An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Eighteen Years, and Dead No Longer – Erased Spoiler Review

Hm… unless I miss my mark, there’s some kind of festival going on right now. Usually, I give everyone a present by cracking into some of the worst stuff (or at least the stuff that ticks me off) and digging into it, but this year, I think I’ll give people looking for good anime to watch a present and review Erased.

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Blast from the… 2023?! – Giant Beasts of Ars Spoiler Review

So, when you look back at older Fantasy, in a certain time frame for anime and a different one for Western media, there’s this palpable “anything goes” feeling to it. You’d be introduced to weird worlds that don’t respect any sort of conventions about technology or story format or these ideas of a standard “fantasy” that have largely emerged across the genre. Sometimes, though, you’ll get a work that will buck the current trends. For anime in 2023 that sometimes feels practically wedded to the Video Game Rules Universe, and only slightly less tightly bound to Isekai and/or Harem, Giant Beasts of Ars is the blast from the past and/or breath of fresh air that marches to the beat of its own drum.

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Ecchi Express – Rail Wars! Spoiler Review

Rail Wars! (the title is excited) is another in a long, long line of shows that try distinct themselves by doing the exact same thing all the others do: serving up a double-d helping of ecchi eye candy to hint at romantic overtones even if the core material doesn’t really have romance in its genre DNA. To be fair, some of the shows like that are at least okay, like the better end of the classical battle school harem bracket, but especially when the show has ecchi but not romance, it does need something to provide the meat of the material rather than just the lovely and usually bouncy gravy that is the fanservice.

Rail Wars! has, um, trains. I guess.

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Nausicaa in White – Kaina of the Great Snow Sea Spoiler Review

It should come as no surprise, given I’ve put down my thoughts on selected Ghibli films that I’m something of a fan of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, particularly in its true and massive Manga form. So, when I see something like Kaina of the Great Snow Sea, where the apple hardly falls from the tree to say nothing of falling far, I typically come in with some mixed feelings. On the one side, there’s an impulse to see more versions and reflections of something great. If you like a work, it’s only natural to also like things that are similar to it. But if it’s a half-assed attempt that can’t really keep up and bring its own material to the table, well… it’s probably worse than being unrelated and of similar quality.

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Does CG Anime Bug You? – Cagaster of an Insect Cage Spoiler Review

Cagaster of an Insect Cage is another in the long line of shows that take place ambiguously in the future, where the only terrain we see on Earth is a dead desert and some horrible occurrence has pushed humanity to the brink. In this case, our story takes place thirty years (or so it’s told) after a “disease” appears that causes humans to suddenly morph (seriously, over the course of 20 minutes) into nigh-invulnerable giant killer insects called Cagasters.

Well, contesting that point will get us nowhere, so might as well dig into the story.

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More Clever than it Sounds – Rideback Spoiler Review

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… wait, I already used that intro last week? Um… Rideback!

So, yeah, Rideback in extremely reductionist theory is another of those stories where a special group of outcasts with a younger main character among them sparks a revolution against an oppressive totalitarian government. But, this one is a good deal different. It has interesting characters, an odd yet effective structure, and motorcycles with arms that can stand up to become beefy wheel robots with the driver on their back. I assure you this is sold as being cooler than it sounds.

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Everything Zero – Yurei Deco Spoiler Review

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: in the nebulous future, all known civilization is ruled in a very skewed and dystopian way that seems to make the masses happy, but a small group of plucky teens and outcasts… Yeah, I’m just going to assume you’ve stopped me by that point, since it’s the pitch for basically every big name young adult novel, an obligatory episode or five of every “scenario of the week” scifi show, and the occasional piece of well-respected Sci-fi as well. Some of those pieces do it better, some do it worse. I won’t even claim to be immune to the allure of the archetype myself, it’s a damn good backbone.

But when you tell an archetypical story, you need to both bring something of your own to the table that’s new and interesting, and know what makes that archetype powerful and resonant. If you do, joke aside, you can create some good stuff – maybe fun, maybe meaningful, and certainly at least worth a look. If you don’t… well, let’s take a look at Yurei Deco.

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Seeing is Believing – Mieruko-chan Spoiler Review

Well, we’re at the end of October, and as much as I’d love to lead the armies of Halloween to reclaim calendar territory from the Christmas occupation forces no doubt already sighted all over the place, such an effort is quite beyond me. Thus, it’s best to wrap up the spooky season with a few more choice ghouls and ghosts. The ones seen in Mieruko-chan will do just fine.

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Werewolves versus Cirtus Fruit – Okamikakushi: Masque of the Wolf Spoiler Review

It’s still October and the relative low quantity of horror anime be damned, I’m doing all spooky shows for it this year! Well, we’ve seen ghosts, vampires, and… weird Victorian soot faeries, guess we might as well give werewolves a shot as well.

Okamikakushi is a show that kind of looks like a game of Werewolf: you’re in a town, there are wolves, and it seems like somebody gets murdered every night under the perpetually-full and always blood-red moon while by day we try to solve the mystery.

In some ways, though, the traditional pattern is placed in reverse.

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