#winter weebwatch

[woolishlygrim]

Winter Weebwatch #5

After last week’s surprisingly bad bunch of episodes, this week’s episodes are surprisingly good! There was also no Darwin’s Game this week, probably because it got pre-empted by a sporting event, but to be honest, I don’t think anybody was especially crying out for another three paragraphs of me struggling to remember what happened in it.

Also, there is a huge trigger warning for discussions of suicide, both in fiction and in real life on this post, specifically in the ID: Invaded review.

In/Spectre

★★★★☆

So, this episode was cruising along for an easy three stars for most of its runtime. Continuing on the Steel Girder Nanase storyline, the episode sees Kotoko and Saki simultaneously deciding to hate each other and deciding that they need to work together to decipher the truth behind Steel Girder Nanase, who they believe to be the ghost of an idol, Haruka Nanase, who was accused of murder and subsequently was found crushed by a steel girder, her face unrecognisable and even her teeth unidentifiable, the body only identified by virtue of carrying Nanase’s identification.

… Just so we’re all absolutely on the same page here, next episode is definitely going to reveal that Nanase murdered someone else to fake her own death, and that Steel Girder Nanase is actually some poor woman who was her victim, right? Right.

But anyway, this episode settles into a nice, consistent tone, sets up a fun and legitimately intriguing supernatural mystery, and seems all set to make its way to a satisfactory conclusion in one or two episodes, probably.

What elevates it to four stars, though? The fairly throwaway joke in which a fully animated opening sequence for a completely fictional magical girl show, complete with an original and fully vocalised song, plays, and ruthlessly satirises the far-right, taking shots at capitalism, militarism, and the police and justice system.

It’s a joke that doesn’t fit the tone of the rest of the series at all, but it’s so unapologetically vicious while also making me laugh out loud that I had to add an extra star for it. I just had to.

ID: Invaded.

★★★★★

Honestly, I wavered on whether this should be a four star or a five star. If I could do half stars, it’d be four and a half, but I think it edges out five.

This episode switches gears a little. With the Gravedigger killed, and the woman who was manipulating him into his murders arrested, Sakaido dives into the woman’s mental world, hoping to figure out exactly what caused her to turn to murder, and why murder in such a specific, gruesome, and sadistic way.

And he fails completely.

The story tempts us with just enough information that we can start forming the half-baked foundations of a hypothesis, but not enough that we can actually form any kind of cohesive theory. We see in the woman’s mental world that she is stuck as a child, endlessly riding a train that’s going in circles, each loop having it cross the train crossing where her mother committed suicide. We see that her victims are gathered at said crossing, waiting patiently to cross. And we see that her accomplice, the man she had killing for her, is present on the train as well, as a young boy very far removed from the blank, not-all-there man we’ve seen up to that point. We see Kaeru, usually representing the murder victims, in this mental world is presented as a suicide victim, having removed her shoes and asked the woman to wipe off her wounds before expiring in a seat at the end of the train.

But we never get enough to build any kind of meaning out of it. The show deliberately withholds closure from us, mirroring the woman’s lack of closure over her mother’s suicide (why did she decide to do it, and why do it by throwing herself in front of a train she knew her daughter was riding?), telling us that we will only ever have a handful of puzzle pieces and no way to piece them together.

I admit, that affected me pretty deeply. As someone who obsesses over puzzles and especially over the whys and wherefores of why people do things, whose lowered empathy response means that figuring people out is often a maddening struggle, the show presenting a puzzle that can’t be solved is infuriating. But more than that, as someone who has had a friend commit suicide, leaving no note and providing almost no indication beforehand that he was going to, I’m familiar with the bewilderment that can follow something like that, the attempts to piece together a cause-and-effect that makes sense.

This episode kind of got to me. I’m not sure I liked that it did.

‘Not having enough information’ is the running theme of this episode, anyhow, as the rest of the investigation team takes some time to discuss the recurring appearance of John Walker, a mysterious man in a red frockcoat who has appeared in five separate killers’ mental worlds (and who appears also in the woman’s, as a reflection in the train window). As they talk, they realise all they know is a baffling mess of contradictions about him: Nobody has ever seen him in real life, and yet the fact that five different people dreamed him up wearing the same bright red coat means he must be going around wearing what is basically American War of Independence cosplay; there seems to be no single link between the killers who have him in their mental worlds, and yet there are strange coincidental links; none of the killers remember who he is, but all of them have extremely strong recollections of him.

The end of the episode pulls another gutpunch on us, as Hondomachi, having killed the Gravedigger in seeming self defence earlier in the episode, finally gets her wish to be trained to dive into people’s mental worlds -- only for Hayaseura, her boss and the man who recommended her, to tell her that it’s not enough to have just killed, you have to be a serial killer, something he knows that she is. While we obviously saw her murder someone (by provoking them into attacking her and then framing it as self-defense) earlier in this episode, Hayaseura also points out something that I’d dismissed at the time and completely forgotten about: That in the very first episode, before Hondomachi was kidnapped by the Perforator, she was alone with one of his victims in the basement, and when we next saw him he was dead, even though the Perforator couldn’t have killed him.

That’s … actually some really solid writing. I hadn’t even realised on my first watch that the guy couldn’t have been killed by the Perforator.

Pet.

★★★★☆

I feel like I haven’t given this series enough credit for how surprisingly vicious it is. The first episode sets us up to think that Tsukasa and Hiroki’s friendship is pretty cute, and the second episode clues us in to the fact that they’re (quasi-?)romantically involved and sets up a clearly unhealthy but quite sweet all the same romance where you think that, hey, they’re screwed up people but they clearly love each other. It isn’t until the third episode that the rug gets pulled out from under you, with the reveal that Tsukasa is actually quite abusive, and this episode pulls the rug straight out from under us again.

It follows two plot threads. The first one is a milder one, with Satoru meeting the niece of the mysterious Company’s CEO, who exposits at him a little about how the Company was founded and some of the strifes that have led it to its current state of disarray -- namely that the qigong masters who created the psychic techniques the Company uses (just … roll with it) all simultaneously betrayed the CEO and were killed for it, leaving the Company with only one person who can pass on those teachings: Hayashi.

The second plot thread sees Tsukasa and Hayashi playing mind games with each other, with Tsukasa first trying to persuade Hayashi to return to the Company, before Hayashi tries to psychically rewrite Tsukasa’s memories, only for Tsukasa to rebuff him and for the two to end up in a psychic battle where they both try to repel the other one’s attempts to alter their memories.

It’s in this second plot thread that we learn all about Tsukasa’s many issues: Like Satoru, he is most definitely in love with Hayashi, and like Satoru, those feelings clearly aren’t reciprocated. Unlike Satoru, however, Hayashi doesn’t even seem to have filial feelings for Tsukasa, and we learn that when he started teaching Satoru, the Company told him that he couldn’t act as mentor for two people and had to choose one. He picked Satoru with what seems like startling ease, effectively abandoning Tsukasa.

There are allusions, as well, to the idea that Hayashi kept using Tsukasa even after that abandonment, entreating him to infiltrate the Company on his behalf and keep Satoru safe. Tsukasa’s … not happy about this at all, and also, as becomes swiftly apparent throughout the episode, more than a little unhinged.

As the episode ends, Tsukasa and Hayashi are ramping up their psychic battle, with Tsukasa informing Hayashi that he’s learned some tricks off Hiroki, so we’ll see where that one goes.

Infinite Dendrogram.

★★☆☆☆

More and more, it feels like this show is falling into a rut, and that’s honestly a huge shame.

There’s just no forward momentum to it. Things happen, but there’s no sense of motion, no sense of things winding towards a conclusion, either on an arc level or a series level, and yet at the same time it’s not fast and snappy enough to be a truly episodic series like, say, Kekkai Sensen.

So, this week’s episode sees Ray, now cursed with dog ears (for reasons which are not plot relevant, but I mean, it’s fine), teaming up with a new character, Hugo, a Dryfe Master whose job is essentially that he’s a giant mecha pilot, as the two attempt to tackle a base of bandits who have been kidnapping children.

The show tries very hard to set the bandits up as absolute monsters, and to sell us on Ray’s rage, but it kind of lacks the elements necessary to make an impact. The huge emotional moment where Ray sees that some of the children have been turned into undead is weakened by the fact that the cinematography is bog-standard, the animation direction for the scene is uninteresting, and the music is unremarkable. Even Ray’s reaction is strangely muted, with some anger but no real horror or anything like that, and not even a quiet fury so much as just moderate amounts of rage.

There are hints of a broader plot involving Dryfe, though (which we know from an earlier episode is prepping to invade), with Hugo making remarks that he can’t use his Embryo yet, because keeping it secret is part of some plan.

He does, eventually, use it anyway, and relatively without fanfare at that.

[woolishlygrim]

Winter Weebwatch #6

Infinite Dendrogram is the lone late-in-the-week show that always makes me late posting these. If it wasn’t around, I could get these done on Tuesdays.

Anyway, kind of a mixed week this week, from the highs of ID: Invaded (now firmly cemented as the best show of the season, nobody’s coming even close to beating it by now) to the lows of Darwin’s Game (still incredibly forgettable).

ID: Invaded.

★★★★★

Another five star episode this week, as the gang decides to enter Narihisago/Sakaido’s Well, sending newly minted serial killer detective Hondomachi in, where she takes the identity of Miyo Hijiriido. Their goal is to discover whether John Walker, the mysterious red-coated man who has appeared in multiple killers’ Wells, and who might have supplied both the Challenger and the Gravedigger with video equipment, also influenced Narihisago to become a serial killer.

While what they find is fairly in line with what Wells have been like so far (in this case, Narihisago’s Well is a numbered board where lightning strikes seemingly at random, somehow never striking the same place twice), things start to go distinctly strange once Hondomachi investigates further: She eventually comes across a perfect recreation of the device for entering Wells, registered as active and diving into the Well of a woman who was the last intended victim of the Challenger, who escaped after Narihisago killed him.

This, we quickly learn from Momoki, is impossible: The woman in question wasn’t a serial killer, so how could she have a Well; the same woman wasn’t important to Narihisago, but rather to Momoki himself; and most importantly, the technology didn’t exist at the time Narihisago’s Well would have formed, so there’s no possible way he could have imagined a version of it.

Things get much stranger when Momoki is immediately arrested, with officers informing him that not only have they traced access attempts from the video equipment to his computer, but they also found John Walker’s distinct red frockcoat and cane in his home, and the body of the Well technology’s missing creator buried in his garden. 

So, this is officially the point where things have gone extremely weird, and the fan theory that’s been going around that the whole show is actually taking place in someone’s Well is growing … ever more plausible, as the show floats the idea of entering Wells within Wells and separate layers of unreality. The evidence that Momoki is John Walker is all a bit too neat for episode seven out of thirteen, so it’s doubtless not actually him, but beyond that, it’s impossible to predict where this show will go from here.

Any episode that is both technically perfect and which totally upends your understanding of the series is deserving of five stars.

In/Spectre.

★★☆☆☆

Here’s that tone problem again.

The episode opens on a fight scene of sorts between Steel Girder Nanase and Kuro, before segueing into a flashback to Kuro’s backstory (which I didn’t think we’d get this early, but sure) and then into an explanation of what Nanase actually is.

It’s … not as jarring as the tone problems in other episodes, but the flashback to Kuro’s origin is far, far darker than anything else in the episode, to the point where it feels staggeringly out of place. The story of Kuro’s powers, in which he is fed the flesh of intelligent beings without him knowing about it by his grandmother, only to then watch his siblings all die before, as the seeming lone survivor, his grandmother decides to begin experimenting on him, is the kind of sequence that wouldn’t be out of place in a much grimmer and more disturbing anime. It clashes hard with In/Spectre’s generally more comedic tone.

The explanation of the identity of Steel Girder Nanase is also a little disappointing. After setting us up for some kind of reveal that the real Nanase is still alive, this episode tells us that no, no, Nanase really is dead, Steel Girder Nanase isn’t her but rather a spooky meme of her that has come to life. I’m not generally fond of ‘mass human belief changes the nature of the world’ stories anyway, and this comes over as a rather weak plot twist.

It’s an enjoyable enough episode (although, man, are we really doing the Steel Girder Nanase thing for the rest of the show? After three episodes, it feels like that arc is almost done), but it’s riddled with all the problems we’ve seen before from this show.

Pet.

★★★☆☆

This episode should’ve been a four start one, but it gets a little bogged down in its own terminology and worldbuilding to really make it. There’s a lot of talk of peaks, valleys, locks, and images, and since the show has never really adequately explained what all of those are, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that these are things we’re meant to full understand, but can’t because the show hasn’t deigned to give us all of the details.

It doesn’t ruin the story or anything. We know enough of these things to get a basic idea of how they work: The peak is the best memory they have, the valley is the worst, the image is the form they take when traversing memories, and the lock is the guard they have on their own memories. It’s just not clear how those all interact. Why and how is the peak hidden by the valleys? Why does having a weak lock make an image stronger? Why is it necessary to find someone’s peak in order to change their memories?

Since the bulk of this episode relies on understanding those things, though, as Hayashi races to find his way to Tsukasa’s peak, only for Tsukasa to reveal a trick with his image that allows him to link their peaks and crush Hayashi’s mind by flooding it with his own valley, it means you do spend a lot of the episode just kind of … along for the ride, not quite lost, but also only really having a surface understanding of what’s going on.

The end of the episode, which sees Hiroki save Tsukasa from his self-inflicted mindcrush by performing the same trick in reverse, sharing his peak to ‘clean out’ Tsukasa’s, also relies on knowing those things, and so also falls a little flat.

There are some solid emotional beats here, though, and some really vividly disturbing imagery, and that’s nice. We also get formally introduced to the guy who I assume is going to be our next villain, a higher-up at the Company who wants to tap one of the three main characters to keep making ‘babies,’ psychics who are mindless automatons. 

Darwin’s Game.

★★☆☆☆

Honestly, it’s still tough to remember anything that happens in these episodes, even with notes, and this episode, which is decisively a ‘setting things up’ episode instead of a ‘things that happen’ episode, is not helping with matters.

This episode is mostly here for introducing the next two members of our main team, neither of which are given names yet (or are they? I wouldn’t remember if they had been): A man with a lie detector ability and a lot of guns, and a kid with a split personality who has water manipulation ability.

Given that this arc is leaning towards our main team coming together as a clan at the end of this treasure hunt game, it seems to go almost without saying that the Florist isn’t going to survive. He’s the only one on Team Hotel who isn’t also in the opening, and with it having been several episodes since anyone last snuffed it, someone has to die if the show wants to keep its death game cred. So the Florist is, to put it nicely, doomed.

This episode also floats the idea that collecting the rings isn’t the point of the treasure hunt game, but it gives us no reason to care about that. Our protagonist is motivated by just surviving, so all he or any other character needs to do is get three rings and not get killed, with the actual goal of the hunt being … I don’t know, an afterthought, I suppose.

Not exactly compelling material.

Infinite Dendrogram.

★★★☆☆

So, I watched this episode when I hadn’t slept for … I think it was thirty-two hours, at that point? It was a few hours before I actually got some sleep. So I think it’s fair to say I wasn’t exactly watching it attentively.

That said, this episode was okay. Most of it is taken up by another big battle with a monster, with Ray and Nemesis trying to figure out the best way to maximise the advantages their abilities offer them, versus a seemingly impossible foe. Where it falls down somewhat is that, just like the previous huge battle, this one ends exactly the same way -- with Ray gaining a new ability and using that to win the day.

But we do get a nice little flashback with his brother Shu, who we see outside the game is a martial artist who enjoys winning impossible fights. This … might actually be the first time we’ve seen Shu in a very traditionally Anime Big Brother role, instead of as a dorky guy in a bear suit making bear puns. 

The episode even has something of a twist, as it’s revealed that Penguin-Suited Doctor Guy, the one who tricked Ray into getting temporary dog ears, is actually Hugo’s older brother a part of the plan for Dryfe to take over Altar, and the dog ears were a way of him listening in on Ray. I said last week that nothing was really done with that plotline, and the whole thing about Ray randomly being given dog ears by a mad scientist was pointless, so colour me wrong, I suppose.

All this together, along with Penguin’s suggestion that they can defeat Altar without any casualties, makes it seem like the show is gearing up for a Penguin vs Bear Battle of the Big Brothers, which is an interesting prospect, at least.

[woolishlygrim]

Winter Weebwatch #8

Man, still stressed out, still typing all of this directly into tumblr all at once instead of doing it in bits and pieces.

Alright, let’s crack on with this.

Infinite Dendrogram.

★★★☆☆

I … feel a little bad about giving this three stars instead of two. It’s a very exposition-y, getting-all-the-characters-where-they-need-to-be-for-the-next-big-set-piece kind of episode, with the looming threat of the Battle of the Big Brothers brewing in the background, and I have knocked stars off before for episodes in which not a lot actually happens.

And yet, I admit, this episode kept my attention throughout. The new Dryfe Superior they introduced (giving us two out of four -- Penguin-san seems to be Shu’s Dryfian counterpart, while this new … dude? Woman? Seems to be roughly analogous to Figaro) is both entertaining to watch and deeply creepy, seeming to be some kind of souped-up thief class that can steal people’s organs out of their bodies, and Shu and Figaro scheming in the background is a lot of fun to watch.

We also get to find out more of Shu’s backstory, namely that he’s a parody of every author self-insert isekai show Gary Stu, having been a famous child actor in his youth, then an expert martial artist, then a university teaching assistant. It’s a ridiculous, nonsense backstory and I kind of love it. I love that Shu is this absurdly over-qualified Gary Stu and his major impact on the story so far has been him working as a children’s entertainer.

It’s a fun episode, is what I’m getting at.

Darwin’s Game.

★☆☆☆☆

I’m going to level with you guys here, I didn’t make notes on Darwin’s Game this week and now it’s almost completely erased itself from my memory.

I do know that the Florist died, though, like we all absolutely knew he would. And I think we found out that Angry Snake Guy’s power is teleportation? It’s unclear, but it definitely seems to be teleportation.

Honestly, from what little I can remember, very little actually happened. What do I know, though? Literally, what do I know, I remember only flickers from about two scenes.

Pet.

★★★☆☆

Pet presents us with a two-strand plotline: First, Tsubasa is getting steadily more and more evil, and seems to have recovered more of his powers than he’s letting on. Secondly, Satoru and Hiroki are dispatched to crush the mind of an ambassador at a party, which seems … oddly unsubtle, to be honest, you guys couldn’t wait until he’s alone?

This element of him not being alone causes some issues, when Hiroki initially refuses to crush the man while his wife is watching, apparently not wanting to put her through what he felt when he found out Tsubasa had been crushed. Satoru takes a more pragmatic view, angrily telling Hiroki that there’s no point in them pretending to be good guys, eventually prompting Hiroki to go through with the crushing.

After which … stuff … happens? Hiroki immediately becomes sick, and it isn’t entirely clear why, and if it’s explained in the episode then I missed it entirely. He’s ill, though, and going to the same hospital as the crushee, and I’m sure there will be shenanigans there next episode.

ID: Invaded.

★★★★★

ID: Invaded really is the hands-down best anime of the season, and if it can stick the landing in these last five episodes, no other winter anime this year is going to come even close to taking its crown.

Now in the Well-within-a-Well inside (not?)Momoki’s Well, Narihisago (now remembering both his real life and his time as Sakaido) finds himself in a perfect recreation of the real world just a few days before his daughter was murdered.

After taking out the Challenger before he can get up to any daughter-killing, Narihisago discovers that Kiki Asukai, the last victim of the Challenger who Momoki rescued and the person whose Well he’s (apparently) diving into, is a dead-ringer for Kaeru, the dead girl in each Well who the brilliant detectives find themselves compelled to investigate.

After Narihisago has a strange Dream-Within-A-Well-Within-A-Well, Kiki explains to him that she broadcasts her thoughts to any serial killers near here, and in turn, John Walker brings serial killers into her dreams to kill her every night.

It’s all very strange, but it’s enough to start piecing together the beginnings of an understanding of what’s going on. Kiki has some uncontrollable power to broadcast her mind into that of serial killers, and John Walker, whoever he may be, has the reverse power, being able to drag the minds of serial killers into Kiki’s. Kiki appears dead in every Well because (maybe?) each Well is the dream of a serial killer who has killed her, or possibly because (maybe?) she is the core or basis for the Mizuhanome, which projects the people using it into the minds of serial killers just like Kiki projects her own thoughts.

There’s four episodes left to solve that mystery, anyway, and more immediately relevant is that, even though Narihisago has (within the Well-within-a-Well, at least) prevented the incident that made him a serial killer, he still remembers it and is still driven to kill, with him talking another serial killer, the Facelifter, into committing suicide. It’s a rather grim note to end on, but that’s fairly normal by now.

In/Spectre.

★★★☆☆

Like Infinite Dendrogram, this was a surprisingly enjoyable episode for one where not a whole lot actually happened.

Picking up from the end of the last episode, where one of Saki’s police friends was murdered by Steel Girder Nanase, this episode throws a heckton of spanners in Kuro and Kotoko’s plan to take down Nanase. Firstly, the fact that she’s strong enough to kill now means that they don’t have any time left, and must successfully defeat her that very night. Secondly, the fact that she’s now killed makes her existence much stronger, as fear is added to belief and the rumour mill about her goes crazy. And thirdly, it becomes clear to the two of them that Rikka, Kuro’s cousin, is in some fashion behind all of this.

Much of the episode, then, is about the two of them and Saki attempting to figure out a way to take Nanase down by cutting off her supply of belief, with Kotoko eventually making the breakthrough that they can do it in steps: Smaller jumps that will let Kuro use his probability manipulating powers on a smaller scale, until they eventually get to the conclusion they want.

It’s an interesting enough set-up that absolutely won’t be followed through on next episode, as that appears to be a flashback episode. I hate flashback episodes.

[woolishlygrim]

Winter Weebwatch #7

This has been a hell of a bad week, so I’m writing these up directly into tumblr all at once instead of writing them into gdocs in bits and pieces over the week. Seat-of-my-pantsing this whole thing. This is also partly why this one is so late -- that and the fact that I didn’t feel like watching In/Spectre for a while.

Also, Infinite Dendrogram didn’t air this week, presumably due to being pre-empted by something, so I’m guessing it’ll be back next week.

Darwin’s Game.

★★☆☆☆

This is another … we could charitably call it a bridging episode, but mostly it’s just sort of a nothing episode.

The main change to the status quo we get is that the last team member from the OP, Sui/Sota, officially joins Kaname’s makeshift clan. Sui’s thing is that she has a split personality, with her other personality being her deceased brother, Sota, and the two have different Sigil powers: Sui can control water, and Sota can instantly turn water into ice.

This ... weirdly actually ties into the idea that Sigils might be based off historical figures. If Sota’s dead, he does kind of count as a recent historical figure after all. He’s not around anymore, at the very least.

Apart from that, the biggest thing we get is the Florist, a man whose powers revolve around plants, facing off against a gang member with pyrokinesis. The battle has only just started by the time the episode ends, but we all know the Florist is going to die anyway.

Pet.

★★★☆☆

Having offered us a lick of hope in the form of Tsubasa seemingly realising how important Hiroki is to him, Pet proceeds to snatch that hope away by immediately showing Tsubasa return to manipulating Hiroki, and even deciding that Satoru will have to die so that he can’t inadvertently interfere with Tsubasa’s ambitions.

We find out that Tsubasa’s goals have shifted now: Since he is too sick to actually use his psychic powers effectively, he wants to use Hiroki to gain greater status within the organisation, setting Hiroki up as the only person who can act as a crusher or make ‘Babies,’ the mindless psychic children that other Company members use, and Tsubasa as the only person who can control him, thus making himself indispensable.

The main bulk of this episode revolves around a scheme by the Company to take revenge on a rival corporation that wronged them in the past (specifically, by killing the CEO’s father). Among other things, this storyline also gives us a closer glimpse at exactly what Babies can do (seemingly they act as a ‘bridge’ for non-psychics to meddle in other people’s heads), and a short glimpse at how they’re made, although the show’s unwillingness to explain anything makes it all very unclear.

ID: Invaded.

★★★★★

ID: Invaded continues to knock it out of the park with another great episode. Picking up cognition particles from Momoki’s house and assuming them to be for Momoki’s Well, the team sends Sakaido and Ankaido in together, the first instance of sending two people into the same Well at once. This isn’t just a fact-finding mission, however, but a rescue mission: Hondomachi hasn’t woken up, and appears to still be in the Well-within-a-Well that was found in Narihisago’s/Sakaido’s Well, and the team believes that that same Well-within-a-Well can be accessed from within Momoki’s Well.

From there, the episode focuses on Sakaido and Ankaido’s interactions, with Sakaido being a visibly far more adept detective, while Ankaido acts as his Watson, albeit a visibly unhinged and somewhat unnerving one. We also find out more about Kiku, the person the Well-within-a-Well reportedly belongs to and the last intended victim of the Challenger, rescued by Momoki years ago. Specifically, we find out that she was linked to a kidnapping, and vanished without a trace shortly thereafter.

Sakaido and Ankaido do find the equipment for diving into a Well within Momoki’s Well, all set up for Kiku’s Well, as Sakaido prepares to enter with Ankaido on standby to eject him -- but in the real world, as Sakaido enters, Momoki realises it’s a trap of some kind, pleading for the detectives to stop him. Aaand that’s the cliffhanger the episode ends on.

In/Spectre.

★☆☆☆☆

This is an episode in which not a lot happens, being more for exposition than anything else, and what does happen (or the relevant things we do find out) just don’t really land.

For instance, intermingled with all the learning about Kotoko’s plan (it’s basically what you’d expect), we do get to find out the truth of Nanase’s death, namely that it was … exactly what the police thought it was, an accident that she did nothing to defend herself from because she was also suicidal.

That’s kind of a boring waste of time, as far as reveals go. The reveal ‘everything is exactly what you were already told it was’ isn’t so much a reveal as it is wasted airtime, and it doesn’t help much with an episode that somewhat feels entirely like wasted airtime, like it could have been over and done with in five minutes instead of twenty.

Just not especially compelling viewing.

[woolishlygrim]

Winter Weebwatch #13

And this is the final Winter Weebwatch, before we start on, er. Spring Spreebspratch. Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway, Infinite Dendrogram didn’t end this week, so actually it’ll be included in the first Spring post, too.

Infinite Dendrogram.

★★★☆☆

Contrary to all expectations, we actually get our Battle of the Big Siblings this week.

As Franklin releases all of the monsters they have stored up, Shu removes his bear costume and proceeds to break out of the arena, making his way to Franklin’s horde of monsters to face off against them, using the skills of his King of Destruction class -- which, as we’re told, involves incredibly high attack at the cost of catastrophically low agility and defence, counteracted by the fact that Shu is, as we learned before, an expert martial artist.

It’s a fun enough episode, even if the sharp drop in animation quality means that Shu’s reveal and little showing off moment isn’t nearly as dramatic as it could be.

The episode ends on two more Dryfe Superiors, both inside the Arena, preparing to make their move, so that’ll be an interesting final episode, at least.

Pet.

★★★☆☆

So as predicted, Pet ends somewhat tragically. Hiroki and Satoru escape from the Company, but Tsukasa, unable to get over his guilt and unable to join them, tricks Hiroki into wiping his memories -- and in the aftermath, Jin and the President begin raising Tsukasa, with the intent of eventually turning him on Hiroki and Satoru.

There is a ray of hope, though, as Hiroki and Satoru come across the landscape seen in Hayashi’s peak -- the same landscape he shared with Tsukasa and Satoru, and that Tsukasa shared with Hiroki -- and come to believe that if they can bring Tsukasa and Hayashi to it, they can restore them to who they once were.

I actually looked up the manga just after this to see if there was any more story, or a possibility of a Pet Season 2, but no, no, this is where the manga ends, which means a continuation is very unlikely. It’s a bleak but hopeful spot for the story to end on, and that’s fine, I guess.

FINAL VERDICT: ★★★☆☆

In/Spectre.

★★★★☆

With the main plot finished, In/Spectre takes some time to focus on Rikka and her motivations (she wants to create God, basically), and a lot more time to focus on Kuro and Kotoko’s relationship, which is sweet.

After an entire series of Kotoko being the forward one and Kuro rebuffing her, it was nice to see that, in private, Kuro actually can be quite affectionate with Kotoko, in his own way.

There’s not a lot more to say about this episode, it was just very sweet, and it capped off the series nicely. I do very much hope that there’s an In/Spectre Season 2.

FINAL VERDICT: ★★★★☆

[woolishlygrim]

Winter Weebwatch #11

Inching extremely close to the finales: ID: Invaded ends next week (I think?), Darwin’s Game, Infinite Dendrogram and In/Spectre the week after, and Pet either this week or next.

ID: Invaded.

★★☆☆☆

I think we’ve hit the point where this show starts to fall apart on itself. Maybe it’ll stick the landing in the finale, but I’m not holding my breath.

With Kiki roaming the halls of the Kura, people are falling into comas, their minds dragged into the Wells of various serial killers that Kiki has connected with. Hayaseura, now revealed to be John Walker, enters the Mizuhanome and kills himself, leaving his mind permanently within his own Well (which in turn contains copies of every Well Kiki could project) as the brilliant detective Uraido, creating what amounts to a permanent Mizuhanome that can exist without Kiki. As Hondomachi and Narihisago pursue him, Momoki prepares to track down Kiki and return her to the Mizuhanome.

This episode feels very much like the writer didn’t have any idea how to end the series and is just hurriedly wrapping things up towards some kind of conclusion. The fact that Narihisago and Hondomachi are serial killers seems to have been forgotten about, Hayaseura’s motive of wanting the Mizuhanome to exist to help police officers catch serial killers makes his actions as John Walker make no sense (why was he inviting killers into Kiki’s dreams to kill her? Why did he create serial killers?) and leave some key questions unanswered (how did he do any of these things?), and Momoki heading out to take Kiki down involves the hurried introduction of a plot device that was never mentioned or seen before.

It’s just not … great, you know? It’s fine, it’s entertaining enough, but it’s not great.

Infinite Dendrogram.

★★☆☆☆

This is another show that apparently realised late that it doesn’t have enough time to do everything it wants to do, leading to this being an extremely rushed episode. In the span of twenty minutes, we get: The entire battle between Marie and the King of Orchestras, a flashback about the KoO’s backstory, a flashback about Marie’s backstory, Franklin fighting the Royal Knights, a confrontation between Ray and Hugo, a flashback about Hugo’s backstory (including the reveal that both he and Franklin are actually women), and the start of a fight between Rook and Hugo.

It’s … a lot. 

It means the episode is weirdly unfocused and gives strangely little weight to certain developments. While literally everybody in the audience had already figured out that Marie is the Superior Killer, the episode acts as if it was never a secret in the first place, not so much revealing it as just having her use the Superior Killer’s abilities with no explanation. Similarly, the reveal that Hugo and Franklin use male avatars in part as a symbolic escape from the abusive, severely misogynistic, deeply restrictive tendencies of their father is a really interesting character beat that the show just zooms past.

And also, I just don’t buy what the episode is trying to push with Ray and Hugo, that they share a deep connection and are rivals at this point, because as the episode itself points out, they met yesterday. They’ve been on one quest together, during which they mostly acted separately and definitely weren’t competing. I fully believe they could become rivals, but that would take actually developing their characters.

Anyway, still hoping for a Battle of the Older Siblings between Shu and Franklin.

Darwin’s Game.

★★☆☆☆

God, I barely remember this episode, but in fairness to it, this has been the longest week of the whole damn year.

Anyway, this episode of Darwin’s Game sees Kaname (see, I remember the protagonist’s name now!) and company (because I don’t remember the others’ names) teaming up with Speedster Boxer Guy (he doesn’t need a name, he’s basically just what you’d get if you dumped Yamato Ishida and Barry Allen in a blender together) to take down The Bad Snake People, who have kidnapped Kaname’s friend.

If I’m being honest, the thing that stands out most about this episode to me is just how much it stamps on the ideas set up in the first few episodes. Kaname’s first big plan for rescuing his friend is to send him an invite to the D-Game, except, you know, doing so means constantly having to look over your shoulder for people trying to kill you, something set up as terrible and oppressive in the first few episodes. The D-Game is apparently so bad that Kaname has sworn to kill its creator, something that came up again just two episodes ago.

Anyway, Kaname’s friend, who is suspiciously less well-animated than everybody else, dies. Whomst would’ve guessed.

In/Spectre.

★★★★☆

It really bothers me how much I like this show. I feel like I’ve been brainwashed by, like, a cult, except I haven’t, I’m just being forced to revise my opinion, which is worse.

Anyway, this is another really strong episode from In/Spectre, as Kotoko introduces her next two theories: The first being that Steel Girder Nanase actually is a ghost, but that she’s a ghost who can be weakened by prayer, hoping that people will pray and, thus, weaken Nanase; and the second being that Nanase faked her own death (or that her sister believed she had) and that someone is pretending to be her ghost in order to convince her sister she actually is dead.

Given that ‘Nanase faked her own death’ is actually a theory I came up with when Steel Girder Nanase was introduced, this tickled me somewhat.

Anyway, this episode is just more of the good stuff from last week, some really clever writing and some nice back and forth.

Pet.

★★★☆☆

Pet is winding its way towards its finale, as Tsukasa convinces Satoru to help him change Hiroki’s memories, while secretly scheming to crush Satoru; Hayashi leaves a secret message for Satoru with Meiling; and Hiroki, faced with a married couple attempting to compromise in their relationship, wonders if there’s any room for him and Tsukasa to reach a compromise in their own relationship.

You know, I have absolutely no idea how this show is going to turn out.

I know exactly how Infinite Dendrogram and In/Spectre are going to end, and I have a pretty solid idea of how Darwin’s Game and ID: Invaded are going to end, but Pet is honestly a mystery to me. It’s got a lot of balls in the air right now, but it feels like it’s confident juggling them, but I have zero clue how they’re all going to end up falling.

The animation is possibly even more hideous than usual in this episode, though. Like good god, man.

[woolishlygrim]

Winter Weebwatch #3

I feel a little bad for giving out so many two and three star scores, so I should probably clarify that three stars is meant to be ‘generally pretty good’ and two stars is meant to be ‘watchable but very flawed.’ We’re not working on IGN metrics here.

Also, this week is the week I finally drop a show! What could it be, what could it -- it’s Plunderer. Of course it’s Plunderer. I couldn’t get all the way through this week’s episode and life’s too short to bother watching any more of it.

Also also, while In/Spectre hasn’t been dropped, it gets subbed so late that I’m skipping it this week and rolling this week’s episode over to next week’s post.

ID: Invaded.

★★★★☆

God, why was this show relegated to the Death Season, Where Anime Goes To Die? For three weeks running now, ID: Invaded has stood head and shoulders over all of its competitors, and while there’s always the possibility it could collapse in under its own weight, it so far seems to be going pretty strong.

So episode four (again, see remarks about how one and two aired in the same week) sees Sakaido and the team in a race against the clock to catch the Gravedigger, a serial killer who traps people into enclosed spaces with just a few oxygen canisters and livestreams their struggles, showing the world their final moments and even continuing the livestreams to show their bodies decaying. The Gravedigger has kidnapped a new victim, and for the first time left enough cognition particles behind for Sakaido to dive into his mental world.

Whereas previous episodes have focused heavily on the mystery angle, this episode largely focuses on the stress the case puts on Sakaido and the team. The Gravedigger’s world is a uniquely dangerous mess of fire, explosions, and shifting architecture, and Sakaido dies again and again as he struggles to find any evidence of the Gravedigger’s identity.

Much like the last episode, this would sit at a solid three stars, being a fairly engaging and somewhat harrowing story of Sakaido and the team putting themselves under immense stress to save a victim. What boosts it up to four stars is the moment where the writers pull the rug out from under the characters and the audience: The Gravedigger they’re hunting is only a copycat of the real Gravedigger, and his victim has been dead for days, the ‘livestream’ actually a recording.

The episode also hints at a bigger role for the Perforator in future, as the team attempts to use him as a back-up detective, Akaido, only to find out he’s ill-suited for the role.

Pet.

★★★☆☆

Pet was so close to a four star rating this week. So close. 

So, this week’s episode continues an unclear amount of time after the last week’s episode, with Hiroki and Tsubasa having bought a fish store (as in a pet store that sells live fish and naught else, not a fishmonger’s), which Hiroki believes means they can stop doing work for the shady Committee -- only for Tsubasa to inform him that the Committee paid for the store in the first place, but not to worry, he’ll do all their jobs, and Hiroki doesn’t have to do any of them.

So this episode is … moderately upsetting, actually. Intentionally so.

The bulk of the storyline, in which Tsubasa alters a bodyguard’s memory so that he’s compelled to murder one of his boss’ friends, isn’t what’s upsetting about it, although it does deal with some sensitive subjects, namely domestic abuse and the objectification of vulnerable people. No, what’s upsetting is that, like with last week’s story about Hiroki and Tsubasa altering the memories of a couple, this one also harks back to Hiroki and Tsubasa’s relationship -- specifically, that Tsubasa is emotionally abusing Hiroki.

We get hints of this early on, when Tsubasa is deliberately vague about whether he’ll psychically synchronise with Satoru, another character who, at least in Hiroki’s mind (although evidently not in Satoru’s), is something of a romantic rival. As the episode wears on, Tsubasa goes about his work, while Hiroki, left alone at the fish store, begins showing his immaturity by acting out with his powers before eventually becoming sullen and unresponsive. All of that wouldn’t be enough to indict Tsubasa as being abusive, except in the final scene, as Katsuragi snidely remarks that their new store will never be successful and Hiroki will have to return to a life of crime, Tsubasa mildly returns that he knows it won’t be successful, and he knows it will hurt Hiroki, but that’s just part of ‘taking care of a pet.’

Aaaand we get our title, with all of the unpleasant implications of how Tsubasa views the much more immature and emotionally vulnerable Hiroki.

This episode would have scraped a four star score, but the early parts of the story are a bit too fast paced and a bit incoherent. That really was the only thing holding this absolute gutpunch of an episode back.

Bonus points to the episode that the thing that prompts Hiroki to act out with his powers is seeing a woman’s domineering and callous boyfriend, implying that he is at least somewhat aware of what Tsubasa is like.

Honestly, when this show started I was not expecting a meditation on the subject of abusive relationships, but here we are, and I’m down for it.

Darwin’s Game.

★☆☆☆☆

Oh my god, I just watched it. I just watched it, guys, and I don’t remember even the tiniest bit of it. Am I crazy? Is this what crazy feels like? It’s like I’m blotting the show out of my memory.

I remember something to do with plants and that’s … that’s actually the only thing I remember about this episode.

I don’t even think Darwin’s Game is bad (although let’s be honest, how would I know), it’s just not really anything. It has somehow hit that sweet spot between good and bad where it just fails to make any kind of impact at all, and my brain just interprets it as background noise and proceeds to flush all data pertaining to it.

I might drop it just because this has got to be getting boring for anyone reading these reviews by now. Watching this show is like a sneak peek of suffering from dementia. 

And yet, I still know for a fact it’s better than Plunderer, so it gets one star.

Plunderer.

☆☆☆☆☆ (DROPPED)

Aaand I’m out.

Look, after the shitshow that was the first episode, I should have dropped it straight away. I gave it a chance, and the second episode convinced me that, hey, maybe this wouldn’t be so terrible, maybe the first episode was just an outlier.

The first episode was not an outlier. Episode three isn’t entirely sexual assault and sexual harassment, but about twelve minutes in it does segue into an extended sequence of exactly those things, getting worse with each passing minute. I got up to fourteen minutes, the point at which a supporting character was cheering on the protagonist to sexually assault someone, before I just couldn’t stomach watching anymore.

This show could be the most interesting, engaging, thought-provoking thing on television, and the constant sexual assault would still make me drop it. Luckily, even if you take out all the sex crimes, all you’d get is a show that was basically okay at best.

So zero stars for Plunderer, and I’m dropping the show. To be perfectly honest, I should have dropped it after episode one. 

Sorcerous Stabber Orphen.

★★★☆☆

Onto more pleasant news, man, I just don’t know what’s up with Sorcerous Stabber Orphen’s pacing. Having proceeded at a truly glacial pace for the first two episodes, this episode caps off the entire current story arc, bringing it to an abrupt close.

Now in the company of his old mentor Childman and a task force of sorcerers, Orphen tracks down the dragon-ified Azalie, attempting to reason with her, only for Childman to stab him and eviscerate Azalie. In the aftermath, however, Orphen realises that he’s been played: The dragon he thought was Azalie was actually Childman, and the person he’s been thinking of as Childman is actually Azalie.

So, that was a weird twist. It’s not, in fact, completely out of the left field. The episode sets up early on that Azalie was skilled not only in elemental Black Sorcery, but also in telepathic White Sorcery, and that she should have access to those spells even as a dragon, something which is cause for concern because nobody in the task force has White Sorcery, including Childman. Later on, the confrontation with Dragon-Azalie (Drazalie, if you will), has a character call attention to how she hasn’t used any White Sorcery since the battle started. So when it’s eventually revealed that Azalie did, in fact, use White Sorcery, secretly swapping her mind with Childman’s and letting him die in her place, it actually fits together in quite a neat fashion. 

The episode ends without any real hint as to where the story is going to go next: Azalie escapes in Childman’s body, and Orphen is still an exile from the Tower of Fangs, and there aren’t any other pressing story threads, so I guess we’ll see.

Infinite Dendrogram.

★★☆☆☆

This is the second week in a row that I’m giving Infinite Dendrogram two stars, and it actually physically pains me to do so, because I really like this series. I think apart from ID: Invaded, it’s my favourite anime this season, by quite a significant margin.

But nothing at all happens in this episode.

Okay, that’s only half true. The episode opens with the Player-Killers roaming around Altar having all been killed, which journalist (that’s literally her character class, which I kind of love as a concept) Marie Adler says was the work of just the four ranked players. One by one, she shows the main cast a video of each one taking out a clan of Player-Killers in their own unique way: Arena gladiator Figaro takes his targets out one by one, sadistically toying with them before striking the killing blow; cult priestess Tsukuyo uses magic to immobilise her targets, before letting her cult skewer them one by one; martial artist Lei Lei takes them out in a surprisingly friendly and sporting fashion; and the King of Destruction, whose identity is unknown and definitely not Ray’s big brother, definitely, absolutely, just levels the entire forest his targets are hiding in.

I … do see the necessity of introducing them. The Superiors are basically this show’s Gotei 13, or Gold Saints, or Hashira, or <Insert Group Of Loosely Allied Big Tough People That Are In Every Post-Saint Seiya Shounen Anime> here. There are, however, more interesting ways this could have been done than having the characters watching four videos of fights they already know the outcome to.

For example, what if, instead, you had an episode setting up the characters all getting trapped in different areas, pursued by higher level Player Killers, only for them each to be saved by a Superior. That would actually have some tension and dramatic stakes, and it’d be a much more dynamic way of introducing them. 

[woolishlygrim]

Winter Weebwatch #2

Alright, Week 2, second episodes, which we are getting to a lot quicker than we got the Week 1 episodes, hence why this post is going out, like, three days after the last one. Hey, maybe by the time we hit Week 3, we’ll be current! That’d be nice. 

Several third episodes have already aired, and In/Spectre always seems to be subbed a little late, so we might skip over it for Week 3 and come back for it in Week 4.

Same seven shows as last week, those being Darwin’s Game, Plunderer, ID: Invaded, Pet, In/Spectre, Sorcerous Stabber Orphen and Infinite Dendrogram. Nothing has been dropped or picked up yet, but the season’s still young.

Darwin’s Game

★☆☆☆☆

Haha, this time I’m reviewing the episode immediately after watching! My memory won’t pull the rug out from under me this time!

So, Darwin’s Game episode two sees … um … sees the guy … whose name begins with a K I think … doing something. Um. Oh! There’s a treasure hunt game with murdery elements on, but … but wait, that happens at the end of the episode? So what happens before that? I think there’s a guy who’s like a boxer with superspeed, and he steals the protagonist’s phone, maybe? But I don’t remember why. I …

God, this show is difficult to review. I swear I just finished watching it, but literally none of it has stuck. It just doesn’t take up any space in my memory, it’s like when you wake up from a dream and you remember it for like six seconds before it starts getting jumbled and confused.

One star again, I guess, because I can’t properly review something that I don’t even have a clear recollection of.

Plunderer

★☆☆☆☆

Fresh off what might well be the worst first episode of the season, Plunderer proceeds to demonstrate that it could have won me over easily if it hadn’t decided to devote the first twenty minutes of the series to making me hate it.

So, episode two kicks off with a fight scene between the protagonist, Licht, and Skeezy Military Guy, and it’s honestly pretty fun, as is the sequence just afterwards where Licht pretends to be an amoral thief as part of a convoluted gambit to keep the deuteragonist, Hina, from being arrested for possession of an illegal Ballot. There’s even a kind of emotional arc in this episode, of sorts. If I hadn’t seen the first episode, I probably would’ve given this one three stars.

Except I did see the first episode, and the consequences of that still apply. I can’t really ever sympathise with Licht or even enjoy seeing him on screen because the very first thing we ever saw of his character was him committing sexual harassment. Despite what my reviews of Darwin’s Game might suggest, I have a memory longer than that of a goldfish, so no matter what kind of emotional moments or ‘Aw, see, he really is a good person!’ moments the show throws out, it’s not going to matter, because his introduction already soured me to him and, to be honest, to the show entirely.

Anyway, the episode ends with some random background extra revealing that he’s actually a major villain, and I guess Hina is going to track down Licht to warn him or something, and I’ve just emotionally checked out at this point.

Pet.

★★★☆☆

Pet wins the coveted Most Improved prize this week, as its second episode retells the events of the first episode, but from the perspective of the psychic criminals. This is kind of a great move, as it shows us how these powers work, sets up rules and limitations, clues us into the character dynamic between psychic crime boyfriends Hiroki and Tsukasa, and their boss, the tyrannical and short-tempered but noticeably less powerful Katsuragi.

With this new perspective, events from the first episode are recontextualised, as we see how Hiroki and Tsukasa alter their victim’s memory, and also see how Hiroki is toying with Katsuragi (most noticeably, by making him believe he’s smoking when his cigarette is unlit), and the tension that arises from Katsuragi’s ostensible superior position juxtaposed against Hiroki’s vastly more powerful psychic abilities, setting us up for a future conflict down the line.

We also get to see Hiroki and Tsukasa’s co-dependent relationship, with Tsukasa relying on Hiroki in their work, while Hiroki is emotionally too tangled up in Tsukasa to function without him. That’s actually genuinely interested, and it’s compared and contrasted with the victim’s relationship with his best friend/possible boyfriend -- a relationship that Hiroki and Tsukasa are, by changing his memories, destroying.

The animation is still pretty bad, but it makes up for that somewhat with some stylistic flair and some interesting aesthetic choices.

Infinite Dendrogram.

★★☆☆☆

Infinite Dendrogram picks up this week with Ray and his new person-weapon Nemesis attempting to level up. After learning about a war between the NPC nations of Altar and Dryfe that ended with Altar’s defeat, Ray’s first attempt to level up sees him making both a new friend in the form of another player named Rook, and a new enemy, in the form of a mystery gunman who shoots him down for no readily apparent reason.

I really wanted to give this episode three stars, I wavered back and forth on it for quite a while, since this is still a really enjoyable episode, but ultimately I had to scrape off a point for two reasons: The first was the inclusion of some really jarring and irritating fanservice in the form of the antics of Rook’s Embryo, Babylon, which just threw me out of the episode and grated on me. The second is the scene where Ray’s brother Kuma informs him that the war between Altar and Dryfe was lost largely because when Altar’s NPC king (and remember, NPCs are sapient in this game apparently) said he would not be giving out loot rewards to players who assisted in the war, players just outright refused to help.

Which is kind of … wow. Thousands or maybe hundred of thousands of sapient AIs perished because players, who were at no risk of serious injury or permanent in-game death, refused to help out unless they got ultimately meaningless in-game rewards for doing so. It wouldn’t even as if they would be killing other sapient NPCs, since it’s clarified that Dryfe uses non-sapient robot soldiers. To make this a more bizarre turn that frames the entire playerbase of this game as sociopaths, apparently a bunch of players did fight for Dryfe, which offered rewards to them for doing so, and those players actually did murder a bunch of sapient NPCs.

I’ve elected to be fairly forgiving with the absurdity of this show’s premise, but that one worldbuilding detail kind of pushes it into the red for now.

Sorcerous Stabber Orphen.

★★☆☆☆

Not a whole lot happens in episode two.

Actually, nearly nothing happens in episode two. There’s a very brief explanation of the magic system, and a short sequence that sets up the next few episodes, as Orphen is blackmailed by his sorcerous former friends to assist them in hunting down his sister Azalie, and apart from that it’s alllllllllllll flashbacks.

The flashbacks don’t really communicate anything that couldn’t have been communicated in other ways, though. I mean, in general I really don’t like flashbacks, given that they bring a story to a grinding halt, but these flashbacks are just sort of pointless. We see that Orphen was a student at the Tower of Fang, which we knew, and we meet a few of his friends, which we meet again just afterwards so it’s kind of pointless, and we get some explanation of how the Sword of Baldanders, the weapon that turned Azalie into a dragon, got to the town that Orphen is currently in -- only for us to be told the same thing in exposition a second later.

The pacing of this show is just not … great. After two episodes, it feels like there’s been maybe one or one and a half episodes of content, and I know that doesn’t sound like it’d drag too much, but I have the attention span of a horsefly, so.

ID: Invaded.

★★★★☆

Continuing on from last week’s episodes, ID: Invaded -- now on its third episode, since again, it aired two episodes at once in its first week -- picks up with a new case, that of a bomber who mixes fireworks into his explosives, creating brightly coloured displays as he murders people. Diving into his mental world, Sakaido finds himself on a tower surrounded by a waterfall with dozens of people, as a sniper picks them all off. As he attempts to find clues, his progress is hindered by constantly dying, causing him to reset his memory and start over each time.

This is kind of an opposite situation to Infinite Dendrogram, where this would have been a solid three star episode, being entertaining, engaging, occasionally even thought-provoking and atmospheric (such as in the scene where Sakaido is thinking back to the aftermath of his daughter’s death, pointing out as he remembers it that his recollection of it, in which his daughter is able to talk to him before she dies, the body is recognisable, and the mortician praises her bravery, is incorrect), if not for a few small things.

In this case, it’s the final scene that pushes it up to being a four star episode. With the bomber in custody and in the cell opposite Sakaido’s, a solid four or five minutes are devoted to a harrowing sequence where Sakaido uses what he learned in the bomber’s mind to talk him into committing suicide. It’s an atmospheric, tense, and remarkably upsetting scene, made all the moreso by the voice actors’ excellent performances.

In unrelated news, for those keeping count, the surrealist director Ei Aoki references this time around is Koichi Mashimo, director of the impressively surreal and atmospheric .hack and Tsubasa Chronicle animes.

In/Spectre.

★★★☆☆

So, after a first episode that was kind of all over the place, the second episode actually settles into something like a single genre, establishing itself as a light-hearted supernatural mystery with some romance elements. Which is fine, and it does it well, and I’m happy to not constantly be getting genre whiplash anymore.

This week’s episode sees Kotoko summoned up to the mountains by a snake spirit who wishes to know why a murderer tipped the body of her victim into the snake’s swamp. The main bulk of the episode is taken up by Kotoko and the snake’s interactions, with Kotoko acting as prosecutor and presenting plausible theories as to why the killer did what they did, and the snake picking holes in those theories and shooting them down.

It actually kind of works, to be honest. As Kotoko explains her theories, we’re shown them happening on screen, and since the snake points out some pretty reasonable flaws in them, it feels like a nice, even back-and-forth debate, as the two make point and counterpoint. Written well, debates like that can be really compelling viewing, and this episode actually is written really well.

There’s also some nice character development moments early on, with Kuro turning down Kotoko’s offer of accompanying her to visit the snake, only to insist she take a thermos of soup and a jacket with her, and later wandering up to meet up with her anyway. Mamoru Miyano doesn’t have the easiest job here, playing someone who is meant to have extremely flat affect and yet still make them interesting to listen to, but he pulls it off pretty well.

[woolishlygrim]

Winter Weebwatch #1

So, because it is Good when I get to have opinions about things, I figured I’d try out doing a bunch of mini-reviews for the current season of anime, doing a new batch of reviews with each episode and seeing how they evolve and change over time, whether some do better, or some fall behind, or if I end up dropping any of them (and by any of them, I mean Plunderer).

The winter anime season is kind of a dead zone: Since it starts in January when everybody’s starting to get busy again and Christmas has screwed over their sense of work-life balance, it’s the season with the lowest amount of viewers, and so it’s the season where the shows tend to be noticeably low effort and low budget. It’s telling that, despite having huge franchises with a lot of brand recognition, Sunrise and A-1 Pictures put Gundam Build Divers Re:Rise and Sword Art Online on hiatus for the entirety of the winter season, choosing to take the hit that comes from a three month hiatus instead of wasting twelve or thirteen episodes on the Death Season, The Season Where Shows Go To Die.

So by and large, what we’re reviewing here are either the shows distribution companies didn’t care about, or the shows distribution companies did care about but couldn’t get a channel to pick up in any other season. We’re also not reviewing all of them, because there’s like ninety and my store of time and opinions is finite, so we’re reviewing seven.

While the intention is to follow these seven shows through to the end, what will probably happen is I might drop a couple that aren’t keeping my interest, and pick up a couple that catch my eye. If I pick up new ones, then whatever I pick up will get some kind of bumper review covering several episodes.

Also, I really dragged my heels getting this done, so most of these shows have already aired their second episodes. I’ll be trying to put out the second episode reviews a lot quicker, so that I can be relatively current by the time the third episodes roll around.

Anyway! Week 1, first episodes.

Infinite Dendrogram.

★★★☆☆

Infinite Dendrogram has a terrible and ridiculous premise that crumbles into dust if you examine it for more than 0.2 seconds, and I kind of don’t mind that at all.

The show follows Ray Starling, a player in the titular Virtual Reality MMO, which promises infinite possibilities owing to its two unique selling points: The first, that all the NPCs are fully-fledged AIs, meaning the world ‘exists’ distinct from its players or any manned oversight, with quests emerging naturally from the NPCs’ wants and needs, and with NPCs able to permanently die; and the second, that each player character has an Embryo, a superpower generated using their personality as a model, with infinite possibilities.

This is an inconceivably dumb premise. Leaving aside the obvious game balance issues with the Embryos, it’s clarified early on that this AI technology is unique to the game, which means that some game company discovered the technology to create fully conscious, sapient life, and decided to use that technology to create a video game (and in doing so, directly led to the deaths of thousands of those sapient lives).

But I … kinda don’t care? Infinite Dendrogram’s episode was fun, lively, not terribly original but consistently engaging, and managed to introduce five characters who I actually kind of like while telling a self-contained episodic story with good stakes and nice pacing. It feels like Sword Art Online if Sword Art Online was written by a competent writer and also not just a delivery system for creepy, irritating fanservice, and that’s pretty nice.

Also, bonus points for actually making the in-universe game look fun? We’ll call that one another advantage it has over SAO.

ID: Invaded.

★★★★☆

ID: Invaded has indisputably the strongest first episode of this season of anime (really first two, as it aired both episodes one and two back to back), by a gigantic margin. A video called ‘Defending ID: Invaded’ floated by my youtube dash a few days back, so clearly some people don’t agree with me on that, but that’s fine. It’s okay for them to be wrong.

When ID: Invaded picks up, a young man awakens in an empty white void full of floating chunks of a city, with his own body in pieces and no memories. Pulling himself back together, he realises, upon seeing a dead body of a young woman, that his name is Sakaido, and he’s a detective here to solve the woman’s murder.

Sakaido, it quickly turns out, is exploring a cognitive world formed out of a telepathic link with the killer, with a team of investigators in the real world watching through his eyes and picking out evidence to find the murderer with. When the murderer, a serial killer called the Perforator, kidnaps a member of the investigation team, the race is on to find him before he can kill again.

So, ID: Invaded has kind of mastered the art of dripfeeding information in a way that gets a viewer hooked very quickly while steadily delivering a series of twists and turns, and recontextualising the story and the mystery (which, it rapidly emerges, is not the mystery of the Perforator, but rather the mystery of Sakaido himself). It’s gripping and inventive, with a strong if slightly convoluted premise and a lot of interesting material to set up going forward in the series.

In a nice touch, director Ei Aoki turns the mental worlds Sakaido visits (two in the first two episodes) into homages to other surrealist anime directors, mimicking both their compositions and their cinematography. The world of the Perforator draws marked influence from the works of Mamoru Hosoda, an apprentice of Hayao Miyazaki and one of the original creators of Digimon Adventure; while the second world visited pays homage to the works of Akiyuki Shinbo, best known for the unsettling surrealist landscapes and equally unsettling cinematography of Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Fate/Extra Last Encore.

Pet.

★☆☆☆☆

Pet looks like a cheap OVA from 2004. Let’s just get that out of the way, it looks bad, but in a really inoffensive way where it just kind of looks cheap and outdated.

It’s … fine. It’s okay. If you’ve ever had a Burger King bacon and cheese burger, you basically know what Pet is like. If you haven’t ever had a Burger King bacon and cheese burger, go and have a Burger King bacon and cheese burger, and then you’ll know what Pet is like.

The first episode doesn’t really give away anything about the premise of the series, save that it involves psychic criminals, but it tells a decent self-contained little story about a guy who learns something he shouldn’t and is then psychic-ly tormented before his memory is eventually wiped.

There’s also just not a lot to say about Pet, though. It fulfills its function as a work of storytelling, and it doesn’t really ever do much more than that, at least in its first episode. It finds its comfortable niche in just being very average and unremarkable, and sticks there, being average and unremarkable.

Of all the first episodes I’m reviewing, Pet seems the most passionless. It’s such a middle of the road piece of art that I struggle to imagine why it was even made. It doesn’t seem like it’s trying to sell merchandise, it doesn’t seem like a passion project, it doesn’t really seem like much of anything. It feels like someone asked a creative writing class to write a short story about psychic criminals, and then one of those stories was turned into an anime episode.

Plunderer.

☆☆☆☆☆

Plunderer offers a moderately interesting premise that literally nobody watching the first episode will even remember because oh good god, from the second scene onwards the entire episode is just non-stop sexual harassment and assault, first from the protagonist to the deuteragonist and then from the antagonist to the deuteragonist, and I hated it. I hated it so much.

In a bizarre turn, when the protagonist sexually harasses and attempts to sexually assault the deuteragonist, it’s played as wacky comedy, but when the antagonist does basically the exact same thing, it’s played with all the sense of horror that those actions warrant.

I just … don’t really get how I’m meant to ever sympathise with the protagonist after this. I don’t know how you rehabilitate a character in the audience’s minds when our very first introduction to him tells us that he’s a sex pest.

Also something something numbers something something die if your number reaches zero something something magical items who even cares what the premise is, my patience for this show ran dry thirty seconds into the second scene.

If I had a way of representing it, I would give this first episode a negative number of stars.

Sorcerous Stabber Orphen.

★★★☆☆

Let it just be noted that ‘Sorcerous Stabber Orphen’ is the most unintentionally hilarious anime title of the season, so there’s that.

A remake of a 1999 series of the same name, Sorcerous Stabber Orphen follows Orphen, a disgraced former sorcerer turned small-time crook and moneylender whose ill-advised attempt to commit marriage fraud is abruptly interrupted by the appearance of a dragon crashing through the roof of his potential bride/mark’s house. This isn’t just any dragon, however, but Orphen’s sister, Azalie, magically transformed after a spell gone wrong, leading Orphen on a quest to turn her back into a human before the sorcerers of the Tower of Fang can kill her.

Side note: While he names himself ‘Orphen’ because he is an orphan, I’m not misspelling the name, that’s how it’s spelled in-show. This is everybody’s fault except mine.

So, this first episode rather shows the age of its source material. It looks very much like a spruced up late 90s anime made with current day animation techniques, and that’s actually not a bad look for it. It’s also not really a good look -- Megalo Box this ain’t -- it’s just kind of a … look. Which is there. It exists in a state of Neutral Retro.

As first episodes go, though, this is probably one of the emptier and slower ones, somehow managing to cover less of its plot than even Plunderer (although it wins out on a massive margin the basis of that plot not being 90% sex crimes), because seemingly not only is its animation style cribbed from late 90s action anime, but so is its pacing.

What’s there, though, is pretty fun. None of it is dazzlingly original, it probably wasn’t that original even in the 90s, but we get introduced to a likeable cast of characters, we get a decent central conflict set up, and the worldbuilding is, while bare bones at present, at least interesting enough to hook a viewer who likes fantasy.

Also, it’s called ‘Sorcerous Stabber Orphen,’ so, you know. Extra star just for that, man.

In/Spectre.

★★☆☆☆

I’m not sure what In/Spectre is trying to be, and it doesn’t seem to be sure either.

The marketing set it up as an atmospheric, brooding supernatural mystery. The first third of the episode frames it as a romantic comedy with emphasis on the comedy. The second third of the episode switches back to atmospheric, brooding supernatural mystery, only for the third third of the episode to switch tracks yet again, this time to an action comedy with an emphasis on the action.

I don’t know whether I’m coming or going with this show. I get mood whiplash constantly, as it veers from genre to genre like a drunk driver on the freeway. By the time the last third of the episode hit, I felt completely unmoored not just from the plot, but from how I was even meant to interpret the characters.

It’s not bad at any of those genres, either. The romantic comedy section was actually pretty funny, the supernatural mystery section was suitably ominous, the action comedy section established stakes and followed through on them pretty well. None of it was blow-me-away-amazing, but it was all competent, it’s just that there’s no coherent sense of tone to any of it.

Darwin’s Game.

★☆☆☆☆

Full disclosure, I completely forgot I was watching Darwin’s Game. I finished these reviews, thought ‘haha, well done, I’ve reviewed all six shows I wanted to review’ and didn’t remember that there was a seventh on my list until I saw its name come up on a streaming website.

That’s a large part of why I’m scoring it so low. It’s better than In/Spectre, Pet, or Plunderer, it’s probably at least as good as Sorcerous Stabber Orphen, but at least those shows actually made some kind of impression on me. Darwin’s Game is good, but I can’t exactly justify giving two or three stars to a show that had such little impact that it vanished from my memory as soon as I stopped actively watching it with my eyes, like some kind of middling Doctor Who monster.

So, Darwin’s Game follows, um. It follows … a guy … with a name that I can’t recall … who is unwittingly dragged into a death game played in the streets of Tokyo. With each player given Sigils, seemingly magical abilities that they can use to gain advantages in the game, and with points exchangeable for vast sums of real money, the players of Darwin’s Game are set to the task of hunting down and murdering other players. Unable to back out of the game, Some Guy finds help with, er … with … a person … whose name I also don’t recall … and …

God, trying to recall the details of this show is like trying to recall what you had for dinner last week just after a severe head injury. You know, but the details just aren’t there.

I’m kind of at a loss as far as opinions go, because I don’t … know? If I think hard, I can remember the order of events that happened in the first episode, but I can’t remember what, if any, emotional response I had to them. All of my memories of this show are a blank, emotionless void, this is like asking me to review Solitaire. Like, I guess it was fine? I guess? 

I can’t remember the main character’s face or voice.

Note to self, write all Darwin’s Game reviews from now on immediately after watching the episode, otherwise all recollection of it will melt like ice cream in a heat wave.

I’m still giving it one star, though, because I refuse to put it on the same level as Plunderer. For a start, the main character doesn’t belong on some kind of registry.

[woolishlygrim]

Winter Weebwatch #10

We’re very much hitting the final stretch of the winter anime season now, and to be honest, I still don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing for Spring Weebwatch (Spring Spreebspratch?). Kami no Tou, Digimon Adventure 2020, and Yu-Gi-Oh Sevens are shoo-ins, but a lot of the shows that start in Spring are the second seasons of shows from Autumn 2019, and I’d rather not do those.

Anyway, on with this week’s shows.

Pet.

★★★☆☆

Okay, so apparently Pet did air last week, I just didn’t see that it had, which is weird, I was looking out for it.

Also weird is that the character I originally thought was called Tsukasa and then thought was called Tsubasa is actually called Tsukasa. Did … did the subbers make a mistake at some point, or did I make the mistake? I genuinely do not know.

Anyway, last week and this week, Pet saw Hiroki discover Hayashi, still not entirely crushed but rather in a mostly-crushed state similar to the one he found Tsukasa in. Realising from exploring his memories that Tsukasa was the one who crushed Hayashi, Hiroki, feeling betrayed, confronts Tsukasa and eventually runs away. Meanwhile, Tsukasa, faced with the prospect of the Company separating him from Hiroki and then with Hiroki running away, grows more and more unhinged, eventually deciding to manipulate Satoru into going after him.

Things are definitely winding their way towards a conclusion, and I honestly can’t see what that conclusion will even be, or how the writers plan to tie this up in two episodes, but it’s fun to watch, at least.

That said, my god, Tsukasa going off the deep end is … something. The animators are having a whale of a time, drawing him wide-eyed, pale, and practically twitching. One scene has him drooling as he talks and occasionally having to wipe it away with his sleeve. If this was an actor, I’d say they were chewing the scenery, but it’s not, someone intentionally made him like this.

ID: Invaded.

★★★☆☆

This is another episode that just doesn’t quite deliver on the promise it set up. While I felt I was being a little harsh with last week’s score, this time I feel like I’m being a little lenient. It’s really a two and a half star episode.

With the set-up of the last episode going forward, Anaido just turns out to not … really have any kind of diabolical plan at all, whereas Hondomachi in the Well-Within-A-Well just kind of puts a couple of clues together and discovers who John Walker is.

John Walker is, incidentally, the character everyone expected him to be, since we’d seen that Walker has a white beard and moustache and only one other character had that.

As far as twists go, it’s … weak. It’s very weak, and the downplayed way the episode presents it suggests that the creative team were well aware of how weak the twist was. Similarly, the reveal that Kiki is inside the Mizuhanome is pretty much expected.

However, we still have two episodes to go, so there is plenty of time for the show to pull a rabbit out of its hat, so to speak.

Darwin’s Game.

★☆☆☆☆

I’m beginning to lose patience with this show, and if we weren’t in spitting distance of the end (this is episode nine, there are eleven episodes total apparently), I would drop it.

So continuing on from last week, the protagonist (nine episodes in and I still have no idea what his name is) engages in a fight to prove that his clan is worthy of allying themselves with the boxing gym-y clan, after which the top-ranked player in the game kidnaps him to … ugh.

Kidnaps him because she is the head of an ancient clan of psychic assassins and she wants him to be the father of her child, and fuck knows writing that sentence made me seriously reconsider watching the last two episodes.

The whole thing ends with said top-ranked player (who can psychically incapacitate people somehow) joining the protagonist’s clan, because I guess we don’t need stakes? Nah, nah, who needs narrative tension, right?

Congrats on another episode I actually remembered, Darwin’s Game. You might’ve done better if I hadn’t.

In/Spectre.

★★★★☆

Okay, I admit it, In/Spectre has wormed its way into my good graces. I enjoy this show now, I guess.

This is just a really good episode, and it manages to be a really good episode while working with material that I’m not sure most writers would be able to make interesting. As the plan to take down Steel Girder Nanase kicks off, Kotoko begins what is essentially a reddit forum argument in which she attempts to cast doubt on the existence of Steel Girder Nanase by proposing an alternate theory and arguing in its favour. As she does this, however, Rikka is attempting to argue back under several different accounts, trying to sway people into believing in Nanase’s existence.

Do you see what I mean? This is … this is banal. This is people arguing in the comments section while one person uses transparently disguised sockpuppets. This is something I can find by just going to a forum and scrolling down a few inches, and yet this episode is absolutely fascinating to watch.

When the episode ended with Kotoko saying that it’s time for her to present her second theory, I wasn’t even annoyed. I’m genuinely interested to see what the second theory is. I hate that I really like this show now.

Infinite Dendrogram.

★★★★☆

This is another one where I was honestly not sure what score to give it. It was a three-and-a-half star episode, really, and I wavered back and forth for a while over whether to bump it up to four stars or down to three stars, before eventually deciding to be nice. 

Honestly, it could have gone either way.

With Franklin/Penguin-san having kidnapped the princess and enshrouded the arena in a barrier, he begins his invasion of the city, remarking to the princess that he will break the spirit of the Masters of Altar before the war between Altar and Dryfe can resume. While Franklin’s own Superior class ability, which allows him to invent and spawn monsters, is a potent threat in his own right, he is also joined by numerous other Masters, from both Dryfe and Altar, along with Hugo and what appear to be the other three Dryfe Superiors.

So this is an actually really fun episode, even if it’s also kind of a nothing episode. With Shu and Figaro both trapped in the barrier, Ray and Rook learn that any player below level fifty can pass straight through the barrier, and use that to mount a counterattack. A small chunk of the episode is devoted to what amounts to a ‘Ray And Rook (And Later Hugo) Show Off Their Awesome Abilities’ scene, and honestly it was enough fun that I’m willing to forgive it for being mindless fluff. I do like the touch that while Rook can use his abilities to convert female monsters to his side, his Embryo Babyl can use her abilities to convert male players to her side, making them a nice team.

Meanwhile, Marie, who had bonded with the princess earlier, tracks down Franklin and shoots him a bunch, and exactly nobody is surprised because we all basically knew already that she was the monster-bug-shooting gunslinger who killed Ray before. Franklin is still alive, though, and as the show, as all shounen shows must, descends into shounen anime battle match-ups, Marie finds herself facing off against another Dryfe Superior with power over music.

Also, can I just express my irritation that Franklin combines both chess metaphors and poker metaphors. Those games are the antithesis of each other: Chess is a game all about planning multiple moves ahead, figuring out multiple paths and multiple outcomes to those paths and then choosing the best one; whereas Poker is a game all about taking a hand dealt to you by luck and tricking, scheming, and gambling your way to getting the best possible use out of it. Either one will work for a scheming villain, but they work for very different kinds of scheming villain.

[woolishlygrim]

Winter Weebwatch #9

Taking advantage of Tumblr’s draft feature to write this into Tumblr in bits and bobs. Streamlining this whooole process.

Also, Pet didn’t air this week, so I presume it’ll be back next week.

Darwin’s Game.

★☆☆☆☆

Wow! A Darwin’s Game episode I actually remember! This is amazing!

But unfortunately it also had a really weird and uncomfortable scene involving Sui, and that’s … egh, I really considered just dropping the show this week because of it, and to be honest I still might, but I gave Plunderer enough proverbial rope to hang itself, so I may as well do the same here. Either way, I’m hacking off two stars for it.

Beyond that, this episode concludes the Hidden Treasure Game arc, with our protagonist (I still have no idea what his name is) finding the treasure and getting a few boons because of it: A ton of points, a conversation with the Game Master (in which he professes that he didn’t create the game, only the interface for it), and one favour of his choice. That favour turns out to be a month of training with the Boxing Gym Clan that the speedster from a few episodes ago is a part of, and the chance to offer an alliance between clans to said box-y punch-y clan.

All in all, this is an episode which caps off the arc in a predictable but engaging enough fashion. The protagonist’s ploy to distract Snakey Dude Man (I know none of these character’s names except Sui, and that’s only because she’s a hydrokinetic whose name means ‘water’) is so simplistic that it kind of falls flat as the show’s attempt to convince us that Protag Guy is some great strategic planner, but sure, fine, whatever.

We have our main antagonist now, at least.

In/Spectre.

★★★☆☆

Good news! Not a flashback episode. Bad news! Partly a flashback episode, partly just set-up for the next episode.

I have to admit, In/Spectre is growing on me, though. I don’t know what it is, it’s just sort of slowly worming its way into my good graces despite having not much about it that’s really that remarkable.

This episode sees us get some backstory on Rikka, mostly how she is both immortal (due to consuming the kudan and mermaid flesh, like Kuro did) and how she is sick (but unable to die, due to the aforementioned), and was discharged from hospital a year prior, living with Kotoko until she eventually vanished.

This actually sets up a really interesting state of play for the next episode, since now there’s another hitch in Kotoko’s plan: Kuro can change the future every time he dies, slowly steering events towards Kotoko’s desired outcome, but Rikka can do the same, steering events towards her own desired outcome, making the upcoming battle a case of ‘who can put themselves closest to their end goal while making the other person’s end goal less plausible and so requiring more steps to get to.’ That’s actually a really interesting set-up for a battle of wits.

ID: Invaded.

★★★☆☆

Well, ID: Invaded’s five star streak had to end eventually.

In fairness, this isn’t a bad episode by any stretch, it’s actually pretty good (if I could do half stars, I’d give it three-and-a-half for sure), it just doesn’t really manage to live up to the potential the previous episode set up.

As Narihisago continues living out his new life in the Well-within-a-Well, Kiki disappears in mysterious circumstances, with thirteen nurses falling asleep and Kiki mysteriously vanishing while they were unconscious, despite the fact that there’s no way she could have gone anywhere. With that mystery fresh in his mind and starting to believe that maybe this is real and his life before was the dream, Narihisago sets out to continue his serial-killing by tracking down the Perforator, only to come face to face with Hondomachi, who thoroughly disabuses him of any notions that he’s in real life.

As the Well-within-a-Well begins to collapse, Narihisago is dragged out, leaving Hondomachi behind to continue investigating John Walker, and lands back in Not!Momoki’s Well as Sakaido, only for Anaido/The Perforator to reveal that he can actually retain his memories in Wells. As Anaido informs Sakaido of his true identity, a storm whips up, revealing them to actually have been Narihisago’s Well all along, the game board having simply been covered by sand.

So, this episode feels rather rushed, and it basically just caps off and abandons the whole Well-within-a-Well idea as soon as it stops being useful as a stealth-flashback. On top of that, while the twist at the end is interesting, it also doesn’t make a lot of sense: Anaido says that he can keep his memories within Wells because of the hole in his head, but Hondomachi has the exact same hole, and we saw that she didn’t retain any memories while inside Wells.

There’s also just not a whole lot of questions answered this time around. In fact, no questions are really answered, bar ‘if the Well they’re in isn’t Momoki’s, then whose is it,’ and even that raises a question of ‘How can Narihisago have murdered the professor if he himself doesn’t remember doing it?’ Instead, it just raises a dozen more questions, like ‘How did Kiki disappear and what happened to those nurses?’

We only have three episodes left, sixty minutes total, and that’s just not a whole lot of time to answer those questions.

Infinite Dendrogram.

★★★☆☆

This episode is basically all fight scene, just five minutes of preamble that mostly serves to remind us that Shu is still a Superior, and then one fifteen-minute battle between Figaro and Xunyu (who is not, contrary to what I said last week, a Superior of Dryfe, but actually a Superior from Huang He, which we’ve never heard of before).

It’s fun, typical shonen anime fare, not tremendously deep but at least an enjoyable watch with some interesting turns, the main one being the reveal that Figaro’s Embryo amplifies his equipment’s stats equivalent to how many free equipment slots he has. That’s an … almost Dark Souls-y ability, to be honest, and it fits in nicely as an interesting but still very game-y ability for him.

Anyway, not much happens this week that’s actually plot relevant, save for Penguin-san showing up at the end (we actually do get his name this episode, he’s called Franklin) and the reveal that he was the one who killed the King of Alter. Still, fun episode.

[woolishlygrim]

Winter Weebwatch #12

Man, I got it entirely wrong which series were ending this week and which weren’t. Darwin’s Game and ID: Invaded both ended this week, while Pet and In/Spectre end this coming week, and it looks like Infinite Dendrogram ends either this coming week or the week after.

That’s going to make next week’s post really easy to write, since I’ll just be doing three shows. Anyway, let’s crack on.

Darwin’s Game.

★★★★☆ (FINISHED)

This episode ... actually had legs, if I’m being honest.

Reeling from the loss of a friend, Kaname decides to abandon his moral principle of no killing and violently take down Wang and the Eighth, leaving Wang to Shuka. In the aftermath, now having control of Shibuya, Kaname institutes a new rule: Anyone playing the D-Game within Shibuya will die.

So, I saw someone describe Darwin’s Game as a superhero show with death game genre trappings, and if that’s the case, this is the episode where it stops being about superheroes and starts being about supervillains. Which, and it pains me to admit this after ragging on the show for twelve weeks, is actually a fairly interesting idea. I can go for that, and if the show gets a second season, I probably will actually watch it to see what happens.

I did also like the touch of having Shuka (see, I’m learning more of the main cast’s names) take down Wang, who’s essentially been the big bad of this arc. It’s just nice that the show remembers that Shuka is meant to be the best fighter of the group, and the fight itself (which takes up the bulk of the episode) involves some interesting use of her powers.

All in all, pretty good.

FINAL VERDICT: ★★★☆☆

ID: Invaded.

★★★☆☆ (FINISHED)

Meanwhile, ID: Invaded’s final episode is basically fine. Good, fine, ticks off all the boxes, but not amazing.

There are some nice touches, though. The fact that Narihisago and Hondomachi trick Walker by luring him into the Perforator’s Well, where everything -- including the chair for entering the Well-within-a-Well -- is deconstructed, preventing Walker from recognising it until it’s too late, is actually a pretty fun and neat twist. Momoki’s refusal to kill Kiki is quite touching, and the tension of ‘the suit he’s wearing to stop Kiki’s powers from affecting him could kill him at any moment’ builds an appropriate amount of tension.

But at the same time, it means this series ends on an oddly happy note. John Walker is defeated, Kiki is back in the Mizuhanome with the promise that she’ll eventually be saved from it, and it all ends on a very cheery ‘and the adventures continue’ note that is very at odds with the show’s tone up to this point.

So it’s fine, but it’s not great, and that’s a shame coming out of my favourite show of the season.

FINAL VERDICT: ★★★★☆

Pet.

★★★★☆

In this week’s episode, Tsukasa and Satoru manage to capture Hiroki, but Tsukasa’s plan begins to collapse around his ears as Satoru receives a message from Hayashi, who alerts him to both the truth of the Babies’ creation and to the possibility that Tsukasa may be fully on the Company’s side (which he isn’t, but details). Hoping to convince Tsukasa to escape with him and Hiroki, Satoru approaches Tsukasa, only for Tsukasa to sell him out and shoot him.

I’m still honestly fascinated to know how this series is going to turn out, and at this point, I can only see it ending tragically somehow. As is often the case with tragedies, Tsukasa has been offered his chance to get out of this peacefully, his way to get a happy ending, but his fatal flaw has seen him reject it, leaving him in a situation where it honestly looks like nobody is going to get what they want.

The episode builds tension well, ties off several plot points, and sets us up nicely for the finale next week, and I really can’t even begin to predict where that finale is going to end up going.

In/Spectre.

★★★★☆

While there’s one more episode after this (I think), the show is basically over now, as this episode wraps up the battle of wits between Kotoko and Rikka, and the corresponding battle of steel-beams-to-the-face between Kuro and Steel Girder Nanase.

This episode sees Kotoko tie her theories all together, crafting one final one that takes elements from each of the previous four, and -- more importantly -- inspiring the readers of the Steel Girder Nanase wiki to start creating their own theories as to how she’s totally not a ghost. It’s a clever way to end this particular battle of wits, culminating in Kotoko challenging Rikka to prove she’s not Nanase, and Kuro defeating the weakened Nanase at last.

This was a lot of fun, actually. The show has been getting consistently better, and the entire string of theories has been really fun to watch. The last time I remember seeing something like this in an anime, it was Zetsuen no Tempest, with three characters effectively Phoenix Wright-ing out a problem in a heated debate. As in Zetsuen no Tempest, In/Spectre’s take on the idea of a back-and-forth debate was just really engaging to watch, to the point it’s drawing up alongside ID: Invaded as one of the best anime of the season.

But there’s still one more episode, and apart from a twenty minute epilogue (which would be boring), I don’t know if there’s really much more for the story to do. I mean, it can’t start a brand new arc, there’s only one episode left.

Infinite Dendrogram.

★★★☆☆

Infinite Dendrogram continues at an absolute breakneck pace, as Rook faces off against Hugo, and Ray faces off against Franklin and their RSK monster, now revealed to be a Ray Starling Killer.

This is actually a pretty good episode, despite its rather rapid pace. We get to see Rook’s deductive skills at work, and then his ability to con people at work, in a nice reference to how he’s seemingly the son of a master detective and a con artist. Similarly, we get to see Ray actually strategise in a fight instead of just winning by pulling out a new ability that happens to suit his situation, and Franklin’s plan -- creating a monster that grows another monster inside it, which attacks through holes in the exterior monster, so that Ray can’t use his Vengeance ability -- is actually genuinely kind of brilliant.

There’s two episodes left, though, and it occurs that there are still two Dryfe Superiors who we haven’t seen yet, so either Dryfe and Franklin are going to continue being problems, or we’re due two more battles.

It’s a bit of a shame that a Battle of the Siblings seems unlikely now, though.

[woolishlygrim]

Winter Weebwatch #4

This was … not a good week for a lot of the shows I’ve been reviewing. It wasn’t bad either, necessarily, just a solid two stars almost all the way across the board (and, like, two three star ratings).

We’ve also dropped another show this week, bringing our count down to five. Amazingly, the dropped show isn’t Darwin’s Game.

In/Spectre

★★☆☆☆

Episode three, and we’re straight back to the tone/genre problem from before.

The first half of this week’s episode finishes up the story about the snake deity and the swamp, with Kotoko giving her final hypothesis to the snake and successfully arguing in its defence. In the aftermath, she admits to Kuro that while the series of events she put forward was plausible, it’s actually a lie: The first theory she proposed, which the snake shot down, is actually the truth, but since it wouldn’t accept that, she had to come up with something else. This actually caps off that storyline in a pretty interesting way, and it tells us a lot about Kotoko’s character.

Aaaand then the story timeskips forward two years for no apparent reason and introduces us to Saki, Kuro’s ex-girlfriend. The timeskip seems fairly pointless, but Saki actually is pretty interesting: We get to see the reason she broke up with Kuro from her perspective, namely that, after an incident with a kappa where it fled in fear from him and where he seemed to be in some kind of trance and daze, she abruptly became acutely terrified of him without really knowing why, to the extent that just thinking about him makes her violently throw up.

That’s … really potent horror-writing right there. The idea that you can know somebody for years, and then one day a switch is flipped and you realise that there’s something unnatural and terrifying about them, and there always has been, is a legitimately horrifying one.

The problem comes back to tone and genre, because this isn’t really a horror show. It’s a romantic comedy, and while there probably would be mileage in ‘Kotoko is the only person not instinctively terrified of Kuro’ as a concept in a dark romantic comedy, we haven’t seen Kuro interact with anyone other than Kotoko and Saki, and there’s been no suggestion that people are instinctively frightened of him. The fact that immediately after this moment, the show resumes being a comedy, doesn’t help.

Darwin’s Game.

★★☆☆☆

I actually kind of remember most of what happened this time! I have to think really hard to remember it, it’s still foggy, but I do know what events took place in this episode.

Aaand because this is part of a longer arc and I haven’t remembered any previous episodes well enough to describe them, if I do any kind of synopsis in this review it’s just going to sound like utter nonsense.

But this episode was okay. Not amazing, not bad, but plenty watchable. It even introduced a semi-interesting idea, as Tech-y Information Broker Girl revealed that her Sigil, the ability to calculate the immediate future, is named after Pierre-Simon Laplace; setting things up for the  main character -- whose name is still a mystery to me -- to later have a vision of a mysterious blacksmith with his face, the apparent source of his own Sigil.

That … presents an intriguing idea that all the Sigils in Darwin’s Game might be in some form manifestations of historical figures. As an idea, it’s completely out of the left field, and it may end up not being the case at all, but it’d be an interesting little twist if it was.

Either way, this was an okay episode, I liked it.

Pet.

★★☆☆☆

We’re handing out a lot of two star scores this week, aren’t we.

I did enjoy Pet, and it probably wasn’t helped but how damn tired I was when I watched it, so this may not be a fair score. What bumps it down from a three last week to a two this week, though, is that this episode doesn’t introduce a whole lot that’s actually new. Hiroki is still in an abusive relationship with Tsukasa (who I think I called ‘Tsubasa’ throughout my review last week), and he still sort of realises that, but is so codependent that he can’t get out of it, Katsuragi is still talking a big game but the weakest one amongst them, and Satoru is still a cinnamon roll who keeps getting unfairly cast as the romantic rival by Hiroki, despite his demonstrable lack of interest in Tsukasa.

Instead of building on its character dynamics, this episode of Pet instead reintroduces us to Satoru and Tsukasa’s mentor, Hayashi, and it starts laying the groundwork for what will probably be an interesting romantic subplot in future: Satoru and Tsukasa both indicate a certain amount of romantic interest in Hayashi, with Satoru even drawing a parallel between Hiroki’s feeling of abandonment by Tsukasa and Tsukasa’s feeling of abandonment by Hayashi -- but Hayashi, meanwhile, seems to barely acknowledge that Tsukasa exists, and while he’s very invested in Satoru’s wellbeing, his interest is more filial than romantic.

Also, Katsuragi’s still a jerk and is still the least competent character around, which is fine.

Anyway, this isn’t a bad episode, but since it doesn’t really deepen our understanding of these characters (except maybe Tsukasa), it’s gotta get only two stars.

ID: Invaded.

★★★☆☆

I wavered on this one, I really did. In a week where every show seems to be doing worse in these reviews, ID: Invaded is unfortunately no different, and its streak of four star reviews has finally been broken.

But that’s … sort of fine, actually. This is very much a bridging episode, the middle part of the Gravedigger arc, and being the middle episode in a three episode (I suspect, it might be more) arc isn’t an easy position to be in.

Picking up immediately from last week’s episode, Hondomachi quickly realises that the fellow Perforator survivor who kissed her is actually the real Gravedigger, present at the crime scene to check out his imitator’s work, and that the reason the team haven’t been able to form a Well out of his killing intent is that he has brain damage, causing his killing intent to manifest as acts of love and his love to manifest as murder.

The plotline ends up not being as simple as all that, with the episode throwing three curveballs at us close to the end, but this is nevertheless very much a bridging episode, and it’s obvious in how relatively low effort the Well in the episode is.

Still, it sets things up nicely for the next episode, and I’m intrigued to see where this arc goes.

Sorcerous Stabber Orphen.

★★☆☆☆ (DROPPED)

I think the pace of Sorcerous Stabber Orphen is just too slow for my short attention span.

This week’s episode opens on another flashback, and when it became very apparent that a) The entire episode was going to be a flashback, and b) That flashback had no real momentum and not a lot of plot relevance, I just kind of decided enough was enough and that I should drop this show.

Unlike Plunderer, though, I’m not dropping this show because it’s bad or horribly offensive -- for viewers with a little more patience than I have, I think Orphen is the kind of series they could really enjoy, a light-hearted, somewhat retro fantasy story with some fun characters and a potentially interesting plotline.

It’s just a little too slow to keep my interest.

Infinite Dendrogram.

★★★☆☆

This week’s episode sees the gang starting on what should be a routine quest, only to run into a wandering boss monster, an ogre with poison and fire powers. The task of defeating it becomes a complex interplay of strategies, as Ray and Rook attempt to work around its ability to stack status effects on them and its potent fire powers.

So, this episode is pretty much all one long fight, and honestly, it’s not a bad fight at all. The main grit of it is Ray trying to juggle all of his abilities and advantages while trying to stay alive -- he has to stack up damage to use his Vengeance Is Mine ability, which adds damage he takes to his own attack power, but he also has to not die, and he has a limited number of uses of healing, and while he’s been given an elixir to protect him against the ogre’s status effects, it only lasts for a limited time, putting everything he does on a time limit.

The show does eventually pull a little bit of an asspull, as he discovers a new form for Nemesis that lets him offload any status effects he receives onto an enemy, but that’s kind of par for the course with shonen shows, to be honest.

One thing I do wish, though, was that the cast had a little more characters in it. At the moment, it’s very much just The Ray Starling Show, with Rook as a supporting character who doesn’t get to do much, and I’d like to see a proper party.