An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Anime Reviews

Yer a Ninja, Ittoki – Shinobi no Ittoki Spoiler Review

Ninjas are cool. School settings are cool. Therefore, school ninjas should be perfectly doable! Sure, Senran Kagura made a poor anime, but the game was fine. Surely this concept can be used elsewhere.

Enter Shinobi no Ittoki, the story of a normal overworked schoolboy who finds out he’s a ninja about as abruptly as Harry Potter learns he’s a wizard. And like Potter, he’s got to go to school to live up to that powerful proclamation.

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5 Girls, 1 Brain Cell; or, Who To Bill for Fourth Wall Repairs – Chronicles of the Going Home Club Spoiler (?) Review

Unlike many of my peers, I didn’t find High School to be a hellish experience. It certainly had its downs as well as its ups, but on the whole I’d consider those years to have left a positive mark on my life. Even with that perspective, though, Anime High School seems like an idealized dream. Even when the students aren’t learning to be super-powered fighters of some sort, they’ve got busy social calendars and, of course, the charm of club activities.

Not every character, however, fills out some after-school time meeting with like-minded friends, however. Some are members of the “Going Home Club”, and are thus cheerfully inclined to depart at the closing bell and return to their residence posthaste. This is what main character Natsuki Andou thought she was getting into when she said she intended to join the Going Home Club…

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No Sanity Is To Figure In The Story – The Detective is Already Dead Spoiler Review

The Detective is Already Dead seems like the kind of show with an obvious premise: it’s literally in the title. So, this should logically be a detective story where, instead of having a brilliant Holmes-style character, that individual is a stiff. Bereft of life. Rests in peace. And instead we have the Watson, the Lestrade, or whoever else can trying to fill in some big, empty shoes when the need for a detective arises.  Maybe we’ll even try to solve the murder of said detective!  Wouldn’t that be an interesting premise?

Unfortunately, I don’t think logic has much of a place in this show.

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Delay of Game – When Will Ayumu Make His Move? Spoiler Review

Shogi. Shogi never changes.

When Will Ayumu Make His Move? (the title is curious) is, like last week’s lamentable offering, a show about Shogi, a storied chess-like game endemic to Japan, regarding which I will not retread my previous introduction. Specifically, it’s a show about fresh high-schooler and former Kendo club star Ayumu Tanaka joining the Shogi club. Why? Because he’s fallen head over heels for its president (and only other member), Urushi Yaotome. However, Ayumu is resolved to not confess his feelings until he can prove himself by beating her in a game of Shogi.

Sounds harmless enough! Let’s have at it!

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Foul Move – The Ryuo’s Work is Never Done! Spoiler Review

Ah, Shogi. Shogi is a chess-like table game (sometimes called “Japanese Chess” in the West) with a long and storied history. Notably, compared to Chess, Shogi is seen as a much more complex and difficult game, both for computers and for humans. The reason for this is that Shogi, unlike chess, is not purely reductive in nature. That is, rather than being gone forever, captured pieces can be deployed instead of moving, thus preserving the complexity of the game well into the late game and generally preventing draws and stalemates.

Thus, Shogi matches often take many hours, even multiple days when masters of the game play against each other. It’s a fascinating topic with history and, like any good game, its share of drama and determination.

According to The Ryuo’s Work is Never Done! (the title is excited), it also includes little girls, crazy chuunis, and various other bizarre personages. Let’s watch it!

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A Different Shade of Isekai – Tenchi Muyo! War on Geminar Spoiler Review

Once upon a time, the Isekai subgenre was… kind of a different beast, where the standard model both of introduction and of the setting and story that the transported character would be dropping into had not yet formed. I’ve touched on pre-formula Isekai before, with shows like 1996’s Vision of Escaflowne, but after last week’s entry, I’m in the mood for a little more.

Enter Tenchi Muyo! War on Geminar (the title is excited in the first half). Being from 2009, War on Geminar is more recent than you might expect for its brand of Isekai. Certainly, the infamous Truck-kun was already well into his reign of terror, and the formulas that the original run of Shield Hero would work to freshen up or KonoSuba parody in just a couple of years were established. But it has something of a pedigree, acting as one of the many spin-offs of Tenchi Muyo!, which first debuted in 1994. And as such, it has a somewhat more retro outlook on its genre. This also tracks with it being an OVA, featuring post-watershed media standards and fairly arbitrary episode lengths.

The question is, has this aged like fine wine… or fresh milk?

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World of Mehcraft – Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody Spoiler Review

Into every anime viewer’s life, a little Isekai must fall. Wait, no it doesn’t. You can leave. Turn your back on today’s schlock and watch whatever you want! Or you can go all in, I’m not your mom. What I am is a reviewer, and into every reviewer’s life a little Isekai must fall. My conceptual umbrella has gone unused for far too long, so today we’re going to look at Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody.

I’m not going to ask for much, I just hope to Haruhi it’s better than Smartphone.

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The Brilliant Detective in the world of the Id – ID:Invaded Spoiler Review

Normally, I try to have quite the preamble to these reviews, but this time I’m going to keep it short: ID:Invaded is a mystery taking place where it’s possible to use technology to dive into the subconscious of a serial killer in order to find clues about their identity or whereabouts. The rub is that those doing the dive do so as amnesiacs, taking up the role of brilliant detectives per fiction… and also, that they must be killers themselves to even try.

But you won’t know most of this, or really any of it, as the show starts.

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Press F to Pretend to Emote – Magatsu Wahrheit: Zuerst Spoiler Review

Why do video game animes suck?

I know that’s something of a loaded question in that it presupposes the suckage, but the evidence seems to bear that out. Not counting outings that primarily have Visual Novel DNA (that’s more of its own thing, and has led to some outright great shows), I’ve reviewed a fair number of based-on-a-game or Game Tie-In shows, and there’s only one outlier I recall that scored higher than mediocrity.

To me, it’s a baffling question as to why this seems impossible to get right. At first the hypothesis that taking away interactivity and control from an interactive medium would do it seems promising, but between the Let’s Play phenomenon and the fact that video games are a legitimate storytelling medium with many examples of powerful or emotionally effective writing over their history, that can’t seem to be the case.

We should be able to get not just acceptable but awesome game-based animes. Unlike the world of film, the twelve (or more) episode format lends itself to the long running nature of many classic and effective games, and animation can replicate the wonder and style of fantastical worlds without bringing a major studio to its knees. But whether it’s common production issues or some nasty factor lurking beneath the surface, it seems as though we’re doomed to get failed outing after failed outing.

So, without any further adieu let’s at least dissect MMO tie-in Magatsu Wahrheit: Zuerst and see what’s wrong with this one.

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And Now For Something Mostly Different – “Oshi no Ko” Spoiler Review (Season 1)

Part of why I run this blog is to address and highlight different shows. Shows that may have been forgotten. I don’t like jumping on the bandwagon of the latest and greatest thing. Even my seasonal write-ups, which might hit popular recent entries, I do more as reactions than as proper reviews, because I think for a fair review you usually need at least a reasonably complete bit of material and a chance to really process it.

Even when I go after big names and landmark classics, I try to make sure I have something at least a little original to say about them. I may not always succeed, but if there’s something that everyone has seen and everyone has written about, what’s the point of me throwing one more identical review on the pile? Well, completeness and the ability to refer to it at later dates can factor in, but that’s not the case this time.

When I decided to do a review of Oshi no Ko (I will dispense with the quotes), I didn’t have that point lined up… because I hadn’t yet watched Oshi no Ko. To be sure, I was aware of it as it was coming out, since that was only last year. With a sterling reputation and a second season that will start airing between me writing this and this going live, it would be weirder – positively unnatural – if I hadn’t heard of Oshi no Ko. But I hadn’t watched it, and I hadn’t really followed it or indulged spoilers either. I knew in a vague sense that it was a drama – not so much a comedy – based on a manga by the same author as Kaguya-sama: Love is War and that it “got” a lot of folks with some sort of twist deployed early, but not what that might have been. I was prepared to look at it sight unseen to attempt to answer the question: Was it really as good as the hype?

Typically when I’ve asked that question before, it’s been with shows that have been overhyped beyond madness, but oddly enough I didn’t feel that way about Oshi no Ko. It was an award winner, that much was certain, which carries with it a certain weight, but while it was broadly beloved it didn’t seem to have the cultish following certain other shows acquired. I don’t know if I just didn’t travel in the right circles for that, but the bar of public opinion, which I am set to either support or stand against, is still a mortal level of quality.

The task set, let us begin.

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