It’s been a while since I did a review of a show that just finished airing, so it’s time to give my thoughts on Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken.
Read moreKeep Your Hands Off Eizouken: Anime Video Review
Sorcerous Stabber Orphen (2019): Anime Review
By all rights, Sorcerous Stabber Orphen, at least this year’s show, should not exist. It’s an adaptation of a heroic fantasy light novel that not only isn’t an isekai, but is celebrating it’s 25th anniversary. That said, I’m glad it does.
Read moreIn/Spectre: Anime Review
In/Spectre is an urban fantasy mystery anime with something of a novel concept. It’s not based around finding justice or solving the crime, but instead on finding a solution that hurts the least number of people. It’s a take that manages to be both pragmatic while also being upbeat.
Read more07-Ghost: Anime Review
07-Ghost is a josei battle anime that I dropped years ago, but decided to revisit for a challenge for AniList. It is, for a variety of reasons, not great. As a disclaimer, I am unfamiliar with the manga that it’s based on, which has been licensed for the US release.
Read moreBlade of the Immortal (2019): Anime Review
Blade of the Immortal has had a mixed adaptation history. The last anime adaptation came out while the manga was still ongoing. This past year, we finally got a new anime adaptation thanks to Amazon – who produced and distributed it.
Read moreAzur Lane: Anime Review
Azur Lane is, basically, Ship Girl Tohou. World War II Warships from various navies are personified as cute girls, and they generally hang out at the bases of their respective factions and do cute things until the plot decides that they have to do combat in battles along the lines of shoot-em-up video games. It’s not quite at a danmaku level – but only because the game series is designed to be played on a cell phone, and you don’t have that level of control with a touchscreen.
Read moreID: Invaded – Anime Review
If I was going to describe ID: Invaded to someone in an elevator, it would be Inception crossed with Criminal Minds. It’s probably the closest I’ve come to a more standard procedural in a genre anime for quite some time, in a very imaginative way.
Read moreFate/Grand Order – Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia – Anime Review
Considering that Fate/Grand Order is widely considered to be one of the most successful mobile games of all time, one would think that more of the game’s chapters had been previously adapted to the screen. You would be wrong – previously only the game’s prologue has received an adaptation. At long last, though, one of the game’s final chapters (at least before the current sequence), the Babylonia chapter, has finally been adapted to the screen.
Read moreKeep Your Hands Off Eizouken: Anime Review
Science Fell In Love, So I Tried To Prove It: Anime Review
Each anime season, however heavy everything else gets, in terms of what I’m watching, I do try to go with at least one romantic comedy anime. For the Winter 2020 season, the rom-com I went with was Science Fell In Love, so I Tried to Prove It.
Read moreMy Hero Academia: Heroes Rising – Anime Review
The latest My Hero Academia movie hit theaters here in the US, and I have my spoiler-free thoughts on the movie in the wake of its release and in advance of any physical release.
Read moreOdin: Starlight Mutiny – Anime Review
Anime, often, cribs from works of western science fiction – particularly films. Star Wars, Star Trek, the Starship Troopers novel, and Lensmen have all been borrowed from or in some cases adapted outright. However, there are some instances where the level of cribbing doesn’t quite pan out, and Odin: Starlight Mutiny is one of those.
Read moreSpecial 7: Anime Review
Special 7 is the last of the big anime series I’d watched in the Fall 2019 season that finished that season – Azur Lane was delayed, Blade of the Immortal, Fate/Grand Order, and My Hero Academia were two-cour series, and I dropped Babylon. It’s an interesting anime series that takes the concept of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and applies it in an urban fantasy context, but doesn’t quite have as much to say.
Read moreWe Never Learn Season 2: Anime Review
The first season of We Never Learn ended with an announcement for a second season. With the manga being based around college preparation and studying for that, I did definitely have a sense that whether or not the manga was actually done at this point, whatever the second season ended on was going to have some degree of finality – with how the anime was paced, I couldn’t really see a way to wrap here without getting into graduation. Without too many spoilers before the cut, it does get to graduation, and in hindsight, I think the ending kind of works well.
Read moreVinland Saga: Anime Review
2019 wrapped up with an anime series that put itself on my list of anime to recommend to non-anime fans. That anime was Vinland Saga – and even better, it was on Amazon Prime, a streaming service that generally a lot of non-anime fans subscribe to.
Read moreNo Guns Life Season 1: Anime Review
It’s kind of been a while since we got a major cyberpunk anime that was outside of the general orbit of Masamune Shirow. Season 2 of SAO, from the description of the arc, was something that I might describe as cyberpunk adjacent – but otherwise, I generally didn’t see much that didn’t have a connection to Shirow or one of the series he created in the listings. So, when No Guns Life came up in the Anime Chart, I figured it was worth checking out.
Read moreAfter School Dice Club: Anime Review
Well, the Fall 2019 anime season has (as of when this goes live) wrapped up, so it’s time to start giving thoughts on some of the anime from the tail end of the year – and we start off with After School Dice Club, a healing anime about Euro-style board games.
Read moreMy 10 Favorite Anime of the 2010s
Well, we have come to the end of the 2010s, a decade where I actually was much more on top of watching new anime each season – more or less – in part because the rise of streaming made it possible to actually do that in an affordable manner. This past decade also saw me get my Bachelor’s degree, and go to Worldcon for the first time, in a semi-vain attempt to get lit-SF fans to give anime the time of day.
So, I’m going to do a run-down of my favorite Anime of the 2010s that I’ve seen. I will be doing one series per year – and again, this is show’s I’ve seen. Just because a show is not included doesn’t mean that I didn’t watch it or didn’t like it. Additionally, I have a massive List of Shame, so just because a show didn’t make the list doesn’t mean I wasn’t interested.
I’m choosing one show per year, that I watched, and that I generally enjoyed. Each show will have links to where you can watch the series, and affiliate links to where you can buy it – buying anything through those links helps to support the site.
Read more5 Favorite Anime of 2019
Well, another year come and gone, so it’s time for me to give some thoughts on my favorite shows of 2019 that I’ve seen. The keyword here is that I’ve seen. There are plenty of great shows this year that I missed, whether because they’re sequels to earlier seasons (Symphogear), or they just slipped under my radar, so I’ll need to come back to them later. As with all of my lists, these are in no particular order, so don’t consider a lower spot in the list, nor an absence from the list, as a slight against that work.
Read moreScorching Ping-Pong Girls: Anime Review
Sports Anime is something of a blind spot in my viewing habits. A lot of the top shows of the past few years (Kuroko’s Basketball, Haikyu, Yowamushi Petal) are on my to-watch list, and a few other shows (Giant Killing, Free, Princess Nine) I’ve never gotten around to finishing. So on a recommendation I decided to sit down and watch Scorching Ping-Pong Girls, on the one hand I found it an enjoyable and brisk watch – but on the other, it left me hanging.
Read moreMy Hero Academia – Two Heroes: Anime Review
When it comes to anime films that tie-in to ongoing shonen series, generally they tend to not be canonical – and basically exist to show a whole bunch of additional cool fights. My Hero Academia: Two Heroes is basically that, except with the nice addition of showing a little bit more of All Might’s backstory, through the introduction of an old friend from his earlier career.
Read moreMiss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid: Anime Review
After this past year’s horrific fire at Kyoto Animation, I found myself looking at all the animated series that Kyoto Animation had done in the past, and found that I had seen so very few of them, and that they were also all on my to-watch list well before the fire. The body of work of the studio was at a level that I’d compare to GAINAX at their prime. So, having read the first volume of Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid a couple jobs ago, while I was working in Downtown Portland, I decided to bump that show up on the list. Also, as a part of the weekly anime viewing nights I’d started with my parents after I got my Dad into anime, I decided to add that show to the rotation, sight unseen. The results were favorable, with an asterisk.
Read morePenguin Highway: Anime Review
At Kumoricon 2019, I had the good fortune of getting into a screening of the anime film Penguin Highway. It is an anime film of a variety that doesn’t come out in the US very much – an anime film that is a straight-up family adventure film, and a film that also plays into some of the Kids on Bikes concepts that came up in a few works I’ve reviewed recently (The Gate and Tales from the Loop).
Read moreWhat the Hell Are You Doing Here, Teacher?: Anime Review
When it comes to concepts related to fanservice in anime, there are some that are very hard to do well. One of them, probably the biggest one of them, is what I call “Sexual Slapstick.” It’s someone walking into a room and seeing someone undressing, or tripping and falling and copping a feel (or seeing something they shouldn’t. They’re all based around acts that are gross, which means it can be hard to make funny. Season one of We Never Learn did it and What the Hell Are You Doing Here, Teacher? also manages to actually pull it off.
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