We’re almost done with 2023 if you can believe it, and Summer has basically come to an end… ignoring a few straggling shows that have fallen behind in their production schedules. I actually watched way more than the listed shows this season. I’ve seen a big chunk of Shiro Seijo to Kuro Bokushi and plan to continue it later, but I don’t have time for it right now.
Jitsu wa Ore, Saikyou deshita? is still airing, and I’m enjoying it enough to keep watching, but I’m not gonna delay this post an entire week just so I can write about something so generic.
I watched 9 episodes of The Vending Machine Isekai because… of course I did. Watched all of the Patissier isekai too. I don’t really have anything to say about either of those two, so I left them out of the post.
And finally, I watched a bit of Seija Musou, Eiyuu Kyoushitsu, Temple, and Level 1. They were all very bad.
Okay, now onto the stuff worth talking about!
Shows watched:
- BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! – 8/10 – Anime of the Season
“Directing and storyboarding that could make a grown man cry.” - Helck – Dropped
“A wishy-washy mix of comedy and drama.” - Higeki no Genkyou to Naru Saikyou Gedou Last Boss Joou wa Tami no Tame ni Tsukushimasu. – 5/10
“Far from the entertainment value that comes from watching a sadist destroy the lives of everyone around her.” - Mushoku Tensei II: Isekai Ittara Honki Dasu – 7/10 – OP of the Season
“It’s foundational, successful in many ways, but not outstanding.” - Nanatsu no Maken ga Shihai suru – Dropped
“A sort of… uglier Sword Art Online.” - Shinigami Bocchan to Kuro Maid 2nd Season – 6/10
“A plot that doesn’t need to be happening.” - Suki na Ko ga Megane wo Wasureta – 3/10
“So lacking in every department I can’t think of anything to say.” - Watashi no Shiawase na Kekkon – Dropped
“I see myself recommending it to others who would like this kind of story.” - Yumemiru Danshi wa Genjitsu Shugisha – 6/10 – ED of the Season
“It’s quite interesting how thoroughly uninteresting this one is.” - Zom 100: Zombie ni Naru made ni Shitai 100 no Koto – Dropped
“Boku no Hero Academia meets Grand Blue.”
BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!!
Episodes Watched: 13/13
Rating: 8/10
Chihaya Anon, an attention-obsessed high schooler who just returned from studying overseas, finds herself transferring into a new high school slightly later than everyone else. The school she transfers to has a history of producing famous bands, and most of the students play instruments as a hobby, so to fit in, Anon decides to form a band! And of course, what would an attention whore want more than to be the lead guitarist AND the lead vocalist?
Quickly, the problems begin to pile up: pretty much everyone else is already in a band, and Anon can’t even play guitar! But she perseveres, befriends the class loner, invites this lonely girl—Takamatsu Tomori—to join the band she’s planning to form, and-! …uh oh.
Takamatsu Tomori is a shy girl who struggles to befriend people. It wasn’t long ago that her one and only friend group—her previous band—broke up in a miserable way. Worst of all, she believes it was her fault.
This isn’t the story of Anon’s happy high school hobbyisms. This is the story of Tomori’s tragic “could’ve been” band.
As the two gather up the broken pieces of Tomori’s heart, they cut their fingers on the shards and feel the lingering pain of the bandmates who couldn’t get along.
I don’t really know much about Bandori. I know Ran and Kaoru from fanart, I know the “Roselia” movies exist, and I recognized Kasumi shouting in the background in episode 1, but… I’ve seen one episode of the original season and that’s really it. Everything else comes from general exposure to SANZIGEN, who are always on my radar after their work on Monster Strike.
But beyond the weirdly capitalized title and the ungodly mass of exclamation marks, we have a powerhouse production of talent. The best in the CG business paired with directing and storyboarding that could make a grown man cry.
The backgrounds are beautiful. It’s kinda crazy; later on in this post is Suki no Ko ga Megane wo Wasureta, a 2D anime with god-awful 3D backgrounds, but in MyGO!!!!! we have a 3D anime with stunning 2D backgrounds. Equivalent Exchange gone wrong. Some of the shots in this one almost got a tear out of me, ‘some’ meaning multiple, of course. That’s a rarity, SSR I’d say.
Speaking of rarity, we have really consistent body language going on between characters. Someone actually sat down and thought about how these characters physically respond to certain factors, and someone enforced it in the animation, and for that, I’m very thankful. Brings me back to those glorious White Album 2 days where you could read what a character was thinking by the way they fiddled with their hair or glanced in certain directions.
SANZIGEN are better than ever at this CG stuff, that’s for sure. I looked up some live MyGO performances after the anime had wrapped up and I could instantly recognize which performer was which character, so I do wonder if they mocapped the voice providers for certain moments. The majority of the show feels hand-animated though, so it’s impressive how consistent they kept the personalities of the physical performances.
There’s also this cool episodic identity thing going on. There’s one episode, largely a flashback, that happens entirely in first person and uses some cool match-cuts to show how the perspective-owner’s memories connect.
Another episode uses grounded camera angles and has no BGM throughout the entire episode to make it feel like a realistic behind-the-scenes video.
It’s so cool to see the style switch from episode to episode, and considering I haven’t seen any mention of the switching elsewhere, they’re evidently maintaining a fundamental house style enough for it to blend well from episode to episode.
The cast that populate this well-directed world… they’re mostly quite good.
Tomori is the best, and I’m not just saying that because she looks like best idol Yoshioka Aoi. She’s very sweet and very shy, but she can talk a lot about the things she loves. Certain things bring her comfort, and when she sees that others are feeling pressured, she pulls them away into the places she feels comfortable; if she feels better watching penguins swim around, surely others will, right? It’s a very childish mentality, but it’s endearing. Quite possibly the only depiction of autism in anime that I can genuinely recognize people in; some of her behavioural quirks remind me so much of people I knew in school, it feels very heartfelt.
Taki too is worth a highlight. Being a very firey personality, she is quite tsun in a way, but man does she speak pridefully about the things she loves. She shouts before thinking, then gets embarrassed about shouting. Love the lack of self-restraint, especially when combined with a personality type that typically plays around an unwillingness to be honest. It’s a fun spin on tsundere. Her so blatantly being Tomori’s biggest fan despite no one commenting on it is a cute touch that makes her stand out.
We also get Raana, typically named Noraneko or “Stray Cat” because of her free-roaming nature and heterochromatic eyes. She’s a girl of very few words, and at times I questioned whether she was even aware of the story unfolding around her… She doesn’t seem quite as sentient as you’d expect a human to be, and yet, whether with intent or by accident, she’s incredibly supportive and empathetic to the emotions of others. Very cat-like indeed. As unreliable as she is, she’s the backbone of the squad.
The voices for these three are great too, but it certainly helps that some of the contrasting voices are… pretty bad. Crucially, the two most common speakers (pseudo-protag Anon and the band’s most communicative member Soyo) are voiced by complete newbies, and it shows. Anon’s character is a bit unbearable at times, so giving her an unbearable voice is actually very fitting and it works pretty well weirdly… It’s not pleasant, but it works, and you can get used to it.
Soyo’s voice though… it’s so intentional, it hurts. I understand what they’re going for, but making a character’s voice purposefully awful for 80% of their screen time is a bad call no matter the justification.
For side characters, Umiri’s voice actor kills it. She’s such a boring character made so incredibly entertaining by the voice performance. Most of the remaining cast members are solid if a bit unremarkable.
But of course, the big kicker: the performances here aren’t all perfectly mixed and polished pieces of production. That really shouldn’t be a point of praise, but even just last season we had Oshi no Ko screwing it up. Here we get to see all the blemishes and fumbles. Shoutouts to that incredibly subtle moment where Anon gets excited and accidentally begins singing a “ma” loud enough to be picked up by her microphone before she cuts herself short. Anyone else hear that one? I haven’t seen anyone else mention it.
Plus, we get the big Haruhi moment! Remember when Bocchi the Rock aired and I criticized it for not having that big wowing performance that gets the world talking? The thing every good band show needs to be good? We get it here!
Despite all this praise, the story really isn’t the best, and it’s what single-handedly holds the show back from greatness. I think the backstory “drama” about Tomori’s past band is pretty meh (though the emotions it inspires in Tomori are great to watch) and everything revolving around “antagonist” Sakiko is just… I don’t understand it, I don’t think. Either that, or I do understand it and it’s just very boring.
Her mindset is entirely unexplored, her reasons are paper thin and were parodied over a decade ago in Kaminomi, her actions are chuuni and cringeworthy. Sakiko pairs well with her friend Soyo in dragging the story’s quality down several pegs. They both treat sweetheart side-character Mutsumi like complete garbage too, and no one even comments on it or steps in to defend the poor girl, so that feels bad.
The final episode being almost entirely about a different band to the main cast is a questionable move, made even more so by how uninteresting said band is relative to the main cast.
This is a case where a bunch of talented passionate creators have been given a poor scenario and they’ve worked hard to make it far greater than it has any right to be. A visual spectacle with some great characters and some inspired storytelling techniques that will get any creator amped up. If you’re looking for a solid story… this ain’t it. But if you’re looking for a solid anime, this is the one to go for this season, hands down.
Helck
Episodes Watched: 10
The Hero and the Demon King fought, and the Hero won. After this great defeat, demonkind retreated further into their lands and began to hold a great content of battle to determine the next great king. However, one strange participant stands out amongst the others: a human. This man named Helck isn’t just any old human though… he’s the brother of the Hero, with just as much power, and just as much charisma.
Vermilio—supervisor of the tournament and one of Demonkind’s four great powers—will do anything in her power to prevent Helck from winning the tournament, even if the rest of her kind fall in love with the oddball Hero.
A wishy-washy mix of comedy and drama, trying to be serious while making fun of its own nature. The setting this tale takes place in is both very loose and very gameified. How strong is the enemy? Around 30, I’d say. No talk of tactics, no element of depth, just a number.
Because it’s a comedy, it doesn’t like to focus on the serious world-building and nuanced plot beats that the plot it’s trying to execute actually requires. Episodes will end with big intimidating cliffhangers, but you know with 100% certainty that the next episode will begin with a rug pull “lol just kidding” moment.
The story will string you along with promises of mysteries to be answered, while it spends 80% of its time focusing on unfunny humour where a girl shouts “baka” in a high-pitched shriek a lot.
And even then, you know the mysteries will never actually result in anything interesting because it’s the same generic plot we’ve seen time and time again, with no time given to character development and… I mean, it’s not quite as bad as Yuusha, Yamemasu!, but it’s basically the same thing.
Sometimes the voices are boosted in volume randomly, and your ears get hit with this big booming clipped audio.
There’s some real ugly vfx on display here, including some of the worst fire effects I’ve seen in years. Very unfortunate; the hand-drawn elements look fine, but I guess this is the drawback of the digital era.
Other than that, it’s far from the worst-looking or sounding anime this season. The problem is… it’s just boring. There are as few interesting techniques on display as there are interesting movements in the plot. It meanders, doing nothing while promising a something that’ll never truly come, half-committing to a story that even its own writers insult for being low quality.
If you can get a cheap laugh out of it, give it a try, but I really don’t recommend it.
Higeki no Genkyou to Naru Saikyou Gedou Last Boss Joou wa Tami no Tame ni Tsukushimasu.
Episodes Watched: 12/12
Rating: 5/10
Cut the preamble, this story doesn’t need a build-up. Girl play otome game. Girl die. Girl in otome game receives memories of girl who die. Boom, she’s been reborn as the villainess. With mere seconds to explain the nature of this reincarnation slash rebirth slash memory transferral slash alternate timeline slash “oh no I’m in a videogame” story, it’s hard to truly grasp what’s going on exactly, but… I’m not sure it matters
So, reborn into this world where she knows how everything turns out, our protagonist ex-villainess Pride immediately makes her move and massively changes the course of events by preventing the death of her parents, the leaders of the country, while turning over a new leaf to become a sweetheart everyone loves.
The second thing she does is, of course, panic over how events are destiny and can’t be changed! Despite, y’know, having made such instrumental change within minutes of being reincarnated.
The weirdest thing is that the protagonist is plain uninteresting, but is constantly contrasted with the “original timeline” (for lack of a better phrase) version of the villainess who IS interesting to watch.
We time skip from one hubby-material introduction to the next, each one offering a short arc where something potentially traumatic that evil-Pride would’ve abused occurs, and our reincarnated alt-verse good-Pride swoops in to save the day. She’s the OP isekai protag we’ve all come to know and… love(?)… She carries everyone on her back, gives an emotional speech about the value of her citizen’s lives, cries a bit, and charms the signature otomege love interest. The boy swears his life to protecting her, and we’re straight on to the next one.
Along the way, an obviously suspicious man with eternal youth spreads propaganda about Pride in hopes of… I don’t know, he’s huffing copium; this girl’s the most overpowered lady on the planet with a game player’s knowledge of the world’s strongest assets. He ain’t got a hope… But he’s spooky and mysterious and dramatic, so there’s room for theoretical tension if you’re able to buy into it.
Normally the big benefit of an adaptation is that, as they know everything to come, they can properly set up future plot threads, doing away with the oh-so-common plot holes that stem from authors making things up as they write. From what I can tell (only knowing the anime adaptation) they’ve elected to not do that. Character motivations don’t line up from episode to episode, twists feel made up on the spot rather than preordained, and the story’s themes and purpose for being are so loose and vague, they may as well not exist.
You could absolutely refine a story like this in the process of adapting it into a TV series, but for better or worse, they’ve erred on the side of faithfulness.
The characters look good for the most part, and they have a bunch of varying designs to reflect the frequent time-skipping that occurs consistently throughout the show. I don’t really like any of them, the main story isn’t exactly engaging, and it’s a far cry from the entertainment value that comes from watching a sadist protagonist absolutely destroy the lives of everyone around her without contest… and that’s a comparison it sets itself up with.
It really isn’t a bad show, it’s… acceptable. But it does itself a disservice by being the “good” route of a far more interesting “evil” plotline.
Mushoku Tensei II: Isekai Ittara Honki Dasu – Covered Previously
Episodes Watched: 12/12
Rating: 7/10
Aaaah! Look at the white-haired elf! That’s my favourite character right there… well, tied with Zanoba, who we also get to see an amount of in this season.
Okay okay, back it up me. Let’s get the preamble over with before I start talking about characters…
This is the second season of Mushoku Tensei. For reference, I gave Season 1 Part 1 a 6/10, read the entirety of the Web Novel which I also gave a 6/10, the second part of Season 1 got a 4/10, and I read 15 volumes of the Light Novel as well, so… I’m not exactly a fan of the story overall, a 6/10 is hardly praise, but… I’ve spent a lot of time with it. I love the world, I like most of the characters, and I adore the boring home life stuff.
This section of the story being covered in this second season just so happens to be the big home life part, and it miraculously features my two favourite characters quite heavily: Zanoba and Sylphie.
As I said the last time I talked about Mushoku Tensei on the blog: “the next season or so of episodes should cover my favourite singular chunk of Mushoku Tensei’s story.”
The hopes are high for this one. No more bland Demon Continent stuff, no more Dead End, get that trash out and bring in the fun daily life story!
I think what sets this season’s helping of Mushoku Tensei apart from the prior two is that we finally have some ordinary life to place these characters in. The otherworldly life-or-death scenarios have been largely pushed to one side, only ever popping up in rare life-changing moments, as they tend to do. In place of the high-stakes drama, we have a backdrop for our main cast’s improvements to rest upon.
This is ultimately a story about self-improvement, and there’s been plenty of it thus far across the show’s many characters, but here in this daily life scenario, we get to see how those improvements manifest in ordinary living. We get to see a routine, we get to see practice, we get to see the inglorious in-betweens. It’s this kind of conference of effort that gets me waking up early in the morning and following an exercise routine to better myself so that I can try and keep up with this… guy with 30-odd years on me and a bunch of magical powers.
Despite not liking the “main” story of Mushoku Tensei, the real bits of importance here… self-improvement, healthy relationships, connection with country and continent… it’s that stuff that endears me to the cast and the setting, and to some extent the events of the show, and in doing so, I’m pushed into Rudy’s shoes. I don’t have the emotional baggage he has, but I’ve been with him long enough to understand it, and I share his interests: to preserve the happy life he’s finally managed to forge.
I understand and empathise with his motives, and that’s what keeps me emotionally engaged. Not the big spooky villain, not the fantasy fighting, not the small moments of fanservice; all those things suck. But man, when Rudy jogs around a setting I’m slowly becoming more and more familiar with, I’m hyped.
Sadly, a lot of the character-building has taken a backseat. A lot of the world-building has too, strangely. Honestly, I’m not sure what’s sitting in the front seat. Compared to singular episodes of previous seasons where a region would get a good helping of lore and atmosphere while characters develop on top, this season feels a bit lacking. It dedicates all of its episodes to covering the Central Continent, mostly set in the city of Sharia’s magic academy Ranoa.
How much of Sharia’s culture do we see? How many streets do we go down? What are the shops like? What are the people like? The answers offered are very light if not nonexistent. Despite taking up far more screentime than any single location in the show’s history, it feels sorely lacking and hardly lived-in. Less characterful than the Demon Continent, less culture-driven than Millis, and yet we spend almost an entire season here.
Even Basherant, in which we spend a handful of the season’s early episodes, feels more alive than Sharia.
Then you look at the characters. Zanoba gets some crumbs of screentime, but he mostly sits in the backgrounds not being important. Cliff and Elinalise are there technically, but you could forget them very easily. Badigadi may as well not be here!
Rudeus definitely has his moments in some episodes, and they’re great, but in other episodes, he feels like cardboard. Similarly, Sylphie will be a slam-dunk feature of one episode then be shunted into background character status for the next. As a result, the emotions don’t really carry through from episode to episode, and since the environment isn’t developed enough to establish a sense of homeliness and nostalgia, the break from emotional peak to emotional peak is devastating for my engagement.
When Rudy goes out for a jog each morning (and we actually get to see it) it’s great. But you know… It’d be nice to see the ever-evolving hovel Rudy and Zanoba have set up in the courtyard to hang out in. It’d be nice to see Rudy’s scheduled experiments and chats with Nanahoshi. It’d be nice if Badigadi said anything important ever. Lemme see the classroom more!
In one scene, Rudy and Pursena are the only two leaving one particular class, which we see from Sylphie’s perspective, but… why is it only those two? Where are the others? What class were they just in? Gimme the deets! If you’re gonna slice-of-life, go all out!
But credit is due… Pursena is far more charming than I remember her being in the novels. Her cat-eared companion was the lively one with an actual personality, while Pursena quietly moped off to one side and occasionally threw in one-liners to accentuate Linia’s insults. But here, in this adaptation, she has so much more going for her. The combination of Tanaka Minami’s cutesie delivery and the animators’ love of her definitely made her a better character…
Thinking about it, they did the same for the Doldia tribe characters last time, so… I guess anime production teams just love Beast Girls.
Both as an adaptation of half my favourite chunk of the novels and as a standalone show, Mushoku Tensei‘s second season isn’t entirely fulfilling. It doesn’t go all-in on the engaging character drama slash action show some would long it to be, nor does it truly focus on the slice-of-life character development others would wish for. The lack of focus is underwhelming, and these episodes ultimately feel like watching someone set up a chessboard before playing an actual match.
Going forward, this’ll no doubt be the section I’ll feel most nostalgic towards, and it’ll be nowhere near as redundant or skippable as the Demon Continent arc of old, but… I’m not sure I liked it as much as I’d have hoped.
It was still the only show of the season I’d build my schedule around, knowing when it’d air each week, and Mushoku Tensei‘s presence does a lot for keeping me aware of my own physical health, so simplifying its presence as merely underwhelming is a tad unfair. It’s foundational, successful in many ways, but not outstanding in any one individual field. Generally great; not impressive.
Nanatsu no Maken ga Shihai suru
Episodes Watched: 4
There’s a magical school, and a bunch of kids go there. That’s the summary; I’m just here to complain about it a bit. I’m a sucker for Harry Potter, so I always check these kinds of shows out, but boy is this a stinker.
Immediately, the story has me questioning everything. The setting is a kind of knock-off Earth, mostly Europe at that, with the names and geography altered slightly. Despite that, everyone speaks the same singular language.
Most knocks I have against it are petty in comparison: why do they use analogue clocks in a world where creatures specifically named after tampering with clocks are commonplace? Why would the people of this world settle for a time-telling method that is never right?
Some however are worse than the questionable single-language nature of their world. For example, why is this prestigious school’s big bragging right that 20% of their students either die or go crazy? That sounds like a bad thing! A 20% failure rate would be bad enough to try and hide for a school with a reputation to maintain, a 20% dead-or-worse statistic is downright awful!
It’s a real tryhard piece of effort, and not in a good way. It’s very ugly. There’s some 3D environment work being used, and it’s reminiscent of Pokemon XY in style for the most part. It has potential, but the actual specifics aren’t great. Every character has their own personal gradient slapped over them, so everyone is lit slightly differently and no colour is ever flat. It looks a bit weird to begin with, but heaps of blurring and a slight chromatic aberration on everything make it even harder to look at. It comes across as a cheap means of making ugly look pretty, but I’d much prefer a plain and simple composite over the effects-laden slop. But then, some people think things like Violet Evergarden and Octopath Traveler look good, so there’s clearly a market for the Vaseline-covered aesthetic.
I noticed some puppeting used to create smoother flowing animations for hair and fabrics in rare moments, and it’s noticeably higher framerate than everything else, so it looks weird. Another weird thing is how they transition between scenes and sometimes even between shots. There are several methods employed, but both the paint-brush cutaway and the blurred-lights transitions stick out as terribly ugly examples of what I mean.
Also the character designs suck. They’re stereotypical, one is just a Hermione clone, everyone wears this one boring uniform in the same way except for the staff (shoutouts to the strict headmistress who walks around in a bra for some reason) and the one important character in the entire show who happens to be the typical samurai girl in both appearance and personality. But at least the bossy ojousama character is a gyaru this time. That’s a good modifier for the ojousama class, I approve.
I’m glad to say there are some saving graces in the looks department still. You may not be able to tell, but beneath all the crazy effects plastered over every frame, there are some impressive 3D environments, some alright-looking 2D backgrounds, and a bunch of well-drawn traditional 2D VFX. I understand most of this complaining comes off as the equivalent of a person complaining about auto-tune in music, but… there’s a time and a place, and this ain’t it. What we’re left with is a sort of… uglier Sword Art Online. To some, that may be an unfair comparison; SAO‘s most recent output is all movie material, whereas this is a TV show. To me however, SAO‘s most recent output is already ugly, so this is an uglier version of an already unpleasing aesthetic.
At the end of the first episode, they try and make a line of dialogue dramatic by raising its volume and bringing it forward in the mix, but as a result, the audio clips really badly so it sounds muffled and unpleasant.
The dramatic dialogue is very cringy too. It’s very chuunibyou rule-of-cool style, which adds another factor as to why the setting feels so nonsensical. It runs of a rule-of-cool system, but the author’s idea of “cool” is truly mundane, so it doesn’t quite work.
Anyway, I just wanted to complain about this rubbish for a bit. That’s all.
Shinigami Bocchan to Kuro Maid 2nd Season – Covered Previously
Episodes Watched: 12/12
Rating: 6/10
Once upon a time, a young boy was cursed. Everything he touched would die, and he would remain alone for as long as he lived… or that’s how season 1 started, but this is season 2, and things are looking up.
Everything that made the first season great is here, but it’s just not as good. We get some stay-at-home slice of life, but it’s not as sweet and feels almost mundane.
The musical moments are here too. The circus number in episode 4 is amazing, but I don’t care for the rest.
There are a bunch of new character introductions, a couple that I do kinda like, but none of them are as good as any of the previous season’s worst.
The pretend-villain character who is actually misunderstood acts as our main villain trope again, but rather than the scornful siblings who really just want a happy family but are conditioned to obey their mother, this time we get a lady who is just… it feels like she’s padding out the story.
We know the villain isn’t a bad guy—we knew that last season—plus she and the main cast have a mutual reason to work together… but rather than sit down and talk about it, she tries a bunch of wacky plans that inevitably fail in a way that screams “we need to stretch this story out.”
On the plus side, we get a lot of Cuff screentime, and she’s the cutest character. On the downside… we waste a lot of time on a plot that doesn’t need to be happening.
Animation-wise, there’s a collection of new techniques on show, most pertaining to character deformation for comedic moments. Some of the chibis and reaction faces are stellar, and it adds a lot of expressiveness to the visuals.
Despite the new tool in their repertoire, the overall quality seems worse than what I remember from the previous season. Expecting that kind of meticulous detail again would be a bit unreasonable of me, but it’s still a bit of a shame. Half of it has to do with how little screen time the overanimated little sister gets in this season compared to last, but it affects other members of the cast too.
That being said, still frames look a bit better in general, I’d say, and there are still lots of great moments of care here and there, especially as the season furthers, which is a bit strange; usually animation starts good and gets worse with each episode, only picking up again for highlight moments, but here it starts poor instead and peaks around the middle.
21:18 into episode 5 for maybe the earliest example has this lingering shot of a group of characters waving goodbye to the main duo. The camera is behind them, so all we see of them is their backs… but the way certain members of the group turn to leave earlier or later, the unique way in which each of them moves, the way they interact with other characters in the group… it all tells a lot, and it’s very cute to watch. Those moments of sentimentality-imbued animation are what made season 1 as great as it was, so to lose them would be the greatest tragedy.
The first episode has an egregious amount of expository dialogue, but it’s for the sake of reminding people what happened in season 1, so I’ll forgive it this time.
What I’m not as eager to forgive is… the rest. I think the best way to cover this would be to go over some comments I made during my coverage of season 1.
In regards to the main plot, I said “I think I like the direction it’s heading, but they could go in the wrong direction very easily.”
I enjoyed the setup, and the ultimate goal looked great, but I was worried the steps would lead us away from Shinigami Bocchan‘s lovely character relationships and wholesome gatherings. How does season 2 choose to proceed? It stalls for half a season, then goes straight into action battle school life nonsense like a light novel from the early ’10s. It strays so far away from what I’d hoped for, which as I said last time…
“If we could get one thing from season 2, I’d love to see the full cast of friends and family hang out on screen together, just once.”
Little did I know, we’d get less group interactions of the sort I wished for than we did in the previous season, and that’s a real shame. The flashes of potential do show on occasion, but the direction the story has taken naturally results in fewer and fewer of those great moments that made me love this series to begin with.
Suki na Ko ga Megane wo Wasureta
Episodes Watched: 13/13
Rating: 3/10
Middle schooler Komura has a crush. The girl next to him, Mie, is a strange girl with wild hair and a habitual problem of forgetting to wear her glasses. On such days, Komura gets to sit closer to Mie and help her live life in her near-blind state. As the two spend time together, their appreciation of one another grows…
The crucial problem with this setup is that we never really get to see much of Mie when she hasn’t forgotten her glasses, which makes the whole “the difference in her behaviour with and without glasses is cute!” gimmick impossible to actually engage with. It’s hard to appreciate a contrast when you never get to see it, and the running motif of “girl forgets glasses” becomes mind-numbingly repetitive when it happens every single episode.
Then looking at Komura, we have a character who literally describes himself as lacking self-awareness until he fell in love with Mie. He’s as plain as possible and has nothing going on in his life other than his attraction to the classmate sitting at the neighbouring table. He has perpetual sweatdrops of nervousness plastered on his face, loves to stammer and mentally self-berate himself for being a creep, and is as dense as a bag of bricks.
The two grunt and sigh and make weird anime noises at each other, lots of non-verbal communication. It’s not a very entertaining dynamic.
That opening segment of the first episode has to be the most high-effort piece of ugly animation I’ve seen since… probably Fate/Apocrypha.
Shoutouts to the animators who had to put up with that insane storyboarding, I have no idea how that got greenlit, but they tried at least. Lots of crazy camera angles that force an unusual perspective. Lots of 3D environments. Lots of character+camera movement happening at the same time. Worst of all, the 3D is ugly.
I’m also not a fan of the hyperrealistic background art, especially not when they slap bloom over it all and shade out the characters. It works for a short animated gif on a hobbyist’s social media page, but not as the art style of a TV show.
It’s not just the opening, I’m sad to say. The ugly aesthetic persists, some through reuse of this opening segment, some through new shots that continue the style.
There’s one of those shots where the sky and the water meet, that stereotypical image of serenity, while our main two characters sit in the middle. Here the water is 3D, really green in comparison to the sky above, connects at the horizon beneath a disguising hazy grey blob of flat color, doesn’t accurately reflect the clouds in the sky, and the ripples have no effect on the characters’ reflections. It looks awful! Weirdly there’s a slightly better version of the exact same shot in the OP, this time with a cleaner horizon, so I don’t know why they didn’t just use that. It still looks bad, but it’s noticeably improved.
There are a few shots of students moving around the school that get reused so frequently, I’m convinced it’s meant to be a running gag. It’s not a subtle still-frame expression that can be inserted into various scenes without seeming obvious, no, they like to reuse the flashy shots. The ones you REALLY remember. The boy running through the corridor. The 3D pan past the ugly reflective shoe lockers. The pan over the classroom sign. Every single episode! Multiple times per episode! It’s so obnoxious! As obnoxious as that loud plane that flies over the school repeatedly!
And I know 3D is pretty common in backgrounds nowadays, but they don’t even hand-draw the in-focus pieces of furniture here like most anime do. Instead we get close-ups of low-poly models that really don’t look good.
Even ignoring the 3D bits, there’s a lot of over-animation that leaves me questioning why so much effort went into actively making a shot look worse. Girl walks past the camera? Better slap on some crazy-wavy strands of hair that don’t look even remotely connected to the girl’s actual hair, and that flow seemingly at random, just so it looks fancy and animated. They cram detail into places where it doesn’t fit, and the result is a mismatched image that takes me out of the moment every single time. It’s like KyoAni but without the brief moments of wonder that leave a lasting impression of quality. Here it only ever leaves a lasting impression of… “what are they even doing?”
Some of the reuse is fine though. For a lot of outdoors stuff, they repurpose bits from that ugly opening segment I mentioned earlier, but they change out the crouds and the traffic, sometimes even the lighting, so it’s not as bad. The flashbacks, as frequent as they may be, are easier to forgive as well for some reason… I guess they’re justified as being memories, and as weak as that justification may be, I’ve definitely seen worse examples of flashback abuse in anime.
But I’m almost certain there’s at least 30 minutes of reused establishing shots across the entire season’s runtime, if not more.
I’m fixating a bit on how ugly this one is, but that’s my big takeaway. Damn is it ugly.
The simple fact that our two main characters are so lacking in every department I can’t think of anything to say about them, when paired with the almost complete lack of side characters to mention, makes it very hard to say anything substantial about the show’s romance or the events of any given episode.
The repetitive nature of the girl forgetting her glasses, mirrored by the repetition of the same repurposed artwork every half a minute, could be considered an allusion of an unchanging everyday lifestyle that many would describe school life as… but to me, the point of establishing that trope is either to enhance an amazing slice of life or to lampshade an impending crisis that changes everything.
But here it’s neither. The repetition exists in an unremarkable fashion, as does the show itself. Unremarkable.
Watashi no Shiawase na Kekkon
Episodes Watched: 6
Saimori Miyo, first daughter of her family, is treated like a slave in her own home. Ever since her father remarried and the influence of the classic wicked stepmother took hold on the house, this household has been her prison. However a boy of equal age named Kouji is thoroughly smitten with her, dreams of saving her from her life of sadness, and so… he asks his father for a means to save Miyo. His father provides, but at a cost.
Miyo is promptly married off to an infamously cold man named Kudo Kyoka. At the same time, Kouji marries Miyo’s younger sister and—at least from the impression of the “only seen one episode” me that writes these opening paragraphs—unknowingly takes Miyo’s place as bottom-rung in the family. I hope that’s how it goes, at least.
Also there’s magic. That’s not in episode 1, but there’s magic. Anyway, what’s important is that we’re back in Taisho, let’s go! I think it’s Taisho at least… Maybe early Showa, but it’s hard to tell until a war or an earthquake shows up. It’s that same industrial pre-WW2 aesthetic either way, so I’m happy.
They reuse a lot of animation, but it’s pretty subtle. I haven’t seen anyone comment on it, but the same shot will be repurposed two or three times an episode sometimes, and they weave that reuse into the rest of the shots very naturally. I don’t normally talk about this stuff, but as the previous entry was so heavy on bad examples of repeating shots, I figure I should highlight a good example of it too.
There’s also stuff such as a cool comparison shot that not only shows the difference in hierarchy between our two episode-1 lovebirds, but it also shows Kouji taking Miyo’s place in his almost jail-like environment.
But not all is made equal, and that becomes apparent shortly after this shot (almost 17 minutes into the first episode) when Miyo steps outside the house for the first time, where the unmistakable sound of modern-day traffic is used for the ambience of this period piece. The audio for this show is far from perfect, and though that may be pedantry to most people, my ears aren’t happy.
Ueda Reina is a voice actor I’ve praised time and time again on this blog, and her performance here is great, but the effects they slap on her voice whenever she’s poetically monologuing warps the audio in a very inconsistent way. Sometimes it sounds fine, but then it’ll trip over certain words (usually with S or T sounds, e.g. Watashi) and your ears will be filled with mechanical-sounding vibrations that anyone who’s messed with Audacity and ruined a bit of audio will instantly recognize. “Warped” is the best description, truly.
But story is what matters to most, so let’s cover it. I think this tale would be best described as… sadness porn. Despite the happy-sounding title, this is one of those shows that constantly puts characters into incredibly depressing scenarios so that you can feel good when they get saved. It’s pretty cheap, and I’m not a fan of the style personally, but I know others like the wish-fulfilment fantasy being used here.
Kudo looks eerily similar to Yamato from Digimon, so I find it hard to take him too seriously, but I really respect the character. When dealing with a person as abused as Miyo has been, his firm “don’t apologize” attitude is incredible. He’s not a perfect person by any means, but he lays down his boundaries clearly and encourages others to do so as well. Put this guy in Koe no Katachi and that film would’ve been drama-free after the first 30 minutes. He communicates so concisely, so efficiently, in a way that makes it impossible for him to accidentally abuse someone so downtrodden as his now-to-be wife, and that’s not something that happens accidentally. It’s a tactful way of dealing with people, some would say distant; I would say careful.
Unfortunately, no amount of tact from a single character can sway the script’s direction entirely away from “let’s subject this girl to sadness” over and over again.
Despite the great techniques on display, the source material is really not something that appeals to me, so it can be hard to sit through it. I really appreciate the effort put into this adaptation, and I see myself recommending it to others who would like this kind of story, but deriving entertainment out of misery is not for me.
Yumemiru Danshi wa Genjitsu Shugisha
Episodes Watched: 12/12
Rating: 6/10
Your typical male teen protag, Sajou Wataru, has a sudden epiphany one day… He’s a stalker.
Sajou’s been deeply in love with the sharp-tongued tsundere Natsukawa Aika for a while, to the point where everyone in school associates them together. But the everyday harshness of a tsundere’s language combined with a near-death experience triggers something in Sajou’s brain. He’s being a creeper, he needs to stop, he needs to sort his life out.
Thus begins the journey of a boy in love, distancing himself from the girl he likes. Buckle up for some separation depression, some self-improvement, and a lot of ugly visuals.
But let’s begin where Sajou would want us to: Natsukawa Aika. She’s the main heroine, and her design looks ridiculously plain, especially with the washed-out hair color. She looks like Jinguuji Ayumi from Sweet Season had all the personality taken out of her. Her voice acting is surprisingly flat for a tsundere character, she can’t really shout or sob or… emote very much at all. It’s like an impressionist who can only perform one specific emotion is playing the part… it’s a very tame albeit natural approach.
It’s not like the character has much interesting going on in her life either. So with all that said… I dislike her, right?
For some reason, when you combine that lame design with the restrained voice acting, she becomes very cute. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it. Show me a still image of her, I wouldn’t care. Isolate the seiyuu’s performance, I wouldn’t care. But when it’s all put together, I really like it. It results in this strangely shy tsundere who struggles to express the tsun just as much as the dere. Her face looks kinda similar to… uh… the protagonist of Rougo something something. Mitsuha? They have a similar shine in their eyes that I like.
Talking about the story would go down a similar route. It’s quite interesting how thoroughly uninteresting this one is; it has all the telltale signs of a bad adaptation—a rushed pace, inconsistencies in how events are remembered vs how they happened, visuals that don’t match the claims of dialogue, episodes that end at seemingly random points in a scene—but given that it follows all the usual Light Novel tropes, I can’t imagine the material it’s adapting is any good either.
Despite that, I get the sincere feeling that the author hasn’t read Haruhi or its many clones, because although it incorporates the usual tropes on a surface level, they’re written rather strangely. Though given that one of the best episodes of the season was apparently anime-original, I’m not sure how much of my positivity stems from the source material’s influence, and how much comes from the adaptation process.
It would be remiss of me to highlight that “adaptation process” without addressing the topic I brought up in the Last Boss section of this post. I complained about how that show failed to take advantage of foresight to patch up holes in the source material to alleviate that “the author is randomly making things up” feeling you tend to get from long-running stories.
There was, to my observation, only one instance where I thought Yumemiru Danshi would fail in a similar manner. In the eighth episode a character who had supposedly been in the protagonist’s class for the entire show so far took center stage. She had been briefly introduced two episodes prior, but prior to that the classroom had been very consistent (the girl with the one-sided bun hairstyle is my favourite btw) and I was certain she hadn’t featured at all in it…
So I went back to the first episode where the classroom’s seating assignments changed and every student’s name was written on the blackboard. Yup, there she was, where she had been all along. The powers of adaptation!
Small details aside, there is some actual value to Yumemiru Danshi as a result of its strange take on things. It may not be entertaining, but it’s still nice to watch in a way. The protagonist is a down-and-out loser, too depressed and self-demeaning to notice his own good traits. Sounds typical, but the way in which his depression is presented is so… plain. It’s not a cartoonish level of depression, he’s just a bit numb to everything, and he always feels a bit distant from his usual environment. He stops caring about how he looks, his grades fall a bit, he just doesn’t bother with trying to live anymore, and it’s a gradual understated decline.
That in itself is nice to see, but then when the show starts putting him into new environments, you get to see what he’s like without the massive feeling of distance that exists in his school or home life environments. He’s still very numb to things, but once you plop him in a part-time job and have him interact with other normal people, you get to see more of his personality than you usually would. It’s also nice that there are a bunch of older characters to combo with this.
Also, as Mr Generico Protagonista is actually talented at certain things—despite his dour self-image—so certain groups want to pick him up. The Disciplinary Committee and the Student Council both try to grab him up, but it’s not because he’s the special protagonist, but rather because of genuinely reasonable reasons. The Student Council is led by the protagonist’s older sister (who by the way is a pretty legit depiction of a slouchy lightly emotionally abusive yet still friendly sibling, very realistic), so it’s by the powers of nepotism. She’d prefer her younger brother step in to take over rather than a complete stranger.
The Disciplinary Committee on the other hand have notoriously struggled to recruit male students as a result of their girls’ club image (a self-perpetuating problem) and their final male member is about to graduate, so… the little brother of the Student Council President who they’ve asked for help from in the past is an obvious go-to recruit.
All of the characters involved (even the generic-looking ones) are actual characters who get their time in the spotlight and have some relation to other characters we already know or will come to know in future, so their circumstances and situations feel grounded as a result.
The protagonist’s reasons for being in this situation are no less in-depth than, for example, that random male member of the Disciplinary Committee. You may not realize it initially, but these kids are trapped in a web of relationships, and everyone is but a degree or two removed from each other.
Some real justification was put into the various plot threads, backed up by a well-established setting with a consistent major and minor cast, and while that doesn’t prevent characters or situations from being typically trope-filled surface-level affairs, it adds that little bit extra realism to, in particular, the protagonist.
That’s where we wrap around to my description of the main heroine. Much as she’s likeable despite not being interesting, so is Sajou. They are both very boring people, but in a world of walking cartoon characters, Sajou isn’t a walking trope, and that makes me like him. And just as the plot threads surrounding him are justified, so is this dynamic between protagonist and heroine.
Natsukawa’s life was made worse by Sajou stalking her. She couldn’t make friends because a weird dude was always hanging around. She couldn’t focus on studying because she was busy trying to avoid him. Once he stops following her around, her life (by every objective metric) improves. And yet his presence fulfilled something in her that she can’t get anywhere else. Her life is made better, but she isn’t happy… She’s in love with him, but her life is worse when they’re together.
Sajou’s life was also made worse. He had no friends for the same reason, he wasn’t recognized for his talents but for his weird stalker behaviour, and although his grades were high and his appearance well-maintained, he was doing it all for a single person who never gave positive feedback. He burned out, gave up, realized how sad he was as soon as the distraction of a pretty girl went away, and it’s only once he’d given up on that life that the people around him began to see value in him.
These are two characters with stunted developments, who are not in the right mental place to build a relationship, who use romance and attention to cover up all their insecurities. They love each other, but by separating from one another, they’re able to build themselves up and gain the foundational elements that all humans need to live a stable happy life before slowly reintroducing themselves to one another. When they have developed, even just a little bit, their interactions are far stronger and far more meaningful than they were at the start.
It is an incredibly boring show to watch, but this dynamic is so fascinating. What we have here is a romance show that understands “romance” and “dependence” are different things. Being in love with someone is good; being dependent on someone is bad. A lot of romance anime fall into that trap, sacrificing their characters’ entire lives in pursuit of romance. Their lives suddenly revolve around love and no moment is spared for hobbies or studies or work or meaningful friendships that aren’t just two girls talking about a boy. I’ve said it a bunch in the past when reviewing romcoms, but… if we don’t get to see the main couple live meaningful lives outside of their relationship, they aren’t good characters. I won’t care about that romance.
Here, that theory is put to the test somewhat. The heroine isn’t quite given the screen time she deserves, but the hero here spends most of his time doing things unrelated to the main romance. He makes friends, he gets a job, he develops hobbies, he rarely spends time with the girl he loves… And as a result, I care far more about his side of the relationship’s success than I did about the couple in last season’s Kubo-san or the season prior’s Tenshi-sama, where very few side characters existed, and the ones that did only existed in service of the main couple’s growing romance.
Yumemiru Danshi steps in with a boom and says “hey, you wanna see this boy organize some books and get praised by his elderly employer!” That’s not a question; you wanna see it. It certainly helps that when the main duo (and their local wingwoman) are put together in the same scene, it’s very cute. No over-the-top shouting, no melodrama, just a trio talking like normal people while one subtly ships the other two together. I’ve lived through that dynamic, and they capture it perfectly here.
Sadly, the visuals detract from the experience more than they help. Cuts often have inconsistencies in character posing or expression which ruins any hope of believing the scene as presented, which makes me think the director or whoever was supervising the animation didn’t actually do any checks or redraws to keep things consistent.
More egregiously, details such as the protagonist getting his hair dyed or it being messier than usual are lost entirely, but characters still comment as if they’re present. In short, the visuals rarely match up with the dialogue.
Okay, that’s enough talking about this show no one cares about. It’s boring, it’s interesting, 6/10.
Zom 100: Zombie ni Naru made ni Shitai 100 no Koto
Episodes Watched: 7
I’m a sucker for zombie fiction, and adult protagonists in anime is a rarity, but unfortunately those elements are really surface-level. In reality, it’s more Boku no Hero Academia meets Grand Blue, with the zombie setting being largely cosmetic.
I was gonna praise this first episode for its color usage, contrasting it with Mushoku Tensei (whose previous seasons I had insulted for its boring visuals) but then the protagonist started telling the audience what metaphorical meanings the first episode’s color usage held, and it all came crashing down.
Similarly, I was going to praise its contrasting “100 things I want to do before becoming a zombie” and “100 to do to prevent becoming a zombie” contrast until (you guessed it) a character explained what that contrast meant. I mean, come on, that one’s on the nose enough for even the dumbest viewer to catch! It doesn’t need explaining!
As you may be able to tell from that previous paragraph, Zom100 suffers from the usual structural issues of manga adaptations.
It meanders, it doesn’t flow together well, the ultimate goal is spurious enough for the author to string it out for as long as possible but call it quits quickly as soon as the series is cancelled… The usual.
An episode will end with a big bold “let’s do this!” declaration of a new arc, and then the next episode will backpedal so that it can redo the declaration with an extra chapter of build-up to fill some time. In a way, it feels like the show was designed to be watched episodically, maybe even incrementally, with the assumption that people wouldn’t watch every episode or even the pre-OP segments of each episode, but instead would tune in part-way and watch a bit of it.
In a way, it does, certainly. But then it has a running plot and reoccurring characters and a bunch of callbacks which go against this design.
It’s a lot of comedy I don’t find funny, drama that involves characters either not talking to one another for some reason or talking so much that they end up explaining basic emotions to one another ad nauseam. The target audience is clearly quite young despite the supposed adult-age cast, so it was never going to be for me.
Please, no hate. 
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