An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Anime Reviews

It’s Only a Model – Busou Shinki Spoiler Review

So, some time ago I reviewed Frame Arms Girl, a show based on a line of plastic model kits, depicting the mecha musume girls from the kits as animate… well, plastic models, leading to a kind of odd living toys setup. Well, it turns out that I might have started in the wrong place: before there were Frame Arms Girls, Busou Shinki from Konami was the main and arguably original line of mecha musume snap-fit models. Being Konami, it was a multi-media franchise including model kits, manga, games, and of course an anime outing as well, which is probably what we have to blame for Frame Arms Girl taking the “tiny androids, VR Battlefields” sort of approach, because that’s exactly what Busou Shinki does. The question will be whether or not it does it better than Frame Arms Girl.

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Earnest Fakery – Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend (plus .flat and Fine) Spoiler Review

Rounding out a February of warped love we have Saekano: the harem romcom about making a dating sim visual novel. On paper, Saekano is about the trials and tribulations of otaku Tomoya Aki as he tries to transition from fan to creator, expressing his love of 2d despite, perhaps, the prospect of an extra dimension of romance being closer than he thinks. In reality… well, let’s take a look.

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Sisterly Lust – Kiss x Sis Spoiler Review

Well, it’s Feburary, and because this month contains a holiday certain cultures associate with love and sexuality, I end up slotting it full of reviews of shows that have similar topics. This year, I’ve done heavy ecchi and pervy romance, so clearly I’m going for the twisted end of the spectrum. So, what better topic to continue the month with than Incest?

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Putting the Hentai in Sentai – Super Hxeros Spoiler Review

So, if you thought the plot for last week’s entry sounded like an overly complicated excuse for porn, get a load of Super Hxeros: In a world assailed by aliens trying to wipe humanity out by draining people of erotic energy, it’s up to a group of teenagers to be horny enough to get super powers and fight back!

In other words, it’s pretty much the same pitch but with a sentai flair rather than battle school. And, okay, I’ve been surprised by what sound like terrible pitches in the past. How’s this one do?

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Make Out For the Sake of All Mankind – Hybrid x Heart Magias Academy Ataraxia

Someone seriously asked the question “What if we had Infinite Stratos but the super suits are literally powered by arousal?”. That idea got greenlit for real. And you might think, “Well, that sounds like a sorry excuse for a Hentai, but what isn’t?” I regret to inform you that I do not review Hentai. This thing actually thinks someone is going to take it seriously. Does it work? We’ll see.

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In the Grim Darkness of the Future, there are Little Girls – Black Bullet Spoiler Review

Well, if an idea isn’t broke, don’t fix it. Instead, remix it! Here we have a very classic and functional idea, a world where humanity is on the brink of ruin because of some unforeseeable mythical disaster or alien invasion. We also have the scenario where little girls are the badass fighters of the hour, beholden to their adult handlers, which seems to be my theme for the time being.

But again, when something works, it works. There’s no reason these elements shouldn’t go together like peanut butter and jelly, with supernatural powers to excuse the fighting girls and gribbly enemies to provide fearsome foes. It still takes care and skill to execute that sort of vision, but going in from frame 1 it’s certainly possible.

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Once More With Schoolgirl Assassins – Lycoris Recoil Spoiler Review

Almost two whole decades after the original Gunslinger Girl, along came a show that took the anime-viewing world by storm with basically the same pitch: In the ambiguously near future, a world government secretly maintains order in society by using specially trained minor girls to do their wetwork.

It’s hard to talk about Lycoris Recoil without addressing the kind of hype this show had. Frankly, around the peak of its popularity, it was the kind of reception that no actual show is going to quite live up to, not even an extremely good one. How far short of that unreachable mark such a show falls… is another story entirely.

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Slice of Death – Gunslinger Girl Spoiler Review

Gunslinger girl is a unique show. The pitch is this: in the ambiguous near future, the government of Italy Social Welfare Agency is a front that picks up little girls who are unwanted and/or damaged beyond conventional recall and gives them (brief, probably) new lives as unassuming cyborg assassins, trained and conditioned to fight alongside their handlers and kill as the government demands in bands known as Fratello.

But while that sounds like a high action, high drama, probably angsty sort of affair what we get instead is a slow-burn methodical character study of these damaged girls and the men who care for them, only occasionally punctuated by bouts of violence. It has more in common with Haibane Renmei than it does with your average action show. Then again, if you know how I regard Haibane Renmei, maybe that’s not a bad thing.

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