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.

[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.

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.

Mako Kawai is a college student whose social anxiety disorder leaves her so meek that she can't even go into restaurants by herself. But after a chance reunion with her old gradeschool friend Shinon Ogawa and meeting Kurea Furudate, she finds herself joining the Food Culture Research Club, which turns out to be quite a bit different than what she expected.

Food for the Soul seemed like it could be more my speed than the premiere of Mono was. For one thing, I love to cook. I daresay an interest in food is more universal than an interest in action photography, but as I'll discuss in a minute, that turns out to be a double-edged sword here. Secondly, Food for the Soul has a touch more bite to it. It's still quite gentle and sweet overall, more like a pound cake with lemon zest added than a lemon tart. The girls of the Food Culture Research Club are all quite kind, including Kurea, who offers to give Mako her sauced katsudon at her mother's restaurant when they run out just before Mako can put in her order. However, any show with as dead-on accurate a description of mental illness as this has the potential to do something with it. If you suffer any kind of anxiety disorder, Mako will hit pretty close, not only in how she gets home from a mildly pleasant social interaction and immediately starts screaming at herself about all the ways she thinks she messed up, but also in her description of how she became more nervous about trying new things and putting herself out there over time, leading to her slowly withdrawing.

The only problem is that, unlike Kurea's katsudon, I'm not sure this show has the sauce. The general animation is as pretty as we've come to expect from PA Works, but the cooking animation is... Look, food anime is as crowded a field as restaurants in Toronto. You have to bring something special to the table, especially if you're focusing on Japanese homestyle cooking. And Food for the Soul isn't doing that. The preparation sequence is done entirely via tight close-ups of Kurea's hands, completely removing the sense of who's preparing the food and the satisfaction they get from it. The motion was slightly jittery instead of smooth and confident. The pastel colour palette, while pleasant when it comes to characters and backgrounds, makes the food look washed-out and undercooked. When you exist in the same field as things like Delicious in Dungeon, Food Wars, Gourmet Girl, Sweetness and Lightning, Ghibli movies, etc., you have to do better than this.

Is it possible that my brain is simply rejecting the prospect of another anime about girls who are obsessed with food after covering GoHands' most recent crime against nature? Absolutely. If we were going to try and dissect what Food for the Soul is lacking on its own merits, however, I'd say there's just an intangible sense of depth and substance that this anime struggles to convey. If I were to resort to hacky food metaphors, I'd probably go on at length describing how certain recipes ask you to add small amounts of seemingly inconsequential ingredients, like soy sauce or tomato paste, that end up contributing greatly to the overall flavour profile of the dish and can heavily alter the taste, texture and colour if more is added than what's needed, and conclude that Food for the Soul is missing that extra tablespoon of mirin in the broth.

It's ironic, really, that a show all about the joys of creating a good meal from scratch would represent the anime equivalent of a fast-casual dining experience. Sure, a trip to Chipotle might technically be a step up from just dipping through the McDonald's drive-thru, but we're still talking about an assembly line process for delivering cheap, convenient products. Dammit, there I go with the food metaphors again.

Point is, while I'm sure Food for the Soul will have plenty of fans, and in a weaker season it might've been something I'd commit to watching weekly, I can't say I'm really feeling all that enthusiastic about it. It's perfectly fine, but there are too many shows airing at the same time that are overflowing with creativity, vision and flair for "perfectly fine" to cut the mustard this season. It wasn't fresh-baked enough to get a big reaction from me. It's not so much a grand cake as it is a modest cupcake trying to stand out with brightly coloured sprinkles. Insert some other food-related line here. I'll put it on the warming tray for later, but it didn't impress me enough to make the priority list.

[Atuhor's Nose: This was meant to be posted yesterday, but things got in the way again. You know what that means.]


Chika Suzugamori is a college student who's been shopping some manga pitches around to publishers ever since she won a rookie manga award, but keeps getting rejected. Just as she was about to lose hope in ever breaking into the industry, she decides on a whim to go travelling without any particular goal. She gets the idea while watching a TV program where they roll a die and assign a place to each participating presenter, who then visit the spots they've rolled. Chika does the social media equivalent, launching a poll and going in the direction that gets the most votes.

Zatsu Tabi -That's Journey- is the kind of flagrant advertising I can kinda respect because it's at least successful at its stated goal of making me want to spend my money. Would I walk out of my front door right now and hop on a train to Aizuwakamatsu for a cheap bento lunch and a refreshing afternoon hike up a beautiful mountain landscape? You bet I would, if it didn't require me booking a $2,000 round trip to Japan and I wasn't poor and physically unwell and recent economic developments hadn't made a simple trip to the grocery store a matter of carefully balancing my ever-dwindling budget.

Sorry about that. The point is, a soul-rejuvenating trip to Japan is something I've long dreamed of but will likely never be able to have, and so I'm forced to satisfy my wanderlust by vicariously experiencing Japan through others, including the cozy overnight trips of anime characters. Zatsu Tabi lets me do that, which is pretty neat. Even if the show itself isn't doing much beyond serving as a moderately entertaining vacation planner, it's still got me interested as someone who's spent the last couple years near-obsessively studying pretty much the entirety of Japan, and that means that whatever dark pact Zatsu Tabi has made with the Japan Tourism Agency is paying off in some way.

I know anime promoting tourism is nothing new, neither are hobby anime, or even anime combining the two. Usually the intersection of the two things involves a group of girls involved in some sort of local craft or location-specific activity. But I've never seen one so blatantly saying "Please go here!" as Zatsu Tabi. Rather than using a location as a setting for a story that gives the characters opportunities to enjoy the local specialties, eat local food or walk through the beauty of nature, Zatsu Tabi is about a young manga artist who decides to use her manga prize money to travel to small tourist towns based on cryptic social media polls. She first goes to Aizuwakamatsu, describing in detail how much things cost, how to get there by train, how she gets a room at a local inn, and so on. Chika herself doesn't bring a lot to the table, but that's because she's not really as much the focus of the premiere as the location is.

To be fair to the show, it does have a bit more going for it than just its chill travelogue vibes. Chika is a perfectly likeable and relatable lead. While I hope she gets a supporting cast to liven up the proceedings, she makes enough of an impression for her show to technically function as a narrative slice-of-life comedy. There was one sequence that even made me chuckle a bit, where she goes through the various stages of exercise-induced psychosis while climbing up a famous landmark of 1,200 steps that turns out to lead to a very anticlimactic reward for her efforts. As a bit of an introvert who prefers to stay home and/or work on her manga, Chika has little in the way of real-world experiences, as her journey shows. She's never thought about the logistics of travel or how travelling has changed with technology. She's never done the cliche things she's seen in manga like having a bento on the bullet train or staying at a countryside ryokan. She's never experienced how spread out things really are outside the big city or what it's like to go somewhere without a set plan. She's never climbed a mountain just because it was there. Over the course of her two-day trip, Chika gains a world's worth of knowledge she can put into her writing. And while a single excursion naturally isn't enough to suddenly up her game, she's certainly on the right track.

The episode puts a lot of effort into showing us how gorgeous and new this whole thing is for her. Sparkles adorn mundane things like what seems to be a rather basic hotel room and a very nice breakfast buffet. She marvels at electrical outlets on trains and local pastries. There's a photorealism to every background Suzugamori wanders through. While the juxtaposition of her very anime form and the highly detailed backgrounds don't hold a candle to Shigeru Mizuki's work (which is always my association with the style), it still works and is the draw of this episode. Most of it is just focused on her wandering around; she interacts with people online and with the editor she's trying to get to accept her manga for publication, but otherwise, this is mostly just Chika talking to herself. That stands to change if the opening theme sequence is to be believed--in particular, the woman she sees overindulging in the hotel bar looks like she'll become a regular.

Overall, while it's not the most riveting thing airing right now, Zatsu-Tabi might be worth checking out for folks who are feeling a bit restless and want to get some virtual sightseeing in. It's a decent time, and while it's not likely to be priority viewing for me in such a powerfully stacked season full of surprising gems, I'd still like to see where Chika's journey goes from here.

The year is 2052, an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity. The reason for this is that humankind has been freed from sickness and pain. Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Dr. Skinner has developed a miracle cure-all drug with no apparent drawbacks called Hapuna. Hapuna soon becomes ubiquitous and essential. However, soon after Hapuna is officially introduced, Dr. Skinner vanishes. Three years later, the world has moved on, but Dr. Skinner has returned, this time as a harbinger of doom. Skinner announces that Hapuna has a short half-life. Everyone who's taken it will die approximately three years later. Death is coming for this sinful world, and it's coming soon. As a response to this threat, a special task force of five agents has gathered from around the world to save humanity from Skinner's horrific plan. This group is called "Lazarus".

Lazarus sure has had a lot of fanfare ahead of its release. It's been getting promotional convention panels for over a year. Shinichiro Watanabe has given interviews declaring it his magnum opus, a tribute to his late collaborator Keiko Nobumoto and a spiritual sequel to Cowboy Bebop. He's described how people who were inspired by his pioneering space western came to him wanting to contribute, to pay him back for what his work has done for them.

A new Shinichiro Watanabe anime is always a cause for celebration, and he's really swinging for the fences with Lazarus. Right off the bat, Watanabe's got Big Ideas, and he's much more concerned that you feel those ideas than think about them too hard. From the start, you just have to accept that an all-powerful genius doctor was able to invent a painkiller that literally everyone in the world takes regularly for some reason, and that he has now unveiled that this same drug is a physiological time bomb that'll kill the whole world unless any one person on the planet can find where he is. This insane, planet-wide Jigsaw trap is something that all of society immediately takes at face value, by the way, which of course plunges the economy and collective psyche of mankind into immediate chaos.

It's entirely possible that this show is laying out its endgame in the first episode. The name "Lazarus" is synonymous with resurrection, after all, while the game of dreidel is symbolic of giving to rebuild the synagogue destroyed by the antagonists in the story of Hannukah. Dr. Skinner, the mysterious figure who created a purportedly flawless super drug, has revealed that all those who took it will die three years after their first dose, setting up a race to find him and the antidote. But isn't it possible that the resurrection and the game are both symbolic markers of what Dr. Skinner wants for humanity, for them to work together? That would also track with our main character Axel Gilberto, a man who, from this episode, seems to largely be out for himself and no one else, initially refusing Hirsch's offer to free him from prison in order to help find Dr. Skinner. He must be reborn as someone who cares in order to fulfill his journey.

All of that theorizing out of the way, this is quite the opening to a series. It's no Cowboy Bebop, nor should you go into it expecting that--there are some similar dystopian trappings and a few other links, like the similarity of the core group, but this is a very different story. It also jumps into the ring ready to deliver its strongest blows, as even without the dystopian elements, this episode has style and swagger for days. Axel's escape from prison and subsequent flight across the city is cinematic and exhilarating. The whole sequence is done with just background music and Axel's occasional effort noises and heavy breathing as he figures out how not to plummet to his death, and it absolutely delivers a spectacle. Even more mundane scenes like Doug opening a car door have panache.

There's a lot of mixed religious symbols and messages, and I feel like that might be the point, that there's a little truth in everything in service of a greater good. I'm not sure Axel's all that keen on it, but maybe that's why, from what I could tell, the dreidel in the beginning landed with "hey" facing up. It means "half" in the game, with the player who rolls it getting to take half of what's in the pot. Is half better than none? We'll have to see what Dr. Skinner thinks as the story unfolds.

For the sake of whatever commentary Watanabe wants to make about humanity's greatest flaws and untapped potentials, your two choices are to either go with this premise so the rollercoaster of a plot can get started, or get off the ride before the cart leaves the loading bay. I can understand why some might choose to take their tickets elsewhere, given that it's very possible Lazarus' story well self-implode into a mess of mixed metaphors and ill-devised allegories before all is said and done. On the other hand, the show is just positively overflowing with kickass confidence, and the act of watching it in the moment is just so innately satisfying that I'm personally willing to go wherever this madman is trying to lead us, just like the heroes of Lazarus have to run with whatever Dr. Skinner is scheming. At least, that's how I feel for now. The worst case scenario, I figure, is that we get a lesser entry in Watanabe's resume, which is still bound to be a standout project that runs circles around the competition in terms of sheer production value. Because lemme tell ya, Lazarus is cool as hell. It's got immaculate art and animation from top to bottom, with expertly drawn 2D assets that often blend seamlessly into the layered and detailed 3D backgrounds and set pieces. This production earned itself a lot of hype by featuring John Wick mastermind Chad Stahelski as it's action choreography supervisor, and that's another investment that's paid off big time. Axel doesn't have a whole lot of character development just yet, all we know about him is that he's good at parkour and breaking out of prisons and that Lazarus wants to exploit his skillset to hunt down Dr. Skinner. That said, we learn pretty much everything we need to know about the guy based on the way he moves, leaps and casually kicks the shit out of anyone standing in his way. The incredibly high-quality cinematography shows off all of these moves beautifully and gives the entire production a cinematic feel that elevates the show to another level of quality.

Given that "Axel breaks out of jail and is chased and recruited by Lazarus" is the beginning and end of the actual plot we get in this premiere, there are still plenty of questions to be interrogated and puzzles to be solved in future episodes. Whether those components of Lazarus' story turn out to be satisfying and sensible remains to be seen, but I'm pretty damn confident in saying that we're in for a good time on the way to those answers.

The Photography Club and Cinema Club are in danger of shutting down due to lack of members, until club members Satsuki Amamiya, An Kiriyama and Sakurako Shikishima decide to merge them and form the Cinephoto Club. They're also asked to be the main characters for manga artist Haruno Akiyama's latest work centered around action cameras. The girls head out to capture the lovely sights of Yamanashi Prefecture, experimenting with gadgets beyond photography and film equipment and, of course, sampling the local delicacies.

Mono is the type of "Cute Girls Doing a Hobby" show that resonates with me more than usual, though it took some time for me to truly get into it. An anime like this is only as good as its cast, after all, and Mono's premiere is slow to establish its core crew. Satsuki is a perfectly fine protagonist to start with, but she's not an especially charismatic protagonist on her own, so the episode begins to pick up until we're introduced to her infatuated best friend An. Halfway in, Haruno joined the trio and balanced out Satsuki and An's personalities with something both a touch more mature and somewhat chaotic. By the last 1/3 of the premiere, I finally started to get what kind of anime mono is trying to be, and I knew I was gonna like it. It's more abstract and roughshod visuals are actually pretty charming, for one, even if they're not the most traditionally pretty cuts of animation you're bound to see. Unlike the original creator's other work, Laid-Back Camp, Mono is much less about the beautiful vistas and emotional refuge of camping with friends and much more about enjoying the unpredictable mischief that a bunch of young girls can get up to when they've got all this modern photographic technology to mess around with and no shortage of ambition.

Despite being a part of the genre, there's more to it than simply revelling in everyday youth and cuteness. The main theme of Mono is the relationship between subject, artist and art. Satsuki finds herself the subject of Makinohara's art. This, in turn, inspires her to make art out of that art, taking pictures of her senpai as she works. This goes even a step further when we learn that the whole time, An was taking pictures of Satsuki taking pictures of Makinohara taking pictures. Of course, it doesn't end there. Once Makinohara leaves the story, we get a new Inception-style cascade. We have Satsuki and An taking pictures, then we have Haruno making a manga about Satsuki and An taking pictures. Then you have us, the viewers, watching an anime about Haruno making a manga about Satsuki and An taking pictures. The point the series is trying to make is obvious: Capturing the act of making art can be art in and of itself, and being inspired by others' art and making your own from it is a beautiful and wonderful thing.

The other theme Mono touches on is the relationship between technology and art. Photography has been around since the invention of the earliest camera prototype and drawing since time immemorial. Yet with new technology, Satsuki is able to easily get breathtaking shots with minimal effort and Haruno is able to sit at home and do all the work of a manga artist with nothing but her tablet. Technology can support artists in achieving their vision and even facilitate new kinds of art, like strapping a video camera onto a cat for a week and seeing what happens.

Yeah, I think the scene that sold me on Mono was when the girls strapped a helmet-cam to Haruno's cat Taisho and inadvertently made a video montage of cats getting into fights. It's the kind of unique and genuinely interesting thing that makes the audience connect more with Satsuki and An's hobbies. When you've seen as much anime as I have, the "Cute Girls" part of the equation has long since lost its novelty for the most part, so shows like Mono have to come up with some legitimately meaningful stories to tell and a cast that has more going for it than decent character designs. Mono has those qualities so far and should make for an easy seasonal pick for any viewers that crave something more easygoing to pass the time.

In the end, I'm kinda shocked at how thematically strong this episode is. Beyond that, it has a fun and silly central trio, with two other characters soon to join the main cast, solid visuals and clever humor. While I don't know if this series will be for me in the long run, watching this episode was a real treat and I can't recommend it enough.

First-year highschool student Yuina Akagi lives an ordinary but unsatisfying everyday life in Maebashi, the capital of Gunma Prefecture. One day, a mysterious frog named Keroppe scouts her and four other girls to become the Maebashi Witches. Suddenly a closet becomes connected to a mysterious space that brings the girls to a magical flower shop where they sing, dance and make other people's wishes come true.

If any of you out there have been praying for a reprieve from the concentrated cuteness convergence that this spring season has turned out to be, well, I have bad news for you. In fact, I'd bet money that the animators working on Maebashi Witches used paints made of melted cotton candy and the stuff they use to coat jelly beans to colour pretty much every frame of this episode. I sure hope Yuina and her cutesy coven offer complimentary insulin shots with their services.

Okay, so Maebashi Witches is about cute girls from Maebashi who transform into even cuter versions of themselves thanks to weird frog magic, and they use their witch powers to light up the lives of regular people with song and dance. While it is very possible that their mascot could turn out to be a total Kyubey and reveal himself to be an eldritch god of nightmares and misery in a few episodes, this premiere plays things completely straight. We meet Yuina, we meet all the other multicoloured hairdos that are destined to be her magical teammates, and then they all transport a girl into an insane realm of absurdist fantasy imagery to solve all of her problems with a pop idol music video.

I think I like this show much more on paper than in reality. It sounds like a fun combination of genres--magical girls, witches and idols, with a helping of local tourism PR for good measure. And it is, in fact, all of those things: In Maebashi, a weird frog thing with a zipper in his back is collecting girls to train as witches. They get to transform and sing songs to help grant people's wishes and shit. It sounds delightful.

Regretfully, I didn't find the reality as entrancing, in large part because Yuina is rather annoying. She herself knows it--at one point she remarks that people say she gets more irritating the longer you spend with her. The rest of the cast may eventually be able to balance her out, but this first episode is primarily The Yuina Show, and the other two girls who get the most screentime also have their issues--Azu is snooty and selfish, while Choco is intended to be endearing but just comes across as a dumbass. The two remaining cast members, Kyoka and Mai, seem a little more balanced, but that also appears to make them uninteresting to the writers, who don't give them quite enough to do yet.

Of course, all of this could very well be intentional. Keroppe, who comments that the name Yuina gives him is treading close to copyright laws, is very genre savvy. He's not quite winking at the audience, but he makes a lot of cracks that make it clear that this is at least a little metafictional. He flings himself into his role as mascot character with mad abandon, asking if Yuina wants the full show when he explains things, and stopping, rewinding and fast-forwarding the episode a few times. He's also very good with the girls, which is nice to see. When Azu starts getting all pissy about Yuina taking charge, he explains that it's not that she's in charge, but that she has the best, clearest imagination of the five, something that lets the cooler heads of Kyoka and Mai prevail.

To be fair, as far as candy-coated anime junk food is concerned, Maebashi Witches seems intent on exquisite production. It's got some funny jokes, decent characters, and most of all, it's got style. For all the joking I did about this show being a hazard for the diabetic, the art and animation are honestly quite stunning most of the time, so I was never bored or frustrated with the show, even when I couldn't be bothered to care that much about the story being told. This is sheer, unabashed pop spectacle, and I respect the work Maebashi Witches has put into being the sparkliest, shiniest, most show-offy production it can be.

Still, this doesn't exactly help the pacing, nor the way it feels like a video game tie-in. I was surprised to find out it isn't one, because it looks and acts very much like it comes from or with one. Perhaps I was thrown by Keroppe's mention that he lost the "witch gacha". In any case, while this does look good in places and uses its colour-coding well, it doesn't really come together as well as I'd have hoped, at least not yet. It's a good idea executed with some big flaws. If you can forgive those, however, it's certainly far from the worst thing you could spend half an hour on.

To say that The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl was a welcome surprise would be an understatement. Thankfully, unlike a certain other anime romcom with a gorilla in it from a few years ago, The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl is not a wretched, spiteful, laughter-destroying entropy machine ripped straight from the bowels of Anime Hell. Instead, this anime is about a girl who's already an outcast in school (due to her being a countryside noble) and gets the blessing of an animal god that makes her even more of an outcast. Animal gods choose people to bless in a ceremony when they turn 16, and whatever god chooses you determines your special abilities. While many girls get more typically feminine gifts, unassuming Sophia Reeler ends up being the first person blessed by the Gorilla God in 50 years, so she gets the incredibly unladylike powers of a gorilla. But even though her new powers make her utterly mortified, they also make her incredibly attractive to the royal knights who'd do just about anything to add a person with super strength and speed to their ranks. Also, the new order of knights she's been scouted into is full of hunky boys that all represent other animal gods, and they'll all undoubtedly fall in love with her. Naturally. In any case, Sophia's life plans are abruptly derailed.

Not that she seems to have had many plans--or much personality--prior to being selected. She does seem ambivalent about earning her MRS degree at the end of her schooling, like so many of her peers are planning, but she was also in no way expecting to be scouted by the Royal Knights, or to be the only girl ever scouted. All Sophia knows is that she doesn't want this kind of attention, so she plans to fail the junior knight exams and go crave bananas somewhere out of the way.

As you might've guessed, that's not going to happen. It looks like she has little to no control over when her powers kick in, and the episode shows them as being somehow instinctive--the boy who seems to be the chosen of the golden retriever god is falling, so she grabs him in her giant fist and then gets them both to the ground. She's running, so she naturally falls into a ground-eating lope. It's like the god is now dictating how her body works, and if she's not all that bemused by it, it certainly looks at least a little awkward, and she may not be registering what's happening because she's so busy thinking about how to fail an exam I'm 90% sure she's already aced.

What we get from this is the story of an outcast finding the place she belongs and is valued somewhere she never expected. The knights-in-training she encounters are impressed by her kindness as much as her powers and the attention she receives is universally positive, and the comedy centered around her lack of control over her powers is worth a laugh or two. I also enjoyed the gorilla facts we get throughout the episode as they give us something we rarely get in anime with superpowers: Concrete numbers. She's stated to be seven times as strong as a normal human and able to run at 40kph. This means we know her limits going in and can figure out when she is or isn't in danger.

Along with the puppy boy, there seems to be a catboy and the true main romantic interest circling around her. We don't get any hints as to what Louis' god is yet, but he's the guy we see the most of, primarily in the opening theme, which makes them look like a set pair. Animation-wise, nothing looks remarkable except how much longer Sophia's hair inexplicably is in the ending theme, and noticeable shortcuts are taken throughout the episode, but this is still a mild, entertaining bit of fluff, and I think it could be fun enough that I can overlook the issue for now.

Overall, this anime is a bit rough around the edges on the animation front and won't exactly blow your socks off with its story or humor, but everything still manages to come together to form a rather enjoyable package. It's certainly better than average and I'll probably keep up with it as best as I can this season.

[Atuhor's Nose: This was meant to go up yesterday but I was having a bad day and I forgor, my apologies. Today's a double-feature day.]


Satoko is a naive young kunoichi, and Konoha is an assassin highschool girl. Satoko escapes from her ninja village and meets Konoha, and they start living together, welcoming in a life full of danger and excitement.

I knew I was going to love A Ninja and an Assassin Under One Roof from its very first scene, which sees our hapless heroine Satoko fleeing from her ninja clan in a sequence that looks like it was ripped right out of a late-80s anime but injected with far more moe ninja girls that you'd have seen back then. Any comedy that's willing to be so playful and confident with its stylistic switchups right off the bat is bound to get my attention.

Then as Satoko gets embroiled in the bloody world of assassination that Konoha is currently climbing the ranks of, we see that this show is a proud graduate of the Nichijou School of Animating the Dumbest Possible Shit in Glorious Detail. This, as I've explained many times before, is an incredibly reliable recipe for good comedy in anime. The contrast between the lush production values and the deadpan editing that shows Konoha straight-up murdering all of Satoko's former clanmates is just inherently funny, and it never really gets old across the entire premiere.

Thankfully, the show has plenty of other jokes to turn to as well, and this anime absolutely benefits from the variety of gags on display, especially since nearly all of them land. For example, when Satoko got disgusted looks and mocking jeers from onlookers as she casually sniffed out the underwear scent trail that led her to Konoha's school, or when Konoha impressively improvised a needlessly convoluted explanation to her friend for why she's suddenly living with a crazy young girl who goes around dressed like a ninja, or when she discovered that her next target was that same friend's father and then immediately proceeded to assassinate him without a second thought, or pretty much every time Satoko turned a corpse into a pile of leaves with her ridiculous ninja magic.

The title makes it clear from the start that this is a lighthearted teen yuri romcom between a ninja and a professional assassin, and while it is that, it also does a great job at subverting genre expectations. Take a similar show like Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid--each dragon introduced is so wonderfully designed and given such a distinct, enjoyable personality and interesting backstory, it's not like they'd be killed off moments after appearing, right? Well, in this show they sure would be. We see not one, but two meticulously designed ninja girls murdered within moments of being introduced, their bodies then turned into leaves and scattered to the winds. What's more, neither of our titular characters seem to care about the killing of Satoko's former companions--it's for the sake of a punchline and nothing more.

In most anime of this type, it's the characters' hidden feelings, who they are underneath, that draws them together. In this anime, it's the opposite. It's Satoko's practical skills--body stashing and homemaking--that appeal to Konoha. The show also gets a lot of mileage out of how unimportant Konoha views Satoko's contributions to her everyday life and how little it takes for Satoko to become overjoyed.

And then there's the production values. Sometimes it feels like there's double or triple the amount of keyframes onscreen than is strictly necessary, but not in a jarring, uncanny way. The direction is incredible when it comes to both action and getting the most out of the comedy. Shaft has really brought their A-game this time around, and it shows.

In a season as stacked as this one, I was wondering how many other premieres would manage to stand out amongst all the stiff competition. Go ahead and add A Ninja and an Assassin Under One Roof to the unusually large pile of anime you should definitely check out this season. I know everyone's Spring 2025 watchlists are probably getting bulky at this point, but I'm confident that this one's a keeper. I'm in for the long haul and I can't wait for more.

Welcome to Kowloon Walled City, a dystopian townscape where the past, present and future converge. Amid the hidden emotions and extraordinary daily lives of the people working in its confines, a tale of romance begins to unfold for real estate agent Reiko Kujirai, one that feels as familiar as Kowloon itself.

Wow. I already had a feeling that I'd enjoy Kowloon Generic Romance because I'm predisposed to enjoying any halfway-decent romance anime about characters who share actual chemistry with each other, especially if they happen to be adults instead of the typical highschoolers, but never did I expect to be this blown away by what I watched.

I have a long-standing fascination with Kowloon Walled City and its influence on the cyberpunk aesthetic. It was a truly fascinating locale that now only lives in people's minds. In this place, we have nothing but people who reject anything else. They eat the same foods, go to the same places, live in the same old tiny apartments, and never even think of leaving the confines of their little city. You could say they're goldfish trapped in a bowl of their own making.

Reiko lives in one of the many densely packed, jagged buildings that made the real Kowloon so infamous. While the real Kowloon was razed to the ground and turned into a public park over 30 years ago, this version of it is alive and well in the year... Uh, actually, that's not entirely clear. Everything about the setting is suspect--even if you didn't know that the real Kowloon was demolished in 1994, the vibe of the place is very much of that time. There are no smartphones, no sleek laptops, none of our now-standard 30-inch LCD televisions, nothing that really indicates a time beyond 1995, and yet we do see some familiar fashions and devices and the like mixed in. There's obviously an intent to make this place feel like it exists outside or beyond any time period we might recognize. Then there's the fact that a giant floating polyhedron monitors the entire city on behalf of a company called Generic Terra. According to Hajime Kudo, Reiko's colleague and love interest, Generic Terra is using their tax dollars to "create a fake Earth". Ah, okay, CLEARLY there's nothing to be concerned about on that front. I'm sure it's a plot point that won't ever become relevant again, even if Reiko's entire world is shattered at the end of the premiere when she discovers that--oh, wait, can't reveal this one for you, sorry. Normally I'd be fine with dropping big reveals the premiere gives us because hey, it's just the first episode, but this? I want you to see it for yourself. Which you absolutely should.

What makes me adore this premiere is the fact that even if we set aside the ominous dystopian sci-fi twists and turns the story takes, the show would still be a must-watch based purely on its success as a romantic drama. Hajime and Reiko make for a great pair of romantic leads, with Reiko's understated but still forceful personality pairing well with Hajime's antics. I could see some folks being turned off by Hajime acting like a bit of a dumb manchild sometimes, but I think the show makes it work, especially when the episode's last-minute reveals give you cause to question how much of the real Hajime we've actually seen.

From the start of the episode, there's an air of something being subtly wrong with what we're seeing, and that's before we see the giant thing floating in the sky. Given that the talking heads of Generic Terra mention a new virtual world that people can live in for all eternity, along with all this taking place in a location that no longer exists in the real world and is apparently populated by Japanese people despite being in Hong Kong, I think we can probably start to connect the dots as to what's really going on here even without me spoiling the episode's ending. Then we have the central love story of the show. While Hajime is a bit of an ass, he's also charming enough to make up for it, and the more we see of him, the more apparent it is that his actions are a way of getting Reiko on what amounts to secret dates. Yet at the same time, there's the constant distance he keeps between them, never letting her get too close even as she falls for him.

It's challenging to even articulate, because every element is so wrapped up in one another, I'm struggling to even separate it all enough to discuss it. The characters, the setting, the story, it's all tightly woven into a stunning tapestry. It doesn't necessarily come across that way at first--Reiko and Hajime chitchat and have mildly belligerent sexual tension as they work together. Reiko craves novelty and adventure, but Hajime admires the nostalgic sensibilities of the run-down city. Kowloon is appealingly worn, full of crowded streets, faded signs and alleyways where children play. There's a sensuality to the two and their space as the episode moves through brief vignettes of their time together--Reiko painting her apartment in skimpy clothes to try and fend off the heat, the two of them gorging themselves at street carts and treating the viewers by proxy to some of the finest anime food ever animated outside of a Ghibli movie, the two standing on a rooftop for a smoke break... Their easy chemistry makes it believable instead of jarring when Reiko thinks to herself "I love this man."

But this is far from a slice-of-life show, given the octagon floating in the sky above them and the mysterious pharmaceutical company with eyedrops that happen to cure Reiko's poor vision. Sometimes Hajime looks at Reiko but seems to see someone else. These bits mixed with the nostalgic sensibility of Kowloon create a defamiliarizing effect, preventing you from ever getting too comfortable with what's happening, and the strangeness comes at a faster and faster pace right up until the bombshell that is the episode's finale. Why the people within Kowloon are o bound by it is an even greater question, and it's one that this episode does a brilliant job of forcing us to ponder.

Everything about this premiere encourages us to question the reality we're looking at. I was instantly struck by the way Reiko kept taking off her glasses, which feels like an odd gesture. The way she presses on her nose could indicate pain, but it also looks a bit like she's trying to remember something. Even before she finds the picture or before the man who runs the teahouse says he recognizes her as Hajime's girlfriend, there's just something barely on the edge of perception that she's trying to focus on, and that makes us suspicious that we're missing something as well.

It's probably worth remembering too that the word "romance" didn't originally mean "love story", but something closer to "fantasy" so while there does appear to be a love story in here, or maybe a lost love story since Reiko doesn't remember Hajime despite people alluding to them having already been a couple, it's that other definition that could be more important. If something happened to Reiko to cause her to lose her memory, Hajime could be living a fantasy version of his life with her, spending time with a woman he loved who no longer recalls their relationship. She knows she loves him, but she doesn't seem to know why, and the brief mention of Generic Terra holding memories is really making me question what's actually happening.

Is it a fantasy? A mystery? A bittersweet love story? I'm not sure, but Kowloon Generic Romance could easily be one of the best shows of the season. There's a lot of talk of the mystifying but undeniable power of nostalgia in this premiere, which is the perfect throughline to explore the intangible magnetism that makes for genuine, complex romance. I cannot recommend this one enough. It's the best surprise of the season so far.

Happy Homestuck Day!

In the harsh region known as the borderlands, humans fight an endless battle against demihuman creatures that come at them relentlessly, intent on taking their land and resources. A young boy named Kai, fighting to defend his village, sustains a life-threatening injury that causes him to regain memories from a past life. Kai's newfound knowledge gives him a new sense of the unfair system that governs the world around him. One thing is clear: For those without a god to serve as their guardian, life is a constant struggle for survival.

Everything has an explanation, and Teogonia's first episode wants to make sure you're aware of that. In its defense, it does try not to just be an infodump--there is action that goes along with the explanations. But so much of it is handled clumsily that it feels like a thin attempt to animate what may well have been paragraphs of descriptive prose in the original light novel. It's not really a triumph of presentation.

On the one hand, I like what Teogonia is trying to do with its twist on the isekai genre. In nearly all isekai stories, our hero is fully transferred to another world either in body or soul. This means that the isekai'd person is basically a modern human. Even if their soul enters the body of an existing person, the original memories and personality are completely supplanted and we're not supposed to think about the horrifying implications of this. Teogonia, on the other hand, shows an isekai on the other side of the spectrum. Kai is very much a child of the fantasy world we see onscreen. However, from time to time, he gets glimpses of his past life, of our world. There's no personality or context in these memories. He knows what onigiri is despite never seeing one. He knows about magic and that it's an imaginary concept on Earth. It's a creative storytelling decision that manages to make the main character special while avoiding the most egregious isekai fantasy cliches.

On the other hand, despite this, I found myself a bit bored throughout this episode, thanks largely to the action being so stilted and awkward. It lingers too long on almost every frame, making it feel almost like it's in slow motion. That's unfortunate because there are some interesting elements to this story. Kai, the protagonist, is the sort of scrappy orphan we've seen before, but that's not a bad thing. He's intensely aware of the inequalities of his home village where the nobles eat better and get the lion's share of "godstones" (which, from what I can tell, are a bit like Final Fantasy 6's Magicite) looted from the corpses of fallen demihuman enemies. He's reasonably sure that if he can't find a way to stand out, he'll never move up the social ladder. But he's also coping with intrusive memories of a different world, something not entirely unknown in his culture but not something he cares to share with the class. It's too early to tell if this is stealth isekai or a situation where he travels between worlds while he sleeps or something, but it could make a major difference in how interesting the story becomes.

It could also just be another point of confusion because Kai's otherworld is like ours but with magic. In a deviation from how the rest of the episode runs, we're not shown Kai using magic in our world, but he seems pretty sure he can, or should be able to, shoot flames from his fingertips. That appears to be a significant difference from how "divine power" works in his present reality. However, it may be a strictly semantic issue since both come from the godstone.

In addition to this, I didn't find the fantasy world particularly engaging. Various species of humans/demihumans are basically trapped in a neverending war where the strong literally feed on the weak to become stronger. The nobles are mostly sexist and classist and the common man is clearly getting a raw deal. While this is objectively terrible, I didn't find myself connecting with it on an emotional level. Kai is supposed to be our bridge to the world and he has little in the way of personality beyond feeling like he's meant for more.

Simply put, this premiere is an odd combination of overexplaining and underexplaining. Characters spout off worldbuilding details in stilted conversations, but the really interesting bits are left out. Orcs look like the evil cousins of the Three Little Pigs, Lady Jose is sidelined because of her gender, and other boilerplate fantasy elements undercut Kai's plot so far. This isn't without potential, but it needs to figure out how best to tell its story within the next couple episodes, because what it's doing right now isn't working and I can't solidly recommend it in this state.

Reiko Hosho, daughter of the head of the Hosho Zaibatsu, has become a rookie detective. Her boss is Inspector Kyoichiro Kazamatsuri, the son of the owner of Kazamatsuri Motors. The two work together to solve difficult cases. When tackling her cases, Reiko always consults her butler and driver, Kageyama, who spouts harsh language and insults Reiko but always brilliantly manages to help solve the case.

So as the title implies, The Dinner Table Detective is this season's big new mystery series. Heiress Reiko Hosho works as a detective, keeping the two sides of her life separate. When a murder occurs at a party she's attending, she has to quickly change her clothes and hairstyle and go into work mode. The criminal remains undiscovered by the end of the episode, largely due to Reiko and her fellow detective Kyoichiro Kazamatsuri, interviewing witnesses and stumbling about. There's some fun to be had with that--Kazamatsuri is played by Mamoru Miyano at his most Mamoru Miyano, braying and boasting without any actual understanding of the situation. They couldn't be clearer foils--where Reiko tries to blend in and keeps her status as a wealthy heiress under wraps, Kazamatsuri doesn't even try to hide his wealth. This premiere also gives every appearance of being a decent fair-play mystery. The near-death of Mizuho is preceded by an appealing number of clues--the attempted suicide of another woman, the conspicuous amount of red dresses with green necklaces in the crowd, and a plotline about old friendships soured, all giving us things to chew on long before we really even know the crime.

However, the show isn't without its problems. One is that this doesn't look great. Oh, it has some nice touches, like the clearly opulent surroundings and the attention to detail in the various body types and dress and necklace styles we see. The character art, which faithfully recreates the manga's artstyle, is quite nice--there's a lot of variation in the characters' faces and dress styles that tell you a lot about their personalities right off the bat. However, the animation is noticeably limited at times, and the backgrounds have this weird effect of looking like photographs run through a filter and given black outlines to make them look like drawn art. The other problem is the bigger issue: A lot of the attempts to inject comedy into the story fall flat. I'm okay with Reiko having a flaky side because she otherwise seems pretty competent, but Kazamatsuri is just a buffoonish loudmouth. Plus there's the matter of the butler, Kageyama, who I know from reading the description helps Reiko solve the mysteries. He has no problem insulting her intelligence to her face, which I know is exciting to some women and will undoubtedly make him be seen as a cool bad boy, but I have reservations about a story that hinges around a man doing a woman's job for her because he thinks she can't handle it.

Oh, and if I could give one solid piece of advice to anyone checking out this show via Amazon Prime like I did, it would be to avoid the English dub at all costs. Amazon seems so determined to drag us back to the bad ol' days of genuinely baffling and damaging localizations, they're on their way to rivalling people like Jamie Marchi, Katrina Leonoudakis and everyone joining in on the "4Kids were misunderstood angels who did nothing wrong" crusade. I don't know what web of contracts and outsourcing is going on behind the scenes that has shows like Tonbo, My Deer Friend Nokotan and The Dinner Table Detective premiering with English dubs that sound like they've been unearthed from some long-forgotten 4Kids vault, but this madness has to end. Everything about The Dinner Table Detective is made categorically worse in English on account of everything from the overly literal and completely inhuman-sounding translations to the forced, awkward accents of the presumably South African performers--the dub was recorded by Transperfect Media Cape Town, whose "AI solutions" approach to their marketing does not speak to a company that cares much about the human quality of their productions, even when a dub like this one does in fact have a cast of flesh-and-blood humans.

I hate to spend so much time railing on Amazon's terrible licensing and localization practices, but if they're seriously going to make an attempt at penetrating the anime streaming market, they need to be held accountable for how badly their service compares to every single other one. Even Disney is doing better with their anime, which is one of the saddest phrases I've had to physically type in a long time.

Anyway, problems aside, the show is a fine and functional mystery caper, at least in Japanese, even if it doesn't make for the most terribly memorable first impression. I enjoyed the playful direction of the show that keeps it from getting too bogged down in exposition, and there's definitely a charm to the wacky banter that Reiko and Kazamatsuri get into as they try to solve the soiree's murder mystery. Your mileage may vary though, depending on your tolerance for a lot of overly shouty manzai antics.

Really, my main beef with the actually watchable Japanese version of The Dinner Table Detective is that I didn't find the detective work itself very interesting, which is kind of a problem for a whodunit, not helped by the episode not even resolving the mystery yet by the time the credits roll. It's not bad by any means, but the whole affair is laden with "random episode of a long-running mystery series that you could put on to kill the silence while you eat dinner" vibes. Far from the worst thing you could watch this season, and shows like this always have the chance of picking up when you move on to a new case. Hopefully the second and third episodes can even things out a little and provide a more satisfying feeling, but if they don't, there's another mystery anime with a preternaturally gifted butler airing on Saturdays, and that may be the better bet.