Spring 2018 Anime in Review
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. I try to rate in-genre, versus a show's most relevant contemporaries, so if scores seem a little higher even after a swift bashing, that's likely why. I don't limit myself to any minimum or maximum for review size, so the variance in review length might be pretty high. Oh, and I only review shows that ended in a given season, so stuff like HeroAca S3 and P5A won't be covered here.
Before we get started, I figured I'd break down some basic stats for this season at the top. I watched 19 shows this season, clocking in at 241 episodes total. That translates to about 94 or so hours, or a smidgen over 4 full days. That said, there's a lot to cover, so let's dive right in to Spring 2018.
Genre: Sports, CGCS, Idol
Studio: PA Works
Streaming: Crunchyroll
Recent anime has proven time and time again that it can make adaptations of even the most mundane content into an interesting product with enough spit and polish. Crazily enough, Uma Musume was no exception to this rule. With an idea this incredibly stupid, this unbelievably dumb, it would take a lot of elbow grease, but PA Works put their nose to the grindstone and produced a lovable, heartfelt, and surprisingly well written show. If you've been out of touch with seasonal anime lately, you're probably a little confused about Uma Musume, but it's just as simple as the key art paints it to be. This is a show about a world of horse girls, horse girl racing, and horse girl... idol concerts? Yes, the absurdity just keeps on coming and never really stops, and you can blame Cygames' insane gatcha mobile game for that. In that game, you raise horses to race to the finish line and perform in idol events. It's a weird combination that is obviously aiming to steal Love Live, IM@S, and BanG Dream market share while side-stepping rhythm elements, also being aimed at the more nekomimi-inclined. Well I guess this would be uma-mimi? Umami? Isn't that a food thing? Whatever.
Cygames likely learned a lot from the popularity of their previous adaptations, writing a blank check to PA Works to adapt Uma Musume how they saw fit, similar to how they handled Madhouse's Bahamut series. Yes, the core concepts are there, but outside of some random horse girl cameos, the show is laser focused on Team Spica and their efforts to become horse racing champions. More specifically, Uma Musume is all about the story of Special Week, a backwoods country horsegirl who comes to the city in order to become "the fastest horse girl in all of Japan". Quickly snatched up into Spica, Spe-chan becomes enamored with Silence Suzuka and pledges to race with her one day. In the most predictable anime twist of all time, they become roommates and then friends and then rivals. Did I mention this all takes place at some sort of horse girl boarding school? Uma Musume relies on the novelty of its "hook" to provide any intrigue into its world, letting the wayside fall into a tired and generic sea of anime "bleh". While I don't think the whole horse girl thing is enough to carry the show as some kind of slice-of-life, it's at least enough to get us into our characters, their motivations, and most importantly, the races.
Special Week is our star of the show here, and although she is a pretty typical sports anime protagonist, PA Works put a lot of effort into making her come off as genuine and, ironically, human. She is put up to succeed in the standard anime theatrical comebacks time and time again throughout her racing career, but Uma Musume repeatedly does something that helps you empathize with not only Special Week, but all of its characters: they repeatedly fail. And not just an "aw shucks I lost" either; I'm talking depressing losses that affect Team Spica's later performance, mental health, and physical condition. When Spe-chan loses, she gets so down on herself that she runs herself ragged, gains a bunch of weight, and starts to lose her drive to compete. This type of sports narrative, while not at all original, is a welcome and effective device for keeping us interested between races. Races are pretty damn hype for something with this dumb of a premise, and outside of some spotty occasional CGI, are pretty well animated to boot. PA Works leverages its off-race character drama into the races themselves in a similar way to how HeroAca uses its fights to resolve that same type of drama. The result is not only an explosion of hype once the gates open on the green, but also serves to make the horse girls in question more relatable and endearing to the audience.
So, other than some decent sports narrative, what else is on the bone for Uma Musume? The unfortunate answer is "not much"; the show really doubles down on what it has. The upside of this is we get to see our characters experience a good bit of the standard sports anime narrative arcs: overcoming personal failings, overcoming injury, overcoming rivals. Notice how there's a lot of "overcoming"? PA Works really pushes for Uma Musume to be as uplifting as possible to send a message of achieving your dreams through hard work, and I have to say that the production is a success in that regard. The animation, framing, and even the music pair perfectly to drive home the story, which although not uncommon for this studio, is nice to see in such an advertisement-focused anime. However, for every upside, there's a downside too: remember how I mentioned those random cameos for in-game characters? That visual schizophrenia can make the art downright mind-boggling to absorb sometimes. There are regularly so many cacophonous character designs on screen that I can't even decipher what's happening. This is a shame, as it really ruins the show's usually warm color pallet and good use of lighting. Character designs across the board are a bit gaudy for my taste, but this is a mobile game adaptation. Those whales that paid 500,000 JPY for their favorite horse waifu must be satiated with an exact replication of the character design; muting loud art is unacceptable in these situations, no matter how much PA Works likely tried to do so.
While my opinions might seem like a bit split above, I have to say that this show was a great amount of fun. An absurd premise adapted beautifully into something the game's creators could never have imagined, Uma Musume never fails to surprise with its hype races, great characters, and clever details. If you're looking for a fun, crazy show to pass the time, or maybe crack a few beers and enjoy with friends, this crazy horse girl show might actually fit the bill.
Score: 7.5/10
Title: Wotaku ni Koi wa Muzukashii
Genre: Romantic Comedy
Studio: A-1 Pictures
Streaming: Crunchyroll
WotaKoi is not a very complex show; it's your typical "romcom with a twist" offering from this past spring, with the twist being that our two main couples are all otaku. Although it's refreshing to see adult characters in an office environment, the rest of the show is about what you'd expect. You get to see these two couples be awkward yet adorable as they figure out how to exist in a relationship when someone possesses the most frightening property: sharing your interests. While playing on that bit "being a negative" is funny for the first few episodes, it quickly grows tired, with the show quickly devolving into montage of office bullpens and restaurants sans a few departures from that norm. It's good thing our main cast is so charming, because the settings and situations they're thrust into each episode are usually enough to put me to sleep.
Naru and Hirotaka both bring different things to the table, but effectively represent the "new" couple. They slowly ease into the new experience of being in a relationship with an otaku, and near the end of the show finally reach a level of openness and caring that both of them (particularly Naru) realizes they likely wouldn't have found without a bridge of interests. Hirotaka struggles with a lot of internal issues, him feeling his otaku interests have caused him to bloom late or be undesirable, where Naru has mostly faced external ramifications for her interests, such as losing previous boyfriends or being shunned by coworkers. Conversely, Hanako and Kabakura represent the "older" couple. They've long gotten over the novelty of being with another otaku, and have progressed to a level begrudging acceptance to the differences in each other's otaku tastes. While they are more of a packaged deal than Naru and Hirotaka, this couple is mainly for providing an example of Hanako's relative openness with her interests versus Kabakura's closeted nature. While the show plays with these themes for both couples pretty frequently, they are very quickly sidelined for jokes at both characters' expenses. These range from the highly intellectual "ur a nerd l0l"-tier to some that hit pretty well, but its never anything really laugh-out-loud hilarious. Sometimes, you do break through the average-or-worse humor and get an adorable, heartfelt moment, but those moments are small in number compared to the large amount of cheap reference jokes and tired jabs.
None of this is to say that the show is overtly bad, it's just pretty painfully average. And in a season where the only real romcom competition is Tada-kun, it makes it really hard for me to recommend WotaKoi as anything more than a title doomed to the depths of a plan-to-watch list.
Score: 6/10
Title: Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card-hen
Genre: Magical Girl
Studio: Madhouse
Streaming: Crunchyroll
Full disclosure: I grew up on Cardcaptor Sakura. It was the first anime that I remember explicitly "as anime". Airing before Pokémon on Kids WB, it was a joyride that brings back those memories of waking up early on Saturday mornings to watch the shows that would one day become the basis of my media consumption for likely the rest of my life. However brightly or darkly that paints your picture of me, it is what it is. While a degree of bias is inevitable, I'm going to try my best to remain impartial, but no promises. Whew, alright, now let's jump into Clear Card proper.
The unbridled levels of hype that occurred when Madhouse announced they would be adapting the straight sequel to the original 70 episode run came with a bit of trepidation for most. Outcries against the new character designs and fears of tarnishing an anime classic were the norm up until Clear Card's air date. Thankfully, Madhouse held up their end of the hype train. Bringing such an old anime series into 2018 was no easy task, but the production team made it work to beautiful effect. Reimagined but still CLAMP-manga-true character designs are a joy to watch both at rest and in motion, accompanied by a modernized reprisal of the original series' musical score. Just like the original Cardcaptor Sakura of old, the new series is no stranger to bursts of good ol' on-cel sakuga, but Madhouse bringing CCS into the modern age shows they can create some draw-dropping still scenes too. The return of almost the entire original Japanese voice cast is an absolute treat. Even Tomoyo's original VA is back! God bless Iwao-san for still hitting the same notes today in that iconic, high-pitched, larynx-killer of a voice that she did twenty years ago. And Tomoyo isn't the only performance where the VA's passion for the series bleeds through: all the original cast bring some incredible voice performances, noticeable even through the language barrier. The full package had to bridge a 20 year gap, and on the backs of Madhouse and the VA, I have to say they've succeeded.
So, series revamping aside, how does Clear Card stack up against the original two core animated arcs? The short answer is that it's really just more of the same; if you're a longtime fan of CCS or don't mind a very classical, by-the-book magical girl show, there's going to be a lot to like here. Clear Card is a bit of blending of Clow and Sakura Card arcs, meshing the monster-of-the-week formula from the former with the outsider intrigue of the latter. Sakura's beloved now-pink cards go silent, with new transparent, glass cards appearing sporadically in their stead. While there is narrative purpose for it, the rehashing of previous cards tends to be a bit of a mixed bag. Some are revised well and must be approached very differently than their Clow "counterparts", while others are simply the same card with a fresh coat of paint. Cards also seem mostly stripped of their personalities, so don't expect any "Mirror" or "Dash" moments in Clear Card. This is the weakest point of this new season, and although it is balanced out by some truly new abilities and some great action animation, it's still a point of note. The unique and "human" presence of the original Clow cards is a big reason why so many people fell in love with CCS in the late 90's, so it's a shame that Clear Card is sorely lacking in those moments.
This is where it becomes hard for me to write about Clear Card as anything other than a huge fan of the series, because if there's one thing that it does best, it's satiate us with a massive amount of resolution and "After Story" for the original run's character arcs. Viewers get to see Sakura and Syaoran be a real couple, Tomoya and Yukito pick up the pieces after Tomoya's sacrifice, Meiling grow past her childhood love, and of course, Sakura unknowingly grow into an even more powerful mage. While some of this is pretty blatant fanservice (in the classical definition of the word), the other bits are woven seamlessly into Clear Card's narrative. Our favorite childhood characters are starting to grow up, albeit slowly, and this season brings that fact to the forefront. As a "third" season to an incredibly long running series, it's not fair to fault Clear Card for focusing on these bits; this is an adaptation produced solely out of love for the original story, and those who have patiently waited and yearned for it should be rewarded. It's a bit upsetting that this direction causes Clear Card's actual plot to fall to the backdrop most of the time, even with our two or three new "antagonists" not getting much development, but none of this is enough to devalue it overall. Any long-running series worth watching has heavily character-focused sections, and CCS is thankfully no exception.
To wrap this up so that I can stop gushing about this show, I'll close with that this is definitely not a sequel than you can just "pick up" without being intimately familiar with the original. A CCS virgin who starts on Clear Card would be incredibly lost, and likely frustrated with the backseat nature of this season's main plot. However, I do believe that Clear Card even greater justifies the worth in watching the original 70-episode series. Getting to see a 20-year gap closed by the same animation studio that started it all is something that any fan of 2D animation can appreciate. There are countless nods and even entire cuts that hearken back to those late 90's Saturday mornings, from the OPs and EDs all the way down to those sweet, sweet sakuga skating scenes. Even if I am a longtime fan, far too gone down the rabbit hole of bias to ever speak on CCS impartially, I implore you to watch the original Cardcaptor Sakura. It's a classic Madhouse passion project that laid the groundwork for so many magical girl series to come, and I couldn't be happier that the same studio brought it back for one more go.
Score: 9/10
Title: Hinamatsuri
Genre: Comedy
Studio: feel.
Streaming: Crunchyroll
It's been a while since we had a truly good gag anime in the seasonal rotation, and Hinamatsuri ended up filling that vacancy pretty well. The story of the life and times of a yakuza boss and his new adoptive psychic daughter is as ridiculous of a setup as any for comedy, and thankfully the shtick is used pretty well all the way up to the end. The cast is enormous for an anime of this type, but the show leverages it well by giving us half-episode snapshots culminating in either tender moments or the eventual punchline. Yes, despite being a comedy anime, Hinamatsuri isn't afraid to turn on the feels to a surprising degree of competence. If there's a message to be told here that isn't jokes, it's a good bit of heartfelt family values, and even if they might come out of left field, they're a welcome break from the show's extended jokes. Like most comedy anime, Hinamatsuri is subject to the same "hard miss, hard hit" factor; there are definitely entire 12-minute sections that aren't at all funny or even interesting. These are usually the non-Hina sections, as watching Nitta and Hina interact is nearly always entertaining and their comedic timing always seems to be a cut above the rest. Hitomi's charmed professional life is also regularly a riot, but Anzu's stint as a homeless person falls flat early. There is payoff for her narrative in some sweet moments with her later-adoptive family, but it doesn't do much to assuage the first eight or so episodes from a good few "misses".
Production-wise, Hinmatsuri is uncharacteristically well put together. Music and visuals mesh pretty well, keeping the tone light unless the scene demands a touch of drama. Studio feel. creates a pretty lively cityscape for how little of it we actually get to see, and even provides some pretty impressive sakuga even if it's only in service of a one-off gag. The visuals do have a certain degree of "A-1 face" sameness to them, especially with the younger characters. Barring hairstyles, pretty much all female and male characters look almost identical, which can be pretty jarring when the focus shifts so quickly between different groups of characters. Other than that, Hinamatsuri succeeds in being a cut above what a comedy anime would have in terms of animation and art, which is all the more a feather in its cap when paired with above average comedic beats.
I wish I had more to say about this one but I really don't. Hinamatsuri is a simple comedy with charming characters and some heartfelt messages about family, and there's a good bit of value in that simplicity.
Score: 7.5/10
Title: Lostorage Conflated WIXOSS
Genre: Children's Card Games, Magical Girl
Studio: J.C. Staff
Streaming: Crunchyroll
We're back for the fourth season of our favorite "trading cards x mahou shoujo" anime extravaganza... and not much has changed since the last season. This sequel "arc" of WIXOSS still has the same problems that I felt Lostorage Incited did, and that's a nagging feeling that there's no real reason for much of the action to be happening. Selector was a perfectly complete story; it had a damn near great conclusion and in no way warranted a direct sequel. Maybe a spin-off with a new group of characters, sure, but unfortunately this new season threw that out the window. Ruuko, Hitoe, Yuzuki, Tama, and even Akira make a reprisal appearance among Lostorage's new core cast, and not only does their appearance muddy the waters on our new group that had potential, but undermine the past versions of themselves from Selector. To make matters worse, our new group of characters still feel heavily removed and act far too irrationally for my taste, which is all the more bitter when Selector acted with so much purpose and heart. So, even if we throw old dreams of Selector to the wayside, taking Lostorage at face value as much as possible, can this last chapter make up for these previous missteps?
The short answer is an obvious no, but I have to hand Lostorage a little credit for trying its hardest to dig itself out. While the previous season (the first half of Lostorage) felt like shitty WIXOSS fanfiction, this closing entry tries to bring the series back to those dramatic, horror roots that were so powerful in Selector. Funnily enough, this change in tone isn't due directly due to the reprisal of old characters... or rather, old characters that we were cognizant of. Enter Mizushima Kiyoi, or as you may remember her from Selector, Piruluk. This character is the reason why Lostorage can claw its way back into being a "damaged but acceptable" entry into the WIXOSS canon. Unlike Suzuko's plight with Chi that took center stage last season, Kiyoi's desire to end the Selector battles forever rings true. Mentally destroyed by the realization of her actions as a LRIG, as well as the tragedy of her friend Ayumi at her own hands, she hardens her heart to take down the White Room and put a stop to Selector battles for eternity. While not nearly as engaging as Selector's use of Mayu as the big bad, this focus for the second half of Lostorage hearkens back to the body-swapping Selector-LRIG drama that was pivotal in creating most of Selector's narrative weight. Kiyoi's internal quest for redemption pairs well with the falling action of the arc, bringing together Selectors both new and old to end the circle of suffering. This is a classic case of one character "putting the show on their backs", but luckily for Lostorage, Kiyoi is the major focus this time around. With her efforts, most of the repeated "meh" still hanging around from Lostorage Incited can be swept under the rug.
When I say repeated, I mean it literally. There is a LOT of re-used and re-hashed plot beats directly ripped from the first half of this arc. While Kiyoi and even our old group starts to blaze a new path towards ending Selector battles in a blaze of glory, our original fan-fiction group of Suzuko, Chi, and Hanna spins in place, reiterating over and over the same implications of losing battles and how they don't want that to happen. Yes, there is a new antagonist in the form of Kaeda, a battle-bent berserker of a Selector who wants nothing more than to die fighting. Kaeda has a fairly well realized moment with Ruuko, nodding back to Selector's highlight of Ruuko's internal struggles with enjoying the death game of battles, but she's nothing more than a boogeyman to Suzuko. Hanna, her narrative complete with the return of the gruesome manslaughter of her younger brother, is content to simply be strung along for the ride, adding nothing but infodump commentary at every turn. Chi's wrestling with the loss of her memories is about as cheap a plot device as you can get, and it's not well executed either. I can't help but feel like Lostorage started out as a fairly directionless project, and once JC Staff realized that focusing on Kiyoi and her efforts would be a better wrap-up, they promptly "threw out" their failed characters. Even then, they didn't commit hard enough to removing them from the story, leaving the show with far too many unneeded "hanging on"s.
For all their missteps with the plot, JC Staff did pull through at the end of it all and kept up the production quality as well. The more-rounded, more moe character designs show up again in this ending entry in Lostorage, but they still work well enough to give at least some of that same darkness that was so well loved in Selector. At the end of the day, there is only so much that can be done to save such an unnecessary and marred product. Even with the best of efforts, I don't think Lostorage will ever become the hidden gem that Selector is. It will become yet another forgotten memory in an endless sea of plan-to-watch and dropped lists, which is probably where it should stay.
Score: 6.5/10
Title: Mahou Shoujo Ore
Genre: Comedy, Magical Girl
Studio: Pierrot Plus
Streaming: Crunchyroll
What an absolute dumpster fire. The only real thing this one had going for it was an initial burst of marketing, starting with an early airing of the show's first episode. It was funny enough for a pilot, but after hearing the same joke ten times in the first fifteen minutes of the second episode, I knew that this one was destined for the trash pile. Animation dropped from baseline acceptable to nightmare fuel, art direction was never good, and there's no action or comedy to speak of. With a concept so ripe for parody, especially in recent years, you'd think that there was no way it could be this bad, but it is. Stay very, very far away. This was the worst show of the season by a long shot.
Score: 2/10
Title: Mahou Shoujo Site
Genre: Drama, Magical Girl, EDGE
Studio: production doA
Streaming: Crunchyroll
Do you think that edge for the sake of edge can be a lot of fun? Then this is undoubtedly the show for you. Just in the first episode, there are multiple instances of attempted suicide, rape, and murder, as well as some horrific bullying. This sort of thing continues throughout all twelve episodes, and the show not only revels in it, but celebrates it. If you can shrug off this kind of stuff as comedic, then more power to you, but for many, Site is going to be a pretty hard sell. In the least surprising twist since Magical Girl Suffer Expo 2018, Site is all about unfortunate girls getting gifted a magic stick from a mysterious website. These sticks have incredible powers that activate through use of, you guessed it, the user's life. Oh, and when they're used, they cause spontaneous bleeding and edgelord eyes. If not taken seriously, this could be seen as a fine parody of just how out of hand some dark magical girl content has gotten over the years, but throughout all my time with Site, I just can't help but feel that the writer (mistakenly) thought they actually had made something prolific.
Gruesome actions for shock's sake are the name of the game in Site. Not five minutes will go by without some sort of fucked up action taking place on screen. You name it, it happens in Site; when I said this kind of stuff was celebrated in this show, I was NOT kidding. Despite this, the plot setup is fairly standard as we move from "collect the sticks, save the world" to "kill the big boss, save the world". In true magical girl fashion, enemies become friends, murderers become allies, and... wait, what? Yes, the level of fucked up things characters do and are not punished for throughout the story is absurd, and at one point our group calmly and openly accepts multiple literal magical girl murderers into their fold. Viewers are going to need some heavy suspension of disbelief, or at the very least alcohol, to make it through these main plot beats without getting whiplash. To make matters worse, the show doesn't even have the common decency to end with any sort of resolution, and if the poor visual quality and constant corner cutting is any indication, we'll never see the end of this one.
None of this is to say that Site can't be a good time. If you can get yourself in the right headspace to watch a mediocre rendition of depressed magical girls beating the shit out of each other, then have at it. But be warned: this isn't a battle-royale like Raising Project was, this is a straight up, hard-to-watch bloodbath. Those with weak stomachs, be advised.
Score: 4.5/10
Title: Caligula
Genre: Action, Mystery, Game
Studio: Satelight
Streaming: Crunchyroll
What exactly happened in Caligula? Does anyone really know? As the runner up for "worst of season", I came into this one with a good bit of promise. The PVs looked pretty interesting, but I quickly learned what level of trash that I'd just signed up for. Turns out, this show is some sort of shitty PSP game adaptation, and for all its unique character designs and interesting yet ridiculous powers, it fell into the same bullshit that all isekai and soft-isekai fall into. There was some sort of hinting at playing with some pretty heavy ideas, like learning to accept or be yourself, and that running from reality is harmful, but Caligula repeatedly threw it all away in favor of standard anime garbage. Not to mention, characters act at random, plot comes out of nowhere with no prompting or reason, and important facts are mentioned passingly as if the viewer was supposed to have some magical foreknowledge of them. Then, the show has the gall to pull some sort of hackneyed 11th hour twist that just makes the whole show feel like even more of a dumpster fire. At the end of it all, at least Satelight tried to make the look characters interesting, even if they were all empty husks. That's about the only praise I can hand out to this trash.
Score: 3/10
Title: Golden Kamuy
Genre: Action, Adventure, Mystery
Studio: Geno Studio
Streaming: Crunchyroll
Golden Kamuy stands as proof that anything can be ruined if you try hard enough. This show started out with a strong premise, wasn't set in high school, and had some pretty endearing characters, then shit all over itself until the original vision just didn't exist anymore. Everything from stupid one-off episodes, to bad animation, to horrific CG bears, Golden Kamuy seemed to do everything it could to make me hate it, but I could never help but feel hopeful. To make matters worse, this is yet another series that didn't have the decency to end with any sort of closure, and even if the second season is a short hop and a skip away, I certainly won't be continuing. Even if I started off hooked by Sugimoto and Asirpa's quest for the motherload of gold, Golden Kamuy is proof that even the most novel of ideas and characters really can't salvage terrible production quality. I wish I had more to say about why this show is bad, like any sort of narrative or character fault that made an otherwise fun experience into a bad one, but I don't. Bad art, animation, and direction are strong enough to destroy even the most powerful original ideas.
Score: 3/10
Title: Megalobox
Genre: Sports, Drama
Studio: TMS Entertainment
Streaming: Crunchyroll
This is a series about robotically assisted boxing set in a hypercapitalist dystopia, played as a mix between sports anime and film noir. In this world, this new form of boxing is called "megaloboxing", where competitors strap themselves with mechanical arm supports and box with superhuman strength. Enter JD, an underground megaloboxer who's stuck losing rigged fights just to get by. When the mafia catches up with him and his "coach", they make a bet on JD's skill to pay off their debt, and strive to become the Megaloboxing champions. JD takes up the name "Joe", aiming to take down the current champion, Yuri, and prove his worth among the greats in this world of future boxing.
With a lead-in like that, it's no wonder that Megalobox garnered as much of a following as it did, and its impressive pedigree sure didn't hurt either. A 50th anniversary passion project for the classic boxing manga, Ashita no Joe, Megalobox is an original project from the minds of those same creators. To paint us this story is the combination of Moriyama You (Redline, Shingeki no Kyojin, Lupin the III, and more) directing and Shimizu Hiroshi creating character designs. If you're not familiar with Hiroshi, you're likely among the many who unfortunately haven't experienced Michiko to Hatchin. This is a series that exudes a certain style and atmosphere, employing a jazz noir aesthetic across the board that pops most in Hiroshi's characters. While Megalobox might opt for a harder, more rock aesthetic, that same personality pops just as well here as it did in his previous work. Add in You's backgrounds and masterfully shot composition, and you end up with multiple killer cuts every episode. Megalobox a visual knockout from start to finish, helped along by masterfully paired original score that brings the hype for boxing bouts and never fails to set the perfect mood for those more muted moments. If there was anything to complain about, it's the infamous decision to render this series in 480P for a "classic" effect. While I don't agree that this decision does much, and that it's more of the art direction and character design that give Megalobox this late 90s or early 2000s anime feel, I can only hope that the BD version includes the 1080P release that the series deserves. However, if you have an even remotely modern screen and watch a high-bitrate copy of the show, the upscaling will easily keep up the action.
The aesthetic might be the draw, but Megalobox's narrative doesn't pull any punches either. It's a fairly classic tale of the underdog, but as with most things, supreme execution can abate any misgivings with a bit of unoriginality, and execution is something that this show nails time and time again. Each fight builds to a hype conclusion, again utilizing the narrative trick of resolving character arcs and plot beats with a swift right hook or nasty uppercut. Despite Megalobox being a parade of fights up until the end, it manages to never feel that way with some excellent pacing, avoiding the pitfalls of many a sports or tournament anime. Our cast is pretty damn deep as well, each having their own motivations that flesh out the world behind Joe's straightforward goals. Nanbu is our second biggest player here, and even if his darkened background and eventual quest for redemption are, again, not exactly original, they add a needed counterplot to Joe's. This culminates in the two sides of this road to the top clashing marvelously, but unfortunately wrapping up with a slightly unfulfilling conclusion. It's nothing that detracts meaningfully from the story of our key players, but for such a high-profile and well-executed show, I expected a lot more than we were given. However, I am a sucker for an artsy cold exit, so Megalobox gets some extra points in that regard.
Overall, I can't recommend Megalobox enough. This is when some truly great talent comes together for a real passion project, and that passion shows in every frame. Even if sports anime aren't your thing, please give this one a try.
Score: 9/10
Title: Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online
Genre: Slice-of-Life, Action, Game
Studio: Studio 3Hz
Streaming: Crunchyroll
You think that I would have learned by now; that the whole community had learned by now, not to get excited about new Sword Art Online content. But...what's this? SAO, but written by a different author and animated by a different studio? Hearing this, we all stumbled helplessly into Kawahara's bottomless pit yet again, hopeful that some new talent could glean hope on one of the most marred-yet-popular isekai series known to the human race. Now that we're through to the other side, riddled with bullet holes and exhausted from two consecutive battle royales, how did PUBG's anime adaptation hold up? The answer is surprisingly well, so much so that SAO Alternative: Gun Gale Online is undoubtedly the best entry into the SAO pantheon, ever.
The good starts with our characters. Gone are the overpowered, emotionless husks like Kirito, and what replaces them are a cast of relatable and fairly realistic gamers. This begins with our main character, Karen, known in-game as LLENN. She doesn't play games because she is a power-gamer or a "beater", and hell, she doesn't even play VR games because she wants to. Karen is extremely tall, far over 6-foot, and she's incredibly embarrassed about it, to the point of having a complex. She starts playing full-dive games because she longs for an escape from her "hell" of living in such a tall body, and performs endless resets until she finally randomly receives a chibi avatar. GGO was far from her first game of choice, and her insistence on playing a small, cute avatar is the only reason she sticks around to "make lemonade" out of her lucky avatar roll. While this still plays into the frankly idiotic staple of SAO's world that your avatar is randomly rolled and IP-locked, it's a well-executed character trait for Karen, something that hasn't yet existed in SAO's canon. We watch as LLENN makes friends and falls deeper into GGO's absurdly harsh and violent nature, due in part to a budding relationship with the gun-crazy Pitohui. Karen, even as LLENN, is reserved and quiet despite her apparent natural gift for the game, while Pito slowly leads her to the crazier, more unkempt fantasies that GGO allows one to indulge in. While this sounds a little heavy, GGO's greatest quality is that it never takes itself too seriously in its premise, being more of a sports slice-of-life more than an attempted serious action drama. No, despite the title and setting, GGO couldn't be farther from SAO II, so don't let that association scare you off from starting this one.
The actual plot of GGO is, like I said, a more slice-of-life affair. LLENN, Pito, and our ensemble cast are just playing games even if the action does rise to super-intense fever-pitches. Some weird original SAO-style darkness does rear its ugly head at about the midway point, but its consequence to the plot is fairly minimal and is easily forgotten, dumb as it may be. It's a help that the show is, while not jaw-dropping, quite visually impressive. The gun-fights are very well choreographed, and we get to see some crushingly brutal action due to the blood being "a game". Yes, it's a pretty blatant censor-sidestep, and the show definitely abuses it, so if you're squeamish you may want to shy away from this one. The art and animation themselves are nothing amazing, but the character designs are at least cute where they need to be. I can't help but compare GGO to cute-girls-cute-shit shows, because it really does feel that way despite the ultra-high level of violence. At its core, GGO is appealing to that sort of audience instead of the more serious, "lore"-driven focus of mainline SAO, and it's in that lightness that GGO succeeds.
This is another series I have to announce some bias in: gun girls are kind of my "thing", always have been. Despite that, I think this one is more than worth a shot for not only SAO fans, but SAO-haters as well. It at the very least proves that it's not the setting or premise that are the issue, but rather an inept, bumbling author. Of course, GGO isn't without its issues either, but nothing here is enough to yank you out of full-dive like SAO has been has been doing since 2009.
Score: 7.5/10
Title: Tada-kun wa Koi wo Shinai
Genre: Romance, Comedy
Studio: Doga Kobo
Streaming: Amazon Prime
From the same director as Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun comes a brand-new, anime-original romantic comedy that filled the void of worthwhile entries into the genre over the past year. Yamazaki Mitsue is a master at creating moments of both romantic levity and drama. She also, of course, creates a colorful and varied cast of intense personalities that although add a fair bit of comedy just with their surface actions, are deeper and more complex than you might initially give them credit for. I can't help but continually compare this to Nozaki-kun, because it just feels so similar, like Tada-kun was the romance story that she wanted to tell back then but was restricted by a more comedy-focused source. This isn't to say that the content or characters are at all same; it's more of an aesthetic and atmospheric similarity that can instantly charm and draw in the viewer. If there was a singular greatest strength of the series, it's this, and combined with the trademark adorable character designs of Kikuchi Ai, stellar backgrounds, and clean animation makes Tada-kun an easy series to fall in love with.
Backing up to the characters again, they are the central focus of this show. Like many a romcom before it, Tada-kun opts to set up some fated pairs as early as episode one. Over these short thirteen episodes, we get a chance to see each of these relationships grow over time to an extent, but the focus is on our main characters, Mitsuyoshi and Teresa. Their love story is so charming and sweet that I don't want to spoil any of the details, but if I had any complaints with their narrative, or all of Tada-kun in general, it's that it's sorely predictable and eventually falls into some overused tropes that it had tried so hard to avoid. Love triangle stuff is so overused (if you can really call any narrative device in a romcom that), so it's unfortunate when it rears its ugly head in the second half of the show. It's forgivable and executed well, and with the narrative being as it was, it was inevitable, but something about the eleventh hour of Tada-kun makes it sting more than usual. That something is likely that I wished for something more original for these wonderful characters, but thankfully even with a short episode count, Yamazaki wraps everything up nicely for us with heart-melting finale. Getting to see her direct a romance all the way to its resolution is something I've been waiting for since Nozaki-kun, and it's certainly something to behold.
If you are even a passing fan of the genre, I don't think you can do much better than Tada-kun wa Koi wo Shinai. Lovable characters, adorable art, great comedy, and a heartwarming romance that can melt even the most frozen of hearts. Don't miss this one.
Score: 8.5/10
Title: Nanatsu no Taizai: Imashime no Fukkatsu
Genre: Shounen, Action
Studio: A-1 Pictures
Streaming: Crunchyroll
While the first season of Seven Deadly Sins was very firmly a tired shounen action series, it was never offensive in its mediocrity. The plot was simple, the characters unbelievably overpowered, and all our favorite tropes were filled out in a neat little row. With Liones saved, our group continues to fight a new evil, the Ten Commandments to their measly Seven Sins, a group of ultra powerful demons. At the outset, this doesn't sound half bad; the fights were some of the best parts of the first season, and those Dragon Warrior-inspired designs look pretty great in motion. Well, unlike its older brother, Imashime no Fukkatsu tried its hardest to undo everything halfway decent that its predecessor did, and unfortunately, I'd say it succeeded.
The first mark against this sequel is a marked drop in quality, heavily relying on still and panning shots, and sometimes even stills, for combat. In a battle shounen, making cuts to the action is the last thing you want to do, but Fukkatsu was more than prepared to make liberal cuts to the fight budget. Story and characters have also never really been the focus of Seven Deadly Sins, but this season throws whatever little importance they had off the edge in favor of ballooning the ensemble cast to obscene levels, and applying an unironic power level system. Seriously, you can't go more than five minutes in Fukkatsu without someone slapping a literal power level number onto a character, and to make matters worse, it's usually the dumbass pig saying it. Even if the Ten Commandments were interesting villains (they aren't), they're reduced to nothing more than some big numbers to our heroes, the viewers, and even the plot of the show itself. Oh, and did I mention this is yet another series that doesn't truly end? That's just icing on the cake.
If you're someone who really liked Seven Deadly Sins, then it's not all bad. There is some resolution for Liz, Meliodas, King, and Diane, as well as yet another heartwarming side-story with Ban. However, if you're even remotely not bought-in to the ridiculous, tired world of this show, you will find Fukkatsu annoying, and guilty of undermining an otherwise pretty fun franchise.
Score: 4/10
Title: Hisone to Masotan
Genre: Comedy, Fantasy, Drama, Military
Studio: BONES
Streaming: N/A
Alright, see if you can stay with me here: a military comedy set in Japan where the planes are actually transforming dragons piloted exclusively by "chosen" JSDF airforce women. That's the most succinct and accurate description of Hisone to Masotan that I can provide, but what that misses is the undeniable and overflowing amount of heart this series has. This starts with the adorable art style, which although pretty out of the ordinary for BONES, rocks it hard. Characters are so expressive and animated, even in the most mundane of situations, making them all instantly relatable, which leads us to Amakase Hisone. As our main character, Hisone has the undesirable trait of being incapable of NOT speaking her mind at all times, leading people to interpret her as rude and cold. Despite this, she could not be more a more animated and happy individual, and that's directly due to BONES leveraging a simpler, more cutesy art style to bring out a greater bit of facial expression and movement. Over the course of the plot, we see our group of D-Pilots struggle and overcome the various challenges of piloting OTFs, or Organic Transforming Fliers (read: Dragons), which arise in unique and original ways throughout the series. Not being shackled by source material really allows more fantastical material like this to flourish in interesting ways, and Hisone to Masotan is a great example of what can be achieved when everything goes right.
So outside the simpler character designs, how does the series look? For the most part, it's downright gorgeous. Watercolor-esque and soft-line brushes flesh out impressive mountainous backgrounds and open-air skyboxes, and the animation is smooth and clean... when it's not using some horrific CG planes. Yes, somewhere in the budget for a TV anime, there always has to be a corner-cut, and unfortunately it happens to be right here at the forefront. It does blend well with the simpler art style, but the jarring nature of the 3D models, especially when the OTFs are transforming between plane and dragon, or worse, are in an in-between state, can really pull you out of an otherwise immersive experience. Thankfully, the music helps you pull you back, with a masterfully produced original score that really captures that feeling of the freedom of flight. It sounds cliche, but the flowing the light nature of the soundtrack ties right back in with the central themes of Hisone to Masotan's narrative. As for that narrative, it takes a bit of a backdrop to the interactions and relationships between the D-Pilots and greater JSDF airforce, but isn't incapable of producing drama or comedy when it wants to. There's a bit of a hard left in the second half of the show into the romance category, which many, including myself, didn't exactly see coming. While I didn't mind it, it was a fairly large departure from the nature of the series at the outset, so it's worth mentioning before one might jump headfirst into the show. I don't want to spoil particulars, because they're really the magic of this show, but I do have a few misgivings with the ending. It feels like they could have used another 2 or 3 episodes to finish it off, but had to squeeze the finale down to fit into 12 episodes.
This is another one of those shows that went unnoticed due to lack of exposure. It didn't get picked up for legal streaming anywhere as far as I know, leaving it up to Asenshi to save us yet again with some great fansubs. Despite a few issues, this is a charming original series that we don't get to see very often. Please, at the very least, give it watch, and if you thought it was worthwhile, try to support original projects like this in the future however you can.
Score: 8/10
Title: FLCL Progressive
Genre: ???
Studio: Production I.G.
Streaming: adult swim
So FLCL is finally back, and like many fans of the original production, I have a lot of thoughts on Progressive. For one, it's amazing to see the series brought back to form with much of the original staff and the amazing music of The Pillows accompanying yet another fantastical romp. On the other hand, I can't help but feel that something is missing this time around, that the bridging of another massive gap in anime history has altered FLCL into something of a distant cousin to its estranged 2000s family. However, I feel that cousin is still very much a close relative, just different from the parent's original vision. "Art house" as a concept is forever dead in anime today; the market can no longer sustain OVAs that push the boundaries of animation simply for the sake of art. You may see truly artistic endeavors arise from ambitious directors from time to time, but at this point, they're locked in the space of theatrical film. Never again will we see the crazy, unbounded anime that we saw in the late 1990s and 2000s, broadcast to television sets or released direct to DVD.
All the "bits" of FLCL are there: the music, the aesthetic, the animation, the characters, and... the plot. And there in lies the root of my criticism as Progressive stands. To make Progressive a successful product, Production I.G. needed a hook for this interstitial step to September's Alternative, and the decision was made to sink deeply into the lore of the FLCL universe. If that seems a bit strange to you, and to longtime fans of the series I know it does, then you understand my criticisms. FLCL was never about Haruko, Naota, or Atomsk; it was about growing up, struggling through adolescence and growing better for it, told through the fantastical happenings and amazing music. Progressive, on the other hand, is overtly concerned with filling in the gaps in FLCL's canon. That's not to say that the same symbolism and imagery isn't present here, and in fact, it's here in spades as well. But, unnecessary addition can and will rob works of their impact, and that's exactly the case with Progressive. Yes, learning about Medical Mechanica, the fates of a handful of FLCL's past characters, and the nature of Atomsk is all well and interesting, but it's all the more jarring that we learn this at all. For every bit of information that revealed in service of expanding the lore, I would have much rather had Hidomi or Ide have more introspective moments of monologue, just like Naota had way back when.
All that said, I think what we got from Production I.G. was amazing in the context of current anime. Even if there was some market-hook lore building, we got to see N-O brought back in full form, and this time from a young woman's point-of-view. I'm not here to get into the nitty-gritty of breaking down FLCL's metaphors, but I thought the differing (and more intense) depiction of adolescence was pretty masterfully done. Ide provides a good contrast to this as well, mirroring Naota and providing a necessary constant that Hidomi can be compared to. This is the key feature of Progressive that I feel helps it succeed as a sequel, or at least the kind of sequel that I wanted. Telling the continuing story of Naota or even the world of FLCL doesn't do anything for me; it's about seeing how another individual reacts to this crazy, rock-infused way of experiencing the pains of growing up. Oh, and I hope I don't have to say it, but the art, animation, and of course the music were incredible. We got some heavy, heavy doses of sakuga each episode, with bursts of the same strange but intriguing dips into experimental art direction we loved from the original FLCL. The Pillows need no introduction, all you need to know is that they're back in full force.
While I can't call Progressive a masterpiece, I can say it was at the very least successful in bringing FLCL back to the forefront of anime. Even from the first "leaked" episode of Alternative, there is a very distinct tonal departure from Progressive, feeling a bit more like the FLCL of yore. Though Progressive may have just been setting the stage for what's to come, watching that stage get built was a hell of a ride of its own.
Score: 9/10
Title: Darling in the FranXX
Genre: Mecha, Romance, Action, Sci-Fi
Studio: TRIGGER x A-1 Pictures
Streaming: Crunchyroll
As FranXX came to a close, the anime community was up in arms, and likely still is even now. Whines of failed potential and missed opportunity filled the phone screens of every r/anime redditor, with /a/ leading the charge in denouncing the show as trash. While I don't feel that the community's complaints with FranXX are completely unwarranted, what I do think is that our fandom at large is missing out on a key element of assessing anime: the staff list. It might say "TRIGGER x A-1 Pictures" on the tin, but FranXX is very much 2018's Diebuster or Gurren Lagann more than the "savior of anime" that the community put it up to be. Yes, this is that very same team that made both those beloved series long ago, and despite nebulous "reports" from AX panels or studio infighting, this outcome was likely planned from the very beginning. That mid-season tonal shift that everyone talks about is fairly analogous to the one in TTGL, an agreed-upon low point for even that classic series. To put things in terms of "hype", it's there to create a lull before the insane and ridiculous finale, and like it or not, this production team really only knows how to do one thing even if they're damn good at it. What I'm trying to say is: while most of the community was surprised at the plot's hard left into a space finale, I was over here saying, "Finally, I wondered how they were going to get there". This warped expectation of what FranXX was "supposed to be" is what I believe is creating a lot of this controversy, so I implore you to block out or reassess the show's "scoring" for the time being. Aggregate scoring from sites like MAL have never been accurate or worthwhile, lest I remind the community that SAO still rocks a highly favorable 7.6/10.
So, this baseless controversy aside, how does FranXX stand on its own, and why is it at all worth watching? Like this production team's predecessors, FranXX uses its narrative and world simply as a setpiece for our characters to exist and interact in. If you are someone who gets off hard on inter-character relationships, then this is your shit. The trials and tribulations of Squad 13 are born almost completely from their own personalities, then given larger than life analogues on a barren wasteland of a mecha battlefield. Thankfully, personality is something these characters have in spades. Each has their own issues in this information-controlled, totalitarian society, and coming to terms with them in the context of their upbringing is a joy to watch play out. Since we're talking about relationships, you can't really talk about FranXX without talking about romance. Romantic drama is the focal point of FranXX to the point where the world itself mirrors it. Mecha are operated in male-female pairs with few exceptions, and the strain that places on Squad 13's relationships is immense. Hell, we've all seen the screencaps and memes about the FranXX mechs being operated in doggystyle, but that's basically the point. FranXX is the least subtle of anything this team has ever produced (which is saying something after TTGL), but that level absurdity drives home the more grounded, relationship drama that arises between our characters. Hiro and Zero Two undoubtedly push this aspect of the show to its limits, hooking viewers with a very aggressive and straightforward romantic relationship that is unfortunately a rarity in anime today. Their lovey-dovey, quick uptake is what springboards Squad 13 into figuring out their own feelings, and even if love triangles are super overdone, I have to say that Ichigo and Goro's romantic arcs resolve beautifully, realistically even.
None of this is to say that there aren't any issues here, because not all the community complaints are unfounded. I don't think that the issues people have with FranXX are actually due to a hard left into space battles, but rather the Doctor Franxx info-dumping episode that serves as this show's lull before the storm. Even if the show had hinted at things before, this episode was an egregious departure from the core characters of FranXX, placed in an inopportune spot in the narrative, just as things were beginning to heat up after episode 15's mid-season finale. It's something that a viewer familiar with the production staff can shrug off as an "Ugh, they're trying this again?", but for those unfamiliar it likely came as a bit of system shock. Everything is well after Hiro and Zero Two blast off to fight the Anti-Spirals, but the damage for many was irreparable and I can sympathize with that take on things. What I can't sympathize with is that it devalues the story of Hiro and Zero Two's relationship, and, if anything, provides just the near-TTGL insanity to close out their love story with a universe-sized bang. At its core, their relationship reprises the classic folklore of the Red and Blue Oni, with Zero Two and Hiro reprising those roles respectively. While the tale is not an overtly Japanese one, having roots in many different cultures, the land of the rising sun has a particular fondness for the story... which is mirrored heavily in the Japanese reception to FranXX. The outcry on the Japanese end upon FranXX's conclusion was far more muted than that of the west's, so although I can see where complaints of "spinning in place" and a "circle of rescue" can be apt, I think that our audience is a tad more in-the-dark about how that piece of folklore resolves.
I've been cagey on narrative and character details here outside of the obvious, and that's because I think FranXX is something that each individual anime fan needs to experience themselves to draw their own conclusions. With something so hotly debated right now, I have no wish at this time to enter that fray directly, only state my misgivings with what I feel are reasons behind all this backlash. There are far worse shows to waste one's time with; FranXX is a beautifully drawn, animated, and composed product that any fan of mecha or anime at-large can find something to like in. For right now, I will be using my knee-jerk score, keeping in mind that I am a very aesthetic-over-plot watcher. However, I plan to re-watch the series in the near future, giving note to community criticism. I might return with an opinion piece after the fact, part-FranXX revisit and part-psuedo-postmodernist discussion about the importance of current anime fans acknowledging staffing over studio names, but for now, I'll just leave FranXX with a recommendation to take it in for yourself, and draw your own conclusions.
Score: 8.5/10
Title: Full Metal Panic! Invisible Victory
Genre: Military, Drama, School, Supernatural
Studio: Xebec
Streaming: Crunchyroll
Even if this one hasn't wrapped up completely yet, I'm more than prepared to share my thoughts, because man, what a hell of a disappointment. When I heard that FMP! was finally returning to anime after being locked to LNs for so long, I was ecstatic, only then to be promptly crushed by bad CG cars. This isn't to say that Invisible Victory, or IV, looks bad all the time, because for the most part the art direction recaptures that classic style, and even some of the mech CG blends well, but there are times when the fact that the show is a rush-job is far too apparent. The show is only 12 episodes, and throughout that run, it's had two skipped weeks and one recap episode, which is quite frankly unacceptable. It's sad, and made all the more so by a pretty significant upturn in the drama of the plot. Those happy school-life and romantic moments are long gone, giving us nothing but twelve somewhat-straight episodes of military action. There are some fairly high points to this new narrative, but it ultimately falls short due to the slapdash nature of this sequel, and that's about all there is to say here. I'm happy that we got more Full Metal Panic!, but Invisible Victory isn't anything warranting newcomers to the series to go out and catch up on the previous three seasons. On that note, it's unfortunately a pretty miserable failure.
Score: 5.5/10
Title: To Be Heroine
Genre: Fantasy, Drama
Studio: Haoliners Animation League, Studio LAN
Streaming: Crunchyroll
So I'll lead with that To Be Heroine really isn't an anime, it's donghua, or in laymen's terms, a Chinese cartoon. This might lead you to think that it's cheap and ripe with rip-offs, but I'll stop you right there: this show was a massive multi-cultural undertaking, with animators from all over the world collaborating to attempt to make something unique. This can be seen easily within the series' first few episodes, as there's a lot of sakuga and fantastical animation that can wow even the most jaded of anime fans, combined with a language whiplash level of alternation between Japanese and Chinese. Since this series technically aired on bilibili, a Chinese web streaming service, then adapted for Japanese TV, the creators had a lot of freedom as to how they wanted this original venture to grow throughout its sporadic run, making To Be Heroine the closest thing to a new-age art house project that we've seen in recent memory. Unfortunately, the Japanese release is a bit of mixed bag, and although most of the original VA is kept, only using Japanese for some distinct sections, the series is marred by a large degree of localization tomfoolery. A lot of the original creative vision shines through, so it's acceptable at the end of the day, but I'll definitely be seeking out a subtitled, Chinese copy when it becomes fully available, even if just to compare and contrast. Other than being an audio-video candy bar, To Be Heroine sets up a more-interesting-than-usual isekai plot that it uses as quick hook to actually tell a dystopian sci-fi tale of missing memories. While this sounds interesting, it also becomes just as muddy as it sounds near the end. Keeping track of where To Be Heroine is going even over its short seven episodes is a chore to say the least, and that's made more apparent with a very one-dimensional cast. While Futuba and Hikaru can be pretty compelling at times, the rest of the cast are as flat as washboards sans one particular character that I'll leave out due to spoilers. The plot does come together in the final stretches too, but that plot ends up being a pretty tired story of friendship and unrequited love that falls short in the end. The focus was obviously on creating a crazy, well-animated Chinese picture light show, and at least in that, they succeeded.
Score: 7/10
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. I try to rate in-genre, versus a show's most relevant contemporaries, so if scores seem a little higher even after a swift bashing, that's likely why. I don't limit myself to any minimum or maximum for review size, so the variance in review length might be pretty high. Oh, and I only review shows that ended in a given season, so stuff like HeroAca S3 and P5A won't be covered here.
Before we get started, I figured I'd break down some basic stats for this season at the top. I watched 19 shows this season, clocking in at 241 episodes total. That translates to about 94 or so hours, or a smidgen over 4 full days. That said, there's a lot to cover, so let's dive right in to Spring 2018.
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Title: Uma Musume: Pretty Derby
Genre: Sports, CGCS, Idol
Studio: PA Works
Streaming: Crunchyroll
Recent anime has proven time and time again that it can make adaptations of even the most mundane content into an interesting product with enough spit and polish. Crazily enough, Uma Musume was no exception to this rule. With an idea this incredibly stupid, this unbelievably dumb, it would take a lot of elbow grease, but PA Works put their nose to the grindstone and produced a lovable, heartfelt, and surprisingly well written show. If you've been out of touch with seasonal anime lately, you're probably a little confused about Uma Musume, but it's just as simple as the key art paints it to be. This is a show about a world of horse girls, horse girl racing, and horse girl... idol concerts? Yes, the absurdity just keeps on coming and never really stops, and you can blame Cygames' insane gatcha mobile game for that. In that game, you raise horses to race to the finish line and perform in idol events. It's a weird combination that is obviously aiming to steal Love Live, IM@S, and BanG Dream market share while side-stepping rhythm elements, also being aimed at the more nekomimi-inclined. Well I guess this would be uma-mimi? Umami? Isn't that a food thing? Whatever.
Cygames likely learned a lot from the popularity of their previous adaptations, writing a blank check to PA Works to adapt Uma Musume how they saw fit, similar to how they handled Madhouse's Bahamut series. Yes, the core concepts are there, but outside of some random horse girl cameos, the show is laser focused on Team Spica and their efforts to become horse racing champions. More specifically, Uma Musume is all about the story of Special Week, a backwoods country horsegirl who comes to the city in order to become "the fastest horse girl in all of Japan". Quickly snatched up into Spica, Spe-chan becomes enamored with Silence Suzuka and pledges to race with her one day. In the most predictable anime twist of all time, they become roommates and then friends and then rivals. Did I mention this all takes place at some sort of horse girl boarding school? Uma Musume relies on the novelty of its "hook" to provide any intrigue into its world, letting the wayside fall into a tired and generic sea of anime "bleh". While I don't think the whole horse girl thing is enough to carry the show as some kind of slice-of-life, it's at least enough to get us into our characters, their motivations, and most importantly, the races.
Special Week is our star of the show here, and although she is a pretty typical sports anime protagonist, PA Works put a lot of effort into making her come off as genuine and, ironically, human. She is put up to succeed in the standard anime theatrical comebacks time and time again throughout her racing career, but Uma Musume repeatedly does something that helps you empathize with not only Special Week, but all of its characters: they repeatedly fail. And not just an "aw shucks I lost" either; I'm talking depressing losses that affect Team Spica's later performance, mental health, and physical condition. When Spe-chan loses, she gets so down on herself that she runs herself ragged, gains a bunch of weight, and starts to lose her drive to compete. This type of sports narrative, while not at all original, is a welcome and effective device for keeping us interested between races. Races are pretty damn hype for something with this dumb of a premise, and outside of some spotty occasional CGI, are pretty well animated to boot. PA Works leverages its off-race character drama into the races themselves in a similar way to how HeroAca uses its fights to resolve that same type of drama. The result is not only an explosion of hype once the gates open on the green, but also serves to make the horse girls in question more relatable and endearing to the audience.
So, other than some decent sports narrative, what else is on the bone for Uma Musume? The unfortunate answer is "not much"; the show really doubles down on what it has. The upside of this is we get to see our characters experience a good bit of the standard sports anime narrative arcs: overcoming personal failings, overcoming injury, overcoming rivals. Notice how there's a lot of "overcoming"? PA Works really pushes for Uma Musume to be as uplifting as possible to send a message of achieving your dreams through hard work, and I have to say that the production is a success in that regard. The animation, framing, and even the music pair perfectly to drive home the story, which although not uncommon for this studio, is nice to see in such an advertisement-focused anime. However, for every upside, there's a downside too: remember how I mentioned those random cameos for in-game characters? That visual schizophrenia can make the art downright mind-boggling to absorb sometimes. There are regularly so many cacophonous character designs on screen that I can't even decipher what's happening. This is a shame, as it really ruins the show's usually warm color pallet and good use of lighting. Character designs across the board are a bit gaudy for my taste, but this is a mobile game adaptation. Those whales that paid 500,000 JPY for their favorite horse waifu must be satiated with an exact replication of the character design; muting loud art is unacceptable in these situations, no matter how much PA Works likely tried to do so.
While my opinions might seem like a bit split above, I have to say that this show was a great amount of fun. An absurd premise adapted beautifully into something the game's creators could never have imagined, Uma Musume never fails to surprise with its hype races, great characters, and clever details. If you're looking for a fun, crazy show to pass the time, or maybe crack a few beers and enjoy with friends, this crazy horse girl show might actually fit the bill.
Score: 7.5/10
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Genre: Romantic Comedy
Studio: A-1 Pictures
Streaming: Crunchyroll
WotaKoi is not a very complex show; it's your typical "romcom with a twist" offering from this past spring, with the twist being that our two main couples are all otaku. Although it's refreshing to see adult characters in an office environment, the rest of the show is about what you'd expect. You get to see these two couples be awkward yet adorable as they figure out how to exist in a relationship when someone possesses the most frightening property: sharing your interests. While playing on that bit "being a negative" is funny for the first few episodes, it quickly grows tired, with the show quickly devolving into montage of office bullpens and restaurants sans a few departures from that norm. It's good thing our main cast is so charming, because the settings and situations they're thrust into each episode are usually enough to put me to sleep.
Naru and Hirotaka both bring different things to the table, but effectively represent the "new" couple. They slowly ease into the new experience of being in a relationship with an otaku, and near the end of the show finally reach a level of openness and caring that both of them (particularly Naru) realizes they likely wouldn't have found without a bridge of interests. Hirotaka struggles with a lot of internal issues, him feeling his otaku interests have caused him to bloom late or be undesirable, where Naru has mostly faced external ramifications for her interests, such as losing previous boyfriends or being shunned by coworkers. Conversely, Hanako and Kabakura represent the "older" couple. They've long gotten over the novelty of being with another otaku, and have progressed to a level begrudging acceptance to the differences in each other's otaku tastes. While they are more of a packaged deal than Naru and Hirotaka, this couple is mainly for providing an example of Hanako's relative openness with her interests versus Kabakura's closeted nature. While the show plays with these themes for both couples pretty frequently, they are very quickly sidelined for jokes at both characters' expenses. These range from the highly intellectual "ur a nerd l0l"-tier to some that hit pretty well, but its never anything really laugh-out-loud hilarious. Sometimes, you do break through the average-or-worse humor and get an adorable, heartfelt moment, but those moments are small in number compared to the large amount of cheap reference jokes and tired jabs.
None of this is to say that the show is overtly bad, it's just pretty painfully average. And in a season where the only real romcom competition is Tada-kun, it makes it really hard for me to recommend WotaKoi as anything more than a title doomed to the depths of a plan-to-watch list.
Score: 6/10
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Genre: Magical Girl
Studio: Madhouse
Streaming: Crunchyroll
Full disclosure: I grew up on Cardcaptor Sakura. It was the first anime that I remember explicitly "as anime". Airing before Pokémon on Kids WB, it was a joyride that brings back those memories of waking up early on Saturday mornings to watch the shows that would one day become the basis of my media consumption for likely the rest of my life. However brightly or darkly that paints your picture of me, it is what it is. While a degree of bias is inevitable, I'm going to try my best to remain impartial, but no promises. Whew, alright, now let's jump into Clear Card proper.
The unbridled levels of hype that occurred when Madhouse announced they would be adapting the straight sequel to the original 70 episode run came with a bit of trepidation for most. Outcries against the new character designs and fears of tarnishing an anime classic were the norm up until Clear Card's air date. Thankfully, Madhouse held up their end of the hype train. Bringing such an old anime series into 2018 was no easy task, but the production team made it work to beautiful effect. Reimagined but still CLAMP-manga-true character designs are a joy to watch both at rest and in motion, accompanied by a modernized reprisal of the original series' musical score. Just like the original Cardcaptor Sakura of old, the new series is no stranger to bursts of good ol' on-cel sakuga, but Madhouse bringing CCS into the modern age shows they can create some draw-dropping still scenes too. The return of almost the entire original Japanese voice cast is an absolute treat. Even Tomoyo's original VA is back! God bless Iwao-san for still hitting the same notes today in that iconic, high-pitched, larynx-killer of a voice that she did twenty years ago. And Tomoyo isn't the only performance where the VA's passion for the series bleeds through: all the original cast bring some incredible voice performances, noticeable even through the language barrier. The full package had to bridge a 20 year gap, and on the backs of Madhouse and the VA, I have to say they've succeeded.
So, series revamping aside, how does Clear Card stack up against the original two core animated arcs? The short answer is that it's really just more of the same; if you're a longtime fan of CCS or don't mind a very classical, by-the-book magical girl show, there's going to be a lot to like here. Clear Card is a bit of blending of Clow and Sakura Card arcs, meshing the monster-of-the-week formula from the former with the outsider intrigue of the latter. Sakura's beloved now-pink cards go silent, with new transparent, glass cards appearing sporadically in their stead. While there is narrative purpose for it, the rehashing of previous cards tends to be a bit of a mixed bag. Some are revised well and must be approached very differently than their Clow "counterparts", while others are simply the same card with a fresh coat of paint. Cards also seem mostly stripped of their personalities, so don't expect any "Mirror" or "Dash" moments in Clear Card. This is the weakest point of this new season, and although it is balanced out by some truly new abilities and some great action animation, it's still a point of note. The unique and "human" presence of the original Clow cards is a big reason why so many people fell in love with CCS in the late 90's, so it's a shame that Clear Card is sorely lacking in those moments.
This is where it becomes hard for me to write about Clear Card as anything other than a huge fan of the series, because if there's one thing that it does best, it's satiate us with a massive amount of resolution and "After Story" for the original run's character arcs. Viewers get to see Sakura and Syaoran be a real couple, Tomoya and Yukito pick up the pieces after Tomoya's sacrifice, Meiling grow past her childhood love, and of course, Sakura unknowingly grow into an even more powerful mage. While some of this is pretty blatant fanservice (in the classical definition of the word), the other bits are woven seamlessly into Clear Card's narrative. Our favorite childhood characters are starting to grow up, albeit slowly, and this season brings that fact to the forefront. As a "third" season to an incredibly long running series, it's not fair to fault Clear Card for focusing on these bits; this is an adaptation produced solely out of love for the original story, and those who have patiently waited and yearned for it should be rewarded. It's a bit upsetting that this direction causes Clear Card's actual plot to fall to the backdrop most of the time, even with our two or three new "antagonists" not getting much development, but none of this is enough to devalue it overall. Any long-running series worth watching has heavily character-focused sections, and CCS is thankfully no exception.
To wrap this up so that I can stop gushing about this show, I'll close with that this is definitely not a sequel than you can just "pick up" without being intimately familiar with the original. A CCS virgin who starts on Clear Card would be incredibly lost, and likely frustrated with the backseat nature of this season's main plot. However, I do believe that Clear Card even greater justifies the worth in watching the original 70-episode series. Getting to see a 20-year gap closed by the same animation studio that started it all is something that any fan of 2D animation can appreciate. There are countless nods and even entire cuts that hearken back to those late 90's Saturday mornings, from the OPs and EDs all the way down to those sweet, sweet sakuga skating scenes. Even if I am a longtime fan, far too gone down the rabbit hole of bias to ever speak on CCS impartially, I implore you to watch the original Cardcaptor Sakura. It's a classic Madhouse passion project that laid the groundwork for so many magical girl series to come, and I couldn't be happier that the same studio brought it back for one more go.
Score: 9/10
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Title: Hinamatsuri
Genre: Comedy
Studio: feel.
Streaming: Crunchyroll
It's been a while since we had a truly good gag anime in the seasonal rotation, and Hinamatsuri ended up filling that vacancy pretty well. The story of the life and times of a yakuza boss and his new adoptive psychic daughter is as ridiculous of a setup as any for comedy, and thankfully the shtick is used pretty well all the way up to the end. The cast is enormous for an anime of this type, but the show leverages it well by giving us half-episode snapshots culminating in either tender moments or the eventual punchline. Yes, despite being a comedy anime, Hinamatsuri isn't afraid to turn on the feels to a surprising degree of competence. If there's a message to be told here that isn't jokes, it's a good bit of heartfelt family values, and even if they might come out of left field, they're a welcome break from the show's extended jokes. Like most comedy anime, Hinamatsuri is subject to the same "hard miss, hard hit" factor; there are definitely entire 12-minute sections that aren't at all funny or even interesting. These are usually the non-Hina sections, as watching Nitta and Hina interact is nearly always entertaining and their comedic timing always seems to be a cut above the rest. Hitomi's charmed professional life is also regularly a riot, but Anzu's stint as a homeless person falls flat early. There is payoff for her narrative in some sweet moments with her later-adoptive family, but it doesn't do much to assuage the first eight or so episodes from a good few "misses".
Production-wise, Hinmatsuri is uncharacteristically well put together. Music and visuals mesh pretty well, keeping the tone light unless the scene demands a touch of drama. Studio feel. creates a pretty lively cityscape for how little of it we actually get to see, and even provides some pretty impressive sakuga even if it's only in service of a one-off gag. The visuals do have a certain degree of "A-1 face" sameness to them, especially with the younger characters. Barring hairstyles, pretty much all female and male characters look almost identical, which can be pretty jarring when the focus shifts so quickly between different groups of characters. Other than that, Hinamatsuri succeeds in being a cut above what a comedy anime would have in terms of animation and art, which is all the more a feather in its cap when paired with above average comedic beats.
I wish I had more to say about this one but I really don't. Hinamatsuri is a simple comedy with charming characters and some heartfelt messages about family, and there's a good bit of value in that simplicity.
Score: 7.5/10
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Title: Lostorage Conflated WIXOSS
Genre: Children's Card Games, Magical Girl
Studio: J.C. Staff
Streaming: Crunchyroll
We're back for the fourth season of our favorite "trading cards x mahou shoujo" anime extravaganza... and not much has changed since the last season. This sequel "arc" of WIXOSS still has the same problems that I felt Lostorage Incited did, and that's a nagging feeling that there's no real reason for much of the action to be happening. Selector was a perfectly complete story; it had a damn near great conclusion and in no way warranted a direct sequel. Maybe a spin-off with a new group of characters, sure, but unfortunately this new season threw that out the window. Ruuko, Hitoe, Yuzuki, Tama, and even Akira make a reprisal appearance among Lostorage's new core cast, and not only does their appearance muddy the waters on our new group that had potential, but undermine the past versions of themselves from Selector. To make matters worse, our new group of characters still feel heavily removed and act far too irrationally for my taste, which is all the more bitter when Selector acted with so much purpose and heart. So, even if we throw old dreams of Selector to the wayside, taking Lostorage at face value as much as possible, can this last chapter make up for these previous missteps?
The short answer is an obvious no, but I have to hand Lostorage a little credit for trying its hardest to dig itself out. While the previous season (the first half of Lostorage) felt like shitty WIXOSS fanfiction, this closing entry tries to bring the series back to those dramatic, horror roots that were so powerful in Selector. Funnily enough, this change in tone isn't due directly due to the reprisal of old characters... or rather, old characters that we were cognizant of. Enter Mizushima Kiyoi, or as you may remember her from Selector, Piruluk. This character is the reason why Lostorage can claw its way back into being a "damaged but acceptable" entry into the WIXOSS canon. Unlike Suzuko's plight with Chi that took center stage last season, Kiyoi's desire to end the Selector battles forever rings true. Mentally destroyed by the realization of her actions as a LRIG, as well as the tragedy of her friend Ayumi at her own hands, she hardens her heart to take down the White Room and put a stop to Selector battles for eternity. While not nearly as engaging as Selector's use of Mayu as the big bad, this focus for the second half of Lostorage hearkens back to the body-swapping Selector-LRIG drama that was pivotal in creating most of Selector's narrative weight. Kiyoi's internal quest for redemption pairs well with the falling action of the arc, bringing together Selectors both new and old to end the circle of suffering. This is a classic case of one character "putting the show on their backs", but luckily for Lostorage, Kiyoi is the major focus this time around. With her efforts, most of the repeated "meh" still hanging around from Lostorage Incited can be swept under the rug.
When I say repeated, I mean it literally. There is a LOT of re-used and re-hashed plot beats directly ripped from the first half of this arc. While Kiyoi and even our old group starts to blaze a new path towards ending Selector battles in a blaze of glory, our original fan-fiction group of Suzuko, Chi, and Hanna spins in place, reiterating over and over the same implications of losing battles and how they don't want that to happen. Yes, there is a new antagonist in the form of Kaeda, a battle-bent berserker of a Selector who wants nothing more than to die fighting. Kaeda has a fairly well realized moment with Ruuko, nodding back to Selector's highlight of Ruuko's internal struggles with enjoying the death game of battles, but she's nothing more than a boogeyman to Suzuko. Hanna, her narrative complete with the return of the gruesome manslaughter of her younger brother, is content to simply be strung along for the ride, adding nothing but infodump commentary at every turn. Chi's wrestling with the loss of her memories is about as cheap a plot device as you can get, and it's not well executed either. I can't help but feel like Lostorage started out as a fairly directionless project, and once JC Staff realized that focusing on Kiyoi and her efforts would be a better wrap-up, they promptly "threw out" their failed characters. Even then, they didn't commit hard enough to removing them from the story, leaving the show with far too many unneeded "hanging on"s.
For all their missteps with the plot, JC Staff did pull through at the end of it all and kept up the production quality as well. The more-rounded, more moe character designs show up again in this ending entry in Lostorage, but they still work well enough to give at least some of that same darkness that was so well loved in Selector. At the end of the day, there is only so much that can be done to save such an unnecessary and marred product. Even with the best of efforts, I don't think Lostorage will ever become the hidden gem that Selector is. It will become yet another forgotten memory in an endless sea of plan-to-watch and dropped lists, which is probably where it should stay.
Score: 6.5/10
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Title: Mahou Shoujo Ore
Genre: Comedy, Magical Girl
Studio: Pierrot Plus
Streaming: Crunchyroll
What an absolute dumpster fire. The only real thing this one had going for it was an initial burst of marketing, starting with an early airing of the show's first episode. It was funny enough for a pilot, but after hearing the same joke ten times in the first fifteen minutes of the second episode, I knew that this one was destined for the trash pile. Animation dropped from baseline acceptable to nightmare fuel, art direction was never good, and there's no action or comedy to speak of. With a concept so ripe for parody, especially in recent years, you'd think that there was no way it could be this bad, but it is. Stay very, very far away. This was the worst show of the season by a long shot.
Score: 2/10
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Title: Mahou Shoujo Site
Genre: Drama, Magical Girl, EDGE
Studio: production doA
Streaming: Crunchyroll
Do you think that edge for the sake of edge can be a lot of fun? Then this is undoubtedly the show for you. Just in the first episode, there are multiple instances of attempted suicide, rape, and murder, as well as some horrific bullying. This sort of thing continues throughout all twelve episodes, and the show not only revels in it, but celebrates it. If you can shrug off this kind of stuff as comedic, then more power to you, but for many, Site is going to be a pretty hard sell. In the least surprising twist since Magical Girl Suffer Expo 2018, Site is all about unfortunate girls getting gifted a magic stick from a mysterious website. These sticks have incredible powers that activate through use of, you guessed it, the user's life. Oh, and when they're used, they cause spontaneous bleeding and edgelord eyes. If not taken seriously, this could be seen as a fine parody of just how out of hand some dark magical girl content has gotten over the years, but throughout all my time with Site, I just can't help but feel that the writer (mistakenly) thought they actually had made something prolific.
Gruesome actions for shock's sake are the name of the game in Site. Not five minutes will go by without some sort of fucked up action taking place on screen. You name it, it happens in Site; when I said this kind of stuff was celebrated in this show, I was NOT kidding. Despite this, the plot setup is fairly standard as we move from "collect the sticks, save the world" to "kill the big boss, save the world". In true magical girl fashion, enemies become friends, murderers become allies, and... wait, what? Yes, the level of fucked up things characters do and are not punished for throughout the story is absurd, and at one point our group calmly and openly accepts multiple literal magical girl murderers into their fold. Viewers are going to need some heavy suspension of disbelief, or at the very least alcohol, to make it through these main plot beats without getting whiplash. To make matters worse, the show doesn't even have the common decency to end with any sort of resolution, and if the poor visual quality and constant corner cutting is any indication, we'll never see the end of this one.
None of this is to say that Site can't be a good time. If you can get yourself in the right headspace to watch a mediocre rendition of depressed magical girls beating the shit out of each other, then have at it. But be warned: this isn't a battle-royale like Raising Project was, this is a straight up, hard-to-watch bloodbath. Those with weak stomachs, be advised.
Score: 4.5/10
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Title: Caligula
Genre: Action, Mystery, Game
Studio: Satelight
Streaming: Crunchyroll
What exactly happened in Caligula? Does anyone really know? As the runner up for "worst of season", I came into this one with a good bit of promise. The PVs looked pretty interesting, but I quickly learned what level of trash that I'd just signed up for. Turns out, this show is some sort of shitty PSP game adaptation, and for all its unique character designs and interesting yet ridiculous powers, it fell into the same bullshit that all isekai and soft-isekai fall into. There was some sort of hinting at playing with some pretty heavy ideas, like learning to accept or be yourself, and that running from reality is harmful, but Caligula repeatedly threw it all away in favor of standard anime garbage. Not to mention, characters act at random, plot comes out of nowhere with no prompting or reason, and important facts are mentioned passingly as if the viewer was supposed to have some magical foreknowledge of them. Then, the show has the gall to pull some sort of hackneyed 11th hour twist that just makes the whole show feel like even more of a dumpster fire. At the end of it all, at least Satelight tried to make the look characters interesting, even if they were all empty husks. That's about the only praise I can hand out to this trash.
Score: 3/10
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Title: Golden Kamuy
Genre: Action, Adventure, Mystery
Studio: Geno Studio
Streaming: Crunchyroll
Golden Kamuy stands as proof that anything can be ruined if you try hard enough. This show started out with a strong premise, wasn't set in high school, and had some pretty endearing characters, then shit all over itself until the original vision just didn't exist anymore. Everything from stupid one-off episodes, to bad animation, to horrific CG bears, Golden Kamuy seemed to do everything it could to make me hate it, but I could never help but feel hopeful. To make matters worse, this is yet another series that didn't have the decency to end with any sort of closure, and even if the second season is a short hop and a skip away, I certainly won't be continuing. Even if I started off hooked by Sugimoto and Asirpa's quest for the motherload of gold, Golden Kamuy is proof that even the most novel of ideas and characters really can't salvage terrible production quality. I wish I had more to say about why this show is bad, like any sort of narrative or character fault that made an otherwise fun experience into a bad one, but I don't. Bad art, animation, and direction are strong enough to destroy even the most powerful original ideas.
Score: 3/10
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Title: Megalobox
Genre: Sports, Drama
Studio: TMS Entertainment
Streaming: Crunchyroll
This is a series about robotically assisted boxing set in a hypercapitalist dystopia, played as a mix between sports anime and film noir. In this world, this new form of boxing is called "megaloboxing", where competitors strap themselves with mechanical arm supports and box with superhuman strength. Enter JD, an underground megaloboxer who's stuck losing rigged fights just to get by. When the mafia catches up with him and his "coach", they make a bet on JD's skill to pay off their debt, and strive to become the Megaloboxing champions. JD takes up the name "Joe", aiming to take down the current champion, Yuri, and prove his worth among the greats in this world of future boxing.
With a lead-in like that, it's no wonder that Megalobox garnered as much of a following as it did, and its impressive pedigree sure didn't hurt either. A 50th anniversary passion project for the classic boxing manga, Ashita no Joe, Megalobox is an original project from the minds of those same creators. To paint us this story is the combination of Moriyama You (Redline, Shingeki no Kyojin, Lupin the III, and more) directing and Shimizu Hiroshi creating character designs. If you're not familiar with Hiroshi, you're likely among the many who unfortunately haven't experienced Michiko to Hatchin. This is a series that exudes a certain style and atmosphere, employing a jazz noir aesthetic across the board that pops most in Hiroshi's characters. While Megalobox might opt for a harder, more rock aesthetic, that same personality pops just as well here as it did in his previous work. Add in You's backgrounds and masterfully shot composition, and you end up with multiple killer cuts every episode. Megalobox a visual knockout from start to finish, helped along by masterfully paired original score that brings the hype for boxing bouts and never fails to set the perfect mood for those more muted moments. If there was anything to complain about, it's the infamous decision to render this series in 480P for a "classic" effect. While I don't agree that this decision does much, and that it's more of the art direction and character design that give Megalobox this late 90s or early 2000s anime feel, I can only hope that the BD version includes the 1080P release that the series deserves. However, if you have an even remotely modern screen and watch a high-bitrate copy of the show, the upscaling will easily keep up the action.
The aesthetic might be the draw, but Megalobox's narrative doesn't pull any punches either. It's a fairly classic tale of the underdog, but as with most things, supreme execution can abate any misgivings with a bit of unoriginality, and execution is something that this show nails time and time again. Each fight builds to a hype conclusion, again utilizing the narrative trick of resolving character arcs and plot beats with a swift right hook or nasty uppercut. Despite Megalobox being a parade of fights up until the end, it manages to never feel that way with some excellent pacing, avoiding the pitfalls of many a sports or tournament anime. Our cast is pretty damn deep as well, each having their own motivations that flesh out the world behind Joe's straightforward goals. Nanbu is our second biggest player here, and even if his darkened background and eventual quest for redemption are, again, not exactly original, they add a needed counterplot to Joe's. This culminates in the two sides of this road to the top clashing marvelously, but unfortunately wrapping up with a slightly unfulfilling conclusion. It's nothing that detracts meaningfully from the story of our key players, but for such a high-profile and well-executed show, I expected a lot more than we were given. However, I am a sucker for an artsy cold exit, so Megalobox gets some extra points in that regard.
Overall, I can't recommend Megalobox enough. This is when some truly great talent comes together for a real passion project, and that passion shows in every frame. Even if sports anime aren't your thing, please give this one a try.
Score: 9/10
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Title: Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online
Genre: Slice-of-Life, Action, Game
Studio: Studio 3Hz
Streaming: Crunchyroll
You think that I would have learned by now; that the whole community had learned by now, not to get excited about new Sword Art Online content. But...what's this? SAO, but written by a different author and animated by a different studio? Hearing this, we all stumbled helplessly into Kawahara's bottomless pit yet again, hopeful that some new talent could glean hope on one of the most marred-yet-popular isekai series known to the human race. Now that we're through to the other side, riddled with bullet holes and exhausted from two consecutive battle royales, how did PUBG's anime adaptation hold up? The answer is surprisingly well, so much so that SAO Alternative: Gun Gale Online is undoubtedly the best entry into the SAO pantheon, ever.
The good starts with our characters. Gone are the overpowered, emotionless husks like Kirito, and what replaces them are a cast of relatable and fairly realistic gamers. This begins with our main character, Karen, known in-game as LLENN. She doesn't play games because she is a power-gamer or a "beater", and hell, she doesn't even play VR games because she wants to. Karen is extremely tall, far over 6-foot, and she's incredibly embarrassed about it, to the point of having a complex. She starts playing full-dive games because she longs for an escape from her "hell" of living in such a tall body, and performs endless resets until she finally randomly receives a chibi avatar. GGO was far from her first game of choice, and her insistence on playing a small, cute avatar is the only reason she sticks around to "make lemonade" out of her lucky avatar roll. While this still plays into the frankly idiotic staple of SAO's world that your avatar is randomly rolled and IP-locked, it's a well-executed character trait for Karen, something that hasn't yet existed in SAO's canon. We watch as LLENN makes friends and falls deeper into GGO's absurdly harsh and violent nature, due in part to a budding relationship with the gun-crazy Pitohui. Karen, even as LLENN, is reserved and quiet despite her apparent natural gift for the game, while Pito slowly leads her to the crazier, more unkempt fantasies that GGO allows one to indulge in. While this sounds a little heavy, GGO's greatest quality is that it never takes itself too seriously in its premise, being more of a sports slice-of-life more than an attempted serious action drama. No, despite the title and setting, GGO couldn't be farther from SAO II, so don't let that association scare you off from starting this one.
The actual plot of GGO is, like I said, a more slice-of-life affair. LLENN, Pito, and our ensemble cast are just playing games even if the action does rise to super-intense fever-pitches. Some weird original SAO-style darkness does rear its ugly head at about the midway point, but its consequence to the plot is fairly minimal and is easily forgotten, dumb as it may be. It's a help that the show is, while not jaw-dropping, quite visually impressive. The gun-fights are very well choreographed, and we get to see some crushingly brutal action due to the blood being "a game". Yes, it's a pretty blatant censor-sidestep, and the show definitely abuses it, so if you're squeamish you may want to shy away from this one. The art and animation themselves are nothing amazing, but the character designs are at least cute where they need to be. I can't help but compare GGO to cute-girls-cute-shit shows, because it really does feel that way despite the ultra-high level of violence. At its core, GGO is appealing to that sort of audience instead of the more serious, "lore"-driven focus of mainline SAO, and it's in that lightness that GGO succeeds.
This is another series I have to announce some bias in: gun girls are kind of my "thing", always have been. Despite that, I think this one is more than worth a shot for not only SAO fans, but SAO-haters as well. It at the very least proves that it's not the setting or premise that are the issue, but rather an inept, bumbling author. Of course, GGO isn't without its issues either, but nothing here is enough to yank you out of full-dive like SAO has been has been doing since 2009.
Score: 7.5/10
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Title: Tada-kun wa Koi wo Shinai
Genre: Romance, Comedy
Studio: Doga Kobo
Streaming: Amazon Prime
From the same director as Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun comes a brand-new, anime-original romantic comedy that filled the void of worthwhile entries into the genre over the past year. Yamazaki Mitsue is a master at creating moments of both romantic levity and drama. She also, of course, creates a colorful and varied cast of intense personalities that although add a fair bit of comedy just with their surface actions, are deeper and more complex than you might initially give them credit for. I can't help but continually compare this to Nozaki-kun, because it just feels so similar, like Tada-kun was the romance story that she wanted to tell back then but was restricted by a more comedy-focused source. This isn't to say that the content or characters are at all same; it's more of an aesthetic and atmospheric similarity that can instantly charm and draw in the viewer. If there was a singular greatest strength of the series, it's this, and combined with the trademark adorable character designs of Kikuchi Ai, stellar backgrounds, and clean animation makes Tada-kun an easy series to fall in love with.
Backing up to the characters again, they are the central focus of this show. Like many a romcom before it, Tada-kun opts to set up some fated pairs as early as episode one. Over these short thirteen episodes, we get a chance to see each of these relationships grow over time to an extent, but the focus is on our main characters, Mitsuyoshi and Teresa. Their love story is so charming and sweet that I don't want to spoil any of the details, but if I had any complaints with their narrative, or all of Tada-kun in general, it's that it's sorely predictable and eventually falls into some overused tropes that it had tried so hard to avoid. Love triangle stuff is so overused (if you can really call any narrative device in a romcom that), so it's unfortunate when it rears its ugly head in the second half of the show. It's forgivable and executed well, and with the narrative being as it was, it was inevitable, but something about the eleventh hour of Tada-kun makes it sting more than usual. That something is likely that I wished for something more original for these wonderful characters, but thankfully even with a short episode count, Yamazaki wraps everything up nicely for us with heart-melting finale. Getting to see her direct a romance all the way to its resolution is something I've been waiting for since Nozaki-kun, and it's certainly something to behold.
If you are even a passing fan of the genre, I don't think you can do much better than Tada-kun wa Koi wo Shinai. Lovable characters, adorable art, great comedy, and a heartwarming romance that can melt even the most frozen of hearts. Don't miss this one.
Score: 8.5/10
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Title: Nanatsu no Taizai: Imashime no Fukkatsu
Genre: Shounen, Action
Studio: A-1 Pictures
Streaming: Crunchyroll
While the first season of Seven Deadly Sins was very firmly a tired shounen action series, it was never offensive in its mediocrity. The plot was simple, the characters unbelievably overpowered, and all our favorite tropes were filled out in a neat little row. With Liones saved, our group continues to fight a new evil, the Ten Commandments to their measly Seven Sins, a group of ultra powerful demons. At the outset, this doesn't sound half bad; the fights were some of the best parts of the first season, and those Dragon Warrior-inspired designs look pretty great in motion. Well, unlike its older brother, Imashime no Fukkatsu tried its hardest to undo everything halfway decent that its predecessor did, and unfortunately, I'd say it succeeded.
The first mark against this sequel is a marked drop in quality, heavily relying on still and panning shots, and sometimes even stills, for combat. In a battle shounen, making cuts to the action is the last thing you want to do, but Fukkatsu was more than prepared to make liberal cuts to the fight budget. Story and characters have also never really been the focus of Seven Deadly Sins, but this season throws whatever little importance they had off the edge in favor of ballooning the ensemble cast to obscene levels, and applying an unironic power level system. Seriously, you can't go more than five minutes in Fukkatsu without someone slapping a literal power level number onto a character, and to make matters worse, it's usually the dumbass pig saying it. Even if the Ten Commandments were interesting villains (they aren't), they're reduced to nothing more than some big numbers to our heroes, the viewers, and even the plot of the show itself. Oh, and did I mention this is yet another series that doesn't truly end? That's just icing on the cake.
If you're someone who really liked Seven Deadly Sins, then it's not all bad. There is some resolution for Liz, Meliodas, King, and Diane, as well as yet another heartwarming side-story with Ban. However, if you're even remotely not bought-in to the ridiculous, tired world of this show, you will find Fukkatsu annoying, and guilty of undermining an otherwise pretty fun franchise.
Score: 4/10
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Title: Hisone to Masotan
Genre: Comedy, Fantasy, Drama, Military
Studio: BONES
Streaming: N/A
Alright, see if you can stay with me here: a military comedy set in Japan where the planes are actually transforming dragons piloted exclusively by "chosen" JSDF airforce women. That's the most succinct and accurate description of Hisone to Masotan that I can provide, but what that misses is the undeniable and overflowing amount of heart this series has. This starts with the adorable art style, which although pretty out of the ordinary for BONES, rocks it hard. Characters are so expressive and animated, even in the most mundane of situations, making them all instantly relatable, which leads us to Amakase Hisone. As our main character, Hisone has the undesirable trait of being incapable of NOT speaking her mind at all times, leading people to interpret her as rude and cold. Despite this, she could not be more a more animated and happy individual, and that's directly due to BONES leveraging a simpler, more cutesy art style to bring out a greater bit of facial expression and movement. Over the course of the plot, we see our group of D-Pilots struggle and overcome the various challenges of piloting OTFs, or Organic Transforming Fliers (read: Dragons), which arise in unique and original ways throughout the series. Not being shackled by source material really allows more fantastical material like this to flourish in interesting ways, and Hisone to Masotan is a great example of what can be achieved when everything goes right.
So outside the simpler character designs, how does the series look? For the most part, it's downright gorgeous. Watercolor-esque and soft-line brushes flesh out impressive mountainous backgrounds and open-air skyboxes, and the animation is smooth and clean... when it's not using some horrific CG planes. Yes, somewhere in the budget for a TV anime, there always has to be a corner-cut, and unfortunately it happens to be right here at the forefront. It does blend well with the simpler art style, but the jarring nature of the 3D models, especially when the OTFs are transforming between plane and dragon, or worse, are in an in-between state, can really pull you out of an otherwise immersive experience. Thankfully, the music helps you pull you back, with a masterfully produced original score that really captures that feeling of the freedom of flight. It sounds cliche, but the flowing the light nature of the soundtrack ties right back in with the central themes of Hisone to Masotan's narrative. As for that narrative, it takes a bit of a backdrop to the interactions and relationships between the D-Pilots and greater JSDF airforce, but isn't incapable of producing drama or comedy when it wants to. There's a bit of a hard left in the second half of the show into the romance category, which many, including myself, didn't exactly see coming. While I didn't mind it, it was a fairly large departure from the nature of the series at the outset, so it's worth mentioning before one might jump headfirst into the show. I don't want to spoil particulars, because they're really the magic of this show, but I do have a few misgivings with the ending. It feels like they could have used another 2 or 3 episodes to finish it off, but had to squeeze the finale down to fit into 12 episodes.
This is another one of those shows that went unnoticed due to lack of exposure. It didn't get picked up for legal streaming anywhere as far as I know, leaving it up to Asenshi to save us yet again with some great fansubs. Despite a few issues, this is a charming original series that we don't get to see very often. Please, at the very least, give it watch, and if you thought it was worthwhile, try to support original projects like this in the future however you can.
Score: 8/10
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Title: FLCL Progressive
Genre: ???
Studio: Production I.G.
Streaming: adult swim
So FLCL is finally back, and like many fans of the original production, I have a lot of thoughts on Progressive. For one, it's amazing to see the series brought back to form with much of the original staff and the amazing music of The Pillows accompanying yet another fantastical romp. On the other hand, I can't help but feel that something is missing this time around, that the bridging of another massive gap in anime history has altered FLCL into something of a distant cousin to its estranged 2000s family. However, I feel that cousin is still very much a close relative, just different from the parent's original vision. "Art house" as a concept is forever dead in anime today; the market can no longer sustain OVAs that push the boundaries of animation simply for the sake of art. You may see truly artistic endeavors arise from ambitious directors from time to time, but at this point, they're locked in the space of theatrical film. Never again will we see the crazy, unbounded anime that we saw in the late 1990s and 2000s, broadcast to television sets or released direct to DVD.
All the "bits" of FLCL are there: the music, the aesthetic, the animation, the characters, and... the plot. And there in lies the root of my criticism as Progressive stands. To make Progressive a successful product, Production I.G. needed a hook for this interstitial step to September's Alternative, and the decision was made to sink deeply into the lore of the FLCL universe. If that seems a bit strange to you, and to longtime fans of the series I know it does, then you understand my criticisms. FLCL was never about Haruko, Naota, or Atomsk; it was about growing up, struggling through adolescence and growing better for it, told through the fantastical happenings and amazing music. Progressive, on the other hand, is overtly concerned with filling in the gaps in FLCL's canon. That's not to say that the same symbolism and imagery isn't present here, and in fact, it's here in spades as well. But, unnecessary addition can and will rob works of their impact, and that's exactly the case with Progressive. Yes, learning about Medical Mechanica, the fates of a handful of FLCL's past characters, and the nature of Atomsk is all well and interesting, but it's all the more jarring that we learn this at all. For every bit of information that revealed in service of expanding the lore, I would have much rather had Hidomi or Ide have more introspective moments of monologue, just like Naota had way back when.
All that said, I think what we got from Production I.G. was amazing in the context of current anime. Even if there was some market-hook lore building, we got to see N-O brought back in full form, and this time from a young woman's point-of-view. I'm not here to get into the nitty-gritty of breaking down FLCL's metaphors, but I thought the differing (and more intense) depiction of adolescence was pretty masterfully done. Ide provides a good contrast to this as well, mirroring Naota and providing a necessary constant that Hidomi can be compared to. This is the key feature of Progressive that I feel helps it succeed as a sequel, or at least the kind of sequel that I wanted. Telling the continuing story of Naota or even the world of FLCL doesn't do anything for me; it's about seeing how another individual reacts to this crazy, rock-infused way of experiencing the pains of growing up. Oh, and I hope I don't have to say it, but the art, animation, and of course the music were incredible. We got some heavy, heavy doses of sakuga each episode, with bursts of the same strange but intriguing dips into experimental art direction we loved from the original FLCL. The Pillows need no introduction, all you need to know is that they're back in full force.
While I can't call Progressive a masterpiece, I can say it was at the very least successful in bringing FLCL back to the forefront of anime. Even from the first "leaked" episode of Alternative, there is a very distinct tonal departure from Progressive, feeling a bit more like the FLCL of yore. Though Progressive may have just been setting the stage for what's to come, watching that stage get built was a hell of a ride of its own.
Score: 9/10
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Title: Darling in the FranXX
Genre: Mecha, Romance, Action, Sci-Fi
Studio: TRIGGER x A-1 Pictures
Streaming: Crunchyroll
As FranXX came to a close, the anime community was up in arms, and likely still is even now. Whines of failed potential and missed opportunity filled the phone screens of every r/anime redditor, with /a/ leading the charge in denouncing the show as trash. While I don't feel that the community's complaints with FranXX are completely unwarranted, what I do think is that our fandom at large is missing out on a key element of assessing anime: the staff list. It might say "TRIGGER x A-1 Pictures" on the tin, but FranXX is very much 2018's Diebuster or Gurren Lagann more than the "savior of anime" that the community put it up to be. Yes, this is that very same team that made both those beloved series long ago, and despite nebulous "reports" from AX panels or studio infighting, this outcome was likely planned from the very beginning. That mid-season tonal shift that everyone talks about is fairly analogous to the one in TTGL, an agreed-upon low point for even that classic series. To put things in terms of "hype", it's there to create a lull before the insane and ridiculous finale, and like it or not, this production team really only knows how to do one thing even if they're damn good at it. What I'm trying to say is: while most of the community was surprised at the plot's hard left into a space finale, I was over here saying, "Finally, I wondered how they were going to get there". This warped expectation of what FranXX was "supposed to be" is what I believe is creating a lot of this controversy, so I implore you to block out or reassess the show's "scoring" for the time being. Aggregate scoring from sites like MAL have never been accurate or worthwhile, lest I remind the community that SAO still rocks a highly favorable 7.6/10.
So, this baseless controversy aside, how does FranXX stand on its own, and why is it at all worth watching? Like this production team's predecessors, FranXX uses its narrative and world simply as a setpiece for our characters to exist and interact in. If you are someone who gets off hard on inter-character relationships, then this is your shit. The trials and tribulations of Squad 13 are born almost completely from their own personalities, then given larger than life analogues on a barren wasteland of a mecha battlefield. Thankfully, personality is something these characters have in spades. Each has their own issues in this information-controlled, totalitarian society, and coming to terms with them in the context of their upbringing is a joy to watch play out. Since we're talking about relationships, you can't really talk about FranXX without talking about romance. Romantic drama is the focal point of FranXX to the point where the world itself mirrors it. Mecha are operated in male-female pairs with few exceptions, and the strain that places on Squad 13's relationships is immense. Hell, we've all seen the screencaps and memes about the FranXX mechs being operated in doggystyle, but that's basically the point. FranXX is the least subtle of anything this team has ever produced (which is saying something after TTGL), but that level absurdity drives home the more grounded, relationship drama that arises between our characters. Hiro and Zero Two undoubtedly push this aspect of the show to its limits, hooking viewers with a very aggressive and straightforward romantic relationship that is unfortunately a rarity in anime today. Their lovey-dovey, quick uptake is what springboards Squad 13 into figuring out their own feelings, and even if love triangles are super overdone, I have to say that Ichigo and Goro's romantic arcs resolve beautifully, realistically even.
None of this is to say that there aren't any issues here, because not all the community complaints are unfounded. I don't think that the issues people have with FranXX are actually due to a hard left into space battles, but rather the Doctor Franxx info-dumping episode that serves as this show's lull before the storm. Even if the show had hinted at things before, this episode was an egregious departure from the core characters of FranXX, placed in an inopportune spot in the narrative, just as things were beginning to heat up after episode 15's mid-season finale. It's something that a viewer familiar with the production staff can shrug off as an "Ugh, they're trying this again?", but for those unfamiliar it likely came as a bit of system shock. Everything is well after Hiro and Zero Two blast off to fight the Anti-Spirals, but the damage for many was irreparable and I can sympathize with that take on things. What I can't sympathize with is that it devalues the story of Hiro and Zero Two's relationship, and, if anything, provides just the near-TTGL insanity to close out their love story with a universe-sized bang. At its core, their relationship reprises the classic folklore of the Red and Blue Oni, with Zero Two and Hiro reprising those roles respectively. While the tale is not an overtly Japanese one, having roots in many different cultures, the land of the rising sun has a particular fondness for the story... which is mirrored heavily in the Japanese reception to FranXX. The outcry on the Japanese end upon FranXX's conclusion was far more muted than that of the west's, so although I can see where complaints of "spinning in place" and a "circle of rescue" can be apt, I think that our audience is a tad more in-the-dark about how that piece of folklore resolves.
I've been cagey on narrative and character details here outside of the obvious, and that's because I think FranXX is something that each individual anime fan needs to experience themselves to draw their own conclusions. With something so hotly debated right now, I have no wish at this time to enter that fray directly, only state my misgivings with what I feel are reasons behind all this backlash. There are far worse shows to waste one's time with; FranXX is a beautifully drawn, animated, and composed product that any fan of mecha or anime at-large can find something to like in. For right now, I will be using my knee-jerk score, keeping in mind that I am a very aesthetic-over-plot watcher. However, I plan to re-watch the series in the near future, giving note to community criticism. I might return with an opinion piece after the fact, part-FranXX revisit and part-psuedo-postmodernist discussion about the importance of current anime fans acknowledging staffing over studio names, but for now, I'll just leave FranXX with a recommendation to take it in for yourself, and draw your own conclusions.
Score: 8.5/10
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Title: Full Metal Panic! Invisible Victory
Genre: Military, Drama, School, Supernatural
Studio: Xebec
Streaming: Crunchyroll
Even if this one hasn't wrapped up completely yet, I'm more than prepared to share my thoughts, because man, what a hell of a disappointment. When I heard that FMP! was finally returning to anime after being locked to LNs for so long, I was ecstatic, only then to be promptly crushed by bad CG cars. This isn't to say that Invisible Victory, or IV, looks bad all the time, because for the most part the art direction recaptures that classic style, and even some of the mech CG blends well, but there are times when the fact that the show is a rush-job is far too apparent. The show is only 12 episodes, and throughout that run, it's had two skipped weeks and one recap episode, which is quite frankly unacceptable. It's sad, and made all the more so by a pretty significant upturn in the drama of the plot. Those happy school-life and romantic moments are long gone, giving us nothing but twelve somewhat-straight episodes of military action. There are some fairly high points to this new narrative, but it ultimately falls short due to the slapdash nature of this sequel, and that's about all there is to say here. I'm happy that we got more Full Metal Panic!, but Invisible Victory isn't anything warranting newcomers to the series to go out and catch up on the previous three seasons. On that note, it's unfortunately a pretty miserable failure.
Score: 5.5/10
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Title: To Be Heroine
Genre: Fantasy, Drama
Studio: Haoliners Animation League, Studio LAN
Streaming: Crunchyroll
So I'll lead with that To Be Heroine really isn't an anime, it's donghua, or in laymen's terms, a Chinese cartoon. This might lead you to think that it's cheap and ripe with rip-offs, but I'll stop you right there: this show was a massive multi-cultural undertaking, with animators from all over the world collaborating to attempt to make something unique. This can be seen easily within the series' first few episodes, as there's a lot of sakuga and fantastical animation that can wow even the most jaded of anime fans, combined with a language whiplash level of alternation between Japanese and Chinese. Since this series technically aired on bilibili, a Chinese web streaming service, then adapted for Japanese TV, the creators had a lot of freedom as to how they wanted this original venture to grow throughout its sporadic run, making To Be Heroine the closest thing to a new-age art house project that we've seen in recent memory. Unfortunately, the Japanese release is a bit of mixed bag, and although most of the original VA is kept, only using Japanese for some distinct sections, the series is marred by a large degree of localization tomfoolery. A lot of the original creative vision shines through, so it's acceptable at the end of the day, but I'll definitely be seeking out a subtitled, Chinese copy when it becomes fully available, even if just to compare and contrast. Other than being an audio-video candy bar, To Be Heroine sets up a more-interesting-than-usual isekai plot that it uses as quick hook to actually tell a dystopian sci-fi tale of missing memories. While this sounds interesting, it also becomes just as muddy as it sounds near the end. Keeping track of where To Be Heroine is going even over its short seven episodes is a chore to say the least, and that's made more apparent with a very one-dimensional cast. While Futuba and Hikaru can be pretty compelling at times, the rest of the cast are as flat as washboards sans one particular character that I'll leave out due to spoilers. The plot does come together in the final stretches too, but that plot ends up being a pretty tired story of friendship and unrequited love that falls short in the end. The focus was obviously on creating a crazy, well-animated Chinese picture light show, and at least in that, they succeeded.
Score: 7/10