An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Anime Reviews

Mediocrity with a Twist of Twists: A.I.C.O. Incarnation Spoiler Review

A.I.C.O. Incarnation (or AICO, as I’ll call it from here on) is a near-future science fiction adventure where groups of mercenaries on roller skates infiltrate a river valley filled with hostile killer goop in search of valuables. This sounds like it should be completely creative and insane, but instead what we get is a fairly standard and small scale harrowing journey with forgettable characters and few strong ideas that it can call its own. The question is not whether it’s great or terrible – it isn’t. The question becomes whether or not it is sufficient.

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Into the Nasuverse – Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works Spoiler Review

Let’s get this out of the way: I’m looking at, and only at, Unlimited Blade Works, the anime. I will not be considering any other Fate routes or properties or any other components of the Nasuverse in this review. I will also get out of the way that I’ve alluded to Unlimited Blade Works before, using it as something of a benchmark for super-powered action. So part of this review will be setting the record straight regarding a topic I can’t help but reference.

For those who don’t know, Fate/Stay Night, including Unlimited Bladeworks (UBW for short), is a sort of Urban Fantasy death game where a small selection of wizards conjure the spirits of heroes of myth, legend, and history (categorized by “classes”) to do battle and claim the wish-granting Holy Grail. Like most good death games, things aren’t what they might seem to be at first, but it will take a while to get there.

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An Exercise In Pain – Kiznaiver Spoiler Review

Normally, I don’t pay much attention to the particular studio behind a given show – I honestly couldn’t tell you what companies produced a lot of my favorites. But one credit that will make me sit up and take notice is the involvement of Studio Trigger. The reason for that is that a lot of Trigger productions, perhaps all of them, share a few traits, meaning that there’s more of the Studio’s style mixed in with the particulars of genre, writers, director, talent, and so on. Not that other studios don’t bring specialties to the table, but Trigger’s inclinations are obvious and loud. Perhaps it’s because Trigger favors original productions, meaning they have a lot more in-house creative control over most of their project than do adapters of Manga and Light Novels that already have a well-defined look and feel from their source material.

Trigger Anime shows are, without exception in my particular experience, arguably defined by excess. They’re bright, colorful, and loud. They cram in a ton of story, some uniquely bizarre visuals, usually a good lot of action, over-the-top characters, weird high concepts, and probably a hearty or heavier serving of fanservice as well. Even their most mellow and down-to-earth efforts are high flying and bizarre by the standards of others. I’ve joked at times that Trigger shows almost seem to be written by the corrupted cores from Portal 2 – there’s a deep thirst for adventure, a willful disconnect from the universe and “fact” as others know them, and they will often find a way to go to space for their climax. When they’re good, they’re amazing. When they’re bad, they’re still amazing, just in a very different way.

That should tell you that, despite the fact that I can usually enjoy the ride, not every Trigger show is a winner. In some ways that makes it even stranger that it’s taken me this long to get around to reviewing one of their productions, but in any case now is the time to rectify that oversight. And thus, we’ll be taking a look at Trigger’s attempt to play against type while still playing exactly to type, Kiznaiver.

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What Comes After – Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka Spoiler Review

Here we are, technically one week into June, and I’m doing one last Magical Girl review to put something of a capstone on the month. The show in question is not a great classic, nor is it a landmark in the evolution of the genre. Rather, it is by its very existence a fascinating look at what has developed and how in terms of the Magical Girl genre. The show is, if the title was not a sufficient hint, Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka.

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Sacrifice, Despair, and Slice of Life – Yuki Yuna is a Hero Spoiler Review

The modern era of Magical Girl is still, essentially, “Post-Madoka” – there hasn’t been another game changer like Madoka Magica or Sailor Moon since, and so what remains is to analyze the themes and tropes of the genre as they exist. After Madoka hit, what did the Magical Girl genre do with it?

Some shows didn’t change a whole lot. It’s possible to get Magical Girl shows that reach to one side or the other of Madoka in terms of what influences they express. There are some harder to escape traits. Since Sailor Moon, the Magical Girl character herself has been more defined as a type of warrior, and since Madoka the image of what a Magical Girl is has more often included the idea that her powers are a burden, not a gift. Some shows play less with these aspects and some more, but when you think about a Magical Girl nowadays, chances are she wields weapons and has a heavy purpose. When speaking of shows that take more, especially from Madoka, though, you’ve got Yuki Yuna is a Hero.

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Kyuubey, I’ve Come to Bargain – Madoka Magica Spoiler Review

Last time when talking about Sailor Moon, I mentioned that there was another show that had to be addressed when it came to studying the growth and evolution of the Magical Girl genre. There are plenty of other big, famous landmarks in the genre, like Lyrical Nanoha or Pretty Cure, but the game-changing elephant in the room is Madoka Magica.

In some senses, it feels almost perfunctory to talk about Madoka, the same way it did to discuss Neon Genesis Evangelion. But as with Neon Genesis Evangelion, I need to establish a baseline to talk about other works, both the two remaining in the Magical Girl May series this year (yes, I’m actually going one week into June) and any other post-Madoka Magical Girl show I may choose to review in the future. So, let’s dig right in.

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Magical Girl Goes Action – Sailor Moon Crystal Spoiler Review

It’s impossible to talk about the history of the Magical Girl genre without talking about two shows in particular. One of those two (we’ll get to the other later) is Sailor Moon. The original series is notorious for two things. One is, allegedly, having a truly awe-inspiring sum of filler, both in terms of filler episodes and repeated battle and of course Transformation animations. The other is for transforming the nature of the Magical Girl genre by taking it from a branch of Adventure or even Slice of Life to one of action, blending the preexisting magical girl themes with those of transforming heroes and fighting hero teams. While Cardcaptor Sakura doesn’t show those influences, at least too much, every other Magical Girl show I’ll be reviewing this month has clearly felt, however distantly, the impact that Sailor Moon had.

The astute reader may note, though, that the title of this review does not simply say “Sailor Moon”. There’s a reason for that. I didn’t watch Sailor Moon when it was first coming out in the states, and hadn’t sought it out as part of my early years as an invested anime viewer. Rather, I knew it by reputation and knew that I had to look into it to really understand the Magical Girl genre. The thing is, the classic Sailor Moon had a five-year run and a grand total of two hundred episodes. I could have tried to cover the first season or arc, I suppose, but instead my research into the genre directed me towards a remake called Sailor Moon Crystal.

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“Release!” – Cardcaptor Sakura Spoiler Review


Welcome to another theme month – it’s May, so it’s time to take a look at Magical Girl anime! Specifically, I’d like to examine a few shows with an eye towards the history or evolution of the genre, including game-changers and reactions to them. To start that, though, I was put into a fairly awkward place: It’s quite hard to find a way to view most of the Magical Girl anime that were legitimately big before the debut of the original Sailor Moon, limiting my knowledge of what the early days of the genre were like to secondary sources. However, those secondary sources led me to one anime that, while it was technically a later release, is very much emblematic of what an entry in the genre would have looked like before Sailor Moon. That show is Cardcaptor Sakura.

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Awkward Inheritance – Aria the Scarlet Ammo Spoiler Review

The basic idea of Aria the Scarlet Ammo is simple: Our main character is Kinji Tooyama, who is enrolled in an academy for heavily-armed supercops called Butei. He’s not doing very well (not that he cares, he’s planning to drop out) but secretly possesses a special power: when he gets turned on, he enters a state called Hysteria Mode where he’s a chivalrous uber James Bond – Suave, hypercapable, and liable to say or do something that will embarrass Kinji later. He ends up paired up with the titular Aria, a Rie Kugimiya Tsundere who takes quick note of his moments of extreme ability but less so their trigger – typically her.

If this setup sounds like it’s going to provide a constant running awkward moment… it does. Depending on how you feel about that it could probably be the best thing since sliced bread or the 12th Circle of Hell. For me, it’s somewhere in between. I don’t enjoy awkward situations for their own sake, and typically think my tolerance is moderately low, but Aria mostly stayed within it, letting me have a good look at what’s going on underneath that.

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