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Dec 24, 2016

Occultic;Nine (Anime) add

Not Recommended

As you can probably guess by the semicolon in the title, Occultic;Nine is another entry from the Science Adventure franchise, except this time it's based on a two-volume light novel series written by that other semicolon writer not named Naotaka Hayashi. Not that it really matters too much because the basic plot is pretty much the same as all the other semicolon entries: a bunch of professional adults go apeshit for no reason other than they're bastards and try to take over the world through some specific scientific area that's been weaponized, and end up involving a bunch of eccentric young teenagers or college students ... who just so happen to have an interest in said field, as well as wield the only (nerdy) means that are capable of defeating said organization. And since this is a semicolon anime, that means all the characters are either a NEET or a cosplayer or an idol or some irritating "man, we sure love anime" trope that is about as un-relatable and accurate in regards to portraying the human being as Steven Seagal in every single movie he's ever made or been in. Which makes even less sense here because the other entries have been all about technology, so they'd all somewhat fit in Japan's electric town. But Occultic;Nine is more about the supernatural, which isn't an otaku-bait subject at all, so having everyone be a nerd is as jarring as all those fanservice-y characters in those Zero Escape games.

Speaking of Zero Escape, it seems that the writers of this series are friends with the guys who made the Nonary games, because this show borrows a lot of storytelling devices from stuff like 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue's Last Reward. You've at least heard of those games, right? Those handheld sci-fi mystery visual novels that raise so many questions to the point of frustration, only to info-dump the answers to you at the very end to the point of tedium whilst being obsessed with the number "nine"? They're tolerable to get through when you're actually playing them, but outside of the interactive medium, they're a fucking grind - something the writers of this show seemed to miss entirely when they somehow mistook that Punchline anime as VN-to-anime genius.

Occultic;Nine also differs from the other SciAdv entries in that it tries to mask the slow-ass pacing that generally happens with light/visual novel adaptations in that it borrows heavily from Ryogho Narita's style of writing, particularly Baccano with the multiple character jumping through different seemingly unconnected phases of the mysterious incident. This may seem like a compliment at first, but I think most of us who didn't have the nails lodged in their brains required to acknowledge Durarara!!x2 as "not absolutely cancerous" can see at this point that Baccano's style of storytelling hasn't aged well at all. Because over-the-top characters with no personal flaws, interesting philosophies, or reason to be in the story other than to be cool whilst backed by an energetic presentation trying desperately to cover up for the lack of plot progression is about as entertaining as watching bird competitions where the competitors ate Chinese food during the pre-competition feeding time. And it doesn't help when that presentation is applied to a plot that is about as over-complicated and impenetrable as a steel wall with candy canes of fifty different colors painted all over it.

Getting past the presentation is a tall task in of itself due to how much of a tonally inconsistent joke it is. For one thing, this show has constant hyper-stylization all through its run time that never calms the fuck down - playing ill-fitting music every time a murder happens to the point that it resembles a Green Day soundtrack in an Anne Frank movie. The animation itself is of decent quality when the show bothers to take a break from cutting to a new scene every two seconds, but it's also horribly mismatched. Having the characters make exaggerated faces with the show's sketchy style every time an important dramatic scene occurs to the point that you'd swear everyone in this show was horribly miscast. And they never blend in well with the realistic-looking backgrounds, looking more out of place than an animated character from Coonskin dancing on the set of How I Met Your Mother.

Not helping at all is that Occultic;Nine has what is possibly the worst directing/cinematography in an anime I've ever seen. A majority of the screen time consists of long long LONG scenes of characters sitting/standing around in one place delivering boring exposition that is almost completely unnecessary to understanding what's going on, and often brings up more questions than it does answers. And because the director of this show lost all his talent after making Your Lie in April, he somehow approved the idea of a drunk cameraman doing the shooting for this show, because 90% of the show is shot in an angle. Most of the times, it'll be dutch. Sometimes, it'll be upside down or sideways. There's one time when the camera just spun around for no reason and gave me a headache in the process. This is not how you make dialogue more engaging. You know what you do to make dialogue more engaging? Write some actual good dialogue.

Speaking of the dialogue, in addition to having some of the worst directing in an anime ever, I think Occultic;Nine's writing was the product of some bet with the Kingdom Hearts guys to see who can make their audience slice their ears off or turn off the subtitles the fastest. Not only do these characters not shut the fuck up, but when they're not delivering exposition against dull still backgrounds regarding Nikola Tesla and how the story intends to rape his corpse, they're prolonging scenes with quips consisting of nothing but explaining the logistics of some minor thing or engaging in otaku dialogue in a show that has nothing to do with otaku. There was one exchange in Episode 5 when the character kept saying the word "pukey" for like five minutes because they wanted their conversation to be "cute" for no reason whatsoever. And even earlier in the episode, one of the main characters info-dumps a lot of signs regarding how Gamon is lying to him from the amount of time his eyes wandered to his facial expressions, even though I don't care how he knows since everything about Gamon's personality should make that obvious. Yes, the dialogue is that bad.

Doesn't help that even by the standards set by the specific visual novel company's previous track record, the nine characters that make up this show are all just completely unlikeable, Rewrite-style. It's like they were written by someone who forgot that the pre-requisite for wanting to see how everything connects together in a mystery show as it goes on is to have individual character stories that can stand on their own do most of the leg work in regards to telling the story. For example, there's this one girl who was so delusional about her brother's death that she ended up living with his corpse for a year until the neighbors realized that onii-chan was starting to smell a bit. You'd think this would give an insight into some serious psychological issues or play a vital role in what exactly the fuck is going on, and you'd be more wrong than a typical 4chan commenter. It's never brought up again, all it did was make the girl creepy without giving me a reason why I'm supposed to care that she's creepy. And just to put the cherry on top, she has no literally no purpose in the main plot at all. I've seen teen stereotypes in 80s slasher films that were more three-dimensional.

Of course, when compared to the villains of this mess, Jason Vorhees might as well be any of the characters that Gary Oldman played in his career. I know the evil organizations in these series tend to be a load of crap, but I think Occultic;Nine was trying to out shit the Sinister Six with the motivations it gave its antagonists. Without spoiling anything major, the evil SERN replacement that looms over this show's shadow wants to control the rich in order to rule the world for no other reason than because they're nameless bastards. You're probably thinking at this point that this sounds like a shitty comic book plot, and it is; but somehow things get even dumber when it's revealed how they're going to accomplish their master plan. Someone want to explain to me who's providing the funding for these guys and their convoluted plans? Because I think Akihiko Kayaba from Sword Art Online presented a more engaging business plan in regards to his quest to kill off Japan's youth.

Oh and for the love of god, ENOUGH WITH THE GODDAMN TIME-TRAVEL/ALTERNATE WORLD SHIT, ALREADY! From Higurashi to Clannad to Madoka Magica to anything written by Kotaro Uchikoshi, I am fucking sick of visual novel companies/writers using it. It was old when those products did it, and as of this point, it's pretty much just a dead corpse kept in cold storage with people fighting over who gets to unfreeze it next. Occultic;Nine doesn't even make good use of it. It's only hinted at through a few characters whose sole purpose are to be McGuffins, and then used as a last-minute deus ex machina for its finale, which is pretty exposition-heavy for an episode that's supposed to conclude things with a bang. But even if the creators had fixed the infamous pacing problems that turned many people away to start with, that still wouldn't have fixed Occultic;Nine's biggest problem: it fucking sucks.

I mean between the numerous plot points borrowed from every visual novel ever, horrible motivations driving the characters forward, and awful humor that couldn't make Barney fans laugh, the shit-ass production of this show just twists the already-deep knife wound so hard the blood fucking explodes. What on earth does this show have to offer anyone? What exactly is it about? When the mystery is over and the answers are revealed, what then? How does this show have anything to do with the occult? You'd think a show called Occultic;Nine would pay more than lip-service to its many practices, but it never does. Instead it does what every awful mystery show does: bait the viewers with questions throughout the entire journey whilst having that bait be the substance rather than everything surrounding it, answer only a few of the questions tediously at the last minute, and have said answers be unsatisfying dogshit.

Well fuck you, Science Adventure guys. And fuck you too, A-1 Pictures. This anime was like a magazine collage that was fed through a shredder and had to be put back together ten minutes before the actual deadline!

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Dec 21, 2016

Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime) add

Recommended

You know, I'm starting to realize more and more how bullshit my policy on avoiding popular opinion of an anime before I make my own actually is. Between my desire to keep up with what's current along with my "nerdy friends who take this hobby seriously enough to the point that they pay attention to the many in-between animators that KyoAni use" flooding the social media sites with tributes to shows that haven't even come out yet, I'd have to seal myself in a bunker without wi-fi to avoid the impact that Yuri on Ice has had on the community. It's not as popular as ... Re:Zero or ERASED were in their prime, but the show benefits from more than just a little luck in regards to it taking the anime world by storm. With sakuga and anime production in general being an increasingly important part of a fan's life, LBGTQ issues being an increasingly important part of a regular human being's life, fujoshi making up more and more of the fanbase in general, and the opening flat-out stating that this show was born to make history, the only people who don't watch this show are the ones who state that it's too gay for them. I should know considering only one of my real-life anime friends actually watches this thing.

So what exactly is the plot of this legendary show, you may ask? Well it's pretty much just every sports show ever only with adult characters and it's not paced like Stephen Hawking trying to win the rocket-powered wheelchair race. You have a young Japanese dude named Yuri failing to make it big in the ice-skating rink and deciding to vent off frustration by getting fat and doing a routine in his free time that his Russian idol, named Victor, was famous for. However, said routine gets uploaded on the Internet thanks to Yuri's annoying friends, causing Victor - who's in a bit of a funk due to being past his prime - to spend his pre-retirement days training the Japanese youth to be the new star of the ice world. However, a snot-nosed kid who's also named Yuri (the Russian spelling) wants Victor to teach him himself, and from there on you see the two training to compete in the Grand Prix of Figure Skating as well as the thousands of yaoi fanfiction being written with every frame used to depict the journey.

Yuri on Ice reminds me a lot of Damien Chazelle's films, particularly how most of the praise and acclaim comes from the actual production and directing, with the story mostly being a bunch of emotions that are handled in unexpected ways. Whiplash was a story about a student and a teacher having a mental war with each other in order to push the former to his limits, and La La Land is a story about two lovers inspiring each other to achieve their dreams whilst wondering whether they can be together whilst doing so. I'm not a fan of Chazelle's movies personally, but I know a lot of people are, and I'm pretty sure a majority of this show's audience intersects with that audience as well. You have to be into emotional storytelling to appreciate what Yuri on Ice goes for because that's really all it has beyond the gay jokes: men embracing their femininity in order to achieve dreams that can only be discovered through the rink. It doesn't actually say anything about ice-skating or LBGTQ issues beyond portraying it positively, and the characters are all either happy go-lucky or do such a good job of seeming happy go-lucky that you can't really believe they're facing serious personal issues even when they say they are.

I will say though that even if you take into account what it's going for, the execution is kind of rough at the start and gets better over time. I understand the humor is not for me, but please explain to me the reason why characters have to be spouting exposition during the ice-skating scenes. When they're getting into the characters' heads like if Makoto Shinkai directed a sports anime, sure maybe you need to clarify some things to the audience. But why on earth do they have to describe moves that I can clearly see? For a studio as talented as MAPPA and a director as talented as Yamamoto, you'd think they'd understand the importance of letting the actual animation tell the story, but I think only the first and last ice-skating scenes of the series had people keep their mouths shut.

And there are alot of performances in this show to the point that it starts to get silly. None of the characters aside from the two Yuris have any relevance to the main plot, so when the show devotes large amounts of time to their moves and arbitrary backstories, I realized that they only existed so that the animators could fill in the obligatory twelve-episode count whilst showing off at the same time. They're not bad or anything, but the only one I even remember by name is JJ, and that's only because it's a really easy name to remember. Well that's a bit of lie. He is also very memorable in regards to how the show constantly screws him over despite nothing really negative about him or his routines sticking out to the point that you'd swear that he signed some sort of devil's contract in order to make as many appearances as he did. But let's be honest, despite the show trying to give him some connection with Victor, he only exists as a convenient obstacle for Yuri and nothing else.

The large number of ice-skating scenes used to fill up the time brings it own annoyances as well. Animating even one of them would be a huge challenge to your average studio, and I'm pretty sure this show tried to fit in no less than twenty of them throughout the entire runtime. This leads to a lot of reused animation, noticeable choppiness, and convenient shortcuts like pulling in on the person's face at a critical moment or cutting to another character watching the routine after a few seconds, like a porno director who's clearly new at his job. And because the ice skaters only stick with one or two routines during the multiple stages of the competition because we're trying to keep some sense of realism to avoid turning into Prince of Tennis, I had to sit through Yuri doing the same Eros moves to the same music every week to the point that it felt like I was watching the same episode over and over again, only with slightly different plot details, Endless Eight-style. In a sense, maybe it's a good thing I don't care about the other characters and thus can't remember their routines after they finish them, because I'm pretty sure they got stuck with repetition syndrome too, and yet every time Yuri (that's the Japanese Yuri, not the Russian Yuri) wasn't doing the actual skating, it all felt fresh in my eyes.

As for the plot-important characters, I can't really say much about them because whatever depth they have is drowned out by how much they conform to their initial stereotypes. Victor is occasionally wise, but mostly a naive gay jackass. Yuri is occasionally deep, but mostly a naive confused happy man. And the other Yuri from Russia is occasionally respectful, but mostly a shark-toothed rival who may or may not be gay. I didn't really care one way or the other whether they would succeed in their goals, since the only reason they have for doing so is because that's what they want out of life. That's not a bad reason, but when you compare it to the named extras who want to impress their loved ones or have a country's name to live up to, that's pretty damn weak. Yeah yeah, it can be argued that these characters are doing all this ice-skating in order for their gay marriage to come true, but given this show's high comedic tone in general, you could say that their goal in succeeding is to have a statue of themselves built in the center of a mountain and it'd have just as much impact.

Disregarding the fanbase and other outside influences, my opinion of Yuri on Ice is that if you're willing to accept that anime is going to continue the legacy of Hetalia for a long time to come, like shows about male characters embracing their feminine side, aren't automatically opposed to bare-bone narratives, and enjoy staining your pants at what my female friends call "vivid brilliance", then I can recommend it. I don't think it's very rewatchable even by those standards, but like I said, I'm into this sort of storytelling, so you should trust me about as much as you'd trust your mother when she assures you that everything is fine despite the very sharp-looking knife in one hand and your father's dismembered head in the other.

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Dec 20, 2016

Shuumatsu no Izetta (Anime) add

Not Recommended

The fact that Japan was on Germany's side during WWII along with how we dropped nukes on them during said war really makes things uncomfortable whenever that country decides to dip their hands into alternate WWII fiction. Especially since they can't demonize the actual Germans, so they have to call them names like Germanians or Britanians or Americans (oh wait) whenever they have to portray actual antagonists. Germanians who are pretty damn fluent in Japanese for a country that wants the world to be ruled by the master race, but what do I know about alternate history? Well I may not know much, but I ... do know that if you want to show your child a good entry in that genre, Izetta: The Last Witch is better left in that bargain bin where you found it.

The show is centered on a young princess named Fine and her attempts to stop the evil Germanians from taking over her country on the eve of this war that shares the same name as the world-spanning conflict of the 1940s, but otherwise has no relation to it whatsoever. Because in addition to all the usual changes that are made to the history in order to make a WWII story fresh after it's been exploited by the entertainment industry like ten thousand times, we now have magic in this world. And I'm not talking about the cultish Hellboy/Conqueror of Shamballa/Maria the Virgin Witch religious magic, although it wouldn't surprise me if the writers of this show took inspiration from that. This one deals more with basic witchcraft, except witches use anti-tank rifles to fly around rather than brooms and can decimate entire armies in ways that an entire army of Jedi would cry foul at.

Said witchcraft takes the form of a young red-haired girl named Izetta, a witch-in-hiding who was saved by Princess Fine in the past, and now that they've both grown up, Izetta vows to use her magical powers to help Fine's kingdom win the war and launch a thousand yuri fanfictions in the process. However, the opposing Germanians are aware of the existence of witchcraft and vow to discover Izetta's weaknesses in order to tip the war back in their favor. From there, the show basically spreads itself out way too thin, trying to juggle multiple characters, viewpoints, and genres all at once. In theory, this means something for everyone. In practice, this means absolutely no one is satisfied.

See, I know Izetta got a lot of attention from anime fans upon initial watch because it dumped a lot of elements that people were intrigued by to the point that they were interested in what it might become over what it actually is. Every time I read an initial positive impression for this show, they never praised anything resembling actual story direction, always concentrating on individual scenes or characters who seem likable and all that stuff that sends out warning lights that the show is going to turn to shit within a few episodes like 99% of all anime out there. Although to be fair, I didn't expect the show to be as tonally inconsistent as it ended up being, dedicating entire episodes to the breast sizes of the females (because that's totally appropriate to talk about during wartime, isn't it?), only to shift to a no-name male soldier who ends up getting an early perish because he knew too much.

Since this is a war story, that means we have to sit through the usual boring "being a soldier is bad" storytelling with all the pointless deaths, men turning into monsters, and blablabla that I really hate about war fiction. But you know what's worse than a war story that throws out its elementary school-level cliches like we haven't heard them before? A war story that throws out its elementary school-level cliches, only to shortchange it with elementary anime cliches. I mean can someone explain to me why all the high-ranking soldiers that hang around Fine happen to be cute girls with big racks? Why exactly do I have to watch them trying to give Izetta a shower, and why exactly should I care about them getting their own episode when they have about as much impact on the plot as a malfunctioning cell phone? Didn't exactly help that the episode itself was just plain bad, focusing on them taking care of a male soldier who happened to be on the opposite side, and anyone who didn't see that ending coming has obviously never watched a war story in their life, and you should have picked a better one to start with.

The characters themselves are pretty generic. Fine is a headstrong princess who wants to serve her country and protect the people, and that philosophy isn't challenged at all during the show's runtime, making it hard to sympathize with any of the arbitrary struggles that she faces along the way. Izetta is pretty much defined by her devotion to her. Pretty much every other good guy is characterized the same way only they can't lift tanks. And the bad guys are pretty much characterized by either "kill the witch" or "die soldier die". Really, Fine is pretty much the only person who's in a position to spearhead the story, but because she doesn't take much action nor does she have her actions challenged, she's about as qualified to guide the viewer as she is to run the country in general. Just about the only thing she really cares about is risking her friends' lives, specifically Izetta's, on the battlefield - and the majority of what qualifies as her arc involves her making sure that her witch friend is safe whilst dealing with a war that outsiders shouldn't be involved in. That sort of relationship couldn't carry a two-hour movie by itself. Why on earth would it be able to carry twelve episodes?

As for the magic angle, I think Izetta was actively trying its best to make it as bland as possible, because it hits all the usual cliches you'd expect from an anime gimmick thrown into a generally serious situation. It has limits so the good guys don't get completely overpowered. It's used for generic slapstick that no one over the age of eight would find funny. After initial usage, it's never used with the same amount of efficiency again. Oh, and did I mention that the enemy side happens to have someone with similar powers? To which I respond with "how does that make any horse-fucking sense?". If they had someone on their side who could use magic, why would either the writers or the characters need to devote so much time to discovering Izetta's weaknesses in the first place when they can just send someone on her level who would definitely know how magic actually works in this world beforehand? And where the fuck did this girl come from anyways? I can't recall her ever being foreshadowed prior to her initial appearance in the last third of this show, so the only possible answer I can come up with was that even with the Germanians discovering her weakness, the writers didn't have an idea how to make a suitable final conflict so they threw Sophie in at the last minute.

One other way the magic in Izetta is misused is that the show ends up putting so much attention on the gimmick that it loses focus on the actual story that was initially hinted at at the very beginning. The final conflict is pretty much one big magic duel that has nothing to do with WWII and introduces a bunch of out-of-nowhere plot elements leading to a paint-by-numbers ending that makes Luke Cage's finale look like Fullmetal Alchemist's (either anime adaptation). I should point out that Izetta: The Last Witch is made by a newbie studio who I know nothing about, but apparently doesn't have any recognizable veterans amongst their ranks, because the animation in this show is absolute ass. Everything looks way too flat, the magic spells have no personality, and just about anybody could have directed this show. As such, don't expect that final conflict I mentioned to be a suitable payoff for all the mismanaged elements that came before. And if you're watching this show for the yuri, put away those virgin boners, because you're not gonna get much of a resolution out of that either.

There really isn't a single thing I can recommend Izetta: The Last Witch for. It only has one not-so-unique idea that's only on-screen like half the time at best, and it failed to make anything interesting happen with it when it bothered to show up. The show is cheap junk food: unfulfilling and you feel kind of weird after experiencing it, but you can't really describe why. My recommendation? Toss it into the same hellfire we threw Corpse Princess and that shitty Romeo x Juliet show and forget everything about its existence, just like we did with those shows.

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Nov 17, 2016

Orange (Anime) add

Mixed Feelings

You know, I thought I was immune to being disappointed by anime at this point of my life, but apparently the medium still hasn't lost it when it comes to getting my hopes up, only to crash them back down with more impact than Icarus hitting the ocean after he flew too close to the sun. I mean obviously I'm not a fan of the manga having never read it, but Orange really looked promising based on the limited research I did. A shoujo romance that was only five volumes long and critical acclaims across the board with a premise that goes beyond the usual ... shoujo tropes found in...well...pick any shoujo anime or live-action drama that got made in the last few years? Sounds like my cup of tea, especially since it deals with suicide: an issue that is still very prevalent in Japan as well as the basis for several very good fictional works from the country.

The start was pretty good as well. Nothing amazing, but at least you understand where it's going by the time the premiere ends. Orange is a show about a young girl named Naho, who starts receiving mysterious letters from her future self regarding a new kid named Kakeru - and because there'd be no plot otherwise, said letters don't specify that if she and her friends invite him for a night out on the town, they'll inadvertently cause his mother to commit suicide. So his mom dies and the letters start to warn Naho that she'll fall in love with the dude whilst warning that he ends up committing suicide in the future, meaning that it's up to her and the Scooby-Doo gang that always seem to be in shoujo romances to save him. Throughout this journey, we occasionally cut to the future timeline where Naho and her friends reminisce about the dude and the regrets they had in regards to saving him, leading up to the moment when they discover the ability to send letters to the past. So here we've got a typical shoujo romance flavored by themes of regret, second-chances, and highschool problems that are more grounded in reality than most anime showcase, in addition to all the suicide stuff. And at the very start of the series too. Sounds great, right?

Well it's not like Orange didn't have problems at the very start either. It is still a shoujo romance anime, so of course that means an insecure female lead and lot of annoying will they or won't they situations, not exactly helped by the fact that we see in the future that Naho married the other male friend, Suwa. And shortly through the show, you'd definitely be supporting that side, because like most male protagonists in this genre, Kakeru is more of a cipher than an actual character. Most of his story is told through the other characters' observations of him without any real input on his end, and while none of the characters really transcend their stereotypes either, we at least are able to understand where most of them come from and why they act the way they do. Which is kind of impressive in of itself given how the other half of the main six are completely unimportant to the plot to the point, even by the usual standards of ensemble romances. The only thing they ever do is encourage the main trio or prevent contrived problems from occurring when they decide they want to have a go at making things more lively, and even when a later plot twist gets them more involved, they still come off as supplementary as those three non-plot important girls in a visual novel adaptation.

The show mostly gets through the cockblock padding by having a bit of self-awareness regarding how stupid it is whilst also highlighting some legitimate teenage issues in the process. Okay, it's no John Hughes film, but at least it raises some interesting points regarding how there's a difference between knowing what's going to happen and actually doing something about it, along with guilt when you discover that you're an accessory to someone else's problems. I was always a bit iffy on the whole love triangle thing that happened when Kakeru ended up dating a female senpai who is - and let's be reasonable about this - a massive cunt, though. Yeah, I don't like using that c-word, but there's really no better way to encompass how completely unlikable she is. While the idea that Kakeru just dated her for her looks was kinda cool, she never gives up on him even after they break up, always showing up out of nowhere to give Naho a hard time whilst having no personality traits or story importance beyond her cunty nature. I don't even think she's very pretty. If I was given the same hypnotism Jack Black got in Shallow Hal, I'm pretty sure I'd see her as a gray-haired hunchback with broken teeth and a trick foot.

But of course, nothing is perfect, and I can get past some bullying if the overall story is good, even if it's a cliche I'm never going to accept in fiction. Unfortunately, as seems to be the running theme for 2016 anime in general, you should never believe a good anime will stay good until the very end. And dear god, did Orange stop being good really fast around the halfway point. TMS Entertainment had put out four shows that very season, so of course I knew that they were spreading themselves a little thin, but that did not initially come through with this show at the very start, because it had some pretty kickass visual direction to the point that you wondered how they were going to keep it up for an entire season. The short answer is they don't, and they seemed to have dragged down the storytelling quality along with it. There's a school festival arc in the second half of the show that only exists as buildup for the sake of buildup, making the characters have fun with each other so that the "save Kakeru" flag will get triggered. It's like how the first movie of that new Harry Potter spinoff series consisted of nothing but introducing the characters and the rules of the world whilst saving all the meaty stuff that's not guaranteed to deliver for the sequel.

Someone please explain to me the appeal of watching setup to a major plot direction when you don't have anything to support it but curiosity regarding the future and likable characters, because I don't see it. It's completely boring, and even if the curiosity is enough to carry you the first time, it's not going to be around on rewatch, leaving you with absolutely nothing. No amount of likability is going to help a character if they're not given anything interesting to do. Most people with a soul love the cast in animated Disney movies, but most people with a brain wouldn't call those direct-to-DVD sequels good. And the less said about Kingdom Hearts until I inevitably review one of the upcoming games, the better.

What's really funny is that despite the artificial lengthening and worsening production values later on, the final episode ended up going double-length, which makes me wonder what the point of it all was. You could have easily cut out twenty two minutes of fluff, split the finale into two weekly chunks, and just run with that. I don't keep up with anime news so I couldn't say for sure, but it feels like there were some creative differences halfway through production and the anime we ended up getting was the result of a bunch of bitter compromises. You know, kind of like what Kare Kano went through when Anno was booted off the set, only not nearly as unique and definitely not something that would fly by today's standards. Oh, and you want to know how the show actually ends? Well I hate to spoil things, but I can't sum up my full opinion on the show without talking about it, so skip the next paragraph if you haven't finished the show yet.

Kakeru ends up realizing that his friends are too important to him to go through with killing himself, he and Naho are still in their "will they or won't they" phase, the future characters smile at the thought of a changed past that they'll never feel the results of, and all I could think was "wow that was lame". Why is friendship and love always the goddamn solution to these sorts of serious issues in anime-land? Yes it's important for depressed people to be surrounded by folks who care about them, but there's more to suicide prevention than that. When you have it on its own rather than just as a tool, it's basically nothing more than a psychology student who failed to get his degree trying to make it into the storytelling business. Most medical professionals would be clueless regarding how to deal with Kakeru, and Orange handles his situation with such a simplistically optimistic tone that not only is the solution bullshit, but we don't really get much of an insight into Kakeru's psychology either. All the shoujo cliches kept getting in the way, trying so hard to lighten up the substance that it ended up forgetting the substance even existed in the process. And everything the characters say or do is too obvious, so that when the substance is empty, their actions are even emptier. No, this show isn't exactly Welcome to the NHK or Aku no Hana, is it?

Orange never really got to the point where I'd consider it an amazing show, but it still saddened me to finish it because of how close it came to transcending its genre at times, only to gets its kneecaps shot off ant a moment when it really couldn't afford to be put on life support. The animation went to shit, ruining key emotional moments to the point that the characters might as well have been wearing clown masks the entire time. The suicide themes devolved into generic go-nowhere shoujo cliches and fucking retarded "as long as you have friends, you shouldn't throw away your life" PSA bullshit. And the time travel stuff ended up being another pointless gimmick that exists for the plot to function a certain way without getting any real acknowledgement until the very end, and of course it's done in a saccharine way that I don't even want to elaborate on. Just trust me when I say that ERASED's usage of it wasn't as conveniently contrived and let's call it a day, shall we?

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Oct 23, 2016

Kizumonogatari II: Nekketsu-hen (Anime) add

Not Recommended

But enough about the price. Let's talk about whether Kizumonogatari actually lived up to its promise this time with its second installment. In case you've forgotten, the first part of this serial movie release had Shinobu get turned into a little girl for reasons that I can't be assed to explain the biology of, and Araragi must use his newly acquired vampire powers to defeat a group of supernatural individuals "shonen tournament"-style in order to get the body parts our Heart-Angel-Blade needs to swallow in order to go from "you masturbate to her and you'll get arrested" to "you masturbate to her and you'll get ... humiliated". Thanks to his newly acquired vampire body, Araragi is basically a non-shining version of a Twilight vampire with his toned body and fighting skills, along with the usual regenerative powers, so of course the movie will exploit the shit out of it with over-the-top fight scenes, Araragi bleeding like a geyser in order to showcase how dangerous his opponents are, and making fangirls squee harder than when Sora in Kingdom Hearts II sung "Under the Sea". This is what all those years of production were for, fanboys. Pure fanservice that I seem to recall Madhouse accomplishing with a far less time-consuming schedule back when attaching their name to an anime actually meant something.

Hanekawa also shows up for no reason other than fanservice. No seriously, that's it. Her cat powers don't seem to exist as of yet and she contributes nothing to the plot but overlong "comedic" banter without the humor and giving Araragi a motive to fight harder, because apparently his loli-fetish for a vampire who doesn't wear underwear is not the best choice for drawing out his true inner strength. She also has this weird habit of just teleporting to where Araragi is at the most plot-convenient moment, just in time to get her guts ripped out or to discover that the only teenage boy that seems to exist in this world is going to be young and hot forever. And because nobody seems to exist in the Monogatari universe but the main characters, it's really distracting how much this movie doesn't bother to clarify why she'd be wandering around these battle arenas in the first place, especially given how these fight scenes always take place in the middle of the night. Is her favorite grocery store in the area? Is her internal clock set in Western Hemisphere time? What?

I'm having a really hard time describing the plot to this thing because it's not really up to much. There's not really more to the movie than Araragi fighting vampires (and a vampire hunter), getting closer to Hanekawa, and that cliched "you risk becoming a monster with these powers" narrative with no original ideas whatsoever. Exactly how am I supposed to write a few paragraphs about your story when that's all you're giving me? Describe the fight scenes? I guess I could say that I liked how Araragi won some of them due to tactical planning rather than Dragonball Z-logic, although the overblown emotional nature of the second and third fights was pretty silly, and the comedic nature in the beginning of the first fight was fucking dumb. And because the camera is constantly swinging, it's hard to appreciate any existing choreography that might have snuck in amidst all the power level clashes, although to be fair, I recall the camera being more calm during those scenes than the talking ones.

As for the animation style, what do you want me to say? Nothing has changed from the last Kizumonogatari or any of the other ten Monogatari iterations aside from a little more blood and a little less fire. Nekketsu-hen does increase the amount of humor, so of course that means an increase in the amount of annoying sound effects and stupid reaction faces that would only be funny to twelve year olds who think it's appropriate to make fun of a woman's vagina whilst calling attention to the fact that you're making fun of it as a free pass. Every time Hanekawa banters with Araragi regarding his perverted tendencies and the amazing appeal of the panty she may or may not be wearing, I wanted to reach into the screen and beat both of them up with each other's faces for wasting about half the movie's runtime on something that in any sane universe would be considered "filler", but in the Nisio Isin universe is considered "solid gold".

Please explain to me the appeal of two characters purposefully making bad jokes and calling attention to the fact that said jokes are bad for long stretches of something that's only an hour long. If I was watching Danganronpa, said jokes would be accompanied by someone getting murdered or going through a villainous breakdown in order to keep the energy going. Monogatari though seems to have that stupid mindset that characterization for its own sake is engaging, and self-aware humor where you just do something stupid and point out that said thing is stupid was funny when Mike Myers did it. And that's what's always annoyed me about this series' usage of irony: it doesn't go far enough or attach that irony to something with momentum. Every time characters converse, the plot basically grinds to a halt in order for the actors to banter with each other like a deleted scene that somehow made it into the final cut. Also, someone please tell me the appeal of sexual harassment as humor. What the fuck is the punchline of those sorts of jokes anyways?

Finally, there are the new characters, who I honestly don't remember a thing about because they have no characterization other than being antagonistic and not above playing dirty to get what they want. Honestly, I can't even remember what they look like or what their names are. They don't have any good chemistry with Araragi, making them very pointless villains that makes Doc Ock's relationship with Spiderman look like something from DC comics, and they're never mentioned again after they're defeated, so Araragi might as well have been fighting moving gargoyle statues. It occurs to me that if you had cut out Hanekawa's very existence from this movie and given all that screen time to Araragi and his vampire opponents bantering it up instead, at least it would have given the action more meaning, even if risks falling into that other DBZ trademark of drawn-out anime action by doing so. But then again, Nisio Isin just doesn't seem to like the concept of male-on-male conversations. Why else would Oshino leave the story right the first series?

All in all, Nekketsu-hen just gets a big meh from me. I don't care for the animation because it's the same Shaft-style it's always been except of higher technical quality, but lacking in strong visual metaphors deserving of said quality, and full of so many quick cuts, annoying reaction faces, and title cards that I'm surprised I came out of the theater without a seizure. The story actually goes somewhere in this part so it's not as torturously boring as last time, but anyone who thinks that Araragi sacrificing his humanity to protect those he loves is an engaging tale obviously does not watch monster movies. Not to mention, since this is a prequel, we know he and everyone else are going to make it out okay, so there's no real tension to anything that happens to the established cast unless you were curious regarding whether Hanekawa actually got through the whole ordeal with her virginity intact.

At the end of the day, I just don't understand why this prequel needed to exist. All it does is show us stuff that we already knew happened, except being shown to us visually. And there's nothing being conveyed to us through these visuals that's new and refreshing unless you count another stupid usage of the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey new and refreshing. It's basically what's inevitably going to happen with that new Star Wars movie focused on the spies who stole the Death Star plans, and if there's anything worse than getting compared to the prequel trilogy, it's getting compared to Disney's brand of mediocre nostalgia cash-ins.

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Oct 15, 2016

Rewrite (Anime) add

Not Recommended

Well well well, Romeo Tanaka. We meet again. It hasn't even been a year since I reviewed that last atrocity with your name on it, and now you're teaming up with a company that people only remember at this point because After Story still ranks high on MAL after all this time in order to get recognized by anime fans who will never play your supposed masterpiece Cross Channel, and thus will only remember you as the guy who made Humanity Has Declined and a load of shit that no one cares about. I sympathize with you. I really do. The anime industry is a ... fucked up place that holds back actual talent. We all know that by now.

But like the people who okayed that godawful Ratchet & Clank movie, you've got to ask yourself this: is having an anime adaptation of your work really the ultimate prize it's all cracked up to be? Don't you realize by now that you work in a video game industry, and thus are inherently incompatible with an entertainment medium that the viewer can't physically interact with? Don't you realize that for ever Steins;Gate and Madoka Magica that ends up making it big, there are fifty World Conquest Zvezda Plots, Robotics;Notes, and Classroom Crises. And assuming you do know this, don't you know that teaming up with fucking 8-bit is considered a mistake in every sense of the word? I mean who even remember what anime they made? Oh right, these are the guys who made Grisaia. And yet somehow, even when you're working with them, they end up creating a product several times worse to the point that I could have done better.

You'd think I'd have spent all my outrage regarding Rewrite after the last post I wrote about it and you'd be mostly right, but the thing about this show is that it's my favorite kind of bad to review on the grounds that it fucks up so royally that you could write more essays about what it does wrong than you can about the many interpretations of Utena. It's not bad in that "incredibly lackluster to the point that I can't even remember what it is I'm supposed to be complaining about" that characterized the last few shows I reviewed. This is straight up "I see how this could have been better if it was handled by people with actual talent, or at least a chimpanzee" bad. And even when I'm being calm about it, there's so many words dripping with unsubtle bile I can write about the product that I can actually cause some impact on the industry by making the producers lose even less money than they already have. Hell, I've already written quite a bit and I haven't even actually started describing Rewrite as of yet. Girls Beyond the Wasteland wishes it could have fucked up as much as this.

Rewrite is an anime about a young boy named Kotarou Tennouji, living all by himself (of course) in the incredibly environmental-friendly town of Kazamatsuri. A town which houses a bunch of mysterious secrets such as dodgy CG crabs and annoying fairy creatures that our git of a main lead just has to discover the truth about, so he ends up joining an occult club and recruits members to help him out that all happen to be female and only two of them at best exist for the sake of more than just fetish fuel. Of course, in this show's defense, there is some semblance of a reason for his decision to only invite girls to hang out with him on one of his nature walks whilst ignoring the one male dude who he antagonizes more than Bugs Bunny did to any of the other Looney Toons. It's because he's a grade-A pervert who thinks sexually harassing his friends and touching their boobs is a charm point. Hey, I didn't say the reason wasn't "pants-on-head"levels of retarded.

But as is usual for visual novel anime, this is all just a smoke-screen for some upcoming serious plot that the writers seem to think would be a good idea to wait until halfway through the show to introduce for some reason, and in Rewrite's case, it turns out that Kotarou's friends actually belong to secret government organizations that are in conflict with each other because one side wants to destroy the world in order for it to be birthed anew and the other side wants to protect humanity even though said world is a morbid state of affairs where humans can kill trees without any repercussions. Yes, the plot is basically X/1999 if you replaced all the pretentiously cool CLAMP characters with little girls who would rather drink tea and bathe in hot springs than actually do something interesting. And yes those are your eyes that just rolled on the floor right now, because your mind can't comprehend how fucking retardedly mismatched the two plotlines are. I mean what's next? Harem school club anime that suddenly turns into Breaking Bad?

Admittedly though, Rewrite does lean heavily on one of its mismatched sides to the point that the other one doesn't cause much interference. It's just too bad that said side is the banal school life side where nothing interesting ever happens and there's no drive to events other than curious retardation. Yeah, remember how I said before that I hate most visual novel anime (and most anime in general for that matter) because for some reason people can't get it into their heads that "comedic episodes and light conflicts that solely exist to build up the world and the characters so that when the true dramatic story hits, it's all the more effective" is an absolutely awful concept that no one with a brain would possibly enjoy, let alone prefer to just "starting the dramatic story at the very start"? Well generally, these sorts of shows stop with their inane prologues by the halfway point, but Romeo Tanaka adaptations just can't seem to grasp the definition of the word "stop". It takes more than three quarters of the runtime for both Girls Beyond the Wasteland and Rewrite to get something even approaching an ongoing plot, and even then the latter seems to think that it can take a break and let girls relax in hot springs as a sort of reward for all the action that occurred previously, even though said action is only a minor skirmish against a twat that looked awful and no lasting impact because apparently stab wounds are easier to recover from than paper cuts.

The show is just littered with every bad adaptation choice you could possibly make when adapting an interactive non-linear product to a non-interactive linear world to the point that it feels like we're living in that shitty visual novel adaptation phase of anime again. Do you remember how one of my big complaints about Charlotte was that it had a severe lack of drama when it was desperately needed? Well it seems Rewrite misinterpreted the complaints people have made about Key products being overly manipulative even harder and decided to only give service to the company's token melodrama in the worst way possible. There's only two episodes that try to tug at the viewer's heartstrings and of course, it'd be directed towards the two girls with no plot-importance whatsoever, as well as being fucking botched to boot.

Just as an example, one of the episodes in the first half of the show is centered on the purple-haired girl, Lucia, and plays out like a bad horror story with its poorly directed attempts to be creepy that end with Kotarou discovering it was her who was causing all the strange things to happen because she has the ability to poison anything she touches thank to experiments done on her. Said episode ends with her throwing a hissy fit, accidentally poisoning Kotarou, him fixing himself up, revealing that she works for a secret organization, and then happy school life continues again in the very next episode. Excuse me Rewrite for not having the tear ducts required to appreciate sadness caused by "magic" that has never been foreshadowed until now, has no impact on the story beyond a few plot points that you could have conveyed better by shooting someone, doesn't further anyone's characterization, and indeed is never brought up again after it's told!

I could go on listing all the bad adaptation decisions...so let's continue, shall we? The animation is uglier than Andrew Lloyd Webber, looking like one of those crappy flash animated shows from the early 2000s with the shining buffed up a bit. And that's not even getting into the 3D animation for the monsters in this show, which looks so retarded and clashes so badly with the backgrounds that Polygon Pictures themselves would have fired the people working on it. And even by visual novel standards, the characters are just completely unlikable. Kotarou basically bullies and sexually harasses his friends for no reason, constantly begging to touch their breasts even during serious moments to the point that you sympathize with Lucia in regards to wanting to murder the bastard. But for some reason, the girls still hang out with him like the moe tsundere sycophants they are. Even dressing into cat-eared maid costumes at his request because apparently we're living in an age where people still think it was funny when Higurashi did this. It's like someone took a bunch of dating sim stereotypes, tacked on an arbitrary twist to each of them, and then beat them over the head with a crowbar that was made out of concentrated STUPID.

Finally there's the ending, which is both the best part of the show in how laughably terrible it was in a "I can't believe you did that" kind of way, as well as the worst part of the show because you couldn't believe they actually did that. To those who played the visual novel, remember how every single girl's route would end with the world getting fucked? Well instead of using one of those endings to cap things off, the producers decided to go a bit more original...by ripping off Evangelion like every other anime under the sun. One of the girls performs a ritual that kills off every human being on the planet and turns them into glowing orbs so that our plant life sovereign can reign supreme in a manner that would make Poison Ivy blush. No, I am not kidding. That is actually what happens, and before you guys start thinking "hey, that actually sounds pretty awesome", note that a sequel adapting the true route that will no doubt retcon the ending harder than Aldnoah Zero did after its three-month break is coming out next season because the creators were so confident that die-hard fans would want it after sitting through this misery. Starting right at the end of this sentence, you have one second to name a single anime where keeping the prologue and the actual meat of the story divided into two distinct series was a good idea. Time's up. That's what I thought.

I am not exaggerating when I say there is literally no audience for this show at all. If you're a fan of the visual novel, you'll be turned off by the insipid adaptation choices that basically scream "fuck it, if they paid full price for that Little Busters anime, they'll pay full price for this". And if you're not a fan, you'd be clawing your eyes out at the complete lack of fun on screen assuming you can work up the interest necessary to acknowledge Rewrite's existence in the first place. I don't know how well the blu-rays sold, but the number can't be high. I mean we're living in an age where the fujoshi market makes up the numbers now and Rewrite definitely doesn't have much in the way of manservice for fangirls to slobber over. The only people I can possibly see enjoying this show are those with a lead pipe shoved in your brain's front lobe, and if that's the case, it'd be cheaper and more exciting to just shove poo down the pipe's hole.

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Oct 5, 2016

Masou Gakuen HxH (Anime) add

Not Recommended

Masou Gakuen HxH is a light novel adaptation about a bunch of scantily clad mecha-using female warriors fighting a bunch of other scantily clad mecha-using female warriors from another dimension...yes this is a light novel adaptation, why do you ask? Oh you thought it was a hentai game adaptation? Pft, when was the last time those things showed up? Anyways, continuing on from that self-inflicted interruption, the show is about these female warriors fighting each other for a reason that isn't really elaborated on because why should plot matter in an anime about underage girls fighting with their tits hanging out, with the good guy ... side having that one lone male who makes you question which side you're supposed to be rooting for because he's a dick and every being with an extra X chromosome falls for him anyways no matter what side they're on? Oh yeah, and these mecha suits are powered by sexual lust for some reason, thus this one guy must charge up these females' fighting energy by giving them orgasms. And whilst females in hentai can get orgasms very easily, I think the producers of this show had some sort of internal bet in regards to how little a man has to do before getting his woman wet. Because the only sex moves that show up in this thing are boob groping and what I can only assume are cowgirl positions that came out of a book called "How To Pretend To Have Sex For Dummies", and yet these girls react to them like they're in a Takaoka Motofumi doujin.

If you've seen one shitty harem light novel adaptation, you've seen them all, and putting in "animated sex" that'd embarrass a shitty flash adaptation adds pretty much nothing to the formula other than more shame, and it's not even enough shame to be noteworthy. There's a bit of paraphrasing going on in the previous paragraph, but otherwise that's pretty much the entire show. Guy gets stuck in an all-girl section of what passes for military in anime world and proceeds to toy with their emotions whilst dealing with a paint-by-the-numbers plot that even a machine by Professor Frink from The Simpsons would have been embarassed to churn out. And I didn't make that Takaoka Motofumi reference lightly. If you've never read any of his doujins, they generally consist of asshole males with bad haircuts raping females that are either big busted housewives pretending to be high schoolers or twelve-year old lolis with nipples so perky you could cut glass with them all in the name of "love". As such, no one is spared. Except for the sister I guess, but after seeing who gets laid in this show, you'd wish the main dude had gone the incest route instead.

The reason I stuck with this show was because it seemed like it'd be a bit raunchier than the average LN series. I mean its very first scene depicted a girl taking it up the butt, which caused me to think that maybe this trash was at least going to be a little tongue-in-cheek regarding the light novel craze the way people thought that godawful Who Is Imouto anime was going to play out before it actually started taking itself seriously and turned the kinda funny stalker angle into the shittiest mystery on the planet. Even if the end result was destined to be shit, maybe it won't be that mediocre/middle-of-the-ground shit I hate so much because there's nothing to say other than it's boring. No such luck I'm afraid, because after the first episode, the show reveals that the main females are whiny tsunderes who don't know what the fuck they want whilst the main dude...um, actually he doesn't have any problems with feeling up his childhood friend and their little sister, so maybe I got a little more of my wish than I thought.

In addition to the repetitiveness of the sex moves, very little actual nudity is really shown until late in the game, and that's assuming you're watching the AT-X version rather than the laughably censored Crunchyroll version. And it always tries to be coy about it even when it does show up to the point that calling out someone else's name during intercourse would be less of a turn-off. I know it sells and all, but I think Production IMS missed a few memos when they decided to become a fanservice studio, because there are a few things you have to keep in mind with porn assuming you're a teenage boy or lesbian who wants to please their frustrated libido without having to pay for it like a loser. One, most porn is absolute shit. I remember when I was introduced to my first porn site and trying to find something that was actually arousing was like trying to find a hot woman in a nude beach that's not in Central America. Two, most successful porn are executed with characters that have confidence, and the only confidence you can expect out of light novel stereotypes are the wishy-washy kind that get mad at their men for interacting with women who have every right to do so on account of them not being "girls". Three, your anime is on broadcast TV. Even with the horrible censors, you can't actually show stuff with real balls, let alone real balls. Four, just because you're making smut doesn't mean it has to be low-budget. Get some goddamn money rolling into your products, dudes.

The show gets particularly shitty in the final few episodes where the loli joins the fray for absolutely no reason whatsoever other than because the show felt like it wasn't pedo enough and decided it might as well go the extra mile. I have a few companions online who like watching this sort of perverted trash, and they all agreed that the show went too far when she got involved. Better not introduce them to the doujin series, Rapiere. They'd probably set themselves on fire if they saw just how low a female version of The Three Musketeers could sink. See, for a show that sells itself on using sex as a weapon, I was expecting something on the level of Sausage Party or Dororon Meera Mera Enma-kun where the big evil is defeated by a giant orgy and the main dude's sexual prowess is so powerful that he ends up getting every female in the world to leak sweat just by his mere aura, including the big evil. But no, the show ends with a bunch of poorly done action scenes followed by the main dude holding hands with the white-haired girl, who I think is supposed to be the main female lead, but the show doesn't do a good job of convincing me on that front for reasons I'm not going to get into because you don't care. Talk about a show that climaxed too early, huh?

Masou Gakuen HxH wanted to prove to the world that it had a big dick, so it took a bunch of forbidden substances to give off the illusion that it could stand alongside the "manly" anime, only to end up getting too overexcited to the point that it blew its load early and ended up pretty pointless the rest of the way through. Its animation was flaccid, its characters limp, its comedy plain sucked, and what passes for sex and a plot just hurts to think about. Can't really see much of anything to recommend about the show. Even a heavily censored hentai on Youtube would be more exciting to watch, if only because there's a certain absurd humor to be found in how only ten percent of the screen is actually visible whilst the other ninety percent is so blurry you'd have better visibility watching the real thing underwater.

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Sep 28, 2016

Mob Psycho 100 (Anime) add

Recommended

The more time passes, the more clear it becomes to me that I am a lone man on a lone island who people can't hear because they're too busy jerking off to the latest "best girl", a term that has become about as meaningless as the word "Final Fantasy". Pretty much every anime fan that matters seems to have watched one of the brightest gems to have come from the Japanese animation market since the one from last season, but I watched an anime that I would have only considered going back to in five years is if I was stranded on an island with ... nothing but this show and a bunch of ecchi crap to pass the time with before my laptop ran out of batteries. I think similar to Re:Zero, a big part of my problem with Mob Psycho 100 is that I'm not an anime nerd. Every single praise I've seen for this show always glorifies the "nerd" stuff, with the only one I appreciate being the actual animation. Unfortunately, most animation nerds seem to judge the art based on the actual technical quality or the style whilst I judge it based on what emotions are successfully conveyed through the art and I have high standards when it comes to emotions. For starters, the emotions that the characters cannot be dripped in nerdiness.

Mob Psycho 100 is the latest manga adaptation from ONE, author of the hit webcomic-turned-anime series, One-Punch Man, and brought to life with the production values from Bones and the directorial talent of that guy who made Death Parade that only smarmy elitists would remember the name of. Unlike the instant hit of what's apparently the best superhero series in a year where every single medium was trying to cash in on the boom, Mob Psycho initially churned out a mixed response for its artsy visual style (because apparently, the anime community is composed of nothing but teenagers who misuse the word "pretentious") and had to win people's hearts the hard way aka by keeping a consistent quality and going through heavy promotion from all the big-name nerds. Obviously it succeeded, because the show quickly rose up in popularity to the point that it's considered amazing, let alone the best anime of the summer. Definitely going to be showing up on many top whatever anime lists by the time this year ends. And obviously I have to stomp on some sycophantic heads, because the word "amazing" is not something you want to throw around lightly in regards to anime. It's something you should only reserve for something that'd be in your top 40, or more accurately, your top 20.

It's no secret that a large part of why people paid attention to Mob Psycho at the very start (for good or for bad) is because of its visual style, which in a community that's getting increasingly sakuga-obsessed is like posting a Youtube video on the Net for all those losers who still think "lolcats" is funny. The real draw though comes from Mob himself, a psychic boy who uses his powers for a local con man in order to make money whilst trying to rely on skills that us powerless humans have to get by in his every day life, despite him being as athletic and social as a donkey in the middle of this year's dragon-hatching festival. Whether you prefer One-Punch Man or this show, you'd be hard-pressed to deny that Mob is a much more relatable character than Saitama considering he actually "can" fail and has goals in life, even if said goals are pretty standard for the superpower genre and teenagers as a whole. Become more social. Join a club. Win over that attractive girl who doesn't have any physical screen time. Take care of your younger brother. Defeat a bunch of evil psychic-users. We've all been there before. Okay, not so much the psychic-user part, but shut up. I'm trying to make a point.

Of course, Mob Psycho probably could have helped alleviate the negativity from the non-sakuga crowd if it had established a more clear direction at the start. The show's primary genre is shonen comedy, and like most American sitcoms and Shonen Jump products, it has a bit of trouble working out the quirks and the characters early on because the writers are either experimenting to see what sticks or are looking so far ahead that they forget that there's no time like the present. The first episode in particular is completely divorced from the overall plot and only exists to establish who Mob and his boss are, which could have easily been accomplished in a way that didn't involve that goddamn "salt splash" meme and only exists because ONE is just that quirky. And the rest of the first half mostly just exists to introduce new characters whilst spouting out lessons regarding how psychic powers should not be used for evil, which could have only been more cliched if they added "thou must not kill" into the mix. Not that you have to worry about anyone dying, because ONE's works run on toon physics and thus getting hit with a Kamehameha is the equivalent of getting hit with a girl's megaton punch. Still hurts mind you, but you'll live.

One of the things you have to keep in mind with Mob Psycho is that a large part of your enjoyment will come from how much you can get into its unique brand of humor. A guy I know who's really into the show claims that it's basically Earthbound: The Anime, and without game play to back it up, Earthbound doesn't have much to its narrative beyond the fact that the protagonists are a bunch of kids who name their pets "Vagina" and fight weird-looking aliens with frying pans and sticks of butter presumably shoved up the ass. As such, even when we get more of an overall plot later on and the storytelling improves, the actual story doesn't grow along with them. All that happens when Mob's brother takes his "why does my nii-san get the powers and I don't" jealousy too far and other psychic users get in the mix is test Mob's resolution regarding when it's acceptable to use his powers to hurt people, as well as provide more convenient excuses for Bones to show off their visual prowess. This does lead to a kinda funny final resolution that's been getting some flak for its anti-climactic nature, but that just goes to show how much Mob needs to make you laugh in order to work.

Personally, whilst it got a smile from me every now and then, I don't recall ever flat-out laughing at anything Mob Psycho did. If this show was an American cartoon, it'd be more alone the lines of something like The Amazing World of Gumball or current-day Adventure Time rather than something like Steven Universe or The Loud House. Okay, Steven Universe isn't exactly a riot either, but the point is that at the end of the day, Mob Psycho feels like a Japanese version of one of the lesser cartoons on Cartoon Network rather than the amazingly brilliant ones. As I said, the animation is awesome, but so is The Loud House's, and most people wouldn't call that show the revival of Nick's animation block just based on that. All of the morals Mob Psycho imparts are too universal to be hard-hitting unless you have low standards and want to ignore all the evolution that superpower stories and animation in general have accomplished in the last few years. And whilst they're all executed well, there's a limit to how much good execution can achieve when your elements are only slight less base than a Ridley Scott film.

It also doesn't help that by the end of the show, nothing really changes other than a few characters not taking psychic powers quite for granted, which is about as progressive as a harem story that ends with the main character slaying a dragon, which would make him come off as less of a loser but it doesn't help in choosing a girl unless they're repulsed by the smell of dragon guts. Mob is still living his life the way he wants to, everyone else's plotlines get resolved cleanly, and it ends on a cliffhanger foreshadowing a Noragami Aragoto-esque sequel that isn't guaranteed to deliver on the same level that Aragoto did. Oh, and there's a two-minute skit at the end that's completely irrelevant to the plot and only exists because Bones realized they had a few extra minutes left to animate and let ONE do whatever the hell he wanted. It wasn't the least bit funny, so let's not dwell on it, shall we?

I definitely wouldn't call Mob Psycho 100 boring. But there's no denying that as far as superpower/psychic stories are concerned, it still plays in the kiddy pool regarding how to handle its elements, and there's nothing in it that makes me want to buy the blu-rays when they eventually come out. It's just a "fun" show at the end of the day, and Bones has proven in the recent past that they're capable of so much more than that, so I'm not sure why I should be satisfied when this is all they have to offer. I'm already looking forward to putting this show behind me after I finish this review. Got to free up some room in the excitement chamber for Luke Cage, bruhs.

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Sep 19, 2016

Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu (Anime) add

Not Recommended

You know, for all the shit I give visual novels, I'll say this about them: at least they have the decency to fucking end when it comes time for them to expire. Light novels, on the other hand, never seem to be written with an end goal in mind. Every single one I've seen tries to be the otaku pandering version of a Shonen Jump manga (well, more otaku pandering than Shonen Jump already is) and as I've made it very clear before, I'm not into on-going stories, especially when they have the straightforward nature of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I grew ... up on movies and novels my school made me read, so I'm used to things having a beginning, middle, and end, especially when said end give birth to a bunch of shitty sequels that make you want to castrate the entirety of Hollywood's population. And it'd be one thing if they had the substance of a (really good) live-action drama, but I've yet to see Hannibal: The Light Novel version come from Japan, let alone be as successful as that show.

Sitting through Holo and Lawrence flirting with each other whilst mostly ignoring the reason why they started traveling together to begin with might be your idea of a good time, but there's only so long a bunch of Tales skits are going to entertain me when you rely on them for substance. Oh, but these interactions are what allows us to care about the characters so that when the drama hits...in which case I stop you right there and tell you that philosophy can fuck right off. Yes you need to develop the characters, but you're not supposed to put the story on halt in order to do that. If you can't meld the character interactions with the plot, then you might as well have not had them at all. But then again, I didn't grow up on superhero comics or anything otaku-related like a lot of anime fans (especially these days), so maybe it's just a style of storytelling that's not meant for me. Just like idol shows. Or anime about bread.

The thing is though, even by those incredibly bizarre Marvel-esque standards, Re:Zero still isn't very good. And it's not just because I hate meta-humor, although that's certainly a big part of it. Despite what Digibro might tell you, anime has always been lazy in regards to being meta, but it's definitely gotten a lot worse in the last few years, and I'm getting really annoyed by how inward anime is starting to become as a medium in general with popular light novel shows like Saekano and even anime video games like Danganronpa. The main character is an otaku - which in theory is supposed to make him relatable to everyone but in practice would only make him relatable to anime nerds (which I am not) - and every time he brings up how something is just like one of those anime he watches, I wanted to reach into the screen and beat him to death with his own face for not realizing that for comedy relief to work, you need to have comedy and something to relieve.

And he keeps quoting anime tropes even when he's in danger. Hell, even the other characters occasionally join him on his nerdy rants despite video games and harpoon guns not existing in the world. It'd be one thing if Re:Zero was a comedy anime, but nothing about the premise is inherently comedic. No one wants to be the Pirate King in a world where pirates have superpowers. Nothing about the fantasy setting screams Tex Avery and none of the characters make Hanna Barbara sound-effects whenever they breathe. Very few of the jokes are even fantasy-related, so why the hell do I have to sit through a speech regarding the glory of the maid? I don't give a shit about maids. Especially not when characters are in the midst of getting burnt alive by a raging inferno.

But even if you did become infected with the same sort of fatal disease that all Romeo Tanaka fans have, the story is like every other light novel story ever in that it's "light" (which in my mind translates to "incredibly boring"), and has all the storytelling quality of Dragon Age II - another shitty fantasy product. It's about this otaku dude with no past and no reason to be the lead that's not circumstantial named Subaru, as he one days get transported to a strange fantasy world for some witch-related reason that's never really elaborated on and falls in love with a half-elf princess named Emilia because the plot says so. However, the two of them end up as bloody corpses thanks to a mysterious female assassin, only for Subaru to discover that he has the ability to go back in time, Majora's Mask-style every time he dies. But this is just the setup. Where did this power come from? What overarching plot comes from it? Who's the main villain? Where's the grand adventure that usually accompanies these fantasy worlds? What exactly is Re:Zero about?

Well unfortunately, there isn't a single thing Re:Zero is "about" that appeals to anyone who's not an anime nerd or a Fire Emblem fan that disagrees with me that the franchise has turned bloody awful since the console releases. Every single character seems to be written with the mindset of "ship first, characterize second", and they all seem to change personality depending on what the plot wants to do with Subaru. Want to torture the dude? Let's have everyone hate him. Done with the torture? Okay, let's have everyone be nice to him now for no good reason. The only meaningful interactions Subaru has in the show are with the two love-interests: Emilia and a blue-haired maid named Rem, who people seemed to like an awful lot once she lost all her personality after becoming attracted to our rough otaku lead. Apparently, this is because the less your know about a person, the easier it is to ship them. A rule that I seem to recall being completely untrue during my brief shipping phase, but what do I know about what's cool these days?

And the plot and dialogue have about as much momentum as a Pro Stock car super-glued to a garbage crusher. It starts with Subaru getting introduced to his time travel powers, the characters, and an evil female villain we never see again in a plotline that screams "obvious setup" in capital lines and enough exclamation marks to fill the Atlantic Ocean. Three, technically four, episodes later and I still don't understand where the show is going with all this. So Subaru is going to move in with Emilia? Why should I care? Where's the story going to go from there? Well the next arc answers this question through a plot line of a mysterious killer in Emilia's mansion that might have acted as a tense mystery if the slice-of-life scenes weren't so utterly canned and the acting wasn't so hammy. But even if they weren't, the end boss turns out to be nothing more than a pack of dogs you could have defeated by chucking a fucking bone at them, and all it amounts to at the end is Subaru getting closer to Rem while having some lap pillow time with Emilia when he can be assed. We're halfway through the series and it's been nothing but prologue material that'd make the seventh Harry Potter movie blush.

But eventually, after sitting through twelve episodes of boring character interactions that were only that long because of the show's utterly stupid usage of its time travel gimmicks, the anime pulls a Shyamalan and gets into what it's really about. A self-loathing prideful dude whose shittiness destroys everything and everyone around him as a sort of deconstruction of the traditional shonen protagonist/trapped in a foreign world/anime in general storytelling. Basically Danganronpa 3: Despair Arc, except with a strange obsession for physically torturing Subaru repeatedly in order to fulfill the two-cour order to the point that it gets ridiculous, whereas Danganronpa Despair generally made the brutal killings of its anime tropes nice and quick bar the most important death scene, which stood out because it happened to that character and said character stayed dead. Listen show, I'm pretty sure I got that Subaru's prideful nature is toxic to humanity after you killed his ass to the point that his body literally broke apart. You didn't need to repeat it five fucking times with the only difference between each time being the method you used to do so and dedicating one episode to each time. Twice would have been sufficient, because the first time might have just demotivated him a bit, but other than that, this is is an anime. Not the Japanese version of American politics.

What really annoyed me with this "true plot" though is that all the torture amounts to at the end of the day is just to give our male lead an incentive to be a better person, which is the fucking white noise of how to do character development, whereas any good writer would have made the general direction from there a lot more bittersweet, or if you're Hideaki Anno, fucking brutal. But because Re:Zero's usage of time travel can conveniently erase a character's death whenever it wants to and make people forget how much of an asshole our lead is (and when they don't, they really easily forgive him), it makes all the effort put into depicting a twisted arm pretty pointless unless you really seeing torture porn animated. Not helping at all is that the actual torture is kind of lame and unimaginative. Nothing but bone-crunching and bleeding eyeballs, which - compared to Danganronpa's ridiculously creative death traps - just looks like the majority of the show's action scenes aka really bad. There's some decent animation in the fights sometimes, but they're either one-sided, badly choreographed, or shot to the point that you don't actually see the blows land. I know a lot of people talk up the white whale stuff, but I don't think the whales actually attacked anyone short of breathing on them, and I'm pretty sure Wilhelm's moves were the only ones that actually made contact.

So the show really never amounts to nothing more than making the viewer feel "emotions", which is something the creative team seems to be very much aware of because all the budget seems to go into the "hard-hitting stuff", causing the animation during the clean-up phase of Re:Zero's tale with the actual fighting and resolutions to look like absolute ass. The final scene is nothing more than a cheesy love confession with the screen brightness turned up and looks nowhere near as good as any of the climaxes in Episodes 13-18. And it didn't help that when all is said and done, all that happened was that Subaru went through "character development" to become a better man. But why? What was the point in watching that? Character development for the sake of character development can't function on its own as substance, and certainly not when the end goal of it is to be a better man for a girl who didn't even have that much screen time and whose half-elf heritage doesn't even factor all that much into the plot other than to be a convenient conflict. You do realize that I could just buy Tales of Symphonia at my local retail store, right?

I liked Danganronpa 3 because it used being "anime" ironically as well as a weapon to corrupt its well-meaning protagonists and their individual philosophies into a bunch of murderers where the only way to cheat death was if the writer was in a trolling mood, and Re:Zero's "anime" nature just feels incredibly lackluster by comparison. The only reason Subaru goes through any sort of shit is so that he can overcome the whiny drama and be rewarded with a personality-less girl who has no chemistry with him ala a shitty JRPG. And the only way he overcomes something is due to someone saving him at the last minute or becoming a little braver after suffering a traumatic event, which is also the kind of thing that characterizes most shitty JRPGs. When characters got corrupted in Danganronpa 3, they had to deal with the consequences of their actions for the rest of their life, generally by staying corrupted or put into a computer simulation for the rest of their days. And most of all, love interests died as a result of their actions and stayed dead! Things stuck in those shows. And whatever interesting point Re:Zero brings up is always invalidated before too long, like a happy marriage after the honeymoon is over.

As a final point though, I don't know who voiced Subaru, but his voice is annoying as fuck. There were several episodes where it became too much for me to the point that I had to mute the video just to get through it, and this includes Episode 18 where I only got through the first two minutes with sound. Just because you're supposed to be a deconstruction of the alpha male doesn't mean you have to sound like a whiny bitch. And don't even get me started on the final villain. I'm pretty sure you could make a funky remix out of every annoying Kugimiya Rie character verbal tic she's ever done and it'd still be more listenable than watching Kirito orgasm at the sound of his voice.

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Sep 1, 2016

Kimi no Na wa. (Anime) add

Recommended

With the exception of maybe Dokyuusei, I can't think of a single original anime movie in recent times that has gotten as much fanfare as Makoto Shinkai's latest work did before it became available to the gaijin public. Even before it arrived in Japanese theatres, the fanbase that erupted from its exclusive Anime Expo-showing have been making their voices louder than a Siberian tiger scratching the world's largest chalkboard. And now that it has arrived in the Eastern theatres, it's made more money on its opening weekend than The Nice Guys had during its entire box office run. Whilst its currently high MAL score is ... almost guaranteed to go down once it reaches the wider audience that is America's toxic anime fanbase, the fact remains that Shinkai has really hit the big leagues as of late, and as one of anime's last remaining auteurs (let alone one that's actually good), I think that alone should be worth celebrating.

Will he become the next Miyazaki as time goes on? I don't know, and quite frankly I doubt he cares, so why should I? This isn't a review of his career anyways. It's a review of Your Name, or Kimi no Na wa as the weeaboos like to call it, and I was really looking forward to watching this one once I discovered that the premise was about a boy and a girl going through a Freaky Friday routine, because that's usually the kind of premise reserved for a cheap harem anime or One Piece. Not something you'd expect a man of Shinkai's caliber to do, and especially not a premise deserving of so much visual porn that it'd make art students cum within five seconds of exposure. Sure when you think about it, it's not too far out of his domain. Shinkai has dabbled with putting a serious take on wacky anime premises in the past (his first major work was basically a modern take on Gunbuster after all). Still, I never really expected this sort of premise to get a big-budget treatment in general unless it was a cheap franchise movie, let alone be put in the hands of such a talented guy. And now that I've seen the result of that combination, I can safely say I should never underestimate this dude.

Now before going on, I should point out that I'm fully aware most of you guys haven't had a chance to see the movie as of this time of writing, and unfortunately I can't talk about the majority of Your Name's story because of how heavily dependent it is on things not being as clear-cut as they seem. That's right. A movie about a boy and a girl who can swap bodies with each other has a lot going on underneath the surface that I can't spoil for fear of ruining your enjoyment like all of pop culture does for Citizen Kane. So let's just start off by saying that I do recommend Your Name. It's easily one of the best anime I've seen this year (not that the competition has been all that fierce) as well as one of the most emotional roller coasters that I've seen this medium produce in quite a long time. Oh, and if you are even slightly interested in shipping culture, there is a 99% chance that you will consider this movie a masterpiece, because it pretty much hits every major shipping button in the book - including ones that most hardcore shippers didn't know they had. If you want a more visual representation of what I'm talking about, remember what you loved about ERASED before it went to shit. Now imagine that show never going to shit and make sure to step out of that puddle of drool and tears you just made.

The tone of Your Name is distinctively more "anime" than most of Shinkai's stuff. It felt like he was trying to cater more to a mainstream audience whilst not sacrificing his signature style in the process throughout the entire runtime, and if the later Persona games are anything to go by, that can really pay off if done well. And it does pay off in quite a few ways I didn't expect. The movie made me laugh a lot, even at jokes that I wouldn't normally laugh at, and the story actually progressed in a way that I wanted to see things end happily rather than the usual bittersweet closures that I generally love about this guy's take on romance. And any anime that can get that amount of investment from me is always worth my time, even if the characters themselves don't have too much going for them individually.

Having to look up their names for this review is one thing because I'm bad at remember names in general, let alone foreign ones. But if you were to ask me to describe the two leads, I wouldn't have much to say besides a normal girl who wants to be free of the traditions set on her by her family and a normal boy who just wants to get by in life. I think it was an intentional decision on Shinkai's part to make his characters "normal" so that we can relate to them more and they're both likable/interesting enough, but I prefer characters who have story to them first, and relatability second. And it's hard to get too invested in a character's dilemma when I'm not given a non-circumstantial reason regarding why I'd want to follow this character in the first place.

For example, the main boy's name is Taki Tachibana, and his goals in life are to get into university, get closer to his hot female co-worker at the restaurant he does part-time work in, and grope his own breasts when he suddenly discovers he has them. That's stuff you can say about any normal Joe, and whilst I can definitely relate to those issues enough to not find Taki boring, the sort of connection I can form with him from just that is limited when I'm not the one who's actually experiencing those problems first-hand. Even when the movie gets into deeper material, Taki never really experiences any emotions or problems that are particular complex to analyze. And considering Shinkai has managed to balance both the intellectual and the emotional aspects of his stories in the past, I found the heavy emphasis on the latter at the expense of the former to be kinda disappointing. Hell, even the majority of Ghibli's output after they peaked did a pretty decent job in that department. Maybe my opinion will change if I watch the movie again (and you can bet I will), but I'm just going to say right now that I liked the character presentation in 5/cm. You fanboys may call it emotionally distant. I call it the solution to you guys overrating the hell out of Holo and Lawrence's thing.

But let's move on to another aspect of Your Name I can actually talk about: the technicals. Frankly, I am quite amazed at how much Shinkai is improving in that field, especially considering how high he sets the bar with each film he does. Not only is the visual quality of the animation so stunning that it makes Garden of Words look like someone's Flash animation and the Radwimps soundtrack one of the most fun anime soundtracks I've heard in quite some time, but the way he utilizes these technicals is so masterful that it can make even the most basic of emotions expressed throughout this film feel like you've just been hit in the face and you want more because you love it. I'm really hard-pressed to come up with a cartoon that gets emotional storytelling down the way the animation in this one does, even compared to what I consider superior cartoons like Kaiba, Haibane Renmei, or a good chunk of Pixar's output. Hell, I'd need a whole other post (and a digital file of the film) just to talk about the specifics.

A lot of you guys are watching Re:Zero, right? Well let's put it like this: if White Fox's "masterful" direction of Subaru's bawl-fests is the equivalent of getting hit with a cannonball, Your Name's direction of the emotions constantly vibrating in its characters, setting, dialogue, and just about everything that makes up a single frame of this film is the equivalent of getting hit with a cannonball the size of Jupiter, and there are thousands more frames where that came from. It knows when to play it light. It knows when to play it heavy. It knows just the right amount to make it seem natural. And it doesn't sacrifice more important things in the process. Well okay, I just said it sacrificed some important things a few paragraphs ago. But never to the extent that I ever walked out thinking to myself "well that was good enough". The Boy and the Beast is an anime I consider "good enough". Your Name is plain good, regardless of the actual magnitude of positive feelings I have for it.

I really wish I could talk more about the plot with you guys, but I can't. Not even regarding the movie's themes, which I'm still not quite clear on myself, but I will tell you that part of the movie's plot was inspired by Japan's recent earthquake disasters. However, I only knew this because Shinkai himself told us. Otherwise, I would never have made the connection, because the "event" that said inspiration is based on...well let's just say depending on your suspension of disbelief, you'll consider it emotionally heart-breaking or completely arbitrary. I'm not for heavy-handed commentary or anything, but if there is a deeper meaning that I'm missing in Your Name that'd make me join on the "masterpiece" bandwagon with the rest of the die-hards, I really think Shinkai should have made it more obvious. After all, some anvils just need to be dropped, because otherwise you'll risk the opposite problem of people reading too much into things. There's open to interpretation, and then there's just laying out a bunch of plot elements and telling your audience to make their own story.

Don't take my word for it though. Watch the movie yourself and come to your own conclusions. Or watch it because this review has just a raised a million questions regarding what the hell could possibly be in Your Name that's making me so cryptic in regards to describing the experience. Either way works fine. Just don't get spoiled before diving in. You'll probably still enjoy the movie regardless, but there can only be one moment of discovery, and no one should have the right to take it away from you but yourself. And even then, only when you decide that you are ready.

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