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Feb 18, 2024
A short story with a cute art style, a fantastical world and a lot of sadness. I definitely recommend you check this out. Each volume is only around 200 pages long, so you can finish this in an afternoon, and it's well worth that time investment. Given that this doesn't have a description, let me tell you what it's about:
Poyoko is a traumatized little girl who lives with an uncaring adoptive family after losing her parents. She has forgotten most of her past, and even her own feelings, because they only brought her pain, making her heart empty. During a school trip, she meets a
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ghostly figure and is spirited away to an otherworldly forest. This world has lost one of it's gods, the Rainbow Lord, who shattered into fragments that grant wishes and corrupt their owners. When one of these fragments becomes embedded in her body, she becomes important to both those that wish for the rebirth of the Rainbow Lord and those that seek the end of this world.
Throughout this journey, Poyoko has to rediscover her feelings and memories while choosing the path for the future of this world.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Nov 5, 2023
It's an enjoyable movie, but it relies too much on it's source material.
Gridman Universe has a Super Smash Bros Ultimate attitude to writing. Everyone Is Here. Remember this character? Well, they are participating. Remember this powerup? It's being used again. A lot of the runtime of this movie is taken up with repeating exciting moments from the previous two seasons and letting every character show off all of their powers and abilities. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it makes the whole thing overstay it's welcome a bit. After a while, I looked at the runtime and got surprised how much of it was
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left.
When this movie does it's own thing, it's at it's best. My favourite scenes involve the slow unravelling of time and internal consistency that the universe is experiencing, with Yuuta seemingly being the only one to notice. I'd say watch it for just those scenes alone, even if the "remember when this happened???" stuff gets a bit much otherwise.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Sep 8, 2022
If you are reading this, I assume you've seen the Anime and wish to know how this story continues. You are in luck, because a fan translation of the light novel has recently been completed. I will be reviewing that translation as well, since we probably won't ever get an official translation for these novels.
Story:
Kamisama no Inai Nichiyoubi is a story about dreams, miracles and what it actually means for them to come true. This theme continues and is expanded upon in the novels that take part after the end of the Anime.
Personally, I would recommend you read the entirety of the novels, even the
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parts that the Anime covers. They sometimes go more into detail, giving you more time with characters that was abbreviated in the Anime, or showing different sides of them. The discussions of dreams and what it means to save the world often felt quite profound and the emotional scenes sometimes ended with me crying. If you really want to skip volumes though, which I don't recommend, read the World Tower section of volume 4, since that was left out of the anime, and then continue from volume 6 onwards.
The story continues to be fascinating and touching, but in my opinion, volume 6 is it's weakest part, showing many characters at a very low point in their lives while making it hard to understand why they are feeling that way unless you can really put yourself in their shoes. It picks back up after that, but I understand why the Anime ended where it did, even if I would have really liked to see the second half of the story animated.
Art:
The novels come with a few illustrations. These usually fit the mood and give you a look at the characters as well as important story moments. Most of the time I enjoyed the art, but there is one aspect I need to criticize. The depictions of the female character are overly sexual sometimes, giving suggestive almost panty shots when the mood of the situation is actually supposed to be very serious. There are even a small number of drawings with the characters naked in the bath, which made me pretty uncomfortable. I often read this on the train on my e-reader and I was worried one of those scenes would suddenly pop up. Thankfully they are rare.
Translation:
This will be a dealbreaker for some readers. The translation is a bit janky. The translator has since retired and we are highly unlikely to ever see an official translation, so I'll review it here as I read it. There are spelling mistakes, sometimes a sentence or even a small section is repeated twice, and the translator really struggles with pronouns at times. Most of the time it's fine, but sometimes Julie, the rough mature hunter, will have she/her pronouns, or the delicate Ai will go by he/him for a while. This happens seemingly at random and I don't understand how it could have happened, bit it is what it is.
Maybe these problems will turn you off, especially because they are extra frequent in the first volume, but they didn't really diminish my enjoyment of the story. The emotions get across, and that's what counts. I was smiling during happy scenes, on the edge of my seat during fights and crying during heart wrenching scenes, even if there was a spelling mistake here and there. I hope you can look past these problems and still enjoy these novels.
Final thoughts:
I'm constantly impressed by just how creative Kimihito Irie can be. So many of the fantastical events in these novels are really well thought out and make me want to steal the ideas for a roleplaying campaign or something. It's never just cool anime battles though, scenes carry an emotional weight and philosophical aspects which make them very enjoyable and engaging to read. If you liked the Anime, I highly recommend giving these novels a shot.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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May 6, 2022
I'm not sure how to feel about this novel.
Cage in Lunatic Runagate is a collection of 8 side stories, each told from the perspective of a different character during the events of Silent Sinner in Blue. These chapters give you background on the thoughts and motivations of the various participants of the story.
My problem with this novel is that it retreads old ground. For example, during the chapter focussed on Youmu, the characters mostly discuss the tradition around moon viewing and the associated snacks, which was already covered in Silent Sinner in Blue. ZUN likes giving lessons in mythology in his works, but that time
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he just repeated the same lesson a second time. Another chapter, this time with Yukari as the protagonist, spends most of it's pages discussing the influence the lunar capital has on gravity and the rotation of the moon.
My favourite chapter was the Mokou one, since it doesn't have much to do with the plot of Silent Sinner in Blue, but instead tells of the events that lead to her stealing the Hourai Elixir. It's a pretty emotional story and made me feel more than all the lore explanations in the rest of the novel taken together.
One thing I'd like to point out is that this novel has wonderful art. It's drawn by Tokiame, the artist for the Touhou fighting game Submerged Hell of Sunken Sorrow. It's drawn in a really unique ink style and well worth checking out, even if you otherwise aren't that interested in the novel's contents.
All in all, this work is okay. If you think about reading it, you are already deep into Touhou canon anyway, so you might enjoy at least some of the elaborations and background motives for Silent Sinner in Blue. The whole thing isn't very long either, so you don't lose much by reading it. If you are curious, go ahead and give it a shot, but don't expect a hidden masterpiece.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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May 6, 2022
This is a cute and colourful special that's well worth 25 minutes of your time.
The story takes place during the time of Motto Ojamajo Doremi and shows the encounters of the various witch apprentices with a young girl named Ayumi. Each of these encounters lets you see the personalities of the witches. My personal favourite is Aiko's episode, in which she does an improvised dance in the rain to cheer up Ayumi, but the other four also get their time to shine.
The animation is done in flash, but it doesn't look bad. The style is pretty different from other Doremi media, it's very round and
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colourful, drawn in pastel tones.
Other than that, I don't have that much to say about this special. If you are a Doremi fan and digging through obscure OVAs like these, you've found one of the better ones.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Apr 12, 2022
I'm glad these fanmade works exist. This is a very touching story with a darker theme and a lot of emotional impact. It's very different from what you'll get from the official Touhou Manga.
In this review I'll give a plot synopsis, so it will contain slight spoilers.
"The Gensokyo of Humans" is a story about Hieda no Akyuu, a character who hasn't featured in the games yet but appears in Memorizable Gensokyo and Forbidden Scrollery.
Akyuu has the ability of perfect memory. Her job is to write the Gensokyou Chronicle, and she has done so throughout multiple lifetimes, reincarnating for the ninth time now. She was born
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as the head of a great household, holding the important position as chronicler and suffering from a shortened lifespan due to her ability and reincarnation.
In this story, her health and mental state begins to rapidly deteriorate. She keeps seeing her cat, which died a year ago, and begins forgetting things she should be able to remember perfectly. While she slowly falls into despair and begins to doubt the purpose of her life as a chronicler, Reimu, Marisa and her best friend Motoori Kosuzu are frantically looking for a solution to the illness that has befallen her, refusing to admit the possibility that her life might be coming to an end naturally.
It's a very sombre story. The art is drawn in dark tones, the characters look slightly older and less cute than in many other works, and the themes are also darker than your usual Touhou storyline, centring mostly around loss and the meaning of life and death.
It might not be canon, but I highly recommend giving this a read.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Jan 23, 2022
The vibes of this OVA are fucked
The story idea is nice. Chloe, the girl Kanna met in the US, is coming over for a visit. They go on a trip to play around in Akihabara and on the next day hang out with Saikawa. But it's just so creepy at times that I can't enjoy it.
Dragon Maid is sadly no stranger to loli and shota fanservice. Especially the scenes with Shouta and Quetzalcoatl are terrible, but this one cranks it up a notch. Spending time with Kanna and Saikawa involves going swimming, of course featuring swimsuits and asshots of the little girl characters, and then
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playing Twister, with more asshots and them falling all over each other.
You know this shit is made for the lolicon audience. It didn't have to be like that, it could have just been a normal OVA, but they decided to make it raunchy and that sucks.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Nov 20, 2021
You are not missing out on anything with this one.
One of the big selling points of the first season was the setting. It wasn't just another school, it was a whole fantasy planet full of all sorts of stuff. The characters were well connected to the world, being the princes and princesses of their respective countries, and the story had a clear goal, stopping the sun from going out.
Now imagine you took all of these characters, stripped them both of their context in the world and most of their personality and transplanted them into a generic school setting.
This second season does not take place on
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the mysterious planet, but instead on a different world that has a school for royalty all the characters have to attend. The days of air balloon journeys around the hollow earth to stop the encroaching darkness are over, now it's time for school adventures, how exciting.
This school is strict though, it has rules against anything fun and will threaten to kick you out if you break them. Any time anything too fun happens, our generic Anime villain student council president will step in and summon shadow monsters to disrupt things, usually with very little success. The princesses then transform and engage in the least interesting battle sequences this genre has to offer, sprinkling the monsters with glitter until they vanish. They still have similar wish magic to the first season, but here it's used much less creatively, mostly to mass dispel shadow creatures or save someone from them.
The other character are present but sadly stripped of what made them enjoyable. Altessa is doing manzai comedy now, Shade apparently forgot his whip and will to fight at home and everyone else barely does anything either. Not particularly bothered by the mystery of the shadow creatures, they instead do stuff like leading the fencing club.
But hey, there are new characters as well, surely those are fun. The princesses now have Doremi fairies that help them transform, stripping Poomo of his role in the story. They are agents of chaos and usually just mess things up. Oh, there is a girl that says "fushigi" a lot, a character dedicated entirely to manzai jokes, the most annoying ojousama character I have ever seen and a boy that cries easily. I know, great lineup.
The story of this show feels like Satou Jun collected scripts for Doremi episodes that got scrapped for being too boring and made a show out of them. The setting has lost it's magic, being mostly school focussed now. Doremi was an excellent example of how to get great emotional impact from such a setting, but this doesn't happen here. You have episodes like the princesses helping an inventor construct a fart fuelled power generator or their fairies messing up the recipe of a baker. I barely even remember what the others were about, none of them left a positive impact.
My recommendation is to pretend this doesn't exist. It's not Futagohime anymore, it's some barely functional school Anime with the same character designs. Just watch Doremi instead or something.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Mar 10, 2021
Since these weird specials are all in circulation now, let me write a quick review after finishing them.
These mysterious specials are basically what it says on the tin, they teach traffic safety and recipes. The traffic safety episodes are only available in truly terrible video quality and even the audio feels weird, with them cutting down on the sounds of the usual transformation sequences. Maybe higher quality video will surface eventually, but for now these really don't look good.
Spoilers from here on, I'll describe the plot of each of the episodes:
In the first episode of this OVA, Doremi receives a surprise order for a cake
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delivery in a short timeframe. She manages to finish the cake with help from Pop and Onpu, but is almost out of time after doing so. So she grabs Pop and rushes through traffic, breaking all the rules and almost getting run over multiple times. When she arrives at the house of her client in time, it is revealed that the Witch Queen had ordered the cake and was watching her through her crystal. She chastises Doremi for her careless behavior, which leads to her returning to the Mahou Dou depressed. Onpu then uses magic to dress up in a cop uniform and shows her the rules of traffic safety, like how to cross a street properly and how traffic lights work. In the end, they visit the Witch Queen again and she congratulates Doremi on learning the rules and reveals that she was the one who asked Onpu to teach them to her.
In the second episode, Pop is challenged by Kimitaka to a bike race, since he just got a new fancy bike. The two go at it while Doremi and Momoko watch from their brooms in the sky. Focused on going fast, Kimitaka misses a turn and wrecks his new bike. He is saved from injury by magical intervention from Doremi, but the bike is broken. Momoko then uses magic to dress up in a battle rangers costume to teach the two the proper rules of bike safety, which is again all about traffic rules.
In the third episode, Pop is accused by Kimitaka and some classmates to not be able to bake like the other members of the Mahou Dou. She replies by saying she'll prove it by making them all delicious food, but quickly realizes she's in over her head. She asks Doremi and Momoko for help, and they create three dishes together. First they make pancakes, but Doremi makes too many, which leads to them making a cake out of the remaining ones, decorating them with cream and fruits. Lastly, they make little puddings that look like bunnies. Pop takes the sweets to her classmates and they are impressed. This last episode is noteworthy because it incorporates live action segments. Between explaining the recipes and showing lists of ingredients, the video repeatedly cuts to a little girl and an adult woman dressed in Doremi costumes who are replicating these recipes in a real kitchen.
There is also a fourth and fifth episode floating around, although they are not part of this OVA, but instead a simple recap of the second and third season with no new animation. Doremi is simply talking over clips of the seasons and explaining it's events. I just thought I'd mention them in case you come upon it.
All in all, this wasn't all that special. Doremi is a great franchise, but there isn't really all that much of it in here, with most of these episodes being focused on explaining traffic rules and recipes. If you still must seek these out for the small bits of unique story and animation, just make sure to brace yourself for the terrible video quality in the first two.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Sep 20, 2020
This show is quite the hidden gem.
It's an art project by Takashi Murakami and his team and has been released one or two episodes a year since the end of 2016. It's release history has been troubled and it's a testament to the perseverance of the team that they've gotten as far as they are now.
At one point, they created a whole pilot with a much different story and then scrapped it almost entirely to start over. You can find this pilot online, so it might also be worth a look if you are curious. Maybe once this show is finally completed and entirely subbed,
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it might gain some more recognition from western audiences.
It's a little hard to write about the story of 6HP, due to my limited grasp on the language, but thankfully, the first two episodes have been subbed already at the time of me writing this, which makes my job a little easier.
6HP takes place in a beautiful city within a wasteland. A catastrophe in the past has destroyed much of earth and humanity seems to be losing it's ability to reproduce, slowly dwindling in numbers. In this city, our protagonist, an ordinary albeit dorky school girl, has a prophetic dream and is later dragged into a magical conflict. The Moon Cats are at war with the Earth Dogs. The latter are using Sin Fragments, magic stones embodying the seven sins of humanity, to create monsters while working towards an unknown goal. The Moon Cats each carry a Heart Sphere, which can allow a person chosen by them to become a Heart Princess and fight the creations of the Earth Dogs.
All of this is quite pretty and well made. I especially love the backgrounds of this show. They city is an interesting place and it's quite fun to just pause and look at all the details in places like the hill covered in giant windmills or the shrine they visit early on.
If you are in the mood for something obscure and artsy, I recommend you check this one out. Even if you are watching it without subs for most of it's runtime, it should still be a good time just based on the art alone. I hope 6HP grows a little more of a following, because it deserves it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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