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.
Continue readingTag Archives: 2020s in anime

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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Anime Review: My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999
My Love Story With Yamada-Kun at Lv999 was a tremendously fun little romantic comedy shojo anime. After the last Shojo series I watched, Fruits Basket, went kinda hog on the melodrama, I was rather pleased to find that this series was a lot more pleasant and chill.
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Anime Review: The Cafe Terrace and Its Goddesses
As per usual, a couple times a year I like to watch a fanservice series or so to just sort of gauge the state of the genre. For the Spring 2023 season, I went with the Cafe Terrace and Its Goddesses, to see if it fares a little better than the last fanservice series I watched with Goddess in the title. The answer is very much “Yes”.
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Anime Review: Heavenly Delusion
Of the heavier anime series from the Spring 2023 season that I watched, probably the heaviest of them all was Heavenly Delusion (released on Hulu in the US and Disney+ abroad under its untranslated Japanese title of Tengoku Daimakyo). The series was one of the two from this past season that sought to build a couple of mysteries over the course of the season, with a varying degree of success. Also, a content warning for this series – it contains imagery of sexual assault.
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Anime Review: Tonikawa Over The Moon For You Season 2
The first season of Tonikawa was a light, refreshing slice-of-life sitcom series that answered the question – can you have a funny sitcom when everyone in the relationship has already said “I Will”, and also they don’t have kids? The answer, it turned out, was yes. The question for season 2 is, “Can this story continue to maintain this momentum?” The answer, it turns out, is also yes.
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