When I finished A Certain Magical Index Season 2, and sat down to write this review, I thought I’d also reviewed Season 1. It turns out I have not – so I’ve got a lot of ground to cover in this review. Hopefully it will go fairly quickly, because while I cannot speak for the novels, but the anime version of these stories is a remarkably breezy watch.
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Quick Review: MF Ghost Season 2
Not a lot to say about MF Ghost Season 2. I enjoyed it, and will move on to season 3 when it comes out. However, the show is getting kind of formulaic at this point – season 1 wrapped with qualifying for the race that started season 2 and took up most of the season – ending in qualifying and the start of the following race. We have some character beats in between, but most of the season is focused on the racing. It’s well-animated and well-paced racing, but there isn’t much more to say. It looks like Season 3 is likely going to shape up to more of the same. So, if you’re looking for some auto racing anime to watch (or you want something to save to watch during the off-season of your auto racing of choice), this is a good candidate.
However, I’m probably not going to review Season 3 or subsequent seasons, unless they do something really stand out.
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Anime Review: Magilumiere (Season 1)
It feels weird praising a show about a business – and a startup at that – in the times we’re in, but such is the case with Magilumiere. It’s one of several shows over the past few years that have used the framework of Japanese corporate storytelling to kinda give a discrete middle finger at more toxic elements of Japanese corporate culture, while depicting a framework that could potentially not suck – in this case also, in a weird way, riffing on what a modern Japanese take on Ghostbusters might look like.
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Anime Review: DanDaDan
DanDaDan is an anime series that has a rough start. If someone were to drop it after the first episode, I’d completely understand. As the series goes on it tells a story with a tremendous mix of action, humor, and charm, but I’d also say that some of those rougher risque elements never quite go away.
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Anime Review: 2.5 Dimensional Seduction (Season 1)
My Dress-Up Darling was a show I enjoyed immensely and one I ended up watching multiple times, including for the Anime Explorations Podcast. I appreciated how the show got into the work of creating cosplay costumes. However, it felt like there was something missing, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what. Watching the first season of 2.5 Dimensional Seduction made me realize what those things were, because this show filled those gaps remarkably well.
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2025 New Year’s Resolutions: Anime
I didn’t quite get through all my shows that I’d picked for my 2024 New Year’s Resolutions this year, and to a degree this is a bit of my own doing, because I’d also not accounted to something that I had at my disposal: the podcast. Several of the shows that I’d picked, honestly, would have been good podcast fodder. Admittedly, some of those were also shows that would have been difficult to do on the podcast due to lack of streaming availability (like Betterman, Freedom, or Teknolyze). However, other ones – including one of the leftover shows, were. So, when it came to doing my list for this year, I put my list together based on two things: what would finish up the AniList Advanced Challenge for me and what would make for good podcast fodder.
Continue readingIn reponse to all the traffic on my blog that came out due to the Teaser for The Electric State, it’s only right for me to give my thoughts on what we have to look at so far.
I haven’t done an anime review on the channel in a while – it’s time to change that with my thoughts on Betterman.
Anime Review: Freedom
By all rights, an anime OVA series made for the anniversary of Cup Noodle feels like it should be bad. However, while Katsuhiro Otomo didn’t write Freedom, the fact that he got involved enough to get into character and mechanical designs should be a sign that this show could actually be pretty good. It turns out that not only is it good, but it’s good enough that I’d consider this something of a hidden gem.
Continue readingThis time we discuss the first 3 films in the Garden of Sinners series of movies, which are available for streaming on Crunchyroll.
And here are the cosplay photos I took at this year’s Kumoricon.
Continue readingCosplay Photos: Kumoricon 2024
So far, for the Fall 2024 season, I’ve only dropped one show so far – and that was How I Attended an All-Guy’s Mixer. The short version for that is this – I was interested in the show as a sort of gender-fluid BL-lite series. Not quite full on BL, but a series that could play with the tropes in interesting ways. However, the second episode felt a lot like it was relying a lot on “No Homo” jokes – to enough of a point that I basically went “Nah” – and I decided to drop it and pick up a proper BL anime later. So, How I Attended an All-Guy’s Mixer does not get a recommend from me.
Quick Notes on the One Show I Dropped
Anime Review: Betterman
Betterman was an anime series I watched a fair amount of on TechTV back when TechTV was a thing and it showed anime, before it became the G4 network. At the time I hadn’t heard about GaoGaiGar, and I didn’t have any form of DVR (and never got around to programming the VCR to tape it when it was on), so I never caught the whole show. However, at long last, in 2024, I have finally watched the show in its entirety and can give my thoughts – finishing it not long after Halloween.
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Anime Review: The Elusive Samurai
The Elusive Samurai is an anime series based on a manga from the creator of Assassination Classroom. That series was one that skewered the Japanese educational system through the context of a Shonen Fight manga – so I was interested to see how The Elusive Samurai handles Japanese history.
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Anime Reviews: A Trio of Summer 2024 Rom-Coms
This weekend I’m quickly bop through a bit of a trio of romantic comedies from the Summer Season, which might not necessarily bear a full-length review, but are worth at least a bit of conversation. Specifically – I’m reviewing the second season of Cafe Terrace and Its’ Goddesses, Pseudo Harem, and Days With My Stepsister.
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Anime Review: Dead Dead Demon’s DeDeDeDe Destruction
I have heard very good things for quite some time about mangaka Inio Asano’s work – and I’ve also heard it’s tremendously bleak to the point of absolute nihilism, so for a while, I’ve been hesitant to read his stuff. When I learned his manga Dead Dead Demon’s DeDeDeDe Destruction (henceforth DeDeDeDe) was getting an anime adaptation and that it was one of his more… approachable works, I figured I would give the show a watch. The resulting show is interesting and messy – messy in some intentional ways, and some ways that may not be (and if those other ways are intentional it doesn’t reflect well on him).
Continue readingThis week I’m stepping into the TTRPG space (something I normally save for August, but slacked off on this year), to cover a documentary film about the life of Gary Gygax.
Anime Review: Spy X Family: Code White
Spy X Family has joined One Piece and My Hero Academia in the annals of (at the time of release) currently running Shonen Jump (or Jump+) anime adaptations that have gotten non-canonical (or mostly non-canonical in the case of MHA) anime film tie-ins. In this case, we have Spy X Family: Code White, which sends the Forger family on a weekend vacation to the mountains, leading to some Bond-Film-level shenanigans.
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Film Review: Ford vs. Ferrari
I have relatively recently gotten into motorsports after years of really not being interested, because all I had access to was NASCAR. The NASCAR variety of “regular oval track of regulation size with everyone just turning in the same direction” never grabbed me. When I played racing games on consoles, I played games which, well, had turning to both the left and right, and consequently that’s what I wanted in motorsport. So, I was curious about things like Formula 1 and – even more than that – the 24 hours of Le Mans. An endurance race that required a car to run for 24 hours straight, requiring them to go very fast and to have a good fuel economy so you don’t need to pit as often to refuel. Having access to Formula 1 through ESPN+ has got me watching that (the Shift+F1 Podcast also helps), and this has also lead me to seek out movies on motorsport – particularly the docudrama Ford vs. Ferrari.
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Documentary Review: The Dreams in Gary’s Basement
A couple years ago I reviewed Secrets of Blackmoor – a documentary about Dave Arneson, and the development of the Blackmoor campaign leading up to the development of the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Kickstarting around the same time was Dreams in Gary’s Basement, a documentary focusing on the life of Gary Gygax. I’ve covered a couple of biographies of Gygax’s life in the past – Empire of the Imagination and Rise of the Dungeon Master. When Dreams in Gary’s Basement went up for Kickstarter, I felt that this was an appropriate documentary to back as well. Well, now I’ve received my physical copy and I’ve watched it – so now it’s time for my thoughts.
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Film Review: Hard Target
Hard Target was John Woo’s first big film in the United States and Hollywood, and it paired him with one of the top action stars of the early ’90s – Jean-Claude Van Damme, a star who was very much not known for his gunplay, and was much more known for his martial arts. It’s generally been held up as a rough start to Woo’s Hollywood run, but that said, I think it’s still an okay fun little action movie, even if it doesn’t reach up to the heights of his earlier Hong Kong career.
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Film Review: Golden Bat (1966)
When looking at the 1966 Golden Bat film, it’s interesting to see how much it innovates – if not outright invents – in the realm of cinematic hero tokusatsu. The main hero – Ogun Bat (Golden Bat) is widely credited as basically being the first 20th-century superhero, with characters from DC having parallel evolution in the US – his cinematic counterpart innovates considerably more then he invents, but those innovations are nothing to sneeze at.
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Anime Review – Texhnolyze
So, the second of the anime series on my New Year’s Resolution list that I’m done with is one I’m dropping – Texhnolyze. I did give it a reasonable try – getting about a cour through the series before I had enough, and because I had the show on my resolution list, I do feel it’s important to talk about why this series failed for me when two other Chiaki Konaka projects – Serial Experiments Lain and The Big O – were fine.
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