In 1989, nearly 40 years before The Legend of Vox Machina and Konosuba, The Slayers came out and showed people how a Dungeons & Dragons animated series is actually done. It was, in a nutshell, the opposite side of Record of Lodoss War's coin, embracing the sillyness that comes from an unhinged magician, an extremely dense paladin and a chuuni-esque white mage being put in situations that can and will be solved by blasting the room with a Fireball.
In 1995, 6 years after that, The Slayers Next came out and blew the original series out of the fucking water. A near-perfect 26 episode run without
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Jul 20, 2023
Slayers is a show based on a book series about how it feels to play Dungeons & Dragons: 2nd Edition while at the mercy of a level 90, metagaming Black Mage addicted to Fireball. If you have any experience with magic users in tabletop RPGs, this should be enough to sell you on it.
If not, here's a few more words to better sell you on it. Much like Dirty Pair, many of its gags involve said metagaming Black Mage, Lina Inverse, causing massive amounts of collateral damage while fighting assorted fantasy goons for one reason or another - so much that I feel like it and ... 
Feb 9, 2023
Bocchi the Rock!
(Anime)
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Bocchi the Rock is a show about three things:
1. Having crippling social anxiety and coping with it through art - in this case, music. 2. The realities of making music as an amateur J-Rock band in current japanese society. 3. How fucking cool J-Rock is and how much the author adores it. All of these themes are expressed through a heavily parodistic filter, often using other animation techniques (notably, hard cuts to live action footage and clay models) to deliver sketches that help us understand the inner workings of the characters' minds. There's also gags that are more reminiscent of older cartoons, like the Looney Tunes or Tom ... 
Mar 23, 2022
IGPX: Immortal Grand Prix (2005)
(Anime)
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IGPX is, in my opinion, the best case scenario for anime co-production: a show where western production and eastern design come together in a harmonic, coherent fashion for the purpose of making something that, above all else, carries a particular kind of *soul* - the Toonami soul.
Yes, the story is silly: it's sports anime about giant robots playing roller derby, as such the writing is suitably predictable and falls for a couple little clichés. It's quaint at best and inoffensive at worst - something I wish Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory or Air Gear could be at *their* worst. Looking past that though, you get F1-inspired ... 
Nov 8, 2021
The first three episodes feel like the season finale of any other show.
Each of the final three episodes could be *the* final episode, but it just keeps going and escalating in a way only Gurren Lagann could manage to top, a decade or so later. The stuff in the middle? It's lovely, works well enough to establish characters old & new, their role in this self-contained story, and the capabilities of their machines. Also, unlike 80% of all anime the dub actually makes it better. Peak super robot, no questions asked. I recommend it to literally anyone who likes fun things and isn't a joyless husk ... 
Jan 18, 2021
Space☆Dandy
(Anime)
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Name me another show whose first word, in the first line, in the first episode, is "tits".
Name me another show whose episodes can range from "space opera hijinks" to "unironically innovative take on zombie fiction" to "surprisingly well-animated Redline parody" in the span of a season and (almost) never miss a beat. Name me another show that will joke about said tits nearly every episode, then stab you in the guts with emotional stingers when you're not looking. A lot of braindead goons on this shit site will tell you "muh linear plot", "muh wasted potential" - and that's fine, they'd probably have to look up the ... 
Nov 17, 2020
Kidou Senshi Gundam Thunderbolt
(Anime)
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An all-killer/no-filler war story with superb animation and an incredible soundtrack that's actually interwoven with its narrative. The fact that this came out in 2015 and not like, 1999 is still mind-boggling to me.
The only flaw i can really think of is that, given the low episode count, none of the characters get much room for development, which may make them seem a bit "flat" or "one dimensional". Still, most Gundam shows have that problem - except they also get +30 episodes to fix it and use exactly 0 of them. If 0080 was the "meaning" of Gundam distilled in 6 episodes, Thunderbolt is the "feeling" ... 
Apr 26, 2020
You know those memes where there's a guy looking at the RX78 shooting upwards, going "wow cool robot" while missing the point that "war is bad"?
Yeah, Gundam 0080: War In The Pocket is that, except you're the observer and the Gundam has locked onto YOU instead of a few feet above your head. Did you get that WAR IS BAD? No? Well you're in for a fucking schooling now. Animation is still superb and the music, while slightly less memorable than Stardust Memory's, does its job well enough. Unlike Stardust Memory though, the story told here is actually good, supported by main characters that ... 
Apr 26, 2020
Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory is what happens when you inject all the budget in the universe in a luckluster story with terrible, terrible main characters (and a bad secondary, too. Lookin' at you, Monsha).
The animation and music are fucking godlike, and the two openings it gets (one for the first half, the other for the latter half) are probably the top 2 OPs in Gundam history, with 8th MS Team's being number 3. Everything else? Mediocre to terrible, with the only decent characters in the crew kinda vanishing from the story as soon as protagonist Kou Uraki and local neurotic individual Nina Purpleton hog more and ... 
Jan 5, 2019
Just skip it and read the fucking manga.
I went into this thing after listening to the tracks Naganuma wrote for it about a dozen times and knowing that the manga had a pretty good reputation - a bit heavy on fanservice at times, but with a sweet artstyle and some cool moments. What could have possibly gone wrong, right? In short? Everything. Lazily animated opening, butchered artstyle, insufferable main characters and the whole thing was canceled before the show even got to the cool part! The soundtrack is pretty much the only saving grace of this entire ordeal (and not just because of Naganuma), so you're ... |
