Weiss & Ramblings

As I now pour over this season's list of completed titles, it's hitting me hard to realize just how mediocre Summer 2018 was for anime. Other than one or two notable standouts, which unfortunately also happen to be sequels, the offerings this time around failed to rouse more than a resounding "meh" from me. This isn't to say the majority of shows were terrible, but rather offensively middle-of-the road. This is the worst kind of bad, and it has the unique quality of being the hardest to write about. That being said, this round of reviews is going to be one hell of a slog, so forgive me if it ends up coming out ludicrously late. Ya'll know the deal by now: ratings are done inside-genre, so don't get livid when they're a little higher or lower than what the review would entail. You can only really compare something this broad and subjective to its in-genre contemporaries, especially with something as baseless as a number value. Like I said, most of t

Spring this year was the typical mixed bag that we've become used to for the past few seasons. While there were a couple notable shows that generated an incredible amount of hype, there was more than enough "bleh" to even the scales. With a shockingly low amount of relevant sequels, new original works and adaptations proved that they can continue to surprise and hold an audience past most fan's staunch "3 episode" rules. I'd hazard to guess that for this spring, there were a lot more keeps than drops across the community, not that I would ever know myself. Yes, my "no drop" quest is still in full effect, and even if some shows this spring tried their hardest to break me, I've still held strong. If this is your first time with me for one of these, I'll give you a quick primer: this is primarily a list of closing thoughts and brief analysis for the anime I watched during the past season. At the end of each, I'll throw out my score.

As 2018 started kicking into full gear for me, with spring on the horizon, a previously silent obligation started to crescendo in the back of my head. Yes, it was about that time… about time to suffer through the experience of a single player video game. While I've become  a bit distanced  from this pasttime in recent years, I try to make it a point to at least consume one each year, at least to see if anything has changed. Last year's endeavor ( NieR: Automata ) left me hopeful for what was to come in the story-driven space for video games, so going all in on the narrative seemed to be the appropriate choice. Since this yearly dive is done purely in the interest of loathsome performance art in order to cultivate a smug sense of superiority about media, the longer and more obtuse the game, the better. It was at that point I remembered the hype around a certain game: a JRPG that released in the holiday of the previous year, of a series I was all too familiar with.  Xenoblade Ch

As a current anime's time in the limelight waxes and wanes into the dark obscurity known only as "last season", the combined MyAnimeList user-base's unfinishable plan-to-watch backlog grows ever larger. Few watchers today tread beyond the comfortable shallowness of a standard, cyclical anime season into the unknown depths of anime-less-traveled, as the community's collective memory since 2012 seems shrunk to that of three months or less. Still, there's something to be said for those brave viewers, those that binge-dive into the masses of anime beyond the "Seasonal" tab on MAL's front page. Gone are the watch threads and community reactions that can guide your tastes, replaced instead by a sorry excuse for a synopsis by MAL and some smatterings of cover art. Forced to think for themselves, many seasonal watchers crumble under the pressure, and find themselves floating back to the shallow shores of the cycling seasons. But others find themselves en