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I really liked the first season of Moonlit Fantasy, so I gotta say it is a disappointing we got lame episodes back to back focusing exclusively on characters who are way less interesting than any of the actual protagonists. Triply so because the main cast actually being interesting and compelling and having their own distinct personalities and motives was IMO the single strongest feature of the first season. The fact the show suddenly had to back up to slam through a bunch of scenes about characters who are markedly less interesting really sucks. Honestly though I'm not sure there was a winning hand here. If they had cut in scenes about these losers into the first season it would've made it worse since these people are boring and also it would have been confusing because they had no relation to the main plot for that entire length of the story of that season. And if we are finally hitting their relevance to the plot and need to know who these people are then yeah, I guess the show does need to cram them into the second season for the sake of the anime onlys. I do hope the show can get back up to speed once we're focusing on characters I actually give a crap about because I don't really care about these people.
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Jan 23, 2024 19:45
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 21:25 |
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The weird thing is that after the most recent episode of Metallic Rouge I think I'm a little bit more confident it will have A conclusion and not just turn into a weird pile of loose threads, but at the same time I do not believe at this rate the series will be particularly "resolved", much less satisfactorily.Caphi posted:The actual plot of Metallic Rouge is about what I came for, the problem I'm having with it is that Rouge is being insanely slow to get on board it, especially against how fast and hard it's actually going. You can't throw all this intrigue at the wall for 7 straight episodes, a good amount directly into the protagonist's face, and have her still in the "but... but you're evil?" phase. This very much. I honestly think Rouge is the weakest part of the show. Naomi is cool, Rouge's interplay with Naomi is cool, but it's hard to ignore that a show dripping with intrigue and fascinating characters and an incredibly wild setting is burdened by this albatross of a protagonist who comes across as not only dense and unaware but weirdly incurious. And some of that is deliberate given Rouge spent the first couple of episodes as an audience surrogate to have details of the incredibly dense setting explained to her AND there's been a whole rolling plot line revolving around weirdness related to her mission and her history and her memories, but despite all that the show hasn't really gone anywhere. We are long past the point where Rouge should be asking what the hell is actually going on here and she just... Hasn't. Another point of concern for me is that I have seen shows that this kind of rolling nested mysteries, and the good ones actually start tying things off as the story goes on. The fact Metallic Rouge just keeps on convoluted things is not a reassuring sign. Meanwhile, Bravern somehow continues its unbelievable balancing act. It's amazing how well the show holds together despite hard shifting between genres every couple of minutes.
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Feb 23, 2024 07:37
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Brutal Garcon posted:This week's Sasaki and Pii-chan was looking a bit rough, hope that's not a sign of some bigger problem I got off after episode six and I never felt like it was a particularly good looking show. If it's slipping even more that's... Not good.
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Mar 2, 2024 04:59
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haypliss posted:The rescues are cool and the guys are gay, yep that's sports anime. Hey now, let's not be exclusionary, sometimes your sports anime is about girls (who are also gay)
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Mar 3, 2024 03:35
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My personal pitch is that Bravern isn't like Gridman at all because because I was frustrated and disappointed by Gridman and I like Bravern.
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Mar 20, 2024 04:19
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 21:25 |
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And we are done! Another season in the rearview mirror, time for too many words because someone out there actually seems interested in my opinions! Sasaki and Peeps: My only drop of the season. I'd call this show a tarfire but that would imply something was moving. Hoo boy was this a botch. Sasaki and Peeps threw absolutely everything at the wall and nothing stuck, more's the pity. I'm not opposed to this kind of hodgepodge kitchen sink style of media, but the show did not work. We had isekai stuff, reverse isekai stuff, fantasy economics, fantasy warfare and politics, rival ESPer factions fighting each other, clandestine magical government stuff, a magical workplace drama, a dark magical girl genre spoof, and apparently there was a good old fashioned death game that popped up sometime after I jumped ship, and you'd think with all that going on at some point the show would get interesting but no, it didn't. Despite all the stuff happening the show was downright languid. I have no idea about the source material, but if you're gonna put a story loaded to the dam gills with so much nonsense on screen you need to actually lean into it and, I don't know, try a little bit? They didn't. Animation-wise either incidentally; I heard the production values fell off a cliff in the back half of the show, but it definitely wasn't a good-looking show to begin with. Aoi Yuki was absolutely wasted in this by the way. She was the reason I gave it a shot in the first place and I don't know what happened but she gave a completely forgettable performance which is an astonishing own goal. Meanwhile our lead is just a rolling botch. He is not interesting at all and that's annoying because once or twice you get the glimmer of a good idea here. A couple of times I thought the joke was going to be that his experience as a salary man was going to ironically make him well suited to all the nonsense happening around him, like his ability to diplomatically beg off and read the power dynamics of the room and know when to take responsibility and when to pass the buck would get him out of bad situations but no, not really. It comes up every so often comes up but that feels less like a narrative choice and more like an accident of concordant themes. Also, not really sure I like the fact that our middle-aged schlub of a protagonist has four separate underage girls not-so-subtly falling for him, and that the fourth member of that group was inexplicably revealed to be underage as a joke. No joy here. On to shows I finished! Shangri-La Frontier: This show ruled. Shangri-La Frontier was an incredibly smart and canny show with a deep understanding of videogames and videogame players and it uses that wealth of knowledge and wisdom to be one of the best dumb fun action series I have ever seen. All the window dressing and world design and character dynamics existed solely for the purpose of getting one or more of our brilliant moron leads in the same room as a big old monster so we can have an immaculately choreographed spectacle of videogame violence. It warms my heart. It's also just about the only VRMMO series about "the most awesome game ever" that actually kind of delivers on the hype about its fantasy game. SLF was clearly designed by a writer who actually knew even a little bit about videogames and videogame design so the fantasy they're pitching is better thought out and way more compelling than most of its oeuvre. I genuinely have fun watching Sunraku learn about the game and progress through it and having fun himself. That's something it has over other VRMMO shows, even good ones. Absolutely gonna be here in October for the next season. Shin no Nakama season 2: A running theme of my winter viewing has been "disappointing second seasons" and here we have case study number one. The original Shin no Nakama wasn't some timeless classic, but it was a surprisingly strong show that took a somewhat overdone cliché and iterated on it in an interesting way. The show did a lot of things that separated it from the standard default Dragon Quest fantasy setting, primarily by having a rather nasty undercurrent to its setting and its magic blessings. Add onto that a strong cast of characters and a really compelling relationship between the lead and his girlfriend and it was a sleeper hit for its season. Season two isn't anywhere near as good, and in retrospect I wonder if the source material was originally intended to end where the first season of the anime left off because we have all the symptoms of sequel-itis writ large… Season 2 is significantly less focused than the previous season. A number of the dangling plot threads remain dangling and largely unaddressed. The Hero from season one ended it having gained an incredibly powerful, possibly even world changing ability and it isn't mentioned a single time in season two. A bunch of characters rotate in and out of the main town despite season one spending a good amount of time emphasizing just how drat remote it was. The driving force of season two is a new chosen Hero who is more or less going on the exact same character arc we saw in season one but approaching from a different direction and while the payoff was good it took entirely too long for someone punch him in his goddamn face. The broader world feels less flushed out and explored this time, and the very real ongoing conflict which we see a lot of in season one is barely here this time. The cast ultimately feel a little more hollow and a little less fleshed out this time as well, and to double down there's also uncomfortably more fan service. I was honestly pulling for this show but it could well just be yet another case where a series continues after it should've ended. C'est la vie. The Fire Hunter: Another disappointing second season, but in hindsight I'm not sure what I was expecting. To be honest I'm not entirely sure why I watched this show's second season but it is in good company because I'm not entirely sure I know why watched the first one either. I will say, however, that there aren't a lot of shows that have the same feel as this one. The Fire Hunter stands almost completely alone in that regard. I don't regret the time I watched it either, but I also don't think I would ever really "recommend" this show. Once again we have an incredibly slow and strangely told series about a weird setting with strange characters and a somber, even dreamlike tone. The production on the whole is just strange from the score to the animation to the way it randomly cuts to still illustrations once or twice an episode. Characters talk about concepts in great detail, but very often they still aren't really fully explained despite how long is spent on everyone reiterating them to each other. Stuff happens, even some downright shocking things actually, but it's all so strangely paced and muted that the impact is bizarre. I was never really sure how I felt about proceedings except maybe that the male lead boy wonder scientist/weapons manufacturer was dull and I wanted to see more of the obsequious female lead who spent 99% of the series cowering and awkwardly calling out to people and 1% effortlessly slaughtering giant monsters with a sickle. Unsurprisingly the show is also weird structurally, the cast repeatedly split up and reunite for no particularly good reason in the first half of the season before everyone decides to just go to the place they decided to go to in the first place, after splitting up again. It's a weird weird weird show without even getting into some of the nonsense like trying to enshrine a satellite as a goddess, or the divine eugenics program, or the giant lightning cannon that turns out to be completely unimportant, or the invasion of capital that's mostly offscreen and also not very important, or the true purpose of the pollution factories, or the exciting non-ending to that whole plot line about "The Lord of the Fire Hunters"... Again, wouldn't recommend it but it is a singular show! Metallic Rouge: Metallic Rouge is a reminder that a show cannot live on vibes alone. It's also a show that puts to mind that old saying: "if it's not in frame it doesn't exist". And it brings that to mind because the back half of the show shifts to become entirely predicated on the familial relationships of people we don't really know, a number of whom are dead by the point it starts to matter and many of whom are just not particularly compelling as characters. The show looks good though. The voice cast did a good job, the score vibed right with the show, and the setting was wild and evocative but surprisingly well presented. Given how much there was to it I think Metallic Rouge did a drat fine job putting it across. Maybe more of a job that really needed to, even, because after spending the first half of the show as a cluster bomb of storytelling going every which way the back half when the main plot really kicked in was decidedly less interesting. There were a couple of standout episodes here including the famous one with the dog punch, and there was some good action (though not in the finale) and I liked a good number of the characters well enough, but the actual story they decided to tell was about the least interesting thing in the show. As a fun bonus the final stretch gave us a sequence of shocking reveals that had me yawning. It wasn't a boring show for sure and the vibes were immaculate and further I will give praise that the show actually took a stand at the end which I really didn't expect, but nah, pass. A show cannot live on vibes alone. BANG BRAVE BANG BRAVERN: Absolutely the surprise blowout of the season. It didn't hit me as hard as I know it hit some people on this dead, gay comedy forum, but wow was this a hell of a show. Hell I'll say it another way: Bravern is a miracle of a show. It should not have worked as well as it did, and yet? This is a show that completely shifted its tone, genre, style, and seriousness about every five minutes. This is a show that goes from gritty, hard nosed Real Robot to Top Gun to a Disaster movie to a completely un-ironic Super Robot show to a completely ironic Super Robot show and then back in THE FIRST EPISODE. And it just keeps going from there. I am truly left in awe that a show can variously be both serious and silly, parody and sincere, heartfelt and comedic, tragic and goofy, all in a single episode with the same cast of characters telling the same story. Holy gently caress. This is basically what Sasaki and Peeps was trying and failing to be with its kitchen sink approach to things and that show just highlights how astonishing Bravern truly is. This was a true bolt from the blue and I'm glad I was there to watch it. Frieren at the Funeral: Well hello there our 2024 favorite for Anime of the Year. This show was phenomenal on so many levels. As an adaptation it looked gorgeous with insane production values. As a story it was amazing, poignant, funny, bittersweet, compelling and so much more. The voice cast were outstanding. The storytelling went above and beyond. The cast were phenomenal. It stands so far ahead of so many other shows. And it's not just that Frieren has a unique take on its material and basic premise, it's that it approaches and portrays concepts that you rarely see not just in anime but in media period. Frieren is one of the only shows I have ever seen where a character who's over a thousand years old feels like she's a thousand years old. This is a show that uses the protagonist's immortality not merely as a way for bittersweet, poignant feelings but also as a lens to get a better understanding of history and to vastly expand the scope of the world. The world of Frieren feels vast and old because of her lifespan when in plenty of other shows it would have to feel that way in spite of it. And that's without getting into the deep nuances and complicated relationships spun from and out and between the characters and the way they are framed against the span of history and the scale of the world. This was, on every level, an astonishing show. The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic: My mandatory, once per season junk food show. Unsurprisingly it's an isekai, and while I don't think I'd go all the way and call this show "great" I think it is actually pretty good. Our protagonist is cool in a terrestrial way and his power makes him special but he's not inherently put over as super OP (the dude goes through hell to get where he is) and while he wasn't supposed to be summoned his two isekai'd hero buddies are genuinely good people who like him and he's broadly respected and appreciated even before he saves the day. It's nothing stellar (and that flashback arc sucked), but it is a show that consistently hit above average (even if only just) and I will gladly watch another season of it should it come out. The Apothecary Diaries: I think Frieren is the stronger show on the whole, but I think this is my favorite of this season and perhaps the last. Like I said in Fall's thread, Aoi Yuki the Drugcat making  and solving mysteries? Hell yeah that is exactly the sort of thing I can get in on. And as it went through both its cours the show demonstrated a real knack for telling interesting stories in its quasi-historic setting. This is a show that frequently knew how to delve into dark subject matter without it feeling excessive or voyeuristic or bleak. It also has one of the most believable takes on the "vast evil conspiracy" I've ever seen. And of course it has Aoi Yuki giving a fantastic performance that vacillates between serious, tragic, comedic, intelligent, and blinkered at varying times that makes her a real wonder to see in action. Watching the drugcat maneuver through a complicated world with her mix of wary cynicism, drug-related exuberance, and her underlying sense of justice was continuously compelling and the voice of her narration made the whole show stand part. An excellent mystery show. More please.Ongoing stuff Moonlit Fantasy Season 2: I really liked the first season of Moonlit Fantasy when it aired a couple of years ago and while it hasn't been a smooth transition into the season two I do still quite enjoy this show. Back then one of the things I called out was the way it gave a crap about more things than just the protagonist and while the show is leaning a little further into him and his group being stupid OP (and his recent new power up looks like garbage) it still has many of the things I liked about season one. There are multiple characters that have their own desires that don't line up exactly with our hero. There are other forces and organizations doing things and there are plots that are not about the MC and his country and his trading company. It also looks like we're going to be getting rival heroes and further backstory about previously established antagonists and in general doing more things about the world as a whole. At the same time I am a little bit concerned about the structure of the show. The start of season two had a couple of episodes about some of the other people who got isekai'd and they were… Well bad. I'm given to understand the novels had these particular accounts threaded throughout the story during the events of season one but they have barely shown up since and I am concerned we're going to get a couple more dud episodes to quickly run through their storylines to the point where they might actually intersect with the protagonist and his group. I suppose I'll just have to wait and find out, cour 2 is ongoing. Sengoku Youko: So we're going to be getting a season break between the end of the first cour/arc and the next two cours/arcs, AKA the really good parts of the series and I cannot wait. Sengoku Youko is maybe my favorite action manga possibly ever, so it was with great trepidation I started watching it after the botched job that was The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer and was with mounting excitement that I realized holy poo poo, this adaptation is actually GOOD! Thank god for that. The adaptation to date has nailed pretty much all the stuff that it needed to. It's animated well, the action is strong and vibrant and exciting, the performances are good, and the really big drat moments hit and hit hard. It's always a little bit hard to gauge these things knowing in advance what's going to happen but the ending of the first arc still killed it on screen. I am really excited to see if they can follow through this summer now that it's time for the story's protagonist to take the reins of the show. And incidentally It says something about how absolutely fabulously stacked this season was that this wasn't instantly the best show of the season for me. Delicious in Dungeon: I read the manga of this up to the middle of the fight with the Undine so we are now in uncharted territory for me. I have heard the back half of the story is incredible and I am eager to see how it all shakes out, doubly so because this is a fantastic adaptation. Yet another ridiculously good show. Pokémon Horizons: We've got the show's second arc in the bag and this continues to be a solid as hell kid's show. I've been saying it every season for about a year now but this is been a really enjoyable show on every level. A thing I've also started to appreciate is that it is a consistently good looking show as well. Horizons seems like it's going to be a semi-forever show and it has strikingly good production values despite that. It seems the next arc is going to be less globetrotting, but given both previous seasons continued to move stuff along at a brisk pace despite its eternal timeslot I am still quite hopeful that the show can keep its groove. Yu-Gi-Oh! Go Rush!!: Our final entry in "second seasons that are not as good as first seasons" Go Rush qualifies on two levels, it is less good than Sevens was (that show is criminally underrated) AND this season is just not as good as the previous one. The final duel was especially atrocious especially since the stakes behind it were um… Look I don't think they were trying to do complete retroactive character assassination but- Look, even in the Yu-Gi-Oh! it's wrong try and prioritize the health of a card game over THE COMPLETE EXTINCTION OF AN INTELLIGENT SPECIES. Hell, even when card game over an unintelligent species would be about 35 bridges too far. Go Rush, man what the gently caress happened? If anything good came out of Go Rush season 2 it's that it (hopefully) finally closed up the ending of Sevens, though not before the damage was done  . I'm honestly on the fence about whether to watch the third season, especially since my favorite of the leads isn't going to be there for probably at least another cour. What a mess.Wonderful Precure!: This year's Precure feels promising. The fact I was able to get on board with it at all is a mark in its favor given it's about things I generally don't like and pulled a complete 180 from my preferred mode of Precure. It's for sure on my watch list for now and I hope my longshot hope for the fifth and sixth Cures does come to pass. Final Thoughts on Winter Season 2024: Feast. 10000% Feast.
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Apr 4, 2024 04:11
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