An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Anime Reviews

Pick A Card, Any Card (As Long As It’s Major Arcana) – Day Break Illusion Spoiler Review

Well, this month I’ve reviewed shows in the vein of Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, two of the backbone shows for my first Magical Girl May… might as well take on one that’s trying to be Madoka, right?

Enter Day Break Illusion, a show that seems to be taking design notes and tonal pointers alike from Madoka Magica. But this one has Tarot cards? As pitches go, I’ve seen worse.

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Ctrl-Alt-Conjure – Modern Magic Made Simple Spoiler Review

What defines a magical girl show? In my mind, there’s not exactly one silver bullet element that is true of all Magical Girls and not of anything else, but there is a cluster of traits where a show should have at least a sizable chunk to be considered.

Modern Magic Made Simple is a work that will often appear on lists of Magical Girl anime. That’s how I found it, to begin with. And in the defense of that categorization, the main characters are all girls and they do wield magic. However, in my mind, Modern Magic Made Simple belongs not really to the Magical Girl theme or genre, but rather to the broader canon of Young Adult Urban Fantasy, specifically Masquerade Urban Fantasy.

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Mew Mew Moe Magical Girl Environmentalism – Tokyo Mew Mew New Spoiler Review

Have you ever wanted to watch Sailor Moon, except instead of the operatic drama you’re up for more general cuteness and maybe a side of 90’s style environmental hand-wringing? If so, Tokyo Mew Mew (New version) may be for you. It’s got all the sparkly transformation sequences, all the monsters of the week and a lot less of the theater, darkness, and intelligence.

That, however, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad show; it’s a different show with different appeal, so I’m hoping to try to look at it in its own context, even if some comparisons are going to be inevitable. Please note as well that this review is solely of Season 1, being written before the release of the second season, much less any viewing of it.

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Note to Self – Orange Spoiler Review

The awkwardly-titled and specifically-styled Orange is a show about a 16-year-old girl, Naho Takamiya, who receives a letter from her 26-year-old future self, detailing moments that the older her regrets, with instructions for how to make different choices and hopefully avoid living haunted by what she did or didn’t do in those days. As pitches go, it’s a very compelling one.

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Why? To Sell Toys, Of Course! – Frame Arms Girl Spoiler Review

Some franchises exist primarily for merchandise. In all honesty, there are certain time periods and genres (like older Mecha shows) where this is true even of strong and well-respected properties. I’m also no stranger to product tie-ins in my reviews, having covered a couple of card game tie-ins, the lamentable Luck and Logic and the surprisingly effective Selector.

None of the entries I’ve yet addressed, though, are quite as blatant about the “Buy our stuff!” angle as Frame Arms Girl. For those who don’t know, Frame Arms Girl is a line of plastic model kits. They’re a spinoff of the Frame Arms series, which is a line of mecha model kits featuring a poseable endoskeleton (the Frame) and easily interchangable or kitbashed shells of armor and weaponry (the Arms) intended to let modelers create their own custom robot action figures. The Frames Arm Girl line is the same idea, but with Mecha Musume (a concept I talked about when reviewing LBX Girls) as its main theme, rather than straight-out robots, offering a variety of girl bodies as well as their attendant armor, weapons and many, many interchangeable parts (around 200 in a single kit, if the manufacturer is to be believed).

In all honesty, it’s a pretty cool idea… but that doesn’t necessarily translate to the anime shilling it being any good.

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A decent anime from a Gacha game? – Fate/Grand Order Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia Spoiler Review

Ah, the Fate series. No doubt the largest component of the Nasuverse and probably the most famous and well-regarded as well. I already looked at Fate/Stay Night Unlimited Blade Works (an adaptation of one of the three routes in the original Visual Novel) and the first season of Fate/kaleid liner Prisma Illya (the magical girl alternate universe spinoff) but the franchise is much, much larger including broadly acclaimed Fate/Zero (a prequel to Stay Night), parody Carnival Phantasm, just plain bizarre entries like Hollow Ataraxia, games and stories that are beloved despite a lack of official translation like Extra and CCC… the list goes on but right now the biggest single title might be its gacha game entry Fate/Grand Order.

For those not familiar with the game, the basic setup can be got either from “Episode Zero” of Babyolnia here or through a double-length special called Fate/Grand Order: First Order, which doesn’t really have enough meat to it to warrant its own review.

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A Perfectly Balanced Anime With No Exploits – Bofuri Spoiler Review

Ladies and gentlemen, sit down, gather ’round, prepare the appropriate beverage if you got the review title, and let me tell you about the joys of horribly breaking video games in ways they were and weren’t meant to be broken. Because when you get down to it that’s what Bofuri (“BOFURI: I Don’t Want to Get Hurt, so I’ll Max Out My Defense.”) is all about.

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Finding the Right Combination – Aquarion Spoiler Review

So, when it comes to the Mecha genre, one subtype I haven’t really addressed is the combining Mecha style. It’s a very classic subgenre, going back to some of the earliest Mecha shows and one that’s fairly familiar to Western audiences thanks to the popularity of Golion, aka Voltron. Yet the closest I’ve come to really addressing a combining robot show is probably Gurren Lagann. Well, that can’t stand! So this week, I’m going after Aquarion.

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Attack of the Plot Ninjas! – Bubuki Buranki Spoiler Review (S1 & 2)

So, I suppose I should start by explaining that title. You see, I’m something of an old hat at National Novel Writing Month – a challenge to write 50,000 words (the minimum definition of a novel) in the month of November. In recent years it’s presented more as a vehicle for actual storytellers, but back in the 00’s when I first encountered it, it was a much looser group with a big focus on getting participants to create all those words in such little time, like that was the big challenge.

One piece of advice that was passed around in the day was that, if you ever felt like a scene was stalling, you should just have ninjas attack. No rhyme, no reason, just ninjas, because surely you would get a lot of words down describing the ninja attack and then making sense of why and how ninjas suddenly appeared. By the time you explained your way out of the outburst of nonsense, you’d be many words ahead and ready for the next crazy thing to propel you forward. Bubuki Buranki feels for all the world like it was written by a teenager adhering to that rule with the kind of wild zeal that only youth can provide and then produced and edited by consummate professionals who had to somehow make all the outbursts work without disrespecting the “source material”.

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