Weiss & Ramblings

Well, I guess it’s been a while, hasn’t it? The most recent piece I wrote for this blog was all the way back in April of last year. For that, I apologize, as I’ve been a bit… busy. The time it takes to put together a large amount of meaningful seasonal reviews, brief as they may be, did not jive with my schedule over the past year. While not many people might actually have read them, it was always a good exercise that kept my non-technical writing on the sharper side, especially when the activity of watching 15+ seasonal anime is a naturally degenerate one. I’ll get back to those eventually, at my own pace, and will likely put out smaller and more directed reviews of only the recent content I find meaningful (or terrible) rather than large dumps of them. The merit of keeping a seasonal deadline for writing became outweighed by my need for more time to pursue... other things. Enough beating around the bush, dude. What the hell have you even been doing? I’ve been playing a game. Ye...

After a bit of a hiatus last season, I’m back with the usual crazed rants that you’d expect. I apologize for the lapse in content generation, but fall was just to “meh” to warrant a full post’s worth of reviews. If you’re really guessing as to what I’d have recommended, I’ll spoil it for you here: it’s just SSS.Gridman and Bloom into You . That’s it. Everything else was kind of boring. --- Title: Boogiepop wa Warawanai Genre: Sci-Fi, Psychological, Mystery Studio: Madhouse Streaming: Crunchyroll, VRV If you’re entrenched in the anime fandom, you may have heard the name Boogiepop before, but been confused as to what it meant or stood for. A famously popular and successful light novel series with a somewhat controversial TV anime, Boogiepop received a far more polished and “straightforward” adaptation by Madhouse just in time for Dengeki Bunko 's anniversary. If anything, this 2019 rendition of Boogiepop is a complete and polished package, something the previous mi...

Ah, theme event days. The cornerstone of a regular TCG community; a necessary evil to spice up the endless loop of playing against the same familiar deck lists week in and week out. However, in a purely English Weiss Schwarz environment, deck building restrictions can be a massive pain in the ass. Since the states haven't got even a third of the "power-up" and "volume two" sets that Japan has, brewing up a fun and functional list can be prove harder than you'd think. Yeah, you might be able to piece together that Love Live waifu list, but all you're signing yourself up for is disappointment and frustration. If you're anything like me, you're sick of dealing with Kotori's lack of a usable brainstorm and functional combos. Bless your (twinkle twinkle) little stars, this deck tech is made explicitly for you. The goal is to brew a functional, fun, and explosive deck that abides by general "waifu/husbando deck" restrictions which are t...

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

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

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

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

These lead-ins are really starting to get tired and forced, so I'll spare you the typical spiel and instead give you some updates. I've started an anime-centric podcast with the help of some of my fellow nerds, @FritschTheRed, @HGF2635, and a rotating cast of other degenerates, called the "Anime Alcoholics Podcast". We strive to have a new episode every other week, which we record live then post to YouTube for later consumption. In an effort to not discriminate, we try to highlight a wide range of anime-related degeneracy (past topics including everything from monster girls to a Fate historical discussion) as well as imbibe as much alcohol as possible throughout the cast. If this sounds even remotely interesting to you, please tune in for our live recordings on Twitch, where you can tell us how wrong we are in chat. Well that's it for that, so let's hop into reviews for Fall shall we? I'm going to skip over the 2-cour shows this time, as adding in ...

It's seasons like this one that make me glad to be a seasonal anime watcher. With a good spread of genres and a generally high overall quality, this summer has been a highly enjoyable anime experience for me. Don't get it twisted though; there's always going to be a few bombs, and I'll always be here to leave a few scathing remarks, but I'm confident in saying that the good (and mediocre) far outweighed the actual "bad" this time. To give you an idea of where I'm coming from, I picked up a whopping total of 17 seasonal shows this season and I'm (strangely) not at all regretting it. I've decided that I'm going to hazard leaving some thoughts about the few two-cour shows I've picked up this season instead of just skipping over them, either leaving my recommendation to check it out or hitting it with a dreaded "skip it". Let's get to it, shall we? ---

I have to say, Spring 2017 was quite an enjoyable ride. Maybe I'm just getting better at identifying shows that suck before they run, or I'm just becoming more accepting of trash. Like most things, it's probably "a little of column A, a little of column B", but unfortunately I'm not here to start a discussion about changing tastes; I'm here to spew my opinions about Chinese cartoons, so let's jump right in. A few shows from this season went two-cour, so as per usual I'm going to omit them from reviews. If I had to drop any opinion about them though, I'd definitely say that Boku no Hero Academia S2 and Re:Creators are definitely worth checking out. --- Zouroku's special form of old man "justice" is always a riot.

As this season comes to a close I find myself looking forward to a yet to the upcoming spring season rather than reveling in this year's "hot and cold" winter season. Overall, shows this season were either pretty damn good or total trash, with only a few "meh"s to speak of. Thankfully, great shows and terrible shows are pretty easy to write about, so strap on in as I run down everything I watched this season, good and bad. I'd say again that I'll try to keep it brief, but we all know that's a bold-faced lie. Insert "rate-within-genre" blurb here, etc... etc... Shows that hold-over into spring will not be rated ( Little Witch Academia ). --- This kind of fight animation from the first episode is the best the show ever looked.

Well, the fall season has finally come to a close. Since I did a "first impressions" post this time around and started watching 18 shows this season, I'm going to keep this one a little more brief than my previous "Season in Review" posts, although that likely isn't going to happen. For the most part, everything played out as expected with only a few surprises and let-downs. Again, i rate everything in-genre, so if something seems a little higher or lower than you'd think, remember that I'm rating against a show's contemporaries and not cross-genre. I'd rant again about the worthlessness of cross-genre ranking but I've done it to death. Anyway, I'm only going to score out stuff that finished this season, so stuff that continued into winter like March Comes In Like a Lion  and Trickster  won't be included. Let's get right into it. ---

We're about 3 or 4 weeks into the fall season, and as per the usual for the industry, the showing is far stronger overall than what we had in the summer. While we don't have an overblown blockbuster in a true sense like spring and summer's Re:Zero, there is definitely a higher general quality in what's airing. That's not to say anything this season is particularly amazing (yet), but there's a notable absence of true dumpster fire series like last season's Taboo Tattoo or Orange. Like the sensible, employed man I am, I made the executive decision to pick up EIGHTEEN series this season. However, my mistake is your gain; I'll give a short synopsis of what I've seen, and whether you should watch it, try it, or just flat out drop it/never start it. Let's get started, shall we? ---

Before I get into the thick of it, I'd like to take a moment to quickly touch on two things: I rate for purposes of recommendation to others, within a show's genre. Like any piece of art, anime is subjective and I don't see any way of attaching a qualitative rating to a subjective medium unless I can categorize a show and compare it to its contemporaries. I try as best I can to keep my personal enjoyment and biases out of my scores, but that's likely impossible. This is why my personal favorites and my top scorers don't always perfectly match up; I try to keep numbers as objective as possible. I'm 'No Drop'. That means I never drop something that I start watching, no matter how bad it gets. This is good for you, because it means you don't have to watch garbage because I'll do it for you. I just hate leaving things unfinished, even if they aren't really worth finishing. Honestly, I just love complaining so much that I turned to terrible a...

For anyone who isn't already aware, I do a lot of streaming for my local Super Smash Brothers Melee community, or rather, I used to. Ever since my senior year workload increased, it's been one thing after another: graduating, looking for a job, getting adjusted to a new job, whatever. It's been hard for me to justify continuing to stream and push footage out at the rate that I used to back when I was in college not too long ago. In general, appreciation for the stream (especially at the weekly) was waning dramatically with our weekly series becoming incredibly stale and losing PR player attendance. In addition to all that, s treaming is a hell of a hassle, requiring me to be the first one in and the last one out from events, cutting drastically into my time to actually enjoy the game, and forcing me to carry around a large amount of equipment that takes an incredible amount of time to set up and tear down.  "Oh, he'll stream his home commute but not fucking Mo...

Let's open this discussion with an example we're all familiar with. Imagine your professor just assigned the class a critical essay on this week's lecture topics. Like all essay assignments you've ever received in your life, this one has a page limit, let's say, 4 pages. Can't be more, can't be less. As you sit down the night before it's due to finally complete (or start) the assignment, you're likely to face one of two problems: 1. You are struggling to meet the 4 page limit that was set for you, experiencing a lack of material to complete the essay or have simply answered the prompt in a concise manner. 2. You are struggling to trim down your essay to fit into the 4 page limit, left feeling like you could not adequately prove your point within the limit or that there is just too much material to be fit within such a small space. Neither situation feels great for you: you either feel frustrated that you just can't seem to fill up those 4 p...