescription for those disgruntled with SA:O: watch two episodes of Log Horizon or Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash and call me in the morning.)

Anyway... really enjoying Confessions of an MMO Junkie. Last episode made me think eventually we're going to find out what made Morimori quit her job and become a NEET, which has always been kind of a nagging question - and it seems to me a bit like she's trying to convince herself when she keeps saying she "chose the NEET lifestyle."

Completed Parasyte which was enjoyable. I think the only misstep was final battle with a parasyte or the creature itself. They made it a little to OP without any real reason for it.

Just started Death Parade which seems pretty good so far. A little predictable but it will be fun to see if my other predictions come true.

Death Parade episode 3 was a surprise. I thought this was going to be all death, torture, and horrible people but this episode was none of that. The episode was rather nice. I'm looking forward to other episodes more now.

I finally watched the first three episodes of Gamers! today and God dammit I've been charmed. I'm sad to see it is yet another series based on a Light Novel and by episode three I can see the formula they'll be following. Granted, it's not a formula I'm entirely familiar with, but it's just such ridiculous comfort food.

What really got me hooked was episode two, and mostly because of the character of Uehara. I find his character and potential arc to be the most interesting of all the characters, and really feel he should be the perspective character from which we observe and participate in events. In the end I imagine it'll bounce between Uehara and Amano, but it's clear Amano is the intended cipher here.

It's also a bit nostalgic for me as Amano is the me I thought I was when I was in high school only I was actually an asshole. If this came out when I was the same age of the characters it would be the most escapist fantasy, and while that's pretty unhealthy all things considered, it reminds me of watching more light-hearted anime like Ranma 1/2, or the slice-of-life aspects of anime like Sailor Moon or Vision of Escaflowne that were always so fascinating to me. Similar enough to reflect American school, but different culturally to be as enticing as, say, Hobbiton.

In the end this will no doubt be the anime equivalent of Wendy's or Burger King, but I am certainly enjoying it.

ccesarano wrote:

What really got me hooked was episode two, and mostly because of the character of Uehara. I find his character and potential arc to be the most interesting of all the characters, and really feel he should be the perspective character from which we observe and participate in events. In the end I imagine it'll bounce between Uehara and Amano, but it's clear Amano is the intended cipher here.

Without spoiling anything... while Uehara does sort of become the POV character in terms of exasperatedly observing and trying to fix all of the misunderstanding and drama from everybody else, perhaps because of that, he doesn't really have any character arc of his own. Episode two is all the development he gets.

So, ID-0 on Netflix is shaking up to be pretty good. I'm about 6 episodes in and am not stopping there. Mecha design seems to be a neat mashup between the skeletal designs of Z.O.E & the bright colors of Virtual-On. The spaceship design reminds me of Outlaw Star as does the plot. Overall I'd recommend this to any mecha fan.