Often with an anime series, you get the caveat of “Oh, it has a weak start, but it really sticks the landing in the conclusion” or the warning of “Oh, it has a good start, but really fumbles the landing”. Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included has the weird instance of being a series with a weak start, a weak end, but a really strong middle portion of the series. The series, which I’m going to just call Studio Apartment for the sake of brevity – starts out as a pretty standard magical girlfriend series, and ends as a magical girlfriend harem series – but there’s a moment in the middle, where the series really finds its feet as the supporting cast builds up – and where it has some interesting humor to go with it.
Continue readingTag Archives: 2020s in anime
We discuss the start of the Spring Anime season, along with some of the failings of Gundam SEED, before moving into Ippon Again.
Anime Review: Synduality Noir Part 2
I watched Synduality: Noir in a previous season, enjoyed it, and was looking forward to the second season. The second half of the series does do a good job of changing up the dynamic, exploring a few more of the world’s mysteries, and bringing the series to something of a satisfactory conclusion.
There will be spoilers below the cut.
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Anime Review: Metallic Rouge
Metallic Rouge is Studio Bones celebrating its 10th anniversary by going back to its routes with an original anime series, with an action show about a pair of ambiguously lesbian characters going on a journey – in this case a science fiction trip through various planets in the solar system, in the process uncovering several mysteries about the world. The problem is that the series, at 12 episodes, doesn’t quite have the time to really do justice to all the themes that they want to cover.
Spoilers below the cut.
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Anime Review: Solo Leveling
Solo Leveling was one of the web novel titles that I remember seeing promoted heavily by Yen Press. It was one of the first of these Web Novel turned Light Novel titles that got an audiobook release in the US, and generally it had a fair amount of buzz behind it. So, when an anime adaptation came up on the Seasonal charts, I decided it was time to find out what all the buzz was about.
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Anime Review: Brave Bang Bravern!
I don’t know what I expected coming into this show. On one hand, I got drawn in by the Real Robots Meets Super Robot take on the show, combined with the involvement Masami Obari. Obari as a director is someone who I almost became more familiar with through his involvement on the Fatal Fury anime series, animating the Brave franchise, along with creating the Angel Blade franchise – putting him at the confluence of strongly choreographed action, spectacularly done super robots, and a lot of… actively heterosexual fanservice. So, I was a little surprised to see just how incredibly queer – and particularly gay, Bravern is.
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Anime Review: Frieren – Beyond Journey’s End
Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End was the anime series in the Winter season that was most able to make me ugly cry. It starts off with some heavy reflections on grief and mourning and every few episodes it manages to slip in another shot in the feels. That said, this isn’t a depressing show – instead, it’s a bittersweet reflection on the fact that we and the people we know will eventually grow old and die, so we should value our time with them while we can. It then proceeds to do all of this interspersed with some tremendous fight scenes.
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Anime Review: Chained Soldier
So, we’ve hit the end of the Winter Anime season, so I’m going to take a short break from the Let’s Play to get through some of the anime series I finished this season – starting with the fanservice anime I went for this time – Chained Soldier.
Continue readingWe discuss the current anime we’ve watched, along with the recent passing of Akira Toriyama, before getting into our March Rom-Com, with My Love Story With Yamada-Kun at Lv.999
Anime Review: Our Dating Story
Our Dating Story: The Inexperienced Me and the Experienced You almost feels like the polar opposite of Girlfriend, Girlfriend. While Girlfriend, Girlfriend is aggressively polyamorous with some hints at bisexuality, Our Dating Story is very monogamous and heterosexual. The other series is very horny, much more horny than the first season, while Our Dating Story is fairly chaste (while being aware of sex).
Continue readingIt’s time to look back on the year that was, with 8 picks for my top Anime (along with 2 honorable mentions, which I guess means it’s 10) of 2023.
Anime Review: Girlfriend, Girlfriend Season 2
The core refrain of the first season of Girlfriend, Girlfriend was “They are such horny idiots.” – That refrain remained true in the second season of the series, with the addition of another Horny Idiot to the series.
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Anime Review: Bullbuster
When Bullbuster was announced, it was viewed as a more grounded successor series to Dai-Guard, a Super Robot anime series that had its tongue firmly embedded in cheek, as it grappled with the tough questions of how do you financially justify operating a Super Robot to fight kaiju. Bullbuster revisits those questions, except with a more grounded Real Robot (though still fighting fairly large monsters), and couches the story in the conflict between small businesses and big corporations.
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Anime Review: Overtake
In the Fall 2023 season, we had an interesting occurrence of two different racing series, each covering different kinds of racing, scheduled on the same day, in adjacent time slots (and I believe on different channels). One was MF Ghost, the sequel to Initial D, and the other was Overtake – a series about Formula 4 Racing. While both were about racing, the two were remarkably different.
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Anime Review: MF Ghost (Season 1)
The Fall 2023 anime season featured the spiritual sequel to the classic street racing Anime, Initial D. As people tend to mellow with age, so has the creator of Intial D. MF Ghost continues the concept of racing on regular roads with normal cars, but expands the concept from pure drift racing, and moves it from beyond the underground.
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Anime Review: Spy Classroom Season 2
Spy Classroom Season 2 is one that is a lot more serious than the first season. It’s not to say that there isn’t a large quantity of slapstick, some comedy around the members of Team Lamplight’s personality foibles, and more development for some of the other members of the group – that’s definitely there. However, it does make an attempt to be more dramatic than last season, with varying degrees of success.
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Anime Review: Oddtaxi
Oddtaxi is one of those truly unique series – on paper it’s the sort of hyperlink-cinema noir story that fits right in with series like Baccano and Durarara (or, for that matter, films like Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, and Pulp Fiction). However, how the presentation of the story helps make it truly distinct from the other stylistic works that came before. There will be some spoilers below the cut.
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Anime Review: Ayakashi Triangle
So, this anime is a little less “spooky” and a little more “fanservice-heavy”, but it’s a series that also involves the Yokai, which are used in both spooky and silly contexts, so I feel okay including this more recent series, Ayakashi Triangle, into my Halloween reviews.
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Anime Review: Synduality Noir
Of the Summer 2023 anime series, Synduality Noir is the other of the series that I’d almost describe as “horror adjacent” – in this case not because of the inclusion of traditional gothic horror monsters (Werewolves, Vampires, etc.), but rather because of a few of the elements introduced later in the series.
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Anime Review: Undead Murder Farce
I’m starting off my October horror reviews with a mystery horror anime – Undead Murder Farce.
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Anime Review: TONIKAWA: High School Days
Tonikawa: High School Days is a short 4 episode miniseries that basically makes up one miniature arc. I don’t know where the manga is at by comparison, so I don’t know if this is a case where the studio is waiting on the next arc to wrap before continuing with the story, or what. But what I do know is that this is a nice, warm and cozy little morsel to tide us over until we get the next arc.
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Anime Review: Mobile Suit Gundam: Witch From Mercury Season 2
This season had the second halves of not one, but two very LGBT-ish anime from Bandai/Sunrise, and a lot of worry about whether these would be able to stick the landing. Let’s start with the mecha series: Mobile Suit Gundam: Witch from Mercury, Season 2. There will be some spoilers.
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Anime Review: Sorcerous Stabber Orphen – Final 2 Seasons
The last two cours of Sorcerous Stabber Orphen went back-to-back, feeding directly into the other, at a total of 24 episodes (which was the same length as the previous seasons of the show) but with two different subtitles – Chaos in Urbanrama and Doom of Dragon’s Sanctuary. The two series are somewhat mixed in quality, but they go one into the other to such a degree that it’s hard to talk about them in isolation.
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Anime Review: Oshi No Ko
If you have followed the anime industry in Japan, and with it have paid attention to Japanese voice actors and the pop singers who do the opening and closing songs of the shows you like, you may have come to the realization that the Japanese music industry kinda sucks, and maltreats people (something that was also previously covered in Key The Metal Idol and Perfect Blue). This past season we got Oshi No Ko, an adaptation of a manga from the writer of Kaguya-Sama: Love is War and also the artist of Flowers of Evil, which gives its own take on this, which I think gives a different spin on some of those beats.
There will be spoilers below the cut. There is some real benefit of going into the show – at least the first episode – completely unspoiled, but if you’d rather not, that’s perfectly okay.
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