An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Category: Back to School

Comfort Harem Buffet – Date a Live (Seasons 1-4) Spoiler Review

Oh, Date a Live, how have I gone this far without reviewing you? This is a show with a majestic four seasons, an iconic design in the form of one of its leading ladies (Kurumi Tokisaki) getting mountains of attention and her own spinoff, and a legendarily goofy premise: a seemingly normal high school boy must date apocalypticly powerful supernatural girls, because the only way to seal their powers rather than killing them or letting them wreak further destruction is with a kiss.

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No, Senpai, This is Our Review – Strike the Blood Spoiler Review

There are some shows that I find somewhat difficult to talk about, and oddly enough it tends to be the ones that I would generally regard as more standard that are difficult to review. This is because there are only so many times you can trot out the same formula and show how it is applied before it gets repetitive. Strike the Blood is all about that.

It’s not as though this is a carbon copy of another show. It does have its own characters (stock though many of them may be) and its own plots (predictable though they may be) and its own world (thinly sketched though it may be). But it sticks very close to the formula for arc-driven Urban Fantasy with Harem elements. It’s the same formula that underlines shows like A Certain Magical Index or to a lesser extent Trinity Seven, but Strike the Blood wears it more openly. I’ll try to give it a fair shake anyway, but there’s only so far generosity can be allowed.

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Not Making Sense Is Its Thing – Kill la Kill Spoiler Review

Kill la Kill is one of those shows where I think I would be hard pressed to find someone interested enough in Anime to seek and read reviews of shows who had not at least heard of Kill la Kill. This was the first work that really got Studio Trigger (who I have talked about several times before) on the map, and helped to set the expectation for what their shows would be like. It’s very important and more than a little crazy, so I’ll try to relate the summary as clearly as I can.

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A Double Major in Pest Control and Lameness – Sky Wizards Academy Spoiler Review

Sky Wizards Academy is yet another of the seemingly endless ream of Battle School shows – anime series where somebody is at a school for wielders of combat-applicable super powers, learning to kick ass. I’ve reviewed many of these shows before, will no doubt review many more in the future, and often find their formula to be something of a guilty pleasure.

That said, for something to be a guilty pleasure you must actually be able to derive pleasure from it. For a show like Sky Wizards Academy, this can be a tall order.

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Killing Time – Assassination Classroom Spoiler Review

Assassination Classroom is one of the big ones, both in terms of popularity and in terms of length. The latter has made it something of a challenge to consider reviewing in the format to which I am accustomed, but for Back To School month, I decided to finally take a crack at it. For this case, I’ve decided to err on the side of giving a general overlay, rather than full detail

The setup for Assassination Classroom is this: a giant yellow octopus man who can fly at mach 20 just blew up the moon, leaving it a perpetual crescent. He threatens to do the same thing to the Earth in a year’s time, but has deal with the governments of the world: for the next year, he’ll be the homeroom teacher for a particular class of middle school students, who have that time in order to kill him (and score a huge bounty in the process). Of course, he has many superpowers, so this is far easier said than done. The octopus is shortly given the name Korosensei by his class, a portmanteau of korosenai (“unkillable”) and sensei (“teacher”), and both he and government forces are ready to teach the students in both ordinary academics and assassination techniques in the hope that they’ll be able to save the world.

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Rushed Testament – A Certain Magical Index III Spoiler Review

Now we come to the (chronologically) last entry in Academy City’s anime run. I left this one for last not because of its place in the timeline, though, but rather because it has some critical differences with its predecessors, and those show in a big way.

On the surface, Index III shares the structure of I and II. It’s a two-cour show and can be fairly easily broken down into a set of arcs, each of which deals with a new crisis, to a greater or lesser degree. However, it’s adapted from a good deal more source material than the previous seasons, and it’s done by compression.

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Antihero Testament – A Certain Scientific Accelerator Spoiler Review

A Certain Scientific Accelerator is, to an extent, the black sheep of the shows set in Academy City. It’s only 12 episodes, and it consists of only a single arc. The character designs are a little different, and the tone is a good deal darker – not that more bad things happen here (Index and Railgun have their fair share of losses), but the emotions evoked are typically more bleak. What’s more, A Certain Scientific Accelerator stars, of course, Accelerator. And Accelerator is a character who, after his first encounter with Last Order, still qualifies as an antihero at best, compared to Railgun and especially Toma who are fairly straightforward heroic characters.

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