An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Immortal Genre – Kemono Jihen Spoiler Review

The world has been saturated with Isekai for so long that it’s hard to remember sometimes that there are other genres that are or were nearly as overused. Some are up and coming like the Modern Dungeon setting with Video Game powers, which has had one of its core pillars adapted fairly recently. Others are old, and kind of fallen out of favor. I have a weird affection for the Battle School sort of genre even if they had a lot of copy-paste, but the Masquerade Supernatural Battler is also up there for action setups that have been around the block a few times. I’ve reviewed no few of them over the life of this blog, and Kemono Jihen… is another?

Read More…Read More…

Character Bonding – H2O: Footprints in the Sand Spoiler Review

Welcome to Visual Novel land, where everything’s made up and only the cute girls matter! There’s certainly a style to the more typical or classical VN adaptations, the ones that follow relatively mundane Gal Game sorts of affairs rather than the merciless mecha nightmare of Muv Luv Alternative or the Lovecraftian WTF soup that was Demonbane… and that is 100% on display here in H2O.

Read More…Read More…

Turning Over the Right Leaf – Kemurikusa Spoiler Review

Rarely have I seen a story that just decides to throw the viewer into a such a bonkers scenario without building any real investment or reason to care as Kemurikusa does in its first episode. Does that proclamation sound sudden, like it’s missing the preamble I would usually include in one of these reviews? Good! Because that means it represents the show’s opening fairly well.

So, let’s get the first episode out. We open with two redhead girls who identify as sisters and seem to have supernatural powers getting excited over the discovery of a pool of water on “the island”. They need to report back so “the roots” can gather it, and in the mean time are worried about “red bugs”. Sure enough one of those appears, the very mechanical-seeming black-with-crimson-lights insect like giant monster that one of the girls has to fight while telling the other to run back to base. The girl told to run, though, evidently didn’t and instead went for the water site again, encountering another red bug along the way.

The fighter girl (having conversed with the other sister, who has catgirl ears and mannerisms and manipulates glowing green filaments that are presumably “roots”) finds the little sister dying, having performed some kind of mutual kill with the bug. She dissolves into pink wireframe leaves as the other girl we’ve known for maybe five minutes grieves and the audience wonders how much we should really care about this mess. 

Read More…Read More…

Because it sounds cooler that way – Beyond the Boundary Spoiler Review

In a world where we have a truly absurd number of Urban Fantasy supernatural battle shows, indulging in a world under Masquerade where inhuman threats exist just out of sight for normals, Beyond the Boundary is… one of them.

Specifically, Beyond the Boundary is concerned with Spirit World Warriors and the Yomu they hunt. Its main characters are Akihito, an immortal half-Yomu under the protection of a clan of such warriors and Mirai, his shy kouhai who happens to also be a Spirit World Warrior, in her case descended from a cursed clan with their own seemingly dark power.

Oddly enough, we spend a lot of time in this show just dealing with the daily lives of these characters, all of whom other than Mirai (who still has her moments) are either deadpan snarkers, pervy loons, or both.

Read More…Read More…