Yu Ayase is the son of Subaru Ayase, a woman gifted with beauty, athleticism and intelligence, but Yu seems to have only inherited her good looks. When Yu is enrolled in a high-class school, he's entrusted to the care of the family of a close friend of his mother's and moves to their house, where he begins rooming with the three Mikadono sisters, who are all exceptionally talented in their own way but each have a weak side to them.

The structural setup of Dealing With Mikadono Sisters is a Breeze isn't anything new by harem romcom standards: Hapless guy winds up rooming with multiple girls, hijinks ensue. But some of the specific details at least help it stand out. In good ways? I don't know yet, but it at least feels distinctive in ways that won't have me confusing this anime for a dozen other structurally similar ones out there when I try to recall it a few seasons from now.

The leads are a bit more distinct compared to what I'd expect from an anime like this, for one thing. The three titular sisters all have styles that are just a little unconventional. There's an angularity to them, sharpened alongside some pretty distinguishing height differences between each other as they tower over the main boy. Naturally I find Niko to be the standout, but that might be because she's done just a little more interaction-wise than the other sisters. The others have their own charming points that are definitely going to target other viewers though, with stage star Kazuki coming off extremely different from other older-girl romantic interest leads.

It's all compounded by focal fellow Yu himself. He is, in the parlance of our times, just a little guy. He's a cute ball of mediocrity. But unlike so many projectable potato protags, Yu is assured and resourceful in his mediocrity. He's gained enough awareness of his alleged betters and learned enough about them that he's got an idea of how to take care of them (or "deal with" them, as the title goes) with a confident understanding you don't see from so many other put-upon dorks these kinds of shows are centered on. He might not be able to perform, fight or win at shogi, but he's the most amazing housekeeper this home has ever seen, and that earns him a spot being subservient to these bigger, more headstrong girls.

At least, that's the obvious train of thought I think Dealing With Mikadono Sisters is trying to lead its target audience to. I spent a not-insignificant chunk of this first episode trying to figure out precisely what his actual deal was. He seems earnestly engaged in the task of forging a family with these girls, their own priorities aside, but his ways of doing so ping-pong between genuine helping out and self-assured psychology. Again, I can't actually say that this is good or bad, but it's at least intriguing. It all looks nice enough, with bold colours and sharp animation on parts like Niko's efforts to kick people's heads in. The show's greatest strength is easily the character designs. Harem though it may be, there's little relying on visual shorthand to express the girls' personalities, which come through in their expressions and actions. The sisters' two-tone hair gives them extra pop in an overall vividly coloured production. It's not just the big picture either, there are small details that show thought and care, like Niko's t-shirt and sweats at home.

In its second episode, Dealing With Mikadono Sisters continues to feel just a bit weird, but that at least means it continues feeling unique. Yu's ostensible status as a simple little guy is regularly underscored by the anime effectively pimping him and his efforts. He's still inherited an actress' looks, after all, and he's even got the caretaking skills to conceive of and prepare meals perfectly suited to the sisters. Really, who wouldn't fall for him as this sort of helpful househusband? Even Niko experiences a dreamy-filtered shot of him, and this episode is overall about Yu's deceptively basic bearings tearing down barriers between him and his new would-be family.

It only feels a little undermining the way the writing keeps slipping in the undercurrent of how Yu has his ways with handling these girls and showing them how strong and independent they aren't. They even throw up imagination spots of him visualizing girls like Niko as cute animals who need to be tamed and manipulated--though at least she does call him out on the inherent creep factor of that fantasy. Nevermind the ultimate reveal of this episode that the rigidly resistant Kazuki is secretly a fussy child who needs an attentive parent to take care of things for her. It's an episode largely concerned with revealing things that these seemingly perfect sisters actually suck at, and it all provides a path for why Yuu would be necessary to helping them achieve their goals in the given fields. But it also comes across, at least a little, like the writing can't wholly abide girls who are actually strong-willed, competent and capable and must concoct situations where they need a self-insert guy playing Princess Maker with their stats and schedules. Granted, there's still a whole lot of a very particular kind of dynamic being fetishized under all this.

It's unclear exactly why Yu is having to act as the live-in caretaker of these extremely wealthy girls. If they fail at their specialties, it'll somehow be his fault. When he thinks of this, he imagines them defeated, humiliated and...stripped of their clothing. Okay, I don't think your clothes fall off if you lose at shogi or a karate match or mess up in a stage performance, buddy.

But there wasn't any other weird, out-of-place fanservice after that, leaving me to enjoy the parts of the show I liked and feel neutral about the rest. To his credit, Yu doesn't win the girls over through trickery or manipulation (so far), but by sincerely attending to their needs. The girls are prickly and suspicious, but accept his help when they see the effort he's put in to address their exact situations. When Kazuki resists his assistance, he tries to learn more about her to resolve the problem.

I have to say, the directing and comedic timing of the show is actually really winning me over the most. There's a lot of good moments of genuine comedy that really take advantage of those pop-up character profiles, with my favourite probably being the profiles following the characters as they're running across the entire school. It's pretty unique and I hope it pushes the boundaries of that type of visual gag as the show goes on. There are also plenty of comedic cuts that genuinely did get a laugh out of me, so at the very least, the show is holding my attention from an entertainment perspective. The problem is the predictability of the whole setup and how the show hasn't quite yet earned those flustered romantic moments yet. The show likes to make it a big point that our main character has the looks and the know-how but doesn't have talent, so everyone keeps getting disappointed in him. With Niko, he's seemingly won her over pretty easily with a single look and a few choice words. It would've been better for the overall story if that affection was actually earned.

Still, maybe the reason I like Yu more than a lot of protagonists who've been in his shoes before is because he interacts with the sisters like an individual character who's just as goofy and weird as his costars, and the interactions he has with them actually make you believe that they'd come to like (and maybe even love) their new tiny butler. That said, we get enough shower scenes and innuendos to keep Dealing With Mikadono Sisters from feeling too wholesome and sterile. You've gotta strike the right balance of being cute and being pervy in a harem anime, learn more from The 100 Girlfriends or Tenchi Muyo and less from, like, Love Hina or Monster Musume, y'know what I mean?

Niko's still my favourite, naturally, but there are some relatable connections Yu makes with Miwa, as their shared lack of athleticism shows they aren't as far apart as they might think--at least before Miwa starts busting out baby memories like she's Ray from The Promised Neverland. There's potential common ground here though, is what I'm getting at, and that's also found in the acting that brings Yu and Kazuki together by the end. His efforts can help to drive her passion for her craft as a motivation, and I find that way more compelling than the ending sequence showing Kazuki dreaming of Yu sweeping her off her feet as she spawns long, womanly hair and dons a feminine dress.

Yeah, seriously, the ending credits roll over a sequence that concludes with Kazuki dreaming of dancing onstage with Yuu in a feminine white dress and long hair. Because I guess every gender-nonconforming girl secretly craves traditional gender roles, right?

Dealing With Mikadono Sisters continues to be amusing in most places anyway. Plus it's still got a strong, vibrant look to it. I dig the variously expressive little bear on Yu's apron too. But I definitely think this series will fare better if it focuses on Yu ingratiating himself into the girls' lives as a caring family and/or equal-footing love interest, rather than showing off how his effective husbandry skills can tame and basically reprogram them or some BS. It all still feels weird, but I hope it can swing closer to "fun weird" than "offputting weird".

Monica Everett the Silent Witch, is the world's only practitioner of Voiceless Magic, a veritable heroine who singlehandedly fended off the Black Dragon of legend. However, the young prodigy is actually super shy, and she only learned Voiceless Magic to avoid speaking in public. Ignorant of this, the Seven Sages have placed her on a top-secret mission to guard the Second Prince.

Well, wouldn't be a proper new anime season without me getting to some of the earlier-premiering shows late, eh? In any case, the first three episodes of Secrets of the Silent Witch each set the stage for the story to come in different ways, and I'd like to use this review to examine those ways.

The first episode is all about laying down the world, key players and core premise of the show. Basically, the kingdom is on the edge of a succession crisis. While many are backing the crown prince for the thrown, the second prince, Felix, is backed by a powerful duke who seems to want to use him as a pawn to take power from royal hands and collect it in his own. This, not unexpectedly, makes Felix a target ripe for assassination by the crown prince's faction, especially as he's currently outside the royal palace attending school. To make things more complicated, the one tasked with protecting Felix, Barrier Mage Louis Miller, is a member of the crown prince's faction, making him less than trusted by Felix or his allies. Thus Louis enlists the aid of Monica Everett, a powerful mage with no ties to either faction whose face happens to be unknown even to members of the royal family. In other words, she's the perfect choice to impartially protect Felix from the shadows.

The issue with this first episode is not the information we're given, but how it's given to us. The premiere was almost entirely expository dialogue where Louis tells the entire situation to Monica. There's very little on the show-don't-tell front and it all feels like a joke due to how uninterested and downright fearful Monica is of the plan to send her undercover into a school for nobles.

The second episode, on the other hand, is all about fleshing out Monica as a character. When it comes down to it, her damn near Komi-level social anxiety, which is so overpowering that she developed a new way of using magic without the need to chant just so she didn't have to talk in front of people, is a complex issue stemming from two sources. The first is a matter of nature. Monica is obsessed with math--it's her special interest and she can't help but want to share how cool and interesting it is with everyone around her. It's also what makes her so great at magic. However, she is aware that few people feel the same way about it that she does, even if she can't quite imagine how this could be. The second is a matter of nurture. After her father was killed as a heretic due to the results of his mathematical research, Monica's new "guardian" would beat her anytime she talked about math (and likely any other time he found her displeasing). This instilled in her a fear of talking, that she never knew what the "correct" thing to say would be in any given situation. In her child mind, any wrong word could potentially set someone off and end with her getting beaten. Thus her defense mechanism became to say nothing at all. And now, years later, she's nearly unable to speak at all, even when she knows not answering might lead to problems as bad as saying the wrong thing. Luckily, through her interactions with the various students at the school, she's starting to overcome her trauma little by little.

The third episode is where the setting and characters are finally put to use. The entire episode is a mystery story where Monica tries to figure out the identity of the person trying to kill Felix. Using her skills in trigonometry and calculus, she's able to figure out where the assassin was during the latest attempt on Felix's life and then collect the evidence needed to find the culprit. In the process, we see her start really trying to grow beyond her trauma and do the right thing to protect her new friends.

We also get hints throughout these three episodes about the greater mystery to solve: The idea of memory-altering magic and its side effects is naturally introduced into the story, and we're able to spot the signs that there's a yet-to-be-revealed mastermind pulling the strings from the shadows, manipulating those who've been attacking Felix in various ways.

Overall, this turned out to be a solid introduction to what we're in for with Secrets of the Silent Witch, and while it started off a bit shakily, I can comfortably say the series has found its footing and earned itself a modest recommendation.

Yuu Yutani is a first-year highschool student who's seen as a good girl. However, to attract the attention of the school's popular, high-class disciplinary committee chairman Atori Mizutori, she begins to act like a delinquent.

When I first heard of Bad Girl, I briefly thought "Oh shit, a whole anime about one of the best bit characters in No More Heroes? Neat!" And then I watched the anime and discovered that I was in for 12 episodes of a soft-yuri romantic comedy. Not what I was hoping for, but hey, I can vibe with this.

Okay, that was mostly a joke, I didn't actually go in thinking that's what the show was, but still.

What's perhaps the most interesting about Bad Girl's first three episodes is how quickly it abandons its central premise. The central concept of the show is that smol bean Yuu Yutani is crushing hard on the head of the disciplinary committee, Atori Mizutori, and is concerned that she's too unremarkable to catch her crush's attention. When Atori approaches Yuu's delinquent-looking friend Suzu Suzukaze at the entrance gate of their school one morning, Yuu becomes fixated on the idea of adopting a "bad girl" persona so Atori will have to talk to her.

This plan fails immediately as Yuu is far too adorable to be a convincing delinquent. However, Yuu has now made enough of an impact on Atori that they can talk regularly, and hijinks between them and a few of their other classmates ensue. The best of these wacky endeavors include some wild misunderstandings around things like gift giving, Yuu accidentally watching puppy play porn after misinterpreting a recommendation from Suzu, and Yuu requesting degradation ASMR from Atori to cure a case of hiccups that she thinks will kill her.

The humor in each episode is more often derived from miscommunications between the central cast, rather than Yuu trying and failing to convince Atori that she's a delinquent as the opening minutes seem to set up, and I'm largely okay with this fake-out. Usually I find humor and situations derived from miscommunication in these kinds of romcoms to be trite and frustrating--I can't connect with characters or find value in their relationships if most of their interactions are just whatever dumbass misunderstandings that the writer feels will be funny or create the most drama. However, in Bad Girl, the miscommunications feel more genuine and believable.

It's always refreshing to watch a romcom where characters are expressive about their feelings for one another, in ways big and small. Of course, because all of these feelings and situations are so new and important to them, they stumble in the execution to humorous effect, like when Yuu accidentally propositions Atori to engage in puppy play after seeing that video, with the latter being extremely into the idea, and then Yuu is immediately overwhelmed by the situation she unintentionally created. A lot of the jokes are like this--cute, fun and grounded in young teenage girls being little idiots and in different places with their sexual proclivities and ability to express intimacy.

I'm also curious to see how the character dynamics develop as the show goes on. Yuu and Suzu have the "childhood friends whose bedroom windows look right into each other's rooms" trope going on, and Suzu has a crush on the oblivious Yuu. The third episode also sparks up an internal conflict in Atori, who seems to think she's less worthy of love and admiration than Yuu thinks she is. None of these lingering plot points feel incredibly weighty or like the show is set to offer some inspired insight into the human condition or something, but I appreciate that these characters are more than just vehicles for gags and have some degree of interiority.

That being said, not all of the jokes worked for me, and one character in particular feels especially one-dimensional. Rura Ruriha, a narcissist streamer, is introduced in the second episode. While the gag in that episode's stinger, where she turns to her online audience for intellectual validation and her army of simps instead respond that they're only watching her because she's hot, was funny, her whole "Tell me I'm pretty!" schtick to Yuu in the third episode was excruciating to sit through. There's a wealth of characters in anime who are memorable and hilarious because they're annoying by design, but this kind of character only works well in smaller doses, and Rura had overstayed her welcome by the halfway point of her proper introduction.

I also need to mention that even with the jokes landing more often than not, a lot of the other parts of Bad Girl are serviceable to forgettable. The voice acting is just solid enough not to get in the way of the jokes, the music is pretty good when it plays into a gag but otherwise largely unremarkable, the animation is limited without taking away from the comedy, and the opening and ending are fine enough. Bad Girl also has a lot of competition in the comedy, romcom and yuri divisions this season with titles like CITY The Animation, New Panty and Stocking, My Dress-Up Darling and Grand Blue's long-awaited second seasons, There's No Freaking Way I'll Be Your Lover! Unless... and See You Tomorrow at the Food Court, and I'm not sure how well it can stack up to them in the long run.

In a vacuum, these episodes of Bad Girl have solid jokes and characters with just enough depth to keep me interested in what they do next. Every character is a little weirdo dummy and I think seeing them continue to bounce off each other will both be entertaining and lead to a more complete characterization of each. While the first three episodes have tempered my expectations, I'm confident I'll have a fun time watching these characters feed into each other's quirky indecencies, at least whenever I find time to watch more between everything else I'm watching in this heavily packed season.

Struggling college student Midori Nagumo lives in an ordinary city filled with not-quite-ordinary people. As this reckless girl runs about, she sets the city in motion. Midori is in a bit of a bind--she's deep in debt, and her landlady is trying to shake her down for unpaid rent. Her best friend Ayumu Niikura refuses to loan her cash since she's wised up to her tricks. Maybe some bullying would help. Or a bit of petty theft. Neither is sustainable. Maybe getting a job would settle things... But working means less time for fun adventures in the big city...

Nichijou is one of those quietly perfect pieces of media that feels like it's always existed. I'm aware that the anime premiered in 2011, but there's such a timelessness and immediately endearing quality to Nichijou that it becomes difficult to imagine a world where it never existed. To use more mainstream examples, imagining a world pre-Nichijou is like trying to imagine a world before the release of works like, I dunno, insert any culturally significant work here. Intellectually, everyone knows that these works didn't exist for most of human history, but doesn't that feel wrong? Doesn't imagining a world before these works existing make that world feel immediately strange and alien?

I begin this review with this question because I could physically feel reality shifting as the opening moments of KyoAni's anime adaptation of CITY, a manga from the same creator as Nichijou, began to play on my TV. CITY The Animation is so utterly charming and completely itself that I now have a hard time remembering a world where IT never existed. Needless to say, it's already proven itself to be a worthy successor to Nichijou and is well on its way to being, dare I say it, even better.

To begin my next several paragraphs of praise, CITY looks incredible and unlike anything else in anime right now. The combination of a simplistic art direction with bold, bright colours that have little to no shadows or shading makes every scene incredibly vivid. While feeling like a natural evolution of the art direction in Nichijou, th visuals evoke digital pop art, possessing an almost overwhelming number of distinct colours in any given shot and thick lines preventing any colour bleed. The character designs are also adorable in a youthful kind of way, like a children's book capturing the random people a kid would see while running errands with a parent. The many little critters tucked into the corners of scenes are a constant source of joy in the show. I can't help but point at the screen and go "Oh!" every time that white cat-rabbit thing is dozing in the corner of a shot or decides to walk in on a conversation and passively participate.

While that description might make CITY sound overly busy, these visuals add tremendously to the anime's style of humor. These designs allow the characters to be incredibly expressive, and the stylized backgrounds of familiar everyday locales make it feel like these hijinks are happening in places you could stumble into yourself. Most of the jokes feel improvisational in tone, where dramatic characters respond to a surprising development in a way that makes a given situation even wackier. Some of my favourite sketches from the show so far include a restaurant owner and new employee covering up spilling yakisoba into a customer's bag only to end up doing it a second time, a girl dealing with several shoulder devils and losing her mind over the lack of an angel after finding 500 yen right next to a police box, a playwright convincing an acting troupe of animals to work with him on his latest project, and the entire city falling in love with and wanting to protect the sleepiest girl you've ever seen.

Even when a particular segment feels like it's starting to run too long or isn't quite landing, a last-minute twist will always bring it home; or the visuals will be gripping enough to make up for a weaker punchline. There are no bad jokes in these first three episodes, only jokes that aren't as good as others. Though for as much as the comedy is this anime's selling point, it's the underlying characterization and heart that makes these episodes so special.

The characters aren't just vehicles for gags, and they all have enough depth to make them relatable and their (usually exaggerated) actions and reactions feel motivated. By the first three episodes, the main trio of Midori Nagumo, Ayumu Niikura and Wako Izumi are all living together (with Wako, sort of the Osaka of this cast, living in the other two's bedroom closet) and have pretty defined personalities and relationships. Niikura gravitated towards Nagumo when they were in highschool, as the latter was a savant who succeeded at everything she tried. However, like many gifted and talented kids, her natural talent left Nagumo directionless as a young adult, leaving her hard up for cash and so overconfident that she's always leaping into ridiculous situations. This makes Niikura the more mature and grounded of the two, though she's still firmly stuck in Nagumo's orbit and pulled into these situations with her. Wako, meanwhile, is a photographer who quickly becomes obsessed with anything she finds interesting and joins in on, and even exacerbates Nagumo and Niikura's shenanigans because she knows the two will give her new stimulations and experiences.

These kinds of fun and earnest relationships populate more and more of CITY's cast with each subsequent episode. While CITY is firmly a comedy, it's also willing to bridge into some more upsetting topics in these relationships. For instance, the middleschool-aged duo of Matsuri and Ecchan has the strongest improv comedy team energy of any combination of characters and are so in sync that they feel like they share the same brain cell. However, in the second episode, we learn that Ecchan and her family will be moving away and she hasn't told Matsuri yet. This left me with an underlying anxious feeling as I watched them bounce off each other in episode 3, as I kept waiting for Ecchan to tell her friend that she'd be leaving soon, and this admission never came.

These tinges of depressing situations or real disappointments make the world of CITY feel much more real, even if it's still infinitely more vibrant and fun than real life. This little bit of darkness makes it feel like I actually could live in this show, which is a brilliant choice because I kinda want to. Especially when the voice actors in both the sub and dub are bringing their A game. I know this isn't much of an observation as she's quietly one of the best VAs working right now, in terms of both talent and overall behaviour if I'm being totally honest, but Erica Lindbeck in particular brings the exact right combination of confidence, mischievousness and dumbassery to Nagumo, and the rest of the cast understood their assignment equally well.

These first three episodes don't just make me want to watch more, they make me want to be a part of this community and interact with these characters. I think that's about the highest praise I can give any piece of art. CITY The Animation seems destined to just keep getting better and better!

Daten City, a place between Heaven and Hell, where sin runs rampant and Ghosts wreak havoc. Atop a hill, in a church entirely ill-suited to their personalities, live Panty and Stocking, two fallen angels tasked with destroying the Ghosts. Panty is the foul-mouthed blonde in the revealing red evening dress, Stocking is the quieter gothic lolita cutie with two-toned purple-and-pink hair. Under the guidance of their priestly handler Garterbelt, they do their job very begrudgingly. Stocking would rather lounge around eating sweets and Panty would rather be out having sex with any and every willing man. But when the need is dire, they kill Ghosts like no one's business. Though the town tends to get very badly damaged in the process.

Words fail me in describing Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt. I know in some of my past reviews I've casually mentioned having a hard time putting my thoughts into words, but this time I REALLY mean it. There's a good reason it took me 15 years to actually review this show, as much as our perception of time has probably made it feel like five fuckin' minutes. I could include a link to a Google Drive folder of 50 screenshots of the weirdest moments in the series as part of this review and still not have enough to say on just how bizarre, crazy, disgusting and hilarious all at once this series is.

One reason for my lack of words to describe it is because the series is a lot of things. In 13 episodes, it juggles genres including monster-of-the-day fighting, horror, sex comedy, science fiction, and even satire of Japanese work culture. No two standalone episodes have the same structure or setup, and many were written and storyboarded by an assorted cast of Gainax legends, with a couple of them (and its infamous Christmas-ruining ending) even penned by Hideaki Anno. If nothing else, Panty & Stocking is certainly not boring.

I've been around long enough to remember a lot of early viewers abandoned the series after the pilot, thinking the whole show would be nothing more than shit jokes and weird angular art. I was one of those people until I decided to give it another try upon hearing it gets much better just one episode later. As for the people who never did the same, it's their loss, because the show just gets funnier and even more surreal after getting the poop fascination out of its system. It's definitely not high-end comedy by any means, but it's fun, and sometimes that's all you really need.

Part of this is thanks to our unconventional leads, the titular angel sisters Panty and Stocking Anarchy. Despite having fairly simple personalities, the series does show them occasionally breaking through their stereotypical behaviours and even showcases some surprisingly touching moments. The two also work wonderfully off of each other, sometimes being at each other's throats and other times being on the same wavelength about the situations around them. They act like, well, actual siblings. Panty and Stocking occasionally show remorse for their actions against each other and others, as the second halves of episodes 5 and 9 showcase. Episodes like those make good arguments against the idea that the series is comprised of literally nothing but crude jokes.

Their boss, the giant-afro'd black priest Garterbelt, seems at first like the straight man of the series, but further episodes prove this wrong. In more ways than one. He also has a very odd past revealed near the end of the series. Meanwhile, Chuck is the mascot/punching bag, dying in every episode a la Kenny McCormick and looking an awful lot like GIR from Invader Zim, to the point that even Jhonen Vasquez noticed and commented on it.

And then there's Brief, a teenage boy highly aware of the paranormal introduced early on in the series, usually carrying a backpack and looking like a Ghostbusters cosplayer and sporting a mop of ginger hair that perpetually hides his eyes. "Affectionately" referred to as Geek Boy by Panty and Stocking, he loves them (mainly the former) despite the hardships he goes through, rarely rewarded for his efforts. He's definitely the most sympathetic character in the series, though he has his creepy moments as well, but I give the series credit for actually having him own up to that.

Our last set of major characters are Scanty and Kneesocks, demon sisters introduced about halfway through the series. Ironically, despite being demons, they're calmer, smarter and better kept than our sex/sweet-craved "heroines". They're also, in any scenario, total sticklers for the rules--oh wait, sorry, the RRRRUURRRRUU! Needless to say, there's quite a bit of friction between the quartet whenever they meet.

By keeping its main cast relatively small, Panty & Stocking gives itself plenty of time in just 13 episodes and a few OVA shorts to explore the characters' lives, pasts and desires. We find out why Garterbelt is stuck with his job, why Scanty and Kneesocks are around to begin with, even the typically disposable Chuck gets his own set of mini-episodes. Still, I do have a complaint: Too much Panty. To say she dominated damn near 2/3 of the series would not be an exaggeration. Stocking only has a handful of episodes dedicated to her, Brief has one or two, Garterbelt barely has one, and Panty gets the rest. Even the finale is almost entirely focused on her. As I significantly prefer Stocking over Panty (whose whoring around is a joke that gets old rather quickly) and find her many times hotter, this irked me quite a bit.

Also, while the show in general is likely to have plenty of people saying it's still funny and aged fairly well, what doesn't have nor deserve that honour is the dub. Despite being from the latter end of Funimation's golden years, it's by far one of their worst productions, at least out of the ones that aren't some post-2015 localization shitshow like their handling of Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid or their borderline gag dub of Free that made 50% Off look legit. The humor is bogged down by the addition of tons of additional swearing and frequent use of homophobic slurs that weren't in the original script, and the subs they gave it reflect this as well and make me very thankful I watched a fansub that I'm pleased to say is still present on pirating sites. Christ's sake, you don't need to make the characters swear where they didn't originally when they're already clearly capable of saying such words in English when they're meant to actually be swearing. It just leads to disappointment when the subtitles make you think they'll say a funny fuck word in English and then they only say "yarou". It's like the embodiment of that idiotic "x if it were written by Vivziepop" meme long before there was ever a Helluva Boss for people to get big mad about not going the way they want it to. Large chunks of each episode's dub script were even outright ad-libbed. Only in today's weird culture of defending awful localizer decisions and literally saying 4Kids did nothing wrong could we see people still championing this dub. It certainly doesn't help that nearly everyone in the main cast has a mountain of controversy attached to them now, like the revelation of Chris Sabat (Garterbelt) having an iron-fisted stranglehold over every aspect of Funimation and leading a highschool-style clique of quintessential mean girls, as well as the accusations from multiple ex-employees of running a casting couch, Monica Rial (Stocking) being at the forefront of the bullshit Kick Vic blacklisting campaign and generally being an awful two-faced bitch who, along with Chris Sabat and about half of the other Funimation regulars, spent 15 years pretending to be Vic Mignogna's friend while mocking, insulting and slandering him behind his back everyday (up to and including theorizing that he's a closeted gay pedophile because they didn't like the way he dressed), and Jamie fuckin' Marchi (Panty) proudly being someone who sees nothing wrong with heavily rewriting anime to her liking and inserting her personal political opinions into characters' mouths, got into a public feud with Asmongold where they argued back and forth about that exact thing, wished all kinds of harm and death on Vic Mignogna, participated in the whole "pretending to be Vic's friend" thing right up to the very day before Kick Vic began, has retroactively trashed nearly every show she's worked on and every character she's voiced, openly insults the fans of these shows and characters, complains about sexualization of teenage anime girls while flaunting that she's the voice of numerous sexualized teenage anime girls, treats voice acting like some terrible thankless job she never even wanted and is obligated to continue doing, and still expects the Brie Larson treatment at conventions and is surprised by her dwindling autograph lines. Oh yeah, and we can't forget all three of them also taking part in the attempt to get Todd Haberkorn blacklisted just like Vic over even more bogus accusations, and making sure to slander and ruin the reputations and job opportunities of any VA who's still on good terms with Vic.

In short, I can't exactly say I was too heartbroken by the revelation that the original dub's writers and voice cast wouldn't return for the long-awaited sequel, and neither were a lot of others. I'm not sure why anyone expected the original cast anyway when one of them is a white man who was shamed out of his role as Garterbelt by post-George Floyd "accurate casting" dipshittery, complete with people retroactively saying how horrible and wrong it was for him to have ever played the character despite being just as praised for it as Rial and Marchi were for their performances back then. And despite these same peope being A-OK with Garterbelt being a racial caricature to begin with. Honestly, part of the whole appeal of the show is the Engrish anyway--I was around when the show was new, so don't try telling me that hearing cute Japanese girls swearing in heavily accented English wasn't a huge draw. People who say they won't watch the new season because the dub is different or the script isn't as loose probably never liked Panty & Stocking itself if those are truly dealbreakers for them. Liking an anime for what it actually is and liking what American localizers can twist that anime into are two very different things. Like people who think there's absolutely nothing wrong with Miss Marchi's Twitter Freak Dragons, or people who only like Ghost Stories for its comically offensive ad-libbed dub and think the original is boring and still believe the debunked myth that it was a gigantic failure when it aired in Japan.

On a brighter note, Panty & Stocking is quite a glossy show and very fun to look at. The artstyle is basically shojo anime staples mashed together with the aesthetics of Craig McCracken, Jhonen Vasquez and in-house Adult Swim hits of the time like Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and it works wonderfully. The colour scheme is loud and vibrant, and the character designs are distinctive and cute in a chunky sort of way. The animation isn't always smooth, but it never looks cheap--when action scenes begin, there's actual animation. And don't forget Panty and Stocking's infamous weapon transformations where they suddenly look like typical magical girls, which quickly became a big hit on image boards and was later matched by Scanty and Kneesocks getting a sequence of their own, and the dedication of the production team to constructing and blowing up actual physical models of every Ghost in the series! Meanwhile, the music, composed and arranged by Teddyloid, consists of fantastic, incredibly catchy electronica, and I don't think I can efficiently put into words how amazing it is. Particular standouts close to my heart are D City Rock, Theme for Scanty & Kneesocks and ending theme Fallen Angel.

Overall, I was quite surprised by Panty & Stocking. I found out that beyond the show's controversial nature is something bursting with life and fun. And I'm very happy to see it finally return under Trigger after all these years.

[Atuhor's Nose: Yep, another double feature. Who's complaining though?]


Alicia, who's aspired to be a brave hero since she was little, is chosen to be one of 13 heroes for a quest. Wielding legendary swords, the heroes set out to subjugate the lord of magical beasts, Clevatess. However, he kills them all without much effort and destroys their kingdom as revenge for attacking his lands. He takes in a baby belonging to the kingdom's royal family, then resurrects Alicia, whom he enslaves so she can help him take care of the baby while hoping to examine humanity more closely.

The premiere of Clevatess is a study in contrasts, and what you see at first is not what you ultimately get. While I wouldn't entirely call it a bait-and-switch situation, the fact is that the first half of this introductory episode is a much grimmer, scarier story than the second half. It also features some genuinely good worldbuilding: The eponymous Clevatess, known as Clen for short, is one of the great dark beasts who keep humans confined to a small portion of the continent, and legend speaks of how a group of brave heroes will ultimately defeat him. Except that legends and stories rarely translate into reality, as Alicia, one of our protagonists, quickly finds out. But she's always known that, because her father was a member of the previous generation of heroes, and he was unsuccessful, to the tune of it costing him a leg. That may be part of what saves Alicia in the end--she's more cautious than her fellow heroes and also more determined, because she knows the price her father paid.

That and she has breasts.

No, that's not a flippant remark, it is in fact her anatomy that wins her a second chance at life, because Clen has, to his own bemusement, rescued a baby from the ruins of a castle he destroyed and intends to raise him. But he also lacks the ability to feed a baby, so he picks Alicia to do it. It's emblematic of the remarkable change in tone between the two halves of this double-length episode, and also a very good reason why this is a double-length premiere: Both the worldbuilding and the introduction of Clen as a character are important, and while they aren't the real meat of the series (or so it seems), Clen raising baby Luna needs that foundation to build on. We have to understand how dire and dangerous this world is in order to appreciate how bizarre it is that one of its chief monsters would take on human form and adopt a baby. Alicia certainly isn't comfortable with it, and the premiere's first half makes a very good case as to why.

The episode also ends on an expectation-subverting twist, which I very much appreciate. It seems that Clen in his humanoid form is just as weak as any normal human. Even simple bandits can overpower him. It's a good joke, and one that adds both drama and tension to the journey. After all, if baby Luna dies, Clen can still turn into a country-destroying monster and wipe out every humanoid on the continent.

Then comes episode 2, and while it's still quite good, it's also incredibly unpleasant. On the plus side, it at least knows that slavery and sexual assault are bad. Given how many shows coyly skirt around those truths nowadays, it's worth noting that Clevatess is not one of them. But we learn this because of what the female characters go through in this episode. Alicia is threatened with rape at least twice and new character Nell is a survivor of unthinkable circumstances. When she recounts her life to Clen, it's one of repeated beatings, rapes and purported stillbirths, with the result that she lives as the bandits' wetnurse for any random child in their encampment. There's a strong implication that she was rendered intellectually disabled through repeated head trauma, although it could also simply be her coping mechanism for the horrific life she's led.

On a symbolic and thematic level, this is all in service of Clen learning about humans as he raises Luna and plans to make the baby fit to be a king. He tells Alicia that he wants to study humanity, and the series is clearly throwing him in at the deep end with the absolute worst that humanity has to offer. Already showing that Clen has far more humanity than some actual humans, he tries to help Nell--he might not characterize it in that way, but killing two of her abusers with his shadows and offering to take her with him as Luna's caretaker at least feels like it's as much about saving Nell as it is about feeding the baby.

That's all well and good, but this episode is brutal to watch. They really don't hide anything that's happened to Nell, and I can't shake the idea that her babies weren't actually stillborn after the first one, but killed to keep her trapped as someone "useful"--her initial refusal of Clen's offer seems to indicate this as a possibility. There's also more graphic violence in general, with a slave being dismembered by a monster and broken, bloody bodies at the base of a cliff. Clevatess seems to delight in its capacity for darkness, though at least I can respect that it's in service of the plot rather than just for shock value or, worse, titillation.

Meanwhile, Alicia's identity is quickly uncovered by the bandits who want to use her to get their hands on her companions' magic weapons. And as mentioned before, they attempt to rape her as well, more than once. I won't say it's unrealistic given the setting, but it's still a lot. Of course, Alicia objects to both plans the bandits have for her and instead dislocates her shoulder, kills a guy and falls to her death, banking on Clen's power and her undead nature to save her. Still looks like it fuckin' hurts though.

In the end, while the show is still one of the better new offerings this season, this episode has solidified to me that Clevatess may not be a show I want to watch weekly--I'd rather marathon it, because episodes like this one will probably go down easier if I can see the comeuppance likely to be doled out in the next episode without having to wait a week for it.

At an all-girls school where young, gorgeous, ladylike girls from all over the country gather, Ririsa Suzunomiya, who became the daughter of a real estate tycoon after her mother remarried, gives up her guitar and love of rock music in order to act like a "proper" lady. But her passion is rekindled when she meets a highly skilled drummer who attends the same school.

On its most basic level, Rock is a Lady's Modesty is the story of a group of girls attending a high-class all-girls academy who secretly form a hard rock band. It's full of comedy as the outwardly proper young ladies release the vulgar rockers inside. It also has more than a little tension as they all attempt to keep this a secret from their friends, families and teachers. However, there's far more to this anime than that.

Thematically, Rock is a Lady's Modesty is about struggling to live up to other people's expectations. To match the school's atmosphere and philosophy, the group is hiding not only the existence of their band, but also the fact that they even know how to play their instruments at all. And for some characters, it goes even deeper than that. Lilisa, our main protagonist, tries to make her mother happy by discarding her past, pretending that her mother's first marriage to Lilisa's rockstar father never happened and that she's always been the daughter of a well-respected millionaire. This means she's not only trying to prove to the world that she's a perfect lady, but has had to give up on her major tie to her father as well.

At the same time, society pressures another band member, Tina, into playing the role of tomboy princess to the point where her true personality is completely hidden, and she has to physically alter herself daily to fit the part. Only through unrestrained, emotion-filled rock music can these girls gain even a bit of freedom in their otherwise suffocating lives.

As is necessary for any music-based anime that wants to be anything more than forgettable, this show also has an amazing soundtrack that display the importance of eah instrument in a way anyone can understand and appreciate. The visuals go hand in hand with this. When rocking out, 3D animation is used to its utmost to deliver awesome camera angles and show the complexity of the music by animating the girls' precise hand movements across the keyboard and strings. This is made all the more realistic because, in the performance scenes, the characters were motion-captured by the members of Band-Maid, the real-life all-female rock band who performs the show's opening theme song.

In the end, Rock is a Lady's Modesty is a silly-yet-emotionally powerful coming-of-age story about girls having to fight an inner battle between their wants and the expectations put upon them by the world around them. It's got great animation and music, and if you've ever wanted to see some “proper ladies” hilariously spouting out the most vulgar insults this side of Panty & Stocking, then this show will have you hooked by the time the first episode's credits roll.

Rentaro Aijou has confessed to 100 girls up to his graduation from middleschool, only to be rejected by each and every one. He goes to a shrine to pray for a girlfriend for his upcoming highschool years and meets the god of the shrine. He tells Rentaro every person has their own romantic partner, but due to an error made when Rentaro was born, he'll find 100 girlfriends during his three years of highschool. But if Rentaro doesn't keep them all happy, they'll die from heartbreak by the end of the third year. Fortunately, Rentaro has a heart big enough for all of them.

Harem anime has had a long and illustrious career of, to put it nicely, not being all that great. Self-indulgency is usually the name of the game, often coupled with the girls of the harem being saddled with doing everything for the relationship to work. And I do get that it's kinda the whole point of dumbass otaku wish fulfillment, but it doesn't really make it very engaging for the rest of us. With this in mind, The 100 Girlfriends (I am NOT typing out its full name) is almost a miracle of a series. It takes so many archetypes and tired cliches I typically dislike in the harem genre and makes them fun and loveable. It also takes what sounds like the ultimate trash harem concept--one dude and 100 girls--and somehow makes it work. You could say it makes it work really, really, really, really, REALLY well.

There have been some other shows that fall under the harem banner that've managed to be quite appealing, and the common denominator among them is that they realized the male lead has to engage with the girls in a way that feels meaningful beyond calling them cute every so often and constantly being physically harmed by them. The 100 Girlfriends takes this crucial step and pushes it along for many more.

The 100 Girlfriends never takes itself completely seriously and pokes fun at not just the whole harem genre, but the very medium of anime and manga. Even the cast make jokes out of each other's vices and core archetypes, often to hilarious effect. But note that "not taking things too seriously" does not mean "insincere" in this case. Rentaro takes note of the positive sides about his girlfriends beyond their looks. It also helps that even when the characters get snippy at each other, they're still friends at the end of the day, and any arguments they have aren't for long. And if they happened in the past, they can be resolved too. The 100 Girlfriends has been referred to online as "a harem series with no losers", and that's one of the most apt descriptions ever. Everyone's a winner here. The manga even did a poll of the #1 most loved girl in the series, and they made every last one tie for first place. That's how dead-set they are with this "no losers" mindset.

With a cast as big as The 100 Girlfriends', being able to tell them all apart helps. Fortunately, this series has strong character designs, with each girl having not only her own distinct hair and eye colour, but also distinct face and wardrobe. Even girls in the same class don't wear the same exact uniform, and some wear additional accessories.

And honestly? I really like Rentaro. It would've been so easy to make him a boring blank slate for the girls to just arbitrarily fall in love with for no discernible reason, or such a non-entity that the show could've worked without him. Rentaro is not that--he's the true heart of the show. Not only does he selflessly help the girls in everything, he also never makes them secondary in his life. It's them first and him second in his mind. He never falters, and I respect him as a character for that. And God help whoever mocks his girlfriends, because he WILL defend them to his last breath, accompanied by some of the series' funnier expressions.

But it wouldn't be much of a harem series if Rentaro was the only good character. The girls of The 100 Girlfriends are not only likeable, but well written and possessing real dimension as characters. The series takes what would otherwise be standard tics or gags and makes them into legitimate problems for the girls. Christ, The 100 Girlfriends literally manages to put the concept of "tsundere" in a positive light as a character trait that you might not necessarily want to throw away on a whim.

For example, Karane. On paper she's your textbook tsundere: Flat chest, needlessly violent, big twintails, never expressing her true feelings, etc. And she hates it. She wants to express herself properly, she wants to say nice things to Rentaro, she wants to show off her more feminine side, but it's just not something she can turn off like a light switch, it's rooted in her. Literally. Because of this, it makes the times where Karane does break out of her shell all the more sweet. And even when she does hurt Rentaro, she always apologizes afterwards, crying over what she did. Karane is a loving, caring person deep down. She also makes an interesting parallel to the series' other main girl and also best girl, Hakari, who seems like the typical girl-next-door sweetheart, but is actually extremely horny, loves to show off her figure to Rentaro, and has a bit of a jealous streak with Karane over him while also harbouring what turns out to be mutual romantic and sexual interest in her.

For a second tsundere example, there's Kurumi, who at surface glance is just a grumpy teen, always looking angry and sporting dark circles around her eyes. She has a super-fast metabolism that makes her always hungry, and when she gets hungry she lashes out at people, leaving her friendless. Like with Karane's tsundere nature, she HATES this side of her, and it takes an eating contest with Rentaro and his other girlfriends for her to open up. She's so cute and flustered afterwards and becomes a more passive straight man to the group from then on, albiet one who is very hungry and mishears anything as food. In fact, one of my favourite panels in the manga is her cutely going over to kiss Rentaro after the contest is over and needing to stand on the tips of her shoes to do so.

In a typical series, Shizuka would just be the cute mute who either doesn't talk because she's just acutely shy or talks through her books just because it's quirky. It might seem like a cumbersome way to go about it while showcasing Shizuka's love for reading, but while The 100 Girlfriends is mostly comedic, it doesn't shy away from pretty dark representations of the girls' lives. Shizuka's in particular comes from deeply rooted family trauma, and she can't really control it. Her situation is not treated as a joke, before or after she becomes Rentaro's girlfriend. And while Rentaro never really learns why she's like this, he does pick up that it's a very uncomfortable subject for her, and then commences with what has to be one of the biggest boyfriend moves on the planet: Over the course of several nights, he transcribes her favourite book, the one she uses to communicate, into a phone app incorporating text-to-speech functionality, simply so she can talk. No one in the main cast mocks her inability to use her voice, nor does Rentaro make any demands on it when he professes his love and invites her to be with him, making her the official step to turn things from love triangle to a full-blown harem.

All this and I'm just four girls in. I'll try not to turn this review into a big-ass character wiki, but I do want to go over at least the other girls of season 1 in a sort of speed round, and why what would usually be annoying/dumb in a typical harem series works here for both of them.

Nano Eiai seems like the emotionless Rei Ayanami type, the definitive kuudere of the group, but she doesn't use it as a mask for trauma or anything, it's simply how she looks, acts and talks. She actually cares very deeply for her friends and especially Rentaro, and she forms the cutest relationship with Shizuka, becoming her protector. Kusuri Yakuzen is the "wacky scientist" type, who uses drugs to change and transform the cast in all sorts of ways, physically or mentally. She normally looks 8 years old due to an aging experiment gone wrong, kinda like what happened to Purah in Breath of the Wild, when in reality she's supposed to be a tall, super-busty 18-year-old. The thing that makes Kusuri an interesting deconstructuon is that instead of just being the goofy senpai others find cute, she drove everyone from her chemistry club away due to her antics. It's only when she meets Rentaro that she feels welcome and ready to experiment openly again. It's a cute, touching moment.

And then there's tomboy baseball player Iku, whose quirk is that she likes training so much and pushed herself so hard that she became a literal masochist over it. She's also hard-working, friendly and cooperative, and she just loves to play baseball with her friends. They have a baseball game with a competing team of weird ear-shaped girls at one point. It starts off like a bog-standard baseball game, until they insult Shizuka. Then Rentaro and the rest of his girlfriends go literally Super Saiyan, complete with golden hair, and destroy them in the game. All with a copyright-friendly version of Cha La Head Cha La playing in the background.

In case you haven't noticed yet, this is a really silly show.

Special note must also go to one of the greatest girls in the series so far, Hahari. Initially introduced as an antagonist in season one, Hakari's mother Hahari has a rather tragic backstory that wouldn't be out of place in a R-rated live-action drama (which shouldn't be a surprise having seen Shizuka's past, where you could argue the same thing). When she was 13, she was in love with a boy around her age who was dying of a terminal illness and wished he could've had more time and been able to leave some proof that he'd lived, and Hahari decided to grant the latter half of that wish, having herself artificially inseminated with his sperm. By the time Hakari was born, the boy had died, and Hahari was all alone to raise her as a single mother. She was forced to grow up and become an adult at 13. When she falls in love with Rentaro at her current age of 29, she finally finds love again, and Hakari doesn't react well to the news once she finds out, as she finds her mother to be a constant embarrassment. It's really nice to see Hahari, after spending 16 of her 29 years alive raising a daughter on her own, finally get a chance to pursue romance and be in a relationship again. She's also a colossal pervert who gets excited by all the girls around her, even trying to kiss them, nosebleeding when they're caught in certain situations, and obsessively offering to breastfeed them. Even for a show as wacky and light-hearted as this, and as someone who immediately loved Hahari, I understand that this is likely going to take some getting used to for a lot of viewers. She also happens to serve as the board chairwoman of the school Rentaro and some of the girls are in, so she gets away with her actions because, well, who's going to try and stop this insanely rich woman? Oh yeah, forgot to mention, Hahari is loaded.

With Hahari comes Mei, the 19-year-old maid of Hanazono Mansion who first appears around the end of season 1. She was rescued by Hahari, who found her abused and abandoned by her parents, and so she views Hahari as her saviour and is immensely loyal to her. Mei's eyes, which have beautiful rainbow irises, are seemingly stuck closed and very little can ever make her even accidentally open them. Despite this, she's a master of pretty much every task she could possibly be asked to do and even drives Hahari and Hakari everywhere and has a pilot's license. Rentaro tricks her into opening her eyes one day and that's when they feel the soulmate spark. Mei initially refuses to be one of his grilriends because she feels that loving the same person as Hahari is inexcusable, but as soon as Hahari gives her permission, Mei asks Rentaro to go out with her.

And then there's one who comes along in season 2 that surprised me a bit more than the others, Mimimi. Mimimi is obsessed with her beauty and has dedicated most of her life to being beautiful with all that entails--makeup, clothes, general behaviour, and so on. You'd think she'd just be a huge narcissist who looks down on the normies because of it, but no, she not only wants to be as beautiful as humanly possible, she also wants to share this ideology with everyone and make them as beautiful as humanly possible too. She does have a past with Nano that's put a bit of a sour note between the two of them, but the reason for that also turned out to be far more wholesome than I expected. She might literally be the biggest team player out of the lot of them, which honestly makes me wonder what she would've brought to the end of season 1 had she been a part of it. Mimimi is basically the demolisher of first impressions, and I couldn't be any prouder of her for it.

The last girl to round out the cast in the anime at this point is Meme, a beautiful girl with absolutely crippling shyness and a desire to not be seen. Her eyes have been covered by her hair for so long that even her parents don't know what they look like, and despite having breasts even larger than Hakari's, she wears a minimizing bra to help her stand out less. Meme enjoys knitting and spends time making tons of plushies, even having knitted her own favourite sweater, and she uses her plushies for "misdirection", in which she disappears quickly and leaves a plushie as a replacement so no one sees where she went. Meme first meets Rentaro as he's leaving school on a windy day--the wind threatens to blow Meme's hair out of the way of her eyes, so she holds them down and is so focused on this that she can't protect herself from a stray sign being blown towards her. Rentaro pushes her out of the way, but when she falls, her eyes are revealed anyway and the spark is felt...and neither of them notice because Meme is so upset about her eyes being exposed. Meme explains her complex to Rentaro, who tells her what a shame it is because she's so cute, causing her to become embarrassed and disappear. The next day, he finds a plushie of Pentaro (a popular in-universe cartoon character who looks a bit like Tuxedo Sam with Rentaro's eyebrows) in his locker, along with a note from Meme thanking him. When he tries to approach her, she disappears again, then he finds her and manages to speak to her, during which she happens to confess that she likes him and gets even more embarrassed. She tries to disappear yet again, but Rentaro assures her that he'll always find her and give her comfort no matter where she hides. She and Mei don't have as much of a twist or breaking of their respective tropes, but I couldn't leave them out of this, especially when they're just as great as everyone else. I also find it interesting that they both have a hidden eyes motif going and require an accidental reveal of them to become Rentaro's girlfriends.

One thing I really loved is how after every girl is introduced, she gets her own little story to flesh out her character. For example, after we meet Karane and Hakari, Rentaro and the girls have to decide who gets the first kiss. So as to not play favourites, the three decide to blindfold themselves, have Rentaro listen to "Hajimete no Chuu" from the 80s anime series Kiteretsu Daihyakka, and then walk up to a girl to kiss her. And the results don't go well. Lots of pratfalls and pulling down of skirts ensue, as well as some Karane slapstick. Another, after Kusuri is introduced, involves the other girls drinking a love potion that Kusuri specifically designed for Rentaro, which turns the other girls into "kissing zombies", incapable of something anything other than "chu"). These stories are not only fun, but kinda creative as well. I have to hand it to this show's karaoke segment too: When the girls decide to go for karaoke as a date, Shizuka requests a drug from Kusuri so she can actually use her voice, and the pandora's box of wholesomeness that is Shizuka's singing leaves everyone doing a Dead Yamcha impression. It was a magical episode and I will not hear anyone tell me otherwise.

It also helps that the show looks really goddamn good too, with lots of colourful backdrops and the aforementioned distinct and fun character designs. The series does a great job of capturing original creator Yukiko Nozawa's gorgeous art. The only complaint I have, and one I share with the manga, is that far too much of season 2 is spent on the school rooftop. I don't know why, but they became borderline obsessed with it. One more thing, since I didn't know where else to put this in the review, but I really liked the opening and ending themes, which are cute, upbeat and sung by the girls' voice actresses.

I am morbidly curious about how Rentaro is going to accomodate a literal hundred girlfriends, because he's already got his work cut out for him at 11 by the end of season 2 and currently 34 in the manga. What I do know, however, is that he's gonna do his damnedest to try, and every girlfriend he's gathered so far will be more than happy to help him do that. I really, genuinely want to see this show continue all the way through. The show is just amazing on all fronts, and I'd hate to see the anime just give up on itself here. That's how much I really, really, really, really, REALLY love it.

Shiki Ichinose's blood is Oni, and his father's is Momotaro. Normally, those of Momotaro's bloodline hunt the Oni, but Shiki's father refused to kill him upon finding him as a baby. Instead he adopted Shiki and lovingly raised him, despite the rebellious attitude and dangerous temper that comes with Oni blood. When a member of the Momotaro Agency kills Shiki's father years later, Shiki vows to avenge him.

Tougen Anki feels like it was assembled from parts of other, more popular examples of darker shonen anime. It's like bits of Chainsaw Man, Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen and Blue Exorcist put together--hell, I've even seen it being called a grimdark edgelord version of Blue Exorcist. It doesn't have a lot of big ideas it wants to showcase, it's just a punk-ass teenager who discovers he can turn his body into guns when his adoptive father gets murdered in front of him. The minute recently expelled delinquent Shiki tells his old man "I never want to become a lame adult like you", we know that the man's gonna die before the end of the premiere. Shiki himself is a little too oblivious to realize he's the protagonist of a "kid suddenly finds he can transform into a demonic ultimate weapon thing" anime, so he doesn't know he's just signed his dad's death warrant, but that's simply what happens when a kid mouths off to their parent in a show like this. How else is he going to feel guilty and revenge-motivated enough to kill the bad guys in however many episodes this series is set to produce?

And y'know what? I think I had more outright fun watching it than almost any other new show this season.

Take the first scene: Shiki sits at his desk in his room full of airsoft guns, chuckling on the phone about how he was expelled from school. He hangs up, and his body language shifts, now looking uncomfortable and lost. In the space of just a couple minutes, I feel like I know something about this boy, and I didn't have anyone sit down and give me an "As You Know" speech or have an omniscient narrator explain it. The dialogue continues in this manner--not exactly naturalistic, but smooth and able to avoid clunky exposition by showing instead of telling whenever possible, having characters explain things only at points where it makes sense. Is a punk with a heart of gold the most original or exciting protagonist in the world? No, but he has a real personality and it's competently conveyed through the animation and voice acting. That goes a long way.

The action direction is just as slick, outside of some clunky shifts into CG and an ill-realized smoke effect. Shiki's power, being able to form guns out of his goopy red oni body, is not only seeded well with his airsoft obsession, but it's...kinda cool, to be honest. The climactic scene takes place in a big, empty warehouse, making for a fairly straightforward fight of characters running at each other with weapons without interacting with the environment, which isn't the most thrilling, but the reds and golds of the lighting set the tone and mood just right. I liked how flashy everything looked with the oni blood powers, even if it did just feel like I was watching footage from a Marvel game at times. I'm not just saying that because the powers of the Oni look like a Carnage knockoff--the action seems to make a lot of use of cell-shaded 3D models to go for some more intense choreography. This works when the Oni are CGI because the blood texture on their body hides that well, but when it's just some guy swinging swords around, it really does look like some obscure video game cutscene.

The fight Shiki has against his father's killer is genuinely pretty badass. The choreography is good, the animation is consistent, and the show takes full advantage of Shiki's specifically gun-based blood powers. I actually began thinking about how I sort of miss the days when a comic could have heroes and villains alike whose entire catalogue of superpowers was having an infinite amount of giant guns to pull out of whatever hammerspace arms factory they generated them from back in the 90s. That whole aesthetic is gloriously stupid and weirdly nostalgic, and Tougen Anki channels that vibe with a single-minded purpose. You WILL be impressed by how many guns Shiki can shoot guys with, dammit!

In short, Tougen Anki is pure junk food, like the anime equivalent of a big bag of Doritos, and sometimes that's exactly what you're in the mood for.

[Atuhor's Nose: I'm dumb and can't keep on schedule lately, apparently. Today you get a triple feature, today's intended review and ones that were supposed to go up on the previous two days.]


34-year-old solo camper Gen Kinokura prefers the company of himself and no one else when camping. However, one day he encounters Shizuku Kusano, a 20-year-old absolute beginner at camping, who demands his assistance, and the two somehow ended up "solo camping" together.

"Ah, another season, another cozy hobby anime about camping and the great outdoors." That's what I was thinking to myself when I started the first episode of Solo Camping for Two. It wasn't long after that, however, that our first main character, Gen, is introduced to our second, Shizuku, by stumbling face-first into her ass while he's trying to set up camp in the woods. That was when I figured out this might not be a hobby anime after all. And after another dozen or so minutes of Shizuku aggressively pestering Gen into being her camping buddy, lest she spread rumors about him being a sex pest or die alone in the wilderness due to her inexperience, I realized Solo Camping for Two wasn't going to be a very cozy anime either.

In case you haven't gathered by now, I was never a fan of the catty 2000s romcoms that featured some idiot constantly bickering with his female counterpart for 90 minutes before they inevitably fall in love regardless of their complete lack of compatibility or chemistry, and those flicks are honestly the closest comparison I have to the overall vibe that Solo Camping for Two is going for.

Now, I get that a lot of the personality-clashing here is being used on purpose to get us more invested in Gen and Shizuku eventually becoming closer (as camping buddies, at least, if not as romantic partners). The secret to setups like this is that the main characters in question have to be charming enough on their own for the audience to bear with the prickly early stages of the relationship. How else do you think Matthew McConaughey survived his Failure to Launch era? Here, neither Gen nor Shizuku stands out as exceptionally likeable or interesting in their own right, and that makes us less interested in seeing them hang out together in spite of or because of their differences.

It doesn't help that the production values from SynergySP are...not great. Half the fun of any outdoorsy show is getting to bask in the lush backgrounds and warm impressions of what life is like when you can just get away from it all. A great nature anime walks a fine line between being stylized enough to stand out from the crowd while still capturing the real-world appeal of the scenery all around us. Solo Camping for Two doesn't really accomplish that. It's perfectly adequate looking, I suppose, but that just doesn't cut it in this particular subgenre.

Also... Listen, I can enjoy a well-written mess of a female lead who makes selfish choices and mistakes and does weird shit. I'm a big fan of plenty of unconventional female characters, and I'll gladly profess my love for the criminally underappreciated Wave, Listen to Me! largely for this exact reason. So I want you all to understand the weight of what I'm saying here: From what we've been shown thus far, I hate Shizuku Kusano. She's a self-centered nitwit who'd be dead in the woods if she hadn't stumbled on Gen's campsite and he hadn't been kind enough to let her use his supplies for the night. She comes out to the middle of nowhere underprepared, apparently without even a change of clothes for when she falls in the river, is lucky enough to find an unattended campsite with a fire going, and starts taking off her clothes in the open. What, was going into the stranger's tent a bridge too far? Then she has the nerve to freak out when the campsite's user comes back, begs him to let her stay there, and sleeps in his tent while he shivers outside in the cold. And then to top it all off, she has the audacity to threaten him with false accusations of sexual assault to get him to teach her how to camp solo.

This selfishness completely overshadows everything else in the episode. The night sky is beautiful in the mountains, but how much can you enjoy that when you're looking at it with the world's most self-entitled bitch? Sure, she can cook better than you, but that also means she's stealing your shit and using it without permission. Gen is no great shakes either, but at least his annoyance with her is understandable. Relatable, even. Her poor decision making bends suspension of disbelief. She claims to be an experienced camper, even if only in a group, but that doesn't match up to her lack of preparation. If she decided to break off on her own because she was more enthusiastic about it with her friends, wouldn't she have better gear? Why the hell did she come to the woods wearing a pencil skirt anyway? Her only skill is campfire cuisine, and while that beer can chicken did look tender and juicy, that doesn't mean much when she's parading around in her underwear for no discernible reason other than for the audience to stare at her equally tender and juicy ass. It just feels so forced, like the writer couldn't think of any other reason besides Shizuku's incompetence and blackmail to shove these two together.

Everything Shizuku contributes to this arrangement is some generally obnoxious imposition. And more egregiously, she will not let up on her request to have him tutor her in camping on his own time despite obvious annoyance and firm refusals on his part. Yes, I can see a lot of Gen's attitude being coded as a rare male tsundere, and as a gruff-exteriored older guy (and come the fuck on, he's only 34, he's younger than I am and they treat him like he's pushing 50!), it helps to dial up his appeal to a certain subset of viewers. But it still feels more like he's being compelled to go along with this arrangement out of adherence to the alleged fantasy of a drop-in camping girlfriend who'll cook for him rather than anything resembling chemistry with Shizuku at this point. Right now he just finds her annoying, and I'm included to agree.

Usually the answer to the question of the appeal of an anime like this is "the fun characters and interesting stories", but we've already established Solo Camping for Two's deficiencies in those departments. So, what we are left with is an uninspired third-stringer of an anime that struggles to compare to most of its competitors. Maybe things will improve later, but I doubt this is going to be one of the big Summer 2025 must-watch shows for anyone either way.

Rudo is one of the hated "Tribesfolk" who lives in the slums of The Sphere, a partitioned society floating high above the clouds. Not only does he belong to a socio-economic underclass oppressed by the rich, wasteful and cleanliness-obsessed city folk, his peers look down on him for being the son of a murderer. When he's framed for the murder of his foster father Regto, Rudo is thrown down from The Sphere into The Pit, an enormous garbage dump from which no one has ever returned.

I'm sure some people would look at this show and discuss how overly obvious its social commentaries are. We've got a big wall that separates the privileged from what they view as worthless scum, we have a "sins of the father" motif going on, and the way people talk about garbage in this show feels overly religious to the point of being cultish. I don't care if a show is direct as long as it makes things fun or interesting, but I wouldn't necessarily call this first episode exciting outside of some glimmers here and there. In some ways, it doesn't even feel like a first episode, it feels more like an "Episode 0" sort of thing. Gachiakuta may open with a decently considered meditation on the ideas of what we do with trash and what we consider trash in the first place, but it quickly starts feeling just as disposable itself, running down a standardized checklist of hilariously on-the-nose societal splits, ie. the pristine rich side of the city being separated from the put-upon shanty town only by a thin wall that people can seemingly walk through.

Gachiakuta also provides a stark reminder that while spurned misanthropic main characters are a defining flavour of revenge fantasy isekai stories, the archetype certainly isn't limited to just those. There are backstory explanations for why all of society persecutes Rudo, but the multiplicity of it gives the game away. It's not a feature of societal power structures keeping him down, everyone is just so mean to him, so he has a justifiable reason to be angry and fighty. Rudo is ostracized and abused for his parentage by a town full of bullies, except for his loving foster father and the one really cute nice girl he has a crush on. He exists for disaffected youngsters to feel like they can relate to his pain as he swears revenge on all layers of his former society for picking him last for kickball--I mean, prosecuting him for a crime he didn't commit.

It's exhausting if you've seen this same song and dance for decades, is what I'm saying. It's almost bafflingly tedious in how little the first episode accomplishes in its runtime. Thrill to characters expositing things they already know about this generic setting to each other. Place your bets on whether Rudo's love interest or father figure will be the one to die horribly as his motivating turning point--it's the latter, by the way. The love interest loses faith and turns on him the instant he's accused of said crime he didn't commit so he can be pissed off at her too. The target audience needs somewhere to project their feelings about the girls who don't like them back, after all.

The structure of Gachiakuta's story may be a sauceless standby recipe at this point, but at least it's got style for days in the looks department, which kinda makes it sadder thatit's turned out this way. There's an appropriate grunge to the character designs and the vibes of the setting. The costume and character design have some interesting connotations, and in some ways, it really shows that the original creator, Kei Urana, is a protege of Atsushi Okubo, creator of Soul Eater and Fire Force. Of course, it doesn't look like this part of the setting is long for the actual arc of the story, so that might not be as big a deal in the long run. The part I could probably pay the least backhanded compliments to is the soundtrack, provided to us by Taku Iwasaki. The hip-hop-infused tunes that kick in during the sole point when the action gets going early is a high point, and it's baffling that the show never feels the need to swell to that level again before the episode ends. Apart from that, this is a tedious and miserable time. I enjoy trashy entertainment in other instances, but this is a flavor I no longer think I have the patience for. Thanks for the reminder of that, at least, Gachiakuta. And Jesus H. Dick, the dialogue, it's wall-to-wall "As You Know" exposition, as characters explain details of the world they live in and their personal histories to each other. Rudo is well aware of the dangers of collecting trash, thank you very much, you don't need to explain it to him in great detail, Regto!

The good news about the second episode is that almost immediately after Rudo gets literally dropped out of the tedious setting setup of the first episode, things actually start happening in this show. He's on the run from dubious CGI trash monsters, having run-ins with new characters and lashing out with the base versions of the powers that'll seemingly define the action in this series. The bad news is that the setting is still pretty slapdash with its themes and ideas, apart from existing to let Rudo wallow in his misery. The revelation of an even poorer demographic, stratified lower than the slums Rudo hails from, could make for an interesting commentary on class awareness in theory, but in practice, the people of the Pit thus far exist mostly to provide another avenue for Rudo to be treated like trash himself.

That mission statement of Gachiakuta is still supplemented by its worst tendencies toward clunky narration, as there's a whole new side of the setting to exposit about now. At one point, new character Enjin dead-ass shouts a bunch of basic bullet points about this place at Rudo because apparently he and the audience are too stupid to take time to absorb any of this organically. Mildly amusing in presentation as a gag, yes, but also clumsy. It does lead into the snazzy action scene of Enjin taking down monsters with his magical murder umbrella though. The animation department continues to be the main thing Gachiakuta has propping up its shameless coddling of teenage edgelords.

Indeed, once the central power mechanic of enhancing objects and fighting with them debuts, it's got some style on it. It might've been nicer had the base concept of items inheriting souls from their owners been reinforced at any point between the first episode's opening narration and a flashback right before Rudo activates it, but that would require Gachiakuta to have any desire to engage with its themes beyond violently stuffing Rudo into a succession of lockers. And this ultimately just leads to the standardized shonen battle anime checklist of the protagonist manifesting his special powers and being invited to join a special society of special power users.

Even after all the gesturing at themes of classism and oppression in its vomited-out worldbuilding, there's nothing substantial learned about this setting beyond that it primarily exists to treat Rudo like trash. It's a world that revolves around the protagonist for a demographic that revels in finding reasons to be miserable and angry, whether they're willing to admit it or not. All the sparkly fight scenes in the world can't compensate for that, and to quote Danny Glover, "I'm too old for this shit."

After failing the final exam for his dream job at the royal court, promising young sorcerer Allen wants nothing more than to retreat to a simple life in the countryside. Unfortunately for him, he can't even afford the train fare. His only solution is to get a job, but his one lead is anything but modest: Duke Howard, one of the kingdom's most powerful nobles, needs a private tutor for his daughter Tina. Despite her academic brilliance, Tina is incapable of casting even the simplest of spells. To make matters worse, the entrance exams for the prestigious Royal Academy are fast approaching, and magical aptitude is mandatory.

I'll be the first to admit that Private Tutor to the Duke's Daughter is average on many levels. It's got animation that doesn't look bad nor fantastic, music that's largely forgettable but does its job, a fantasy world similar to many others (but it doesn't work like a video game taken literally, which is a plus), and characters that fit into the same classic archetypes we've seen before. Even the plot, a magic teacher helping students overcome their issues, both in magic and in their greater lives, is hardly anything new. But while it's average, it's also my kind of average.

What hooks me with the premiere is the subtle background mystery. It's introduced in the first scene of the anime and we constantly get new clues to fuel our speculation over the course of the episode. This mystery, of course, is why Allen failed the court sorcerer's exam. It's established right away that Allen is a talented magic user--after all, his teacher is not only also baffled by his failure, but has no problem recommending Allen for a job with one of the five most powerful people in the kingdom. In fact, the whole situation seems like a setup, like the professor caused Allen to fail specifically so he could take this job.

But as the episode goes on, this appears to be a red herring. Allen seems perfectly content teaching Duke Howard's daughter magic. He's respectful and kind, seemingly unbothered by his failure on the test. He's also proficient at magic that seems impressively difficult even to those knowledgeable about the subject. All of this implies that he failed the test on purpose.

From there, we're left with the next logical question: Why would Allen purposely fail the test to get one of the best jobs in the kingdom? The answer, as it turns out, is Lydia Leinstar. He refers to her as "the albatross across my neck", and from his other comments, we see that he's been forcibly tied to her for years. This isn't because of any personal affection, mind you, but because he alone seems to be able to put up with her rotten personality. The trick, however, is that she has graduated while he hasn't. Thus, by keeping himself from graduating (by purposely failing the test), he's able to stay away from her. Going to the north of the country for this job until spring is simply a bonus.

While it is the job of a first episode to set up the story to come, this one takes that job a bit too literally. Much of this is simply an introduction to Allen and his two students, along with some background information about the kingdom and its magic system. A large part of the problem is that none of these are all that exciting. Allen has a very bland personality, Tina is defined by her jealousy and lack of magic, and Ellie (the maid Allen is also supposed to teach, in a surprise announcement) is characterized by a squeaky voice and the preternatural clumsiness that seems to be required of anime maids for some reason. The setting, while it has a few interesting bits and pieces, isn't much better.

Still, credit where it's due, there are some very nice uses of speaking glances and other nonverbal communication. The look Allen exchanges with Tina's father when she tells him to call her by her first name is well done, and it shows that Allen is taking his job seriously. He seems to have come by it honestly, as he spent a lot of time with another ducal heir, Lydia, as the only person who could handle her, which is decent enough worldbuilding.

Then we have the second episode. I appreciate the realism on display in this episode. Sure, this is a fantastical world, but when I speak of realism, I mean in how the central problem is being tackled. Despite seemingly doing everything right, Tina just can't cast magic. There has to be a problem somewhere, so how do you find it? The answer is both simple and monotonous: Change every possible variable one by one and see what happens.

This means that first Allen cycles through the various types of magic and then through different spells in each element. After that, he looks back at older spells and techniques, testing them day by day, one after the other. What we learn from all this is that while the spells still refuse to activate, Tina is getting better at casting them. So what's her block? Even by the end of the episode, we still have no answer.

On one level, I get it. We're supposed to be just as frustrated as Tina is by her lack of progress. But that doesn't change the fact that the plot has been in a holding pattern for two full episodes now. We've spent an hour with the girl and she's no closer to using magic than when she started--in fact, she may be even further from it, given her emotional mana explosion in the episode's closing moments. Adding to this frustration is the fact that we're given a specific piece of information halfway through the episode: Allen knows a way to get her to cast magic, he's just been banned from using it. However, that makes it a Chekhov's Gun of sorts. It's now just a matter of waiting til he uses that path anyway. It makes the story feel like more of a slog because we know what's eventually going to happen.

The episode tries to keep things interesting by having Allen interact with Ellie (the maid Allen is also supposed to teach, in a surprise announcement, characterized by a squeaky voice and preternatural clumsiness) and her family, but her story is far from captivating. The most important thing this episode shows is that emotional state and self-confidence have a large effect on one's ability to cast magic, which in turn leads to the aforementioned mana explosion that serves as the episode's cliffhanger.

Overall, I feel like there's just not enough here to keep me watching weekly, it's just burning a bit too slow for me. That said, I won't be opposed to watching and possibly reviewing the show in full once the season's over and I can marathon it.

Wada is an honour student who keeps to herself and has an air of mystery about her. Yamamoto is an intimidating fashionista with dyed blonde hair and a shortened skirt. Although this unlikely duo seems to have nothing in common, it's only during their daily meetings at the local shopping centre's food court that they can be themselves.

See You Tomorrow at the Food Court is a practically laser-focused distillation of the Cute Girls Doing Cute Things formula. Wada and Yamamoto are our cute girls. Wada is the smaller, perkier one who likes mobile games and gets roped into internet drama. Yamamoto is the gyaru who digs the supernatural and urban legends. The cute things are the conversations they have at the food court on the regular. That's it, that's the show. "Girl talk is a placebo", Yamamoto posits partway through the premiere. This is an anime built on slice-of-life girl talk, where Wada, the proper-looking other half of its conversational duo, calls out the rapidity of slice-of-life girl talk. So it's a densely self-aware anime centered around its basic premise, with the point being to highlight how Yamamoto and Wada's conversations are just interesting enough to carry full-length episodes of a show like this.

Not that See You Tomorrow is getting too ambitious. This adaptation is only slated to run for half a season, which is probably for the best. Still, while the production tends towards modest and understated, there are still instances of trying to jazz up the conversations with little highlights. The sidebar about aliens is the first glimpse of that, and that's before Yamamoto gets one of her lines sweetly highlighting her affection for Wada as rainbow fireworks go off in the background.

Oh yeah, this is going to be a yuri-flavoured story, by the way.

While the anime looks pretty good, See You Tomorrow isn't exactly an animation-driven spectacle fuelled by delirious gags. It also isn't the kind of CGDCT anime where a niche hobby or subculture is explored from week to week like Ruri Rocks. As stripped down as it is, See You Tomorrow essentially functions as a hangout simulator, and its success will depend entirely on how much you enjoy spending time with its main characters and watching them act like your everyday goofy teenagers. We the audience function as that third friend in the group who's happy to just sit there and munch on their chicken while their louder friends make a show of their antics.

Honestly though, the component most carrying the proceedings is the healthy dose of face game from Wada. She's definitely the "funny" one in this boke and tsukkomi routine (one of the first things she's introduced with is getting her ass handed to her in the QRTs), though Yamamoto's deadpan delivery must not be underestimated. The most compelling part isn't how funny the conversations are, really, but how they keep up the interest level by naturally revealing details about the leads as they go. Wada's complaints about how she perceives points like the aforementioned girl talk lead Yamamoto to bring up societal points about why some girls choose to talk that way. The girls also comment on each other's style, with Yamamoto actually touching on the countercultural origins of gyaru. Both girls get instances of tilting audience sympathy toward their given "side" of a conversation, which is good as the main/only vector of delivering characterization and "plot" in a show like this.

As for me, I think both girls are indeed pretty cute, Yamamoto moreso. While the former tends to play the hyperactive little weirdo role to Yamamoto's straight man routine, I appreciate that both have their singular fixations and personality quirks. The show hits on familiar jokes about gacha game pulls, internet urban legends, and...uh, "shady-looking Indian guys" that make Wada paranoid about over-the-counter drugs. Yeah, not sure about that one. I guess "cringing while your buddies make casually racist comments with absolutely zero context" is a more universal experience for highschool hangouts than I thought.

Anyway, overall, See You Tomorrow at the Food Court was a pretty decent time. I had to laugh at the incident where Yamamoto put on Wada's ugly sweater and then still wore it in the next conversation, an entire scene later. I feel like the atmosphere could be a little stronger, with the titular food court becoming more of a character in its own right. Currently it's mostly getting by on oddly noticeable real-world food brands that make me wonder if some sort of sponsorship deal was involved here. But the chemistry between the two girls, as Yamamoto gives Wada lil' head pats and they chat over the ending song's intro about whether songs need intros, that's all endearing. Just six sweet weeks of wherever these discussions lead could be a nice enough pick-me-up. And if it's not enough for you to consider appointment viewing, at least it can function as a solid fallback option when nothing else is on and you need to kill 20 minutes before heading out to meet your own friends for KFC.

Ruri Tanagawa, a highschooler who loves jewelry, crystals and accessories, meets mineralogy graduate student Nagi Arato, who pulls her into a crash course in mineralogy. Before she knows it, Ruri is joining Nagi in her mineral collecting adventures and learning all about many fascinating natural treasures.

It was only a matter of time before we got the anime about cute girls getting into collecting minerals. I'm a little shocked it took this long, though I'm even more surprised that we (to my knowledge) haven't seen one about birdwatching or coins or model trains. Still, the industry's obsession with monetizing and marketing to literally every conceivable branch of nerd culture and every hobby imaginable will never cease, so I know that the arrival of Ruri Rocks (technically "Ruri's Jewels" in Japanese) just means we're that much closer to the show where a bunch of cute little Egons go all-in on their research of molds and fungi.

I'm taking the piss a little bit, of course, Ruri Rocks is totally fine. It's got perky anime girls, a niche hobby that features all sorts of intricacies and subcultural quirks that the anime can hyperfixate on, plenty of detailed backgrounds that feature the nature of Japan (specifically the nature that contains a bunch of rocks and dirt), a soundtrack that does that "plinky-plonk dootly-doo" stuff that most of the shows in this wheelhouse utilize, the works. The character animation in particular is a standout, with a lot of detail being given to Ruri and Nagi's expressive emoting and their movements through nature.

Oh yeah, speaking of the character designs and animation, you can tell that this show featured the work of at least a few exceptionally talented perverts. Please note that I am not saying this in any kind of derogatory manner--it's merely an observation born from years of observing the telltale signs that pop up in nearly any work of animation by now. This is an incredibly laborious and stressful artform, and I firmly believe that most animators and artists need to be at least a tiny bit preoccupied with their kinks to stay sane in their line of work. All of this is to say that you might notice our two girls', let's say, distinct proportions, and the somewhat frequent closeups of Ruri's thighs. Of course, the camera is mostly interested in fixating on Nagi. I looked into the manga and found out the animation team really inflated Nagi's breasts and ass and vacuum-sealed her into her button-down shirt and tight pants. Her tits and ass are so big in this adaptation, they seem to have their own gravitational pull, judging from how persistently the camera is pointed at them. You might think to yourself "Huh, I feel like this show want me to be horny for these rock-collecting cartoon girls." Your instincts do not deceive you.

That said, Ruri Rocks isn't overloaded with sleazy fanservice, or anything. It's a much more passively horny anime that a lot of other examples you could name from any given season. I just figured I'd point that fact out, since your mileage will vary on how much the blatant yet relatively restrained fanservice will affect your ability to enjoy the otherwise wholesome feel of it all.

Also, if you were a fan of the lavish travelogues of anime like Laid-Back Camp, then know that Ruri Rocks is giving it a run for its money in its own style. The tree-crowded shady areas of Ruri's local mountains create layers of attentive, atmospheric colouring for these rock walks to happen in. The running water of the rivers sparkles more than the focal gems at times. And of course there are breathtaking renderings of the crystals themselves, both small stones and huge formations that I only slightly doubt are that easy to find in real life.

Ruri's also the amusing kind of bratty to start in the story, and she forms an effective chemistry with Nagi as she's brought along into genuinely enjoying mineralogy and learning to appreciate the journey these rocks have gone on, and from my experience, it works on the audience as well. Ruri Rocks has that feel of a somewhat elevated CGDCT series, and if it can keep up these vibes, I can see this rock becoming the surprise gem of the summer.

[Atuhor's Nose: Another double feature day! Enjoy, everyone!]


One Valentine's Day, young part-time arcade employee Renji Kusakabe notices a small foreign girl, Lily Baker, struggling to win a stuffed toy from a crane game. Three hours later, after finishing his shift, she's still at it, but the toy remains unmoved. Feeling sorry for her, he decides to help, and in one skillful try, he wins the toy, which he then hands to the girl. Startled by this unexpected gesture, she looks at Renji with suspicion. Flustered, Renji hastily tells her it's a Valentine's Day gift. Little does he know, in her home country of England, Valentine's Day is traditionally when boys give girls gifts along with a confession of love.

What do you do when you have an anime that stars a native English speaking girl with a lot of lines? You hire American-born Sally Amaki, who you might also recognize as Betsy from Kaguya-sama, Carol from Tomo-chan is a Girl, Kiriko from Overwatch 2 and Peni Parker in Marvel Rivals. Given how much of the comedy and cuteness of Cultural Exchange With a Game Centre Girl revolves around the linguistic barrier that separates Renji and Lily, this was a fantastic casting decision. This is a show that'd work a lot less for both Japanese and English-speaking audiences alike if Lily and Renji didn't actually have to figure out ways to communicate with each other. Could I snark about Lily's English being a little all over the place? Sure, but once you hear her mother try to offer her a "cuppa", you'll understand how much worse things could've been.

It's always nice to hear Sally Amaki. Even if her attempts at an English accent are...questionable, the rest of her delivery as Lily is precious enough. In concept, it could be cute enough to watch her perform a whole short series here it's just a cute British loli playing around in a Japanese arcade, plugging away at crane games and blurting out "Bloody hell!" as adorably as possible. Maybe the others in the cast glimpsed in the OP could join in later, and "Cute Girls Playing Cute Arcade Games" could take off. This isn't even the first premiere this season where Street Fighter is glimpsed at the beginning, and we also got an unexpected Jashin-chan Dropkick cameo.

Unfortunately, the show that Game Centre Girl is interested in being at the outset here is both a bit more ambitious and a good bit more prone to chafing under that ambition. I won't get too much into the issues obviously inherent in Renji inadvertently ending up in a courtship with Lily, as much of it so far has been played for the "precocious crush" angle. Renji's just trying his best to be nice and, at least partially on account of a language barrier, doesn't seem to be quite aware of how deep in he's getting with Lily thus far. Hopefully that aspect of the series works as a way for both of them to grow and learn overall, on account of that "cultural exchange" element in the title.

Rather, the more pressing issue is that a simple communication barrier just isn't enough to sustain a full episode's worth of interactions between these characters as they putter around an arcade. At least in more standard CGDCT shows, there might be odd little conversations to lend personality and flavour to the goings-on. Here, our two leads can barely talk to one another, so there's just a whole lot of repeated basic sentences over them playing arcade games. Lily figuring out UFO catchers and discovering an aptitude for not-House of the Dead (featuring Jill Valentine?) are slightly more compelling than her kinda hovering around Renji, fawning over him and waiting for him to figure out what her emotional intentions are.

In any case, it looks nice enough, and even if most of the arcade games are unlicensed stand-ins, some are still neat enough to see. And maybe the energy will increase once more cast members show up to shake up the dynamics. And maybe even further, the leads will actually learn to communicate and the cultural exchange part can drive things more earnestly. I'd really like to find out that the cozy candy-coloured artwork and nostalgia baiting aren't gonna end up being the only things this show has going for it.

The hero Toto is strong but very shy and has trouble finding companions because he comes off as frightening to everyone around him. One day, three beautiful girls named Ciel, Anemone and Gore approach Toto to form a party. However, their secret goal is to assassinate him.

While most of this premiere left me a little cold, one moment did precisely the opposite: When Anemone, the assassin disguised as a priestess, stopped when she noticed a little girl being sold into slavery and kicked the slave trader's ass. And she even waited until she'd rescued the little girl, handed her a purse full of money and told her to run away before killing the guy, because she feels a child that young shouldn't have to see something like that. Not only did that cement Anemone as one of my favourites, it also felt like a well-deserved slap in the face to one of the most unpleasant popular tropes in recent fantasy anime.

Anemone's actions may be a sign that The Shy Hero and the Assassin Princesses is going to be a better series than this rather bland first episode lets on. Ostensibly a comedy, the plot involves three dangerous girls separately being hired or assigned to murder the hero Toto, and they all infiltrate his party to do so. Well, not so much "infiltrate" as "offer to be the only ones willing to work with him", because Toto has crippling social anxiety that, when coupled with his large form, make him seem scary rather than scared. He's also remarkably easy to render unconscious so the girls can discuss their plans--all they have to do is act sweet or sexy (or just look like what they are, sexy girls) and he drops like a stone.

There's a fine line between something being enjoyably stupid and irritatingly stupid. This anime mostly falls into the former category, because it's aware of exactly the sort of dumb trash it's aspiring to be. Sure, the art can be janky and the animation is inconsistent, but I dunno, they kinda added to the raggedy charm of the whole production.

I think something the show does genuinely well is give us characters that are worth a damn. Now, to be clear, I'm not arguing that they're exceptionally deep or artful protagonists. They're all clearly ridiculous idiots, and the show doesn't take them seriously for more than a few seconds. As the main quartet of a comedy riff on fantasy anime cliches, however, they each possess identifiable personalities and are performed with enough gusto to keep scenes interesting. More important is the fact that our three assassins play off of each other with a friendly murderous rivalry that can be well and truly charming. Sure, anyone that lacks patience for silly sex comedy antics will likely find someone like Goa pretty tiresome, but we've got two whole other princesses to rely on for other gags once her routine with our titular shy hero is done with, so it's not like she's able to drag things down completely.

It's also worth noting that the show is actually capable of producing some decent cuts of animation, even if the art and character designs consistently give off "bargain DVD you might find in some obscure bin tucked away in the back of a grocery store" vibes. The fight between Anemone and the decapitated zombie monster isn't half bad. This isn't the kind of anime that'll ever produce YouTube supercuts of all its impressive setpieces, but The Shy Hero and the Assassin Princesses might surprise you with its competence if you can look past its more glaring and obvious shortcomings. The same goes for its jokes and its main characters. This anime won't be setting the world on fire anytime soon, but I could see it making for decent watchlist filler. I just hope we find out soon why everyone wants Toto dead so badly, because that's a glaring plot hole that isn't helping.

Two years ago, the death of Naoto Watari's parents left him as the sole caretaker for his sister Suzu and forced him to move in with their aunt. So devoted is he to Suzu that he refuses to join clubs or even hang out with anyone, earning him snide comments and the title of "siscon" at his new school. But as long as Suzu is safe and happy, Naoto doesn't care what everyone else says. However, his sneering classmates may turn out to be the least of his worries. The sudden transfer of a girl named Satsuki Tachibana, a childhood friend-turned-enemy who once destroyed his beloved garden, throws his life into chaos. Nasty secrets begin to surface with her arrival, threatening his new life.

...Wait a fuck, does the "******" (or, in the Japanese title, "XX") stand for "garden?” Seriously? Look, I'm not trying to make too big of a deal out of the expectations set by a ridiculous title, but come on. If you name an anime "Watari-kun's ***** is About to Collapse", you are telling me that the word you replaced with asterisks means something. Probably something sexual, something deranged, something so crude and graphic that it'd even get bleeped out of the Japanese version. There are so many words you could slip into the title, and the creators of this anime have to know the games of Mad Libs that its viewers would be playing before the premiere even got past the opening scene. Except now I'm pretty sure it just stands for "garden", because Naoto's interest in gardening is the one element of this show that stands out in any way.

Oh sure, Satsuki--the girl from the promotional image with the menacing-looking hoe--is a freak, but in a manner that's completely unremarkable for any stupid anime romcom. She sexually harasses men and women alike in her stalkerish efforts to resume her dysfunctional friendship with Naoto, and she would've been arrested several times over before the premiere ended if this show took place in a reality that wasn't composed entirely of stale tropes. The only thing that "collapses" at any point in this episode is the garden Satsuki trashed before peacing out of Naoto's life when they were kids. For reasons unknown, she's also decimating his social life, along with any prospects he has at getting a date with the not-deranged cutie from school, but the gardening material is what the show seems to be relying on to stand out from the crowd.

Does this work? No, absolutely not. I'm sorry to report that a couple of scenes that reference gardening tools and whatnot are not enough to prevent this from being a total snoozefest.

If there's one thing I cannot stand in a narrative, it's deliberate cruelty towards someone who's done nothing to deserve it that forever remains unpunished. That, in my mind, is the damning sin of this episode. Naoto's life may not be perfect before Satsuki comes stalking back into it, but it's at least on a trajectory he's relatively comfortable with. He and Suzu, who were orphaned two years ago, have finally found a place in the home and neighbourhood of their oddball aunt, he's gradually making friends as people start understanding his situation better, and he generally feels like things are going in the right direction. But then Satsuki transfers in and his life promptly goes to hell, because she's terrible about things like appropriate boundaries and consent.

I'll give it this, at least Satsuki is equally horrible to both boys and girls. After she assaults Naoto by forcibly kissing him (and no, him commenting that it's starting to feel good isn't consent, it's a physiological reaction), she comes to school the next day and starts groping Yukari, a girl he's friends with. Her opening encounters with Naoto are framed as a horror narrative, with her stalking him and repeatedly calling out his name in a way that's somehow both obnoxious and creepy. She seems utterly devoted to destroying both his life and his peace of mind, and that's far from okay, even if the episode seems to want to play it for laughs.

In some ways, this feels like a throwback. This is a bit like a harem series from the Love Hina years, where shitty behaviour is handwaved aside in favour of trying to make the unhinged girls look cute 'n quirky. As the episode wears on, there's a clear sense that that's what it's trying to do with Satsuki--she has a reason for the things she's doing that don't involve the state of her mental health. We don't know what that is at this point, of course, but her later actions with Suzu, Naoto's 10-year-old sister, seem to indicate that she has SOME sense of right and wrong. That's nowhere near enough to make up for her other actions, but I suppose it's something.

This show is just fundamentally lacking anything appealing, my friends. None of this is helped by the flat and lifeless animation being so boring to look at. Not a single spark of energy can be mustered by any of the "comedic" scenes, since this cast shares the collective chemistry of a bag of mushy cucumbers that got left in the bottom drawer of the fridge for too long. If it had leaned more into the psychological horror angle, it'd be a very different story, but instead it's just another dumb romcom that fails at both the rom and the com.

[Atuhor's Nose: This was meant to go up yesterday, but I forgor because of SGDQ. Double feature time.]


In a world laid to waste by a demon invasion, Kyle subdues the demon king with his last remaining strength, but then he's sent back four years into the past. Armed with his memories and experiences, he takes this second chance to ensure that the tragic events of the future he lived through never occur.

Sometimes winning isn't worth it. That seems to be the case for Kyle, a hero who managed to take down the demon lord, but at a price that was far too high. If anyone deserves to get their hands on a magic spell or item that can send them back in time, it's him, and conveniently for the plot, that's exactly what happens. Hands down, the best pieces of this are the ones that show what a toll the final battle and the loss of everyone he loved took on Kyle. When he collapses after winning, there's a sense of resignation in the weight of his body. That goes double for when he stands back up after realizing that his work isn't quite done--you can practically feel his exhaustion. Then later, when he finds himself back in his childhood bedroom and faced with his lost love Liese, his reaction is also palpable. Do I love that he goes right from squeezing her in a tight hug to groping her ass? No, but he thinks he's dreaming of a time that's gone, so it at least makes a little sense, and he knows enough to let go when she slaps him and to apologize later for his bad actions. Thus far, he doesn't seem like a twit who assumes consent without asking when he's in his right mind.

And that's what I liked about this episode.

I have all sorts of criticisms I could level at New Saga, but my Spidey-Senses didn't begin to tingle as I watched its first episode, and that means more than you might think in the middle of a packed season. Still, even if New Saga is put together well enough to give you the impression that it actually cares about being a decent TV show, that doesn't mean that it gets an automatic pass for all the shortcuts and crutches it's relying on. This is yet another vaguely defined dark fantasy world where yet another hardened hero has slain yet another world-destroying Demon Lord, only to find that he's actually trapped in yet another "Death kicked me back to the beginning of the story" type of reincarnation anime. Also, our main hero's name is Kyle. Just Kyle. First Dennis, then Lloyd, now Kyle, this is apparently the season of fantasy anime whose protagonists have the most laughably ordinary names ever. There is not one element of the show so far that you'd be surprised to find in an anime with this premise. I feel like anyone who's watched more than five anime in their life should know what to expect from this kind of show. With a protagonist named Kyle.

Like I always say though, execution is everything, and New Saga's execution is just solid enough to keep me from writing it off. The voice cast does a good job of giving our band of heroes emotion and personality. The art and animation are decently appealing. As with any story about getting a second chance at some terrible misadventure, there's always the chance that New Saga will find a genuinely interesting way to use Kyle's foreknowledge of events in its writing.

If this show were truly trash, all of the issues I took with it would be foregone conclusions, but I feel like New Saga has a chance at being, if nothing else, not so bad. This first episode is just a bit too preoccupied with setting up the basics of a story we've already seen done a few dozen times before to be anything close to gripping or compelling, but the characters are likeable enough that it still holds your attention. Maybe, just maybe, we'll even see improvements in the coming weeks.

As this episode went on, I found myself reminded of A Returner's Magic Should Be Special more than anything else. Kyle lacks the self-assurance of that protagonist, but his motives are very much the same: Stop the same tragedy from unfolding twice, just this time there's no Tolkienian pasta dragon. He's been cautious with his methods so far, and ultimately his steadiness may prove to be a big advantage for the overall story. This isn't a great first episode, but it's competent, and that makes me think it'll be worth giving it a couple more episodes to see how it unfolds.

One day, the white mage Lloyd is banished from his party led by a great hero. He then happens to accompany an S-rank party on a quest by chance. At that time, no one knew that the hero's party would collapse and Lloyd would gain fame. He's actually an extraordinary support magic user who's unaware of how he'll eventually become peerless.

This is the story of that time Madoka Kaname was reincarnated as an adventurer in another world. Well, not really, but I can't be the only one who thinks the pink girl looks just like her if she were aged up a few years, right?

In any event, Scooped Up by an S-Rank Adventurer is another entry in the ever-increasing subgenre of "kicked out of my party by an idiot who apparently doesn't understand how my class works". Lloyd, a white mage, ie. THE HEALER, is unceremoniously removed from his party by Allen, a hero who thinks much too highly of himself. Only part of the episode is about Lloyd's adventures with Allen's group, however; most of it's actually focused on Lloyd being trained by his mentor, a girl who seems to mean well but is also from the "tough love" school. By the time Lloyd runs away to the city, he's more than earned the respite, and I'm frankly surprised he didn't do it sooner. Of course, this all seems to be part of his mentor's plan, because she's got a guy reporting back to her that he's started the process of hooking Lloyd back up with Allen's party. Which makes it seem like the pamphlet about the city that Lloyd just happened to find was a plant, and that she intended for him to leave at about this point all along.

Watching a premiere like this one is an exercise in consistent but infuriatingly vague irritation. The show is so bland, unoriginal and fundamentally lacking in meaningful artistic perspective that all one's brain can do is play Spot the Plagiarism and try to figure out precisely where you've seen these exact same character designs before. Or these exact same worldbuilding details. Or these exact same story beats. Or these exact same abilities. Or these exact same musical cues.

See? There I go, doing it again. It's almost an automatic response at this point. Of course, the worst part of the whole ordeal is that the elements being so flagrantly borrowed are themselves terribly faded and warped photocopies of original elements that may as well be ancient history by now. I don't care if this isn't literally the hundredth anime I've seen where some nothingburger potatoboy specifically named Lloyd is given superhuman abilities and the self-awareness of a sea cucumber--as far as I'm concerned, they're all named Lloyd, and they all got kicked out of their adventuring party after being trained in the art of heroing by Sexy Merlin. Even the completely different series in this same season that I reviewed just the other day, where I went out of my way to make fun of the main character for being named Dennis? He too is now Lloyd.

In a case like this, where the show isn't even pretending to give a shit about bringing anything new to the table with its characters, or setting, or big-picture story, the only way you can attempt to measure its quality is by the entertainment value of its individual episodes. So, is this single episode worth a portion of your finite time on this planet? I dunno, maybe? This Lloyd variant has bluish hair instead of being another bargain-bin Kirito, so there's something you might not have seen recently. Oh, and they fight a minotaur in this one, instead of, like, a dragon or a goblin. Minotaurs are fun, right? Also, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that there's a Waifu Girl with pink pigtails, and the one with a blonde ponytail has, like, a faint trace of pink highlights going on, I think, and even Lloyd has little pink sparkles in his eyes, so if you like the color pink, you've got maybe 10-15% more of it here than the average random light novel adaptation.

Also, the scenes of Not Madoka training Lloyd are unnecessarily mean. She gingerly doles out praise before cruelly demonstrating how much more powerful she is than Lloyd, and it's no surprise that his self-esteem is so low that he believes Allen's bullshit about him being of no use. We can see that Lloyd is buffing the other members for all he's worth, but Allen and most of the rest of the party can't be bothered to notice something so understated. And since Lloyd's mentor barely ever told him he was doing a good job in any meaningful way, he's got no sense of his true strength. Is this an attempt to paint being humble as preferable to egotistical? Possibly, but it doesn't make the episode any more engaging.

Yeah, I've got nothing more for you on this one, folks. I'll be moving right along to the next new show, thank you very much.

Takopi travels from his home of Happy Planet to spread happiness across Earth, but meets the unsmiling Shizuka upon landing. Her life at school and home seem to be the source of her somber expression, and the pure-hearted Takopi is determined to change things for the better.

I almost don't want to continue watching this show. And believe it or not, that's a compliment. This show WANTS you to feel uncomfortable and rethink your perspective on the world, even if it alienates you in the process.

There's really no way to begin covering Takopi's Original Sin without warning anyone who doesn't know what they're getting into. This is easily one of the most grim, harrowing, frank and graphic depictions of childhood neglect and depression that I've ever seen in animated form. This is a show that features near-constant occurrences of violent bullying that make sure you can never ignore the despair etched onto Shizuka's face. At one point, after her dog is stolen from her and presumably euthanized, Shizuka takes her own life, and the sequence forces the audience to linger in the aftermath. It does not cut away. It does not obfuscate any details. It makes you really look at and absorb the horrible scene before you just like when you carefully opened Sayori's door. And this is all before the premiere is even halfway over.

If you're wondering how an anime can even continue when its protagonist doesn't survive past the 15-minute mark, it's because the core premise of this story revolves around Shizuka's friendship with Takopi, a cute little alien that looks like Kirby if he were an octopus. His name isn't really Takopi, Shizuka gave him that name because his real name is "Nnu-anu-kf"--she took "tako" from his octopus-like appearance and "pi" from his verbal tic to give him the name "Takopi". Like many kids' cartoons, Takopi's Original Sin establishes a formula where Shizuka's magical new friend will use his fantastical Happian Gadgets to solve life's problems and get into hijinks. The twist, as you will have guessed by now, is that Shizuka's problems can't be easily squared away into simple, innocent conflicts. The premise is basically "What if Doraemon was hit with the reality that things on Earth are way more fucked up than he was prepared for?" Shizuka lives an unbearably difficult life surrounded by cruel and vicious children who can get away with just about anything because the adults in her life simply cannot be bothered to care, and due to having a level of innocence befitting his Kirby-esque appearance, Takopi is unable to understand this.

At this point, anybody can tell you what to expect going into Takopi's Original Sin. This adaptation of Taizan 5's manga was designed to generate word-of-mouth marketing. It hardly buries the lede with its harsh, scrungly artstyle surrounding the cuddly titular alien, making the tone come through even before the clear cruelties start manifesting onscreen. This is an anime concocted to give you a bad time, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, as long as audiences have the proper content warnings to brace themselves. What viewers might be less immediately aware of, however, is that it does have a real range to show off. Even in this extra-long opening volley, it's not entirely designed as 40 minutes of endless misery. The opening eases audiences in, not shying away from the reality of the bullying Marina inflicts on Shizuka, but also lingering on moments when it's "not so bad" as Shizuka interacts with Takopi. The simple naivety of a happiness-driven alien learning to understand human sadness and suffering means there's purpose to this framework, and that veneer of amusement allows for moments of reprieve and even mild entertainment. Much like dealing with real-world horrors, we relish the relief when we can get it.

That's the other secret about Takopi's Original Sin: Depending on your tolerance for darkness, this story can provide moments of black humor. It is objectively funny to watch a split-screen montage of Marina's bullying attempts fail to land, thanks to Takopi's gentle interventions lifting Shizuka back up. There are funny reaction-face shots and cutely animated physicality in the characters as they go about this sort of business.

And then the show unflinchingly shifts to poor little Takopi experiencing Marina's brutal bullying firsthand. And even when he uses time travel to undo the horrific final moments of Shizuka's life, the viewer must watch as he runs a grueling Groundhog Day gauntlet of suffering in his attempts to "fix" Shizuka's life.

On a metaphorical level, Takopi is a stand in for all those people out there who've never experienced being bullied, along with those who've never dealt with domestic abuse and suicidal depression. While well-meaning, his reactions to Shizuka's obvious troubles are naive to an extreme degree. Flying in the sky means nothing to a kid who's being tortured everyday, and she sure as hell doesn't need a magic ribbon to understand why Marina is making her life a living hell. And, most importantly, none of his gadgets will solve any of the actual problems in her life. Takopi is fundamentally unable to see the world through any lens but his own, even when he finds Shizuka's dead body hanging from the ceiling in her dark, filthy home. He thinks what happened is his fault for breaking the rules and letting her use a Happian Gadget without him present, since both he and the audience can clearly see that she hanged herself using the ribbon he gave her. So he time-travels and tries again. It's only at the moment that he experiences Shizuka's pain firsthand that he starts to understand the fear, shame and utter helplessness that comes from being bullied so relentlessly. Those in authority (ie. teachers) do nothing unless directly asked (and even then, they do the barest minimum), and peers who offer help have no idea what they're suggesting and can't be relied on. And to cap things off, we learn in the closing moments of the episode that Marina is lashing out at Shizuka not because she's a natural bully, but because she's facing emotional abuse at home, and her bullying Shizuka is her way of both supporting her mom and lashing out at someone at least tangentially related to the broken state of her own family, because it turns out her dad cheated on her mom with Shizuka's.

And yet, as unpleasant and upsetting as Takopi's Original Sin is to watch, I think it's trying to tell a vital kind of story. The entire gloomy world of this show may seem extremely exaggerated, bordering on exploitative, but it's all in the service of conveying the very real suffering that children all around the world experience daily. The show's rough-yet-stylish animation contributes to this effect perfectly, so you can't accuse the show of being cavalier or tone-deaf. It knows exactly what it'sdoing, and I'm honestly compelled to see how Takopi and Shizuka can possibly emerge from this nightmare unscathed, if that's even possible at all. For those who are inclined to engage with art that forces you to explore some of life's darkest and most painful experiences, I recommend you brave giving this show a try.

After being unfairly kicked out of the adventuring guild he's worked at for many years, Level 99 cook Dennis decides to take all his savings and invest them into setting up his own diner in the countryside.

If I can praise anything about Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant!, it's that the show presents us with a slightly more sane interpretation of a tired old cliche--in this case, the world of the cast-out adventurer protagonist allows for one to pursue an occupation that's not intrinsically tied to grinding it out in a bunch of featureless dungeon caves for always and eternity. It's not an original enough detail to make the utterly generic setting into something genuinely classy or compelling, but it at least makes the world of the show feel like it's ripping off a mid-tier fantasy game that people might actually play.

To be clear, this isn't actually an anime where the main character is literally stuck in a video game, but I think we can all admit that such a detail is always completely superfluous. The only thing I'm looking for that will truly differentiate this show from its no-effort competitors is whether it actually tries to be, y'know, good. Even then, I think most of us can also admit that the term "good" is in this case going to be very relative and will need a half-dozen asterisks worth of qualifiers.

So, is Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant! any good******? Um... Kinda? It is decently animated, and the voice actors seem to be putting in some effort to give their characters a bit of real personality. Then again, our protagonist looks like a substitute gym teacher who's just trying to save up money so he can open up his own independent hardware store, and his name is Dennis.

Dennis.

"Haha, that's me!"

Also, Dennis' response to the issue of slavery is "I can't just go and get outraged by every last injustice in society--oh wait, this slave is a cute little girl? Okay, I guess she deserves rights and freedoms."

Yeah, I was all set to rip this show a new one for the fact that our ostensible hero buys a slave at about the 12-minute mark. Thankfully, that turns out to be not quite as bad as other shows that use a similar plot device. It's still bad, don't get me wrong, but when Dennis tells the little girl he just purchased that he did this to free her and that she can leave if she wants to, he seems to mean it far more than other comparable protagonists. Atelier (this show has a name problem, there's also a guy named Spaghetti) is young enough that her survival should she leave is questionable, especially given that the creepy, potentially dishonest merchant Polvo and a bunch of other guys wanted to buy her for decidedly unwholesome reasons. So she doesn't really have as much of a choice as Dennis implies, but he's still trying to be better than we typically see and does appear invested in caring for her. And with the bar firmly set at ground level, I guess that's what we're gonna get.

That aside, Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant! seems to answer the question "What happens if you combine Unfairly Kicked Out of My Party anime with cooking anime?" Dennis is a cook (which seems to be his class in this RPG-inspired world) and is, in fact, unjustly removed from the Silverwings, in this case because the captain is jealous of his friendship with bikini-armored Katie. Dennis doesn't seem too heartbroken over this though, because he's been carting around a book on how to efficiently open a restaurant when you retire from adventuring, and despite spending most of his money on Atelier, he's still able to get that project off the ground. At this point it looks like the series is set to be about the delicious food he cooks for people and how cute Atelier is when she tries real hard.

And the food does look delicious. There's only one cooking scene in this episode, but the ease and flair Dennis whips up a batch of fried rice with is impressive, and the end result looks very tasty. It seems like most of the episode's resources were directed into that one scene. Not that the rest of it looks bad, but it's still a definite upgrade once Dennis begins chopping green onions and beating eggs. Credit where it's due, the depiction of Atelier as utterly defeated and beaten down by life is also well done, and it's nice to see her slowly coming out of her shell be expressed through both her facial expressions and the colours used to paint her.

So, to be clear, we're not shooting for the stars here. Still, this premiere isn't busted or braindead enough to inspire any legitimate anger. Besides, it's got that benefit I mentioned earlier of not just recreating mediocre dungeon-crawler RPG mechanics. It's also about recreating mediocre cooking minigame mechanics! I would be a bit more enthusiastic if this episode spent more time with the food aspects of the show that are easily the best cards it has to play, but we only get that one short montage of Dennis preparing fried rice. If Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant! spends more time getting the "Restaurant" part of its title right going forward, and if Polvo never comes back and the whole slave element is tossed aside, this could be a decent weekly watch.

Thanks, FA, for your wonderful pants-on-head update to fulfill a progressive brownie points quota. Now I have to go through almost TWENTY YEARS of submissions, over 3,400 of them, to remove the tags you forced onto them. This is gonna take fucking forever. But I'm not abiding by your fucking new system, I'm not defining my characters by their gender, I'm not giving in and tagging my shit for you, and I'm not playing into your beligerent wokescold bullshit.

"Full of outdated terminology" my aching ass. All you've done is destroy the browse, blacklist and search functions and force gays using the browse function to view straight porn to find what they want. DURING PRIDE MONTH.

Gender tags just disappeared from all pics overnight and the option is gone from the submission process.

Yeah, wow, FA staff, thanks for removing our ability to tell at a glance what gender a character is or dictate quick and easy what our own characters are, we were totally all begging for this. Such a massive improvement.

The hilariously named Biscotti Republic, set in the even more hilariously named world of Floynard, faces a national crisis: It's being invaded by warriors who look like they just got back from a convention. Princess Millhiore F. Biscotti decides that the time has come to summon a hero, and as luck would have it, some British kid living in Japan named Cinque Izumi (gotta love Japanese attempts at European names) who can apparently perform acrobatic feats that should land him on a list of modern wonders (as usual, don't even ask why) has been fated to fall down a hastily CGI'd magical wormhole. When he pops out the other end inside a glowy CGI flower, Cinque is informed that he's the hero of destiny, which he refuses to believe for about 10 minutes in order to drag out the episode, but then he has a change of heart right before the end so we can segue into the closing credits with a dramatic pose.

Have you ever wondered where failed children's shows go after they die?

Pitch to me a show that has colour-coded princesses, shallow rival characters, fights where no one gets hurt, wars fought over obstacle courses, war crimes punished with bops on the head, a sociopolitical structure ruled by the adorable, and half the characters and one of the kingdoms having names derived from European desserts, and I'd point you in the direction of the Disney Channel and move on to the next pitch. Dog Days, in any other medium, would be a children's show. It's bright, shiny and sweet enough to make your teeth ache with a glance, but this is anime, so this show isn't for kids--naturally, it's for young men. If the superficial dark elements aren't the giveaway, then the girls' exploding clothes sure are.

Now, in the Year of Our Lord 2025, I don't view moe as a form of entertainment worth watching for its own sake and I don't actively look for it in what I watch, but I'm not against it either. Shows can be as cute and moe as they like as long as they have the story, characters and plot to match it, and ultimately, that's how I will judge Dog Days looking back on it all these years after first watching it. If you hate the perniciously sexualized cuteness of late-2000s/early-2010s otaku bait series as a matter of principle, then stop reading now and look for another series.

I'll get my biggest gripes out of the way first: On its surface, it's hard to think of a more unimaginative series than Dog Days, a show that moves mechanically from one plot point to the next and doesn't even really try to add fresh concepts or unexpected twists to its premise. In fact, nothing illustrates this problem better than the chocobos on loan from Final Fantasy. Yeah, that one's so damn blatant, you'd be forgiven for thinking future Pocketpair devs had something to do with this. The main character designs are hardly worth mentioning either--Cinque is a generic energetic teen with messy blonde hair and big blue eyes, and Millhiore and her warriors look like escapees from a "How to Draw Generic Vaguely JRPG-Style Characters" book. The animators also frequently use CGI as a lazy shortcut on things they could've easily animated by hand, like DOORS OPENING, and everything is topped off by a tinkly "Let's pretend these synthesizers are trumpets" soundtrack.

In any case, those of you still interested are in for a visual treat if you are a fan of unrelenting cuteness. Every single catgirl and doggirl is unfailingly adorable. The bright palette that dominates the backgrounds, along with the character designs, also manages to be pleasing rather than garish. Many "cute" series either drown their worlds in ribbons or leave them bare to lavish more attention on their characters, but Dog Days gets the balance just right. The music, while cheap-sounding, matches the aesthetic. The action also is pretty reasonable, mixing up actual fighting with big ol' ki blasts and generally manages to keep me entertained. One thing of note is that the production values don't always keep up, and that's particularly clear during the concert sections, which we receive via shoddy CGI.

In terms of story, Dog Days isn't pushing any envelopes. The isekai routine, which was still relatively fresh at the time, plays out completely straight, though the reasons why the world is essentially harmless (for the most part) are interesting. To be honest, the background is pretty competent, the system of wars and the reason why no one gets hurt are a clever wink to the tropes themselves, but they're simply adornments to an otherwise standard "help the princess, save the kingdom" story. It does play out well though and only feels a little aimless sometimes, since the series feels slightly chopped up between plot events and "characterization" scenes, for a lack of a better term. This would be fine normally, but I always found myself pining for another fight scene rather than the constant introduction of new characters that took up so much of the series. All I can say is that I'm glad a second season came along, because this series had far too many characters for a 13-episode show.

Honestly, you really can't get much more generic and safe than this, although it is admirable just how far they decided to go with the sugary sweetness mixed with incredibly out-of-place fanservice. See, while fallen male warriors revert into these kittyblob things, female warriors just get tons of clothing damage, but it never gets to the level of, say, Queen's Blade or Ikkitousen.

The characters themselves are a bigger problem. The series really does have more characters than it knows what to do with, and only Eclair, Cinque, Millhiore, Leo and perhaps Ricotta get anything close to minimal characterization. Yes, there are glimpses of other characters like Eclair's brother and Cinque's rival Gaul, but there are characters that get a sizeable amount of screentime without much personality at all, like the Genoise, Gaul's henchgirls who don't really seem to warrant inclusion in the series at all but can't seem to stay offscreen. That aside, even the main cast doesn't have much depth. Eclair is your basic tsundere, Cinque is the stock shonen hero and Millhiore is cute and earnest and not much else. Most of the characters can be quite fairly categorized like this, and while they certainly aren't unpleasant examples of the archetypes, they certainly are clear examples of the archetypes written with little deviation from the bare-bones basics. Sadly, that is as deep as any of the character seems to get. They're also clearly setting up some kind of chaste romance between Cinque and Millhiore throughout. You can see it coming from a mile away, even with the inevitable harem Cinque ends up getting (which they heavily played up in all the promotional art) and the obvious lesbian undertones between Millhiore and the catgirl warrior Leonmitchelli.

Ultimately, if you can overlook the unashamed pandering then you'll find a reasonable, modest series that's about as average as you can get. Outside of the brief-yet-frequent fanservice, Dog Days is so dedicated to being little more than just fluff that it's inoffensive to a strange extreme, like a show constructed entirely out of Nerf material. It's fine to watch if you've got time to waste or just want some background noise, and that's about it.

Hodaka Morishima is a 16-year-old from Kozushima who's run away from his upper-middle-class home, using a ferry to get to Tokyo. He lives on the streets for a time, looking for odd jobs while Tokyo experiences a constant downpour. During one of his first nights there, a young girl named Hina Amano takes pity on him while working her job at McDonald's (and yes, it actually is McDonald's and not a copyright-safe stand-in!) and gives him a burger for free. Encouraged by this, they part ways for awhile and Hodaka lands a job writing for a small tabloid. As time goes on, Hodaka eventually runs into Hina again and discovers that she can pray to make the rain stop. They set up a small business selling brief reprieves from the rain, but this power comes at a terrible cost. Furthermore, both Hodaka and Hina are both being pursued by the police.

What do you do when the rain won't stop? Weathering With You attempts to answer this question in both a literal and figurative sense. From acclaimed director Makoto Shinkai, the man behind the universally beloved your name., and CoMix Wave Films, it tells the story of two young people whose lives become entwined in a Tokyo trapped under an endless rainfall. Weathering With You is an interesting film to discuss, especially because while largely good at what it does, I don't think it reaches the lofty heights it's aiming for.

Visually, it's gorgeous, as expected of a Shinkai movie. The character animations are smooth and crisp, with a relatively realistic look that grounds the film in its setting. Tokyo is particularly well realized. The city is lovingly recreated, with many real-world locations and landmarks identifiable throughout it, and everything from the sweeping skylines to intimate indoor locales is marvelously done. The greater Tokyo Metropolis is a well-worn setting for anime, and Japanese media in general, but Weathering With You makes you feel like you've never seen it quite this way before. The shattered building with the shrine on the roof is a really unique visual set against the backdrop of Tokyo's shimmering neon vastness.

A great deal of attention is paid to rain and water movements. When the rain falls, it's truly awe-inspiring to see the care put into animating each individual droplet. The way the raindrops (and at times tears) roll down surfaces and interact with the characters and environment is remarkable and lends a surreal quality to a number of scenes in the movie without being outright fantastical.

The cast are all strong and likeable. Given that the entire film hinges on Hodaka and Hina's relationship, they do not disappoint. Their stories of escape, obfuscation and eventual blossoming love are enjoyable and make them easy to root for. The supporting cast like Nagisa, Keisuke and Natsumi are given much less screentime but make a huge impact whenever they are onscreen. Each has their own unique quirks and charms that allow them to leave a lasting impression, and their contributions during the final escape/chase sequence are a delight.

The movie's themes are certainly resonant. There are elements of young people being harassed by authorities in a world that has no place for them. Hina gives up her entire being as a sacrifice, in part to a job and in part to the happiness of others, and the consequences of that are explored. There's also an unmistakable statement on climate change. There's a quiet undercurrent of dread for these people living under an unrelenting, unforgiving set of weather conditions that are making normal life impossible and looking for any solution to the problem. But in that sense, there is hope. There's a scene in particular where an old man delivers exposition regarding the sunshine girls and humankind's relationship with nature. In particular, he points out that our perspectives are very short and limited, and that our need for the world to be in "balance" is a relatively modern notion. In the end, all we have while facing a volatile, unpredictable world is each other.

The cinematography is solid as well. The shot compositions are strong, and the film is visually exciting without being confusing. There's good use of occasional POV shots with fish-eye lenses and blurring at the edges to simulate the feeling of trying to look at something in the rain. My only gripe with the cinematography is the movie trailer-esque "black screen with dramatic narration" moments that pop up several times during the film. Otherwise though, visually, thematically and cinematically, the elements of the film all come together nicely.

And yet there's an unmistakable sense of missed potential keeping Weathering With You from standing alongside its own predecessor as one of the all-time greatest anime films.

Nothing in the film feels incompetent or poorly executed, but you don't get the sense of anything being particularly risky or groundbreaking either. The film is good from start to finish, but it never quite makes the leap into being great. It's hard to articulate exactly why that is, but the lack of any truly defining elements is one reason that comes to mind.

The runtime is another issue. Weathering With You is not exactly a short film at over two hours long. There's a lot of movie here and not enough tension to sustain it for my tastes. Certainly, the characters often find themselves in very tense situations--homelessness, vagrancy, lack of supervision, being chased by police or harassed by predators, none of those are exactly safe or secure. Hina is even taken away and transported to a frankly terrifying realm of storm dragons, sky jellyfish and colossal cloud whales. But at no point did I feel like there was much threat or cause for concern. We move at such a steady pace from scene to scene and for such a long time that there isn't much of a chance to stop and feel the weight of what's going on. I wouldn't call the movie predictable, but none of its events are necessarily shocking either. All of the potential major threats to the safety and security of our cast just sort of evaporate without much consequence.

Similarly, Hina and Hodaka have almost no friction in their relationship--they have a fondness for each other before they've even conversed and never really come into conflict. In fact, our leads never appear to suffer much in the way of consequences. Hodaka gets in two standoffish situations involving guns, but you never really worry about his safety. He also abdicates all of his responsibilities to the tabloid, but that never really amounts to much--Keisuke gives him money and helps him and eventually finds all the success in life (professionally and personally) that he wanted anyway. The police are supposed to be a constant threat throughout the film, but they're mostly just an inconvenience, and all that results from Hodaka breaking the law in the end is being on probation during his remaining three years at school.

I think this is most egregious in the case of Hina's absence. The film does a great job establishing how scary her disappearance should be--her body slowly becoming like seawater and the moment where Hodaka wakes up to see her empty bathrobe in the bed are both really haunting moments. Hodaka's desperate attempts to somehow get back to her also feel well executed. But part of the problem is that we don't have enough time as an audience to truly feel Hina's absence. We see her a few times in this other world as a reminder that she's still alive in some form, which clearly suggests that her rescue is at hand. Knowing that she is still alive and relatively unharmed sorta tells the audience "Hey, it's all gonna work out, enjoy this low-stakes chase scene." After the climax of the film, Hina and Hodaka are apart for three years...but we jump right ahead to Hodaka's graduation and reunion with Hina, picking right back up where they left off as if nothing happened.

Oh yeah, and all I can say without spoiling anything is that the feeling I got from the last 10 minutes or so of the movie was the epitome of the narrative losing me right at the end. And it also causes the cameo appearances of Taki and Mitsuha from your name., which is in fact meant to set the two films in the same timeline (with this film taking place in the summer of the year Taki and Mitsuha reunited), to make far less sense. If you've seen both movies, you should understand why.

Maybe that's the problem holding this film back. It's gorgeous, technically well executed and thematically resonant. The characters are fine and there's just enough tension to keep things moving. But there seems to be a hesitation to fully commit to some of the heavier themes at work, and that results in a two-plus-hour film that's little more than generically pleasant. It feels harsh to say that, because there's nothing lacking in its technical merits per se, but I think it holds itself back from being a real must-see. Weathering With You is a good film that I recommend you see if you have the chance. I'm mostly positive on the majority of the film, but it's hard not to see where, if they'd leaned in a little more, it could've been one of the greats.