An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Anime Reviews

How we got to more card games – Z/X Ignition Spoiler Review

Here I go with the Card Game anime again. Don’t worry, though: unlike last week’s entry, this isn’t one that’s about playing card games, but rather an entry that takes the same route as Luck & Logic and tries to present what I guess is the story behind the card game.

To that… I know basically nothing about Z/X. I know it’s a game, and that its branded merch like sleeves and deck boxes have often been on clearance, but I don’t know the first thing about how it plays or what its cards are like. Instead, I’m going into this anime basically sight unseen.

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Diagnosis: Terminal Edginess – Redo of Healer Spoiler Review

WARNING – This is an angry review of a naughty show. Some things cannot be said without foul language.

The revenge plot is one of the oldest and most famed stories in fiction. The Count of Monte Cristo, written in 1844, is considered a great work of western literature, and is one of the most pure examples of the revenge fantasy, which has had perhaps countless imitators over the years. Of course, one could cite the Euripides play Medea, first performed in 431BCE, as being the true antecedent of the genre, depicting as it does how the former princess of Colchis took her revenge on the unfaithful husband who abandoned her, with the gods on her side even as she goes through many a terrible movement in ruining Jason.

But despite that legendary pedigree, the revenge story is also one of the easiest sorts of tales to get wrong. It is easy, perilously easy, for revenge stories to degenerate utterly into morasses of edge and skewed priorities that, rather than entertaining, leave a body baffled and often a bit upset.

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And the Meta Award goes to… – Keep Your Hands off Eizouken! Spoiler Review

Keep Your Hands off Eizouken! (the title is excited) is an odd duck of an anime about, oddly enough, the one thing that any anime studio should know pretty well: the process of creating anime! The basic pitch is that a trio of high-school students with a passion for the art of animation form a film club and use it to produce anime and… that’s about it.

Yeah, this is very much a slice of life show. It is held together by three broad story arcs, around the first three productions by the club, but the “story” isn’t so much the point as it is an exploration of the characters and a window into both the fluffy and technical sides of the creative process. Because of that, I’ll be doing this review a little backwards from how I normally do it, starting with commentary on the show and its structure while saving plot summary largely for the end.

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It’s a Video Game Adaptation and That Explains Everything – God Eater Spoiler Review

When I first watched God Eater, I didn’t know the source. Being left with some constructive questions, I discovered the truth, that it was based on a Video Game, and that honestly changed a good deal of my opinion. So, perhaps it’s best not to look at this as an anime so much as a twelve-episode trailer.

God Eater takes place in a world where humanity has been pushed to the brink of extinction by the arrival of beings known as Aragami. The Aragami are beasts that simply spawn into existence, have no biological needs that would seem to limit them, are pretty much invincible to conventional weapons, and pretty much seem to exist to desolate the world and mess up humans. You know, the full package.

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Imuto Mystery Theater – Nakaimo: My Little Sister Is Among Them! Spoiler Review

So, here’s the pitch for this anime: Shogo Mikadono is the heir to a powerful corporation. With his father’s passing, though, one hurdle stands between him and his inheritance: his father’s wish to secure the line by having Shogo find a bride before he’s done with high school. Thus, Shogo is sent off to a new school with the secret mission of acquiring a partner in his time there. However, he’s contacted by a girl claiming to be his sister (though he sees himself as an only child) who comes off as… potentially dangerous and stalker-ish, as well as infatuated.

It’s a pitch that could go a lot of ways. My Little Sister Is Among Them! (or Nakaimo for short) just had to pick one and attempt to execute that vision.

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Streaking Shinto Magical Girls? – Matoi the Sacred Slayer Spoiler Review

Matoi the Sacred Slayer is a magical girl show where, say it with me, a teen girl gains mystical powers that allow her to transform into a prettied-up super state, and with which she’s able to fight monsters that secretly threaten humanity. In short, it’s got the same pitch as just about every other action-skewed Magical Girl show. What’s Matoi’s unique claim to fame?

Well, the show seems to want you to notice that when she comes out of magical girl state, she does so nude. So at least we have that.

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Pick A Card, Any Card (As Long As It’s Major Arcana) – Day Break Illusion Spoiler Review

Well, this month I’ve reviewed shows in the vein of Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, two of the backbone shows for my first Magical Girl May… might as well take on one that’s trying to be Madoka, right?

Enter Day Break Illusion, a show that seems to be taking design notes and tonal pointers alike from Madoka Magica. But this one has Tarot cards? As pitches go, I’ve seen worse.

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Ctrl-Alt-Conjure – Modern Magic Made Simple Spoiler Review

What defines a magical girl show? In my mind, there’s not exactly one silver bullet element that is true of all Magical Girls and not of anything else, but there is a cluster of traits where a show should have at least a sizable chunk to be considered.

Modern Magic Made Simple is a work that will often appear on lists of Magical Girl anime. That’s how I found it, to begin with. And in the defense of that categorization, the main characters are all girls and they do wield magic. However, in my mind, Modern Magic Made Simple belongs not really to the Magical Girl theme or genre, but rather to the broader canon of Young Adult Urban Fantasy, specifically Masquerade Urban Fantasy.

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