An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Anime Reviews

Unseen – Mushi-shi Review

For those who don’t know, Mushi-shi is an anthology-style show. It follows (roughly) the travels of Ginko (by trade, the titular Mushi-shi), a man who specializes in dealing with strange cases related to Mushi, spirit entities that most humans cannot see but that all can feel the effects of. He walks the length of ancient Japan, interacting with isolated villages and others that have Mushi problems whether they know that’s what they have or not. Part nature documentary, part medical drama, and part ghost story, Mushi-shi has a broad range of experiences to offer.

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Vacuous Vixens Vanquish Virulent Villains in a Vexatious Venture – Venus Versus Virus Spoiler Review

Sometimes, the first couple of seconds can tell you a lot about a show. With the extreme closeups of a gun being loaded, girl in a dress, general art style, ruined church setting, and shots fired at some swirly darkness, the first thirty seconds of Venus Versus Virus let you know you’re watching yet another of the crusty mid-2000s urban fantasy pieces. What it doesn’t tell you is whether you’re watching something into which actual effort was put, like Shakugan no Shana, or something that’s going to just bring you pain, like Omamori Himari.

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Mine Transfer – ID-0 Spoiler Review

It should come as no surprise, but I tend to enjoy science fiction. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good fantasy setting or even a hybrid with both magic and technology, but there’s just something about visions of the future, dealing with such topics as robotics, AI, and transhumansim that tends to hit a different way. And while there are some good examples in anime, it’s generally something that sparks hope to see another. Enter ID-0

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Shooting Blanks – Girls’ Frontline Spoiler Review

Despite this not being the first one I’ve reviewed, I’m always kind of impressed when I hear a gacha phone game got an anime, especially once it’s been out a bit rather than as a launch or pre-launch outing like Takt Op Destiny. Perhaps I shouldn’t be – I know that an anime outing can be more of an advert than a culmination, and I know that even a phone gacha game can be used as a storytelling medium, potentially creating something at least decent to work off. But games in general are a source that has struggled to find success in adaption and phone games are a particularly troubled subset. So when I see there’s an anime of Girls’ Frontline (also called Dolls’ Frontline), I both feel some appreciation for the fact that something with such an inauspicious beginning managed to go the distance, and deeply worried that the final product is going to hurt.

Unlike Azur Lane, I haven’t played GFL, so I’ve gone into this completely blind as a new viewer, arguably the kind of person that the show wants to attract and be appealing and memorable to. Why? Because I’m a glutton for punishment and people like it when I review something I should have dreaded watching. Is it really all that bad, though? Let’s take a look.

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The (Frustrating) Show about Passion and Mechas – Rumble Garanndoll Spoiler Review

They say the past is a different country, with an outdated military and huge oil reserves (okay, only Randall Munroe says that last part) but usually that’s not to be taken literally. In the case of Rumble Garanndoll, someone took that idea a little bit literally. The general concept is that the show takes place in a world where Modern Japan was invaded by a parallel universe Japan that still follows the no-nonsense militaristic culture that was dominant during the Showa era (particularly before the end of World War II, for obvious reasons). The invaders, armed with future tech weaponry such as mechas, quickly turned into occupiers and aimed to force modern Japan to follow their principles. This involved, among other things, persecuting art and culture that didn’t fit with their vision, particularly Otaku media.

This leads to our show, where a resistance group made up of weird nerds engages in a rebellion plot that’s almost as much of a pastiche of genre conventions as they think it ought to be.

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Strip Shinobi – Senran Kagura: Ninja Flash! Spoiler Review

A little while back, I was breadcrumbed to a certain beat-em-up video game: Senran Kagura (specifically Burst Re:Newal, the re-remake of the first game of the series). It was aggressively fanservicey, but the button-mashing gameplay was fun enough and, like many before me, I found that the writing in the visual novel segments between missions was… better than it had any right to be. Don’t misunderstand, the game is not high art or anything like that, but for something that could have gotten away with the barest minimum excuse plot to get busty ninja girls taking clothing damage while beating up hordes of generic enemies? It went several steps above and beyond the call of duty to actually develop characters and a scenario that were likable and effective, so that most of the cast had more than one dimension and the conflict had at least a little meat to it.

And, as is the case with more than one dubious and fanservice-laden series, there was an anime of Senran Kagura. Actually, there are two seasons, but this time around I’ll be focused on the first season (Subtitled Ninja Flash!) since that covers the first game’s main storyline in terms of adapting the story.

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The Harem Reloaded – If Her Flag Breaks Spoiler Review

If Her Flag Breaks is a show that you think you have figured out in Episode 1. The introduction is somewhat interesting, but ultimately very basic. The Main Character, Souta Hatate, has an ability that allows him to see “Flags” (literal tiny flags on people’s heads, representing the gaming concept of an event flag that determines something will happen) and, with an instinctual ability, manipulate them. We see this with him breaking a man’s death flag (causing the infamous death-by-truck to swerve the other way) and later, when he joins his new school, by striking down a lot of friendly or romantic overtures with precision, breaking the related flags. This is the interesting part.

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FrankenMech – Jinki: Extend Spoiler Review

Jinki: Extend is one of those situations where I’m going to go ahead and spoil the tone of the review right at the start: it’s a deeply flawed show, where we’re mostly going to be looking at the storytelling problems in its construction.

To put it plainly, and get the biggest problem out at the start, Jinki: Extend suffers from cobbling together material that shouldn’t have been assembled the way that the show assembled it. This is a twelve-episode anime, but it follows a convoluted, multi-line story insultingly by jumping between scenarios and points in time with really no rhyme or reason, and in so doing it ends up squandering what good will it did manage to build.

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Advert in C Major – Takt Op. Destiny Spoiler Review

So, this one has a kind of odd pitch – we follow a sour musician, the superpowered human incarnation of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, and said human incarnation’s ordinary older sister as they take a road trip across the United States. Complicating everything is the fact that in this retro-futuristic world, which looks vaguely like the 1950s in its automobiles, architecture, and general style but is more like the 2050s in terms of its actuality and in some senses technology, everything has gone to hell thanks to the arrival of of squiggly black monsters who hate and hunt down music and can only be fought off by the magic music people and the conductors who guide them. Oh, and the whole thing is basically a prequel to a mobile game.

This probably sounds both patently insane and like it’s cruising for disaster, but give it time.

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