#arcaneanime

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - The Yakuza's Guide to Babysitting

It's very nice, but the title feels a bit misleading.

The Yakuza's Guide to Babysitting may give you the first impression that it's going to be some kind of dark comedy with drama splashed in, but by the end of it, I was feeling much more Fruits Basket than anything else.

The last show I finished was Akiba Maid War, and the contrast between the two is stunning - while the yakuza as depicted in Maid War was unrealistic due to the over-the-top violence on display in every episode, Babysitting swings too far in the other direction. The Family depicted in this show feels less like the yakuza, and more like a group of roommates who happen to have a leader.

The main character Kirishima has a violent past, for sure, but the vast majority of this show is meant to be about him overcoming that. I can appreciate that as a story angle, but the problem here is that every conflict that comes up is solved ridiculously quickly to get back to the sugary sweet family comedy stuff.

It robs what could have been a more meaningful narrative of any stakes - towards the end, we of course get Kirishima running away because he's afraid he's going to relapse into the "demon" he was before the story began, but a search party is sent out for him and he ends up coming home without a fuss, despite the heavy angsting he'd been doing only minutes prior.

These feel like story beats that were hit for the sake of having a plot, rather than being written with any kind of intentionality, and it left me wishing the show could have been deeper than just being a cute time.

Basically, despite the title, it's essentially just another father-daughter show without much going on beyond that. It's a decent one, but don't go in expecting more than that.

7/10.

[sup-honey]

In which Jayce tries to make Viktor eat. And also shoots his shot...

Someone please give me a voice over 😣😣

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - World Trigger Season 2/3

World Trigger, from austere beginnings, made a surprise revival in 2021 and just blew nearly all of its competition out of the water.

I've talked about this show before, a very long time ago, but getting a full, higher-budget continuation this year was not something I'd ever expected to happen. World Trigger was originally aired before the perpetual-animation concept had really and truly fallen apart (sorry, Boruto and Black Clover) and aired over seventy episodes in its first "season", which clearly was meant to keep going, except that the author of the manga had to take an extended break from the project. Without any new manga chapters in sight to come back to, the show was cancelled.

But despite being initially ridiculed for its fairly poor production job (even for a Toei Animation joint), World Trigger had steadily been gaining an audience interested in its writing, worldbuilding, and its extremely interesting fight sequences.

In most other shounen anime, the main characters will simply develop brand-new superpowers as the plot needs, or through character development, or even just naturally as the show goes on. World Trigger's bread and butter lies in the hard rules of its universe, which basically runs on "what if Midichlorians but not stupid" rules. People have varying levels of energy capacity and a certain number of ways to use it, with their "trigger" abilities largely being shared powers that must be combined or utilized in interesting ways to fight against their enemies, and each other.

This leads to tons of extremely cool and unexpected moments where characters come up with plans like making a giant energy meteor that crashes into a shopping mall by just increasing the input of a regular environmental-destruction attack, or using a trigger that's meant to let you change your angle mid-air to create a fearsome pinball attack that bounces a projectile in a thousand different directions.

And then you have the main character Osamu, whose defining traits are that he's pretty decent at strategizing and has a far-below-par energy capacity that he must find a way to work around and make useful, which leads him to investigate less-used support powers that can combine well with his unique team in order to make himself useful in combat.

This show manages to juggle that with a massive cast that rivals any sports anime, and yet gives you a total sense of who everyone in a fight is and what they're capable of by the end of it. These two seasons cover the rest of the "Rank Wars" arc that pits the human characters against each other in squad battles to determine who gets to go on a mission to a neighboring planet, and every single one of these fights is incredible because of how many different ways the story is able to set them up and pay them off.

I really can't say enough good things about World Trigger, and while I think it's got a while to go before we get to the meatier and more emotional parts of the story, I'm immeasurably excited to have it back, and have the possibility for more of it in the future.

9/10.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs

Someday, this war will end. But not today.

The title of Trapped in a Dating Sim will tell you absolutely everything you need to know about this show, on more than one level. The fact that it's written like a One Direction fanfiction title tells you the competency of the author, the length tells you that this is a Light Novel Anime, and the title itself tells you that it's going to be yet another goddamn dating sim isekai.

Mobsekai asks the daring, dangerous question on everybody's minds: what if the person being reincarnated was...a mediocre man with black hair?

Sure, it might look like he's got some circumstances working against him because he's reborn as a random peasant NPC, but by the end of the episode, he's already drowning in money and cheat powers by using his knowledge of the game to acquire a literal space ship.

Basically, take all of my complaints about Slimesekai, and just put them on fast forward for this one. It's already power tripping in episode one, and that gives me no hope that it will be at all interesting going forward. Easy drop.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Salaryman's Club

I've got something of a personal, broad take on sports shows. Typically, if they're only one cour, it's seemingly never enough time to tell a complete and compelling story.

Salaryman's Club attempts to subvert this problem by deciding to speedrun a full tournament arc in only twelve episodes, and I'm happy to say that it mostly succeeds.

The most striking thing about this show is that it's a sports anime about adults, a rarity in and of itself. Given that the story is about working-class adults competing in what seems to be an amateur corporate league, it has to establish stakes beyond just "the seniors really want to win before the graduate". It mostly succeeds by executing the arcs of its two leads.

The more straightforward protagonist is Mikoto, a recent high-school graduate who attempted to play for champion-class team Mitsuhoshi Bank but failed due to an issue with PTSD caused by his high school doubles partner being injured due to his mistake. He gets recruited by the much more laid-back Sunlight Beverage corporation, and partnered up with the other main character. Over the series, he confronts the issues with his past and gains experience in his new position as a salesman while recovering his badminton career.

Then we have Tatsuru, who is one of the oldest members on the team at 32, and is approaching an age where he won't be able to play competitively anymore. He actually met Mikoto when he first started the Sunlight Beverage job and Mikoto was a child, and inspired him to take badminton seriously in the first place, but now he has to confront both the possibility of aging out of the game and the consequences of backsliding in his work.

It has to skip over a lot of stuff to get there, but Salaryman's Club does manage to competently tie up both of these arcs in full in only twelve episodes, and while it's a bit jarring to have entire matches happen offscreen, it does end up working in favor of the pacing.

Really, the thing holding Salaryman's Club back is that it's nothing too special. Despite the twist of the adult characters, it plays out like a pretty ordinary tale in its genre, making it a very enjoyable time, but not a particularly distinct one.

7/10.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - NOMAD: MEGALOBOX 2

I hope it's understandable that this one took me a while.

Back in 2018, I was in a very different place in my life, but I stand by my decision to give the original MEGALOBOX a perfect score. Even though I was basically forced on a break from anime when NOMAD was airing, I managed to set aside some time alone in the dark to watch the first episode...and that, by itself, was also a 10/10. It took months for me to work up the nerve to actually keep going.

The worst thing that a second MEGALOBOX could have done was to try to be more of the first one, and full credit, NOMAD is absolutely not that. It's brutal, upsetting, and emotional, and it knows well enough that just doing a sports movie sequel would not be doing justice to the original. NOMAD takes the focus off of the ring (especially Joe's) and places it squarely on the aftermath of trauma.

Six and a half years after the conclusion of the original show, the Joe we are introduced to is so different that he's not even using the name anymore, going by the new title of the show - Nomad. He's washed-up, he's failing to fight, and he's addicted to painkillers to try and keep himself floating through whatever is left of his life. And he's being haunted by a hallucination of Pops, who we learn, has died.

This is, of course, a pretty far cry from how the first season ended, and one of the driving mysteries is how the hell things got so bad. It turns out that although Pops died of natural causes, the situation surrounding that event completely shattered the sense of family that the surviving characters had together, and having flown too close to the sun, Joe fell just as hard as Icarus did.

The first story arc is a self-contained tale of Joe encountering a community of immigrants hated by society for basically the reasons that they are in real life. While the story of Chief and the immigrants is effective in and of itself, and extremely moving, the first stumble of the season comes with its depiction of racism. While accurate, NOMAD misses the opportunity to show anything but the most obvious and overt bigotry, rather than the way said bigotry can manifest in smaller and more deep-seated ways.

Moving on from this, we get into the real meat of the season, which is the newly-clean Joe's efforts to reassemble his old life despite nobody that knew him now wanting anything to do with the former champion. This is followed by a more cyberpunk-themed story about a boxer who had left the ring for a career in law enforcement, became a local hero, and was nearly paralyzed from the neck down until a miracle machine came from a pharmaceutical company that would restore his body with the use of a computer implanted into his brain. The negative side effects, unfortunately, are threatening to rip his family apart.

I want to stress that NOMAD is a great show with many triumphant emotional moments, but unfortunately it ends up fumbling the ball in a few key ways that prevent me from awarding it with the same perfect score as its predecessor.

The first is in said depiction of law enforcement. It's squeaky-clean and without any interrogation of the systems at play, which is unusual for a cyberpunk-genre story, particularly when corruption is a theme in the side of the story involving the pharmaceutical company (who want to sell their miracle machine to the military).

The second is the final episode. Whereas Joe and Yuri's fight from the end of the original felt like it had massive emotional stakes, Joe and Mac's fight here doesn't really have any.It ends extremely prematurely in a way I can only imagine was written because they didn't have enough room in the episode to have both this last bout (which is constantly interrupted with plot flashbacks) and the story wrap-up, and since the penultimate episode is mostly just set-up for the fight, I probably would have spread it over both that and the last episode. Joe and Mac don't really seem to care who actually wins here, it's purely symbolic, but that also means that the audience likely doesn't care either.

But the ride to get there and the phenomenal character writing is still enough for me to give NOMAD a spot in my Hall of Fame, with a 9/10. It's not as good as the original, but it has the balls to go in a different direction, and it executes almost all of that in a perfect, moving way.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Fruits Basket The Final Season

This is a review that's been four years in the making.

As I've been watching the Fruits Basket remake, it's predictably been difficult to really find things to say while we were still on the first or second season. This was a story that was going to live and die by how it ended, and TMS had promised to tell the entire thing. The community waited nearly twenty years for a proper retelling of Fruits Basket that would reach all the way to the conclusion.

There is a good reason this story is so beloved.

These thirteen episodes are a rapid-fire masterpiece of dramatic character writing that deftly moves between the series' massive cast and yet manages to feel like nobody really gets left behind. The transition from lighthearted romantic comedy with dramatic elements, into a full-power drama with barely any jokes in sight was a difficult one, but the way it was split up ended up working directly in its favor as well.

Where the second season of Fruits Basket ended up leaving off on an underwhelming reveal, all we have here is satisfying conclusion after conclusion to each and every character's narrative, as the cycle of abuse is finally brought into sharp focus. The story of Akito was going to be a tricky one if she's meant to be redeemed in the end, and yet it's pulled off flawlessly with the centering of her narrative around her father.

Akito can't understand that what she does is wrong, because she was taught that she could do no wrong, deliberately skewing her view of the world so that she would pass on the abuse to those around her and continue to propagate the curse. As her world begins to crumble under the weight of self-examination, we see that the bonds between her and the cursed family members break one by one, and ultimately Tohru's act of offering her the first real friendship she's ever had is what brings the dam down entirely.

The comedic concept of people who transform when they're hugged is refocused and turned on its head, and becomes a heavy and tear-jerking desperation on their parts for physical affection. As each of them are relieved of their curse, they all immediately move to hug the nearest person to them, for the first time in their lives able to actually express such emotional intimacy.

And the story draws to a close as each of them begins to make plans for a life outside of the control of the family and the zodiac curse, for once allowed to make their own choices. Some choose to stay, others choose to leave, and we end with one final character arc for Tohru's late mother Kyoko. The payoff for this elephant in the room is massive, and had me bawling for a good ten minutes before I could calm myself enough to watch the final episode - and then it gets brought back around.

Yes, the problematic elements of the story are still present. There's still probably too many characters, the family members getting together is still weird and no attention is really drawn to it, and the adult-teen relationship ends the series intact.

But if you just let Fruits Basket sell you into its world, you might not even notice anymore. It's such a well-told story that its 90's-era problems are, in the end, very easy to forget, and what you're left with is one of the greatest stories in any anime, and probably a very red face.

10/10.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Sabikui Bisco

Probably should have listened to my first instinct on this one.

Sabikui Bisco made a pretty bad first impression by having its first three episodes tell both a present-day and flashback story at the same time, and in the process, it established its universe as a deeply weird place. Once I was convinced to get through this rough portion, I will admit that I started to have a good time.

Sabikui's world is a post-apocalyptic Japan where many animals have grown enormous, a mysterious rusting disease is claiming lives, and mushrooms have become functionally illegal to cultivate because the public believe they're causing that disease. A young doctor from the city has made it his mission to cure his sister (a ranking guard and extremely capable fighter) of this rusting disease before it eventually kills her, by experimenting with the supposedly harmful fungi. He meets a hot-blooded "terrorist" who can make massive mushrooms grow instantly, who informs him that the truth is inverted - the mushrooms can actually reduce the rust, and there's one that can reverse it entirely.

So, for a while, the show becomes a road trip story where the two outlaws partner together to find the Rust Eater, riding atop their faithful crab steed Actagawa. Sabikui Bisco settles into an entertaining groove where it gets to just play with its world, even if it ends up feeling a bit derivative of Gurren Lagann.

And then the big villain is introduced, a mad scientist who essentially is responsible for the spread of the rust, and the stupidity just bleeds out all over the narrative.

This is a show where both the main characters appear to die and then are resurrected. Nino gets shot in the back five times at the end of an episode only to recover by the beginning of the next. Bisco has an onscreen death where he supposedly kills the scientist as the rust is causing his body to crumble, only to be reborn in the body of the giant monster fought in the climax, so fully-reformed that it somehow regenerated his clothes too.

And then in the end, it turns out Bisco is literally immortal now, and the show hasn't even provided a reasonable explanation for how he comes back to life. Evidently it was just because his friend was calling his name on top of the monster, and he just wakes up and crawls out of it.

Dumb. This is dumb. Please don't kill off your characters and then bring them back without any explanation. I feel like I shouldn't have to say this out loud.

5/10.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - My Dress-Up Darling

My first show of 2022, done and dusted. What did we get?

My Dress-Up Darling, more than possibly any show I've ever talked about, came right the fuck out of nowhere, and its surprise popularity utterly flattened everything this season not named Demon Slayer or Attack On Titan. As I'm writing this, it is the third-most popular Winter 2022 show on MAL behind only those two, and the fourth-place show (Arifureta Season 2) has less than half of its member count.

And all of this over a moderately-horny romantic comedy about a shy boy who makes fancy dolls and a trendy, sex-positive girl who wants to cosplay.

Dress-Up Darling does deserve the hype, though. It's pretty unfailingly cute, the leads have a boatload of chemistry together, and it's honest about how awkward the entire thing can be for a boy who's never had an interaction with a girl his own age before. Their first major conversation involves him basically totally forgetting that he's even talking to a teenage girl because he's so wrapped up in critiquing the quality of her work from his artisan's point of view.

As the show goes on, it introduces some very nice genre curveballs (the girl falling for the guy way ahead of time, for example) and some unfortunate and stale tropes (like the middle-schooler who looks eighteen and has massive boobs). While I find the characters' personalities enjoyable, I think the story would have been fine just paring some of these elements down. Being openly horny is fine, being wholesome is fine, and smashing them together can work out fine, but anime as a whole needs to move on from the trope of sexualizing young girls' bodies on TV.

The other cultural issue that the show unfortunately belly-flops into is racism. There is an entire episode about the heroine putting together a costume for a character who wears extremely revealing clothing (which is where most of the jokes in the situation come from), but unfortunately for the viewer, this also involves her deliberately darkening her skin in order to more closely resemble said character. This really doesn't get touched on, but it's deeply uncomfortable to watch, and you can't really escape it because this costume appears in the show's opening.

That stuff out of the way, though, My Dress-Up Darling is still a very enjoyable romantic comedy that breaks from the typical formula in some ways, and executes that same formula excellently in others. While the ending is fairly unsatisfying, the journey to get there is fun, it looks great, and I can't imagine we won't get to see more of these crazy kids in the near future.

8/10.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun Season 2

My favorite comedy of 2020 returns with a slightly improved production job, a really annoying new opening song, and just as much pure charm as ever.

Charm is absolutely a key word I would use to describe what makes Welcome to Demon School! so good. Yes, it's funny, but even when it's in between jokes (or worse, something isn't landing), the show is able to coast on its demonic-Lisa-Frank aesthetic and the inertia of its characters until the next thing that makes you laugh.

And those characters are basically all featured heavily this season. Despite having fewer episodes, I feel like I got to know every single member of the somewhat expansive cast better over the course of this second season, and seeing the friendship that our protagonist develops with his demon friends is extremely wholesome. I actually commented to one of my fellow writers that it didn't seem like Iruma even needs to still be concerned about his classmates finding out that he's secretly a human, because they all have developed so much respect for him that I can't imagine they would actually eat him at this point.

And Iruma himself remains one of the show's greatest strengths, as a protagonist with personality flaws that only make him more endearing. This season truly fleshes him out into a more complicated character as we get to see his "evil" side, and this alter ego version of him is driven, relentless, and yet still fairly selfless in his pursuit of a goal that benefits the entire class. (Side note: Evil!Iruma sitting on the Demon King's throne is easily one of my top ten anime moments of 2021.)

All of that being said, this season's second half does unfortunately get a bit dragged down by an extended story arc taking place away from the school, and while that isn't a bad thing on its own, the "demonic amusement park" setting is pretty quickly made irrelevant when the place gets wrecked by giant kaiju and then several episodes are spent fighting said kaiju. There's a few good character moments here for the rest of the class, but it goes on for too long, and focusing multiple episodes on slow-paced action battles doesn't really suit the strengths of this story.

All of that being said, by the end of the season, summer break is over and the kids are returning to school, with a new ultimatum and a lot of hard work ahead of them. Season 3 is coming in October, and I can't wait to see how this turns out.

8/10.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Jujutsu Kaisen 0

Oh, boy. You ever look at a movie's audience score and think you must be taking crazy pills?

Jujutsu Kaisen has emerged as a massive breakout hit for Shonen Jump in the wake of the Demon Slayer manga ending, and for good reason. I have positively compared this property to Yu Yu Hakusho and gave the first season a 9/10, easily placing it among my favorite shows of 2021. The story is excellent thus far, the tone is perfect and all of the characters are likeable and memorable.

Jujutsu Kaisen 0 is...an anomaly, and my opinion of it is not going to be received well.

I have in the past made the comment that some 12- or 13-episode shows I've watched may have worked better as a movie, but this is one of the rare times where a movie really should have been a show, and the entire first half of the movie certainly feels like three episodes of anime that pretty cleanly divide from each other. The villain takes half of the movie to be established, but I have greater sins to discuss regarding him later.

If you accept the weird structure, the first half is actually pretty okay. We get a lot more characterization for some side characters from the parent story and more time to get attached to them, the protagonist Yuta's backstory is goofy but acceptable, and it actually mostly works even for viewers who haven't seen the first season of the TV series.

All of this is completely thrown out the window by the second half, wherein all notion that this film could stand on its own are thrown completely out and the pacing jumps off of a cliff. Given that the source material is a four-chapter manga volume, it is bonkers how much feels totally skipped-over as if they had to cut stuff for the sake of the runtime. Major fights between important characters happen completely offscreen and the emotional moments that have any chance of landing just don't get time to breathe.

The biggest offender here is the villain, who has very nearly nothing at all to do with Yuta. Geto Suguru is, right down to his name, very clearly meant more to be a foil to Yuta's teacher, Gojo Satoru, but despite being a genocidal extremist, he has absolutely no personal beef with the protagonist until the fighting has already started and Geto has hurt Yuta's friends. Yuta, in this moment, self-actualizes out of nowhere and suddenly decides that killing Geto would fully satisfy his character arc somehow.

In terms of screentime, they met for the first time about twenty minutes ago.

The climax then totally abandons the self-contained notion of the story by shoving in an extended scene with several of the side characters from the parent story, who receive no explanation regarding their identity or presence, shoved into the middle of the final fight between Yuta and Geto. This movie already has half a dozen underutilized villain underlings whose plots go nowhere and apparently resolve offscreen as well, but sure, let's cram in a bunch of people who don't belong here for the sake of fanservice.

And the entire time, the movie just repeats through internal dialogue over and over again that all of this is crucial, that this is Yuta's reason for living, is to kill this guy he's barely ever interacted with...and then it's proven correct at the end when his curse breaks for no reason whatsoever.

What could have been an emotional moment between Yuta and his deceased childhood friend is totally robbed of pathos because of how much progression they'd apparently made together offscreen during a series of unmarked timeskips, and the idea that fighting Geto has anything to do with his character arc is extremely flimsy. Yuta himself says he doesn't even know if he disagrees with Geto's genocidal ideals, and he's fighting purely because his friends are hurt, which feels like the movie itself admitting that his motivation just isn't very strong here.

The second half of Jujutsu Kaisen 0 is an absolute disaster of jarring pacing, messy plot construction, and wasted narrative potential. The longer it kept going, the worse the bad taste in my mouth got.

From a productions standpoint, it's a few steps up from the show but anything beyond the one-on-one fight scenes just doesn't match what we saw just last year in the Demon Slayer Mugen Train movie. It's great, it's what I'd hope for from Mappa, but most of it is just above the quality of the show rather than feeling particularly jaw-dropping.

I walked out of the theater feeling pretty upset, honestly. This is such a massive step down from the show I fell in love with, and I have to hope that that's mostly due to 0 actually being written first, when the author had less experience. But seeing the rapturous praise with which this film has been met is leaving me pretty dejected at the thought that this could be a sign of what I can expect for the second season.

My solution? As I said earlier, I just don't feel like this should have been a movie. If the author wanted to expand on this story to this degree, this form factor and limited runtime ended up working against him because of just how much of the ideas have no time to resolve or even be properly established in the first place. This story seems like it would have been better suited to being the first cour of the second season, like how the second season of Yuki Yuna was divided. There's a lot of untapped potential in these characters and the film ultimately doesn't do them any favors.

I'm willing to give this a 5/10, for the solid first half and the enjoyable character moments we did get, but the sour taste in my mouth at the end was unrelated to my choice of movie theater candy.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Visual Prison

The shadow of Hypnosis Mic's failure looms large here.

Visual Prison is a strange beast. It's a show that leans very heavily into the visual-kei genre, where normal-ish-looking-people perform as glam-rock demons, the twist here being that all the performers are vampires and they're having a competition with each other.

With more care given to its presentation, that might be really cool, but one of the first things the viewer will notice about Visual Prison is that despite being an A-1 Pictures original anime production, it looks mediocre at best and ugly at worst. The performances are, like Hypnosis Mic, done largely in C-G with lyrical text appearing on the screen, but the way these scenes play out is far less visually interesting despite the subject matter.

The other big problem lies in the genre of music. I have no issues with visual kei, by any means, but one of the ways that the groups in HypMic distinguished themselves was that they all had different styles and subject matters for their rap numbers. I could probably hear a track and tell you which group had made it, even though I find the voices hard to distinguish because I don't speak the language. With all of these groups playing some kind of dark-pop-rock that doesn't really have a lot to do with their individual personalities, it robs them of something that might make them feel unique from each other.

So considering that HypMic collapsed into an embarrassing mess, and this show is already giving me the vibe of "like HypMic, but worse"...I don't really see myself going any further with this one.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Akudama Drive

The best attempt in a while to make an anime out of one-hundred-percent hype.

Akudama Drive comes to us as an original collaboration between Too Kyo Games, the studio built by the creators of Danganronpa and many of their previous coworkers at Spike Chunsoft, and - this threw me for a massive loop - Studio Pierrot, best known for...Naruto. This studio was, at the same time, also producing Boruto - a show with such bad visuals that I dropped it after five episodes just because I couldn’t stand to look at it - Black Clover, best known for its memetically awful main character, and the third season of Osomatsu-san, so I don’t know where they got the manpower to make what is very comfortably the best-looking show they have ever made, as well as the best-looking of this entire season. My jaw hit the floor in the very first episode and stayed there for the majority of what followed.

But anime is about more than visual appeal, and series composer Norimitsu Kaihou has worked with Danganronpa creator Kodaka before (writing the script for Danganronpa 3: Despair Arc, and the series compositon for Future Arc) in addition to cementing himself as an above-average creator himself, being responsible for School-Live! as both its original creator, as well as the script and composition for the anime. This show got its hooks sunk into me from the first minute, introducing a group of criminal misfits and the ordinary girl who has accidentally gotten swept into a job that promises a ludicrous payout in exchange for pulling off what seems to be an impossible, incredibly illegal feat.

The plot from there goes a little all over the place but still remains mostly easy to follow, the cast is all different flavors of likability but without letting you forget that they’re all definitely criminals who ought to have stayed locked up, and the whole thing goes in an extremely political direction that felt very topical for 2020 but was appreciated nonetheless, even if it didn’t quite stick the landing every time on that note. The dystopian element of the story is definitely front and center in the latter half, which manages well to give it more weight as the events of the story become more clear.

The major stumbling block is the final twist, which is somewhat predictable given the abundance of religious imagery in the visual design and narrative, but even then, it gets dealt with fairly quickly to make room for a very good final episode that ties the remaining loose ends up while making it clear that this is indeed the end of the story, and showing us just how far the remaining cast members have come in their development in order to accomplish what is ultimately a noble goal, and throwing society out of whack in the process.

Akudama Drive is, like the thing its creator is most known for, the type of anime insanity that definitely feels like it’s still going somewhere even as it careens off of the rails. Some of its metaphors get too mixed up in the process, but ultimately, it’s still an absolute visual treat on par with a lot of full-on movie productions that hopefully will propel Too Kyo Games forward into whatever their next big project is. It’s a transitional piece for the people making it, but it’s one hell of a ride anyway.

8/10.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - PuraOre! Pride of Orange

This is a cultural ouroboros, eating its own tail.

PuraOre starts with a couple of well-animated minutes of women's hockey, and then after the big victory, the lights go down and any hope I had for this show jumps off a cliff. The winning team of cute girls swaps out their uniforms for generic idol costumes, and performs right there, on the ice, without skates.

I already thought this was asinine when Umamusume did it, but here, it just implodes all suspension of disbelief and draws back the curtain on a show that is chasing way, way too many trends. Not only does the protagonist look like yet another ripoff of Honoka from Love Live!, but the show goes right from that performance to a scene in a middle school embroidery club.

This show is trying to be a hockey show, an idol show, and a club show, all in twelve episodes, and with no identity of its own to speak of. It's an original story with no good reason to be all of these things at once.

[arcaneranger]

Premiere Impressions - Skate Leading Stars

Look, it’s not Yuri On Ice!! Season 2 but this looks more than interesting enough to make up for it.

This isn’t nearly as much of a carbon copy as some other shows I could name (like, oh, Gymnastics Samurai), instead pretty clearly striking out on its own more towards the “pretty boys doing pretty things” territory with some solid drama right out of the gate. In just this first episode, our hero loses his parents at a young age, loses four consecutive junior national skating championships to the same guy, seems to have quit skating all together, and then meets a guy who stalks him until he agrees to skate again...and is so sure of that decision that he half-kidnaps one of the people skating in the championship so our hero can take his place in disguise.

What excites me here is the immediate, hostile dynamic between our main boy Maeshima and pretty much everyone else he meets - he’s become so shut off from the world that it’s made him insensitive to the people around him and pretty callous to boot, leading to problems between him and the people in the club he’s now trying to join. This immediately sends things into a more Free!-style melodrama zone, knowing that these kids are gonna have to unpack some feelings in order to work together properly.

Production-wise, well...J.C. Staff are certainly not MAPPA, and the fact that director Gorou Taniguchi is working as director on two different shows this season (the other being Back Arrow) is going to start to show pretty quickly, but this first episode was a very solid effort for this studio on projects without the word Dungeon in their title. What’s going to really grab me later is not only the team figure skating sequences, but the hopefully fabulous costume design - figure skating of all kinds tends to be remembered partly for the fashion element, and indeed the costumes designed for Yuri On Ice!! are so memorable and lasting that one of the queens on the current season of RuPaul’s Drag Race filmed a promotional video in a recreation of one.

Basically, there’s a lot of elements in play here that I’m hoping will come together in an interesting way, and we’ll see where it takes us.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle

A comedic tour de force that challenges the notion that you must have more than one joke.

Sleepy Princess had the unique distinction from any other show this season of being the one I was kind of familiar with, having read the first two books of its source material, and so I wasn’t particularly worried going in when other people were heaping cautious praise on it. Not that I blame them - if you strip away the nuance at play, there really is just one joke. The princess wants to sleep, and will do whatever it takes to achieve that goal, regardless of what form of sociopathy she’ll have to engage in that day. The show takes this concept in so many different, well-written directions that this was probably the most concentrated joke-per-minute comedy of the entire year (barring maybe Osomatsu season 3, but that’s not counting towards this year anyway) that also brought with it a cast of characters whose simplicity gave way to the nuanced relationships they have with each other and with the princess herself.

Syalis, the core of the show, is for sure one of its best components all by herself - taking the deadpan loli to its absolute extreme comedic potential, episode after episode, while slowly and steadily growing into a more likable and understandable character. She never outgrows her extreme focus on her goal, but she manages to express it in different ways and learn more about the world around herself in the process of her little adventures, and this ends up being the primary way the audience experiences the small but effective worldbuilding that Sleepy Princess has to offer.

It’s basically the MST3K Mantra applied to a fantasy setting - everything that exists in this world is there to make the show funnier. Does this magical kingdom have anime? Of course it does, and also the Home Shopping Network, video game terminology, and Christmas, because there are jokes to be had here. You learn to stop questioning it because Sleepy Princess is only here to entertain you. There’s a story, sure, but it’s really only kind of there at the end, and though it’s small, it does deliver a genuinely heartwarming conclusion.

I would be remiss though if I didn’t include my other favorite aspect of the show, that being the Demon Lord himself. While initially he seems to have kidnapped the princess simply for reasons of evilness, over time their rapport develops into something more resembling a brother and sister who get along despite neither really acting the way the other wants them to, and the very heart of the show is built on this relationship as the people supposedly holding Syalis captive (emphasis on supposedly) end up with a strange affection for her despite her constant torment of them, creating a unique, platonic reverse-Stockholm in which both sides mutually agree that their situation is probably for the best.

The visual presentation by Doga Kobo, which manages to be on par with what they did with Sing Yesterday For Me, only closer to their usual art style, just sends the show up to the stars for me, with my only real complaints being that I wish I could have seen a bit more of the hero’s side of things because he seems like an incredibly amusing character in his own right, and wanting just a little more plot if they were going to have one at all. Otherwise though, Sleepy Princess is the best comedy since Demon School and the two of them stand high at the top of the genre heap this year. (And hey, Demon School is getting a second season...maybe we’ll get one for this too, a couple years down the line?)

9/10!