What I Watched This Week – 2/18 – 2/24

Katsugeki Touken Ranbu – I don’t know what I’m more surprised by: That this has a rating below 7 on MAL, or that they got ufotable to animate a franchise with an almost exclusively female audience. Aside from a brief foray to the Sengoku period, most of the action takes place in the Bakumatsu period, as the cast of famous swords from Japanese history incarnated as attractive young men in the 23rd century travel into the past to fight shadowy figures that are attempting to change the course of history. I can’t really argue too much with the critics pointing out the corny dialogue or the undercooked plot, but having my two great loves – history and hot anime guys – combined together with nicely produced animation made for an entirely pleasant experience for me. If you don’t run in terror from franchises aimed at women, and you don’t mind a premise you’re not supposed to think about too hard, the action scenes alone are pretty fun to watch. 7/10

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: Visions of Coleus – I can’t quite remember where this three-episode OVA fits into the series’ timeline, maybe just before season two, but it follows Rimuru as he visits a desert country to investigate the mysterious happenings surrounding the two princes vying for the throne. It fits the usual pattern of his adventures, where he arrives in a place, he meets the various players, discovers some shadowy power working behind the scenes to suit their own agenda, then calls his crew to help him as they set everything straight with a round of fighting. It’s nothing new or particularly innovative, but I like all these characters, and I enjoy watching them work. 7/10

Eureka Seven Ep.1-6 – Since this is on Funimation but not Crunchyroll, I wanted to watch it before Funimation shuts down in early April, as it’s a fairly popular mecha series. It has a number of things I thought were pretty interesting, if a bit dated, like the way the robots surfed on magnetic waves in the air, and how the main cast was a ragtag crew of misfits styled after skateboarders who flew around doing side jobs and antagonizing the authorities. However, these episodes went heavy on pranking or just straight up hazing the main character, whose biggest crime was being a naïve fourteen-year-old boy who idolized the crew, and it just isn’t fun for me to watch him get humiliated and/or embarrass himself over and over. I might come back to it, I might not.

What I Watched This Week – 2/11 – 2/17

Lovely Complex – After that contractor who worked on the English dub for this posted that long Patreon post about how awful this series was and how he rewrote it to be better in the dub script, naturally I had to go back and re-watch this to see if it was drastically different than I remembered, or if he was just full of shit. After re-watching it, I can confidently say that anyone claiming that the main girl was an unlikeable sociopath, or that the mangaka was some kind of narcissist sicko, is just a garden-variety misogynist with poor reading comprehension. The story aged just fine. The Osaka setting and Kansai dialect should clue in even the most clueless observer that the insults and roughhousing between the two leads is slapstick/manzai comedy and not anything abusive. Seiko’s introduction earlier in the story is certainly clumsy, especially by today’s standards, but after that she’s just one of the girls, and none of the sympathetic main cast ever deadnames her. It was honestly even a bit funnier than I remembered it. Risa is a sweetheart, her friends are golden, Otani is the shorty male lead we need more of in shoujo, and the whole thing is just a great time. Now that I own the Blu-ray, I might just watch the English dub to see what that idiot did or didn’t change. 8/10

The Quintessential Quintuplets Movie – This two-hour movie caps off the series, and I have to say that my first foray into pure harem anime was a bit of a mixed bag. As a work of romance fiction, I can’t say I care for this. While I suspected the “winner” would be who she was, it wasn’t because she had the best chemistry with the lead, or because the story took the time to establish a strong relationship between the two, it was because it felt like the series was saving her story for the end. Without that bit of metagaming on my part, I could easily have seen him end up with any of the girls. If the main character has the same amount of chemistry with everyone, it’s functionally the same as having chemistry with no-one. As a drama, I wasn’t terribly taken with it. A lot of the dramatic moments it brought up just felt silly or empty. As a comedy, though, I could kind of get into it. It was fun to watch a guy juggle the moods of five girls with very different personalities, and the pranks they’d play on him from time to time could be pretty funny. I think if I watch any other harem anime, I’m going to seek out ones that lean into the comedy rather than the romance or drama. 6/10

Seikimatsu★Darling – I have watched pretty much every BL series available on the various legal streaming platforms, so I’m down to watching short, fansubbed OVAs, like this one-episode OVA from 1996. BL was just built different in the 90s, with triangle chins you could cut yourself on and plots that are a little out there for the modern BL reader. The main characters of this OVA are two coworkers who have developed feelings for each other but resist taking their relationship to the next level, as neither one wants to be the bottom. This is all mostly played for laughs, and I will admit that it got me to chuckle a few times, but it definitely feels extremely dated. Still, it’s not exactly a major time commitment, and it was interesting to watch an older entry in the genre. 6/10

What I Watched This Week – 2/4 – 2/10

Magical Circle Guru-Guru – I don’t remember adding this 2017 remake of a 90s shounen adventure series to my watchlist, but it looked fun, so I threw it on the other night. The story follows a boy named Nike, whose parents see a sign advertising a cash reward for defeating the big bad and decide he should become a hero, who joins up with a young sorceress named Kukuri to journey across the world and defeat its enemies. I really enjoyed the cute little character designs, the action was zany in a way that made me nostalgic for the cartoons I watched when I was younger, and it tells a complete story in 24 episodes. The pacing felt a little fast at times, which may have been a matter of trying to squish in 16 volumes of content, or it may have just been a rapid fire style of comedy writing. Either way, it was a fun watch with a number of likeable characters. 7/10

The Quintessential Quintuplets S2 – In season one, I complained about fanservice scenes that felt awkwardly shoehorned in. Those thankfully were missing from this season, but they were replaced with an equally annoying element, as this arc made a big deal of the sisters looking so much alike that Fuutarou can’t tell them apart. It really strained my suspension of disbelief as this kid who has spent all this time around these girls with strikingly different personalities, tastes in fashion, hair colors, voices, and so on gets fooled over and over by wigs the girls keep stashed in their purses. I know I’m not supposed to think too hard about this, but that’s not how wigs work, for one, and I struggle to ship him with any of the girls if he can’t notice fairly obvious traits distinguishing them from one another. I’m not having a terrible time, though, and I’ll probably watch the movie this week, despite feeling a little stressed that the “wrong” girl is going to win. I don’t know who I want to win, I’m just worried I’m going to feel sad for whoever doesn’t get picked. 6/10

Roujin Z – Created by the mangaka who did Akira, this 75-minute movie blends a fairly sharp critique of the way society treats elderly people in need of care with sci-fi thriller action centered on runaway technology. In response to the cost of caring for the elderly, the government accepts an offer from a company developing a high-tech hospital bed that provides everything a patient would need, from food to entertainment to hygiene, without needing to pay others to look after them. When the elderly man chosen to be the bed’s trial run contacts the young student nurse who’s been looking after him to free him from the machine, it sets in motion a wild ride involving military contractors, a computer gaining sentience, a roomful of elderly hackers, and a desperate run to see the beach. The tone swings a bit wildly from the serious to the silly at times, and it’s not animated nearly as well as Akira, but it’s a solid piece of sci-fi writing that kept me entertained from start to finish. 7/10

What I Watched This Week – 1/28 – 2/3

Akuma-kun (ONA) – This appears to be a sequel to a 60-year-old series that I haven’t seen or read, so I hadn’t planned to watch it. I saw it got nominated in the backgrounds category, though, and I figured I’d give it a go. I might have been missing some stuff from the earlier series, but if I was, it didn’t really feel like it, as the story stood alone just fine. It follows a paranormal investigator named Ichirou Umoregi, who operates out of a dingy office cluttered with books alongside his half-human/half-demon assistant, Mephisto III. Most episodes have the characters encounter some supernatural situation involving wayward demons where Ichirou unravels the mystery behind the incident, and Mephisto forces the demon to go back home. It wouldn’t be my top pick in the category, but it definitely has excellent background art, which fits the cartoony style just about perfectly. Yuuki Kaji does an excellent job voicing Ichirou/Akuma-kun, giving him the right mix of dispassionate rational thinker and young man still working through childhood abandonment. The cases were suitably creepy, and the ending caught me by surprise. Definitely a good show to keep on tap for spooky season. 7/10

Uma Musume: Pretty Derby Season 3 – Having completed this entry in the series, I can confidently say that it’s an awful pick for the slice of life shortlist in the r/anime awards. Not only is it not very good, it is categorically not a slice of life in the slightest. If I asked people to recommend me a slice of life anime, and they suggested an action-heavy racing drama full of screaming horse girls, I would think they were trolling me. Maybe it has some connection to the real life horse she’s based on, I don’t care enough about the show to look it up, but the constant screaming while Kitasan was running was unbelievably annoying, and I adore the screaming boys of Haikyuu. Combining this irritating noise with the lousy way the story introduced and then just sort of forgot about her rivals, there wasn’t a whole lot to recommend here. I can’t help but feel it’s stealing a spot from shows that were both much more enjoyable and actual slice of life stories. 5/10

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off – The way all the marketing for this emphasized that they were bringing back the cast of the movie left me uninterested in watching it, as I figured it was just going to be a nostalgia grab. It kept showing up on different best of fall lists, and it got nominated in the adventure and animation categories, so I figured I’d take a look. As I had figured, the English version was not super good. Actors do not always make very good voice actors, and a few of them were pretty wooden-sounding. It was weird to have Japanese voices in this very North American/Canadian story full of English language pop music, but switching it to Japanese was the right decision, I think. Once I did that, I got an extremely fun adventure centered on Ramona Flowers that imagined a story where Scott lost the first fight against her seven evil exes. The character designs were charmingly creative, the color palette was great, and the animation went hard when it needed to. Most importantly, the soundtrack was as good as I hoped it would be, with songs from the Dead Kennedys, Vampire Weekend, and Metric alongside an original score. 8/10