An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Anime Reviews

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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School Shooting – Upotte!! Spoiler Review

Years before Girls’ Frontline, there was another anime that presented cute girls who were also, somehow, famed military combat rifles. While Moe Anthropomorphizations are common enough, there’s always that little hurdle of getting used to them, especially when it’s not just in the background but rather direct about the concept.

Enter Upotte!! (the title is very excited), that aforementioned show about guns who are also cute girls doing cute things (while going to school and learning how to gun better). At a mere 10 episodes there is, for better or worse, not that much to get through, and it’s hard to imagine it being less effective than GFL was, so let’s go ahead and dig in.

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Immortal Genre – Kemono Jihen Spoiler Review

The world has been saturated with Isekai for so long that it’s hard to remember sometimes that there are other genres that are or were nearly as overused. Some are up and coming like the Modern Dungeon setting with Video Game powers, which has had one of its core pillars adapted fairly recently. Others are old, and kind of fallen out of favor. I have a weird affection for the Battle School sort of genre even if they had a lot of copy-paste, but the Masquerade Supernatural Battler is also up there for action setups that have been around the block a few times. I’ve reviewed no few of them over the life of this blog, and Kemono Jihen… is another?

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Character Bonding – H2O: Footprints in the Sand Spoiler Review

Welcome to Visual Novel land, where everything’s made up and only the cute girls matter! There’s certainly a style to the more typical or classical VN adaptations, the ones that follow relatively mundane Gal Game sorts of affairs rather than the merciless mecha nightmare of Muv Luv Alternative or the Lovecraftian WTF soup that was Demonbane… and that is 100% on display here in H2O.

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Turning Over the Right Leaf – Kemurikusa Spoiler Review

Rarely have I seen a story that just decides to throw the viewer into a such a bonkers scenario without building any real investment or reason to care as Kemurikusa does in its first episode. Does that proclamation sound sudden, like it’s missing the preamble I would usually include in one of these reviews? Good! Because that means it represents the show’s opening fairly well.

So, let’s get the first episode out. We open with two redhead girls who identify as sisters and seem to have supernatural powers getting excited over the discovery of a pool of water on “the island”. They need to report back so “the roots” can gather it, and in the mean time are worried about “red bugs”. Sure enough one of those appears, the very mechanical-seeming black-with-crimson-lights insect like giant monster that one of the girls has to fight while telling the other to run back to base. The girl told to run, though, evidently didn’t and instead went for the water site again, encountering another red bug along the way.

The fighter girl (having conversed with the other sister, who has catgirl ears and mannerisms and manipulates glowing green filaments that are presumably “roots”) finds the little sister dying, having performed some kind of mutual kill with the bug. She dissolves into pink wireframe leaves as the other girl we’ve known for maybe five minutes grieves and the audience wonders how much we should really care about this mess. 

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Because it sounds cooler that way – Beyond the Boundary Spoiler Review

In a world where we have a truly absurd number of Urban Fantasy supernatural battle shows, indulging in a world under Masquerade where inhuman threats exist just out of sight for normals, Beyond the Boundary is… one of them.

Specifically, Beyond the Boundary is concerned with Spirit World Warriors and the Yomu they hunt. Its main characters are Akihito, an immortal half-Yomu under the protection of a clan of such warriors and Mirai, his shy kouhai who happens to also be a Spirit World Warrior, in her case descended from a cursed clan with their own seemingly dark power.

Oddly enough, we spend a lot of time in this show just dealing with the daily lives of these characters, all of whom other than Mirai (who still has her moments) are either deadpan snarkers, pervy loons, or both.

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Start Your Engines – Wish Upon the Pleiades Spoiler Review

Some series exist to push product. It’s true in Western animation and it’s true in Anime as well. Usually, the product in question is some manner of toy; I’ve covered a fair number of anime shows based on card games or plastic models, so this blog is no stranger to the sometimes desperate product tie-in side of the art form.

Yet even given that, Wish Upon the Pleiades is weird. Subaru – the car company – apparently decided that they needed an anime outing to their name, and got Gainax of all studios to put it together for them, first as an ONA in 2011 and then as a full-run show in 2015. The latter is what we’re looking at today.

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