An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Seasonal Selection – Shine On! Bakumatsu Bad Boys Episode 1

Some shows, you watch the first episode, and you’re pretty sure they’re going to suck. Others, you watch episode 1, and you have a fairly strong impression that the show is likely to be pretty good. More often, it takes a little longer to get any sort of strong sense. For Shine On! Bakumatsu Bad Boys, there’s an immediate feeling that this show is going to be… fun. If it’s good, it’ll be a fun sort of good. If it’s bad, it seems like it will still be fun. Naturally, that’s just an Episode 1 impression and anything can change during the run of the show, but that’s more or less how it presents itself. I actually got to see Episode 1 first at Anime Expo, but now that it’s out for real, it’s time to give my typical summary and thoughts.

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Strip Shinobi – Senran Kagura: Ninja Flash! Spoiler Review

A little while back, I was breadcrumbed to a certain beat-em-up video game: Senran Kagura (specifically Burst Re:Newal, the re-remake of the first game of the series). It was aggressively fanservicey, but the button-mashing gameplay was fun enough and, like many before me, I found that the writing in the visual novel segments between missions was… better than it had any right to be. Don’t misunderstand, the game is not high art or anything like that, but for something that could have gotten away with the barest minimum excuse plot to get busty ninja girls taking clothing damage while beating up hordes of generic enemies? It went several steps above and beyond the call of duty to actually develop characters and a scenario that were likable and effective, so that most of the cast had more than one dimension and the conflict had at least a little meat to it.

And, as is the case with more than one dubious and fanservice-laden series, there was an anime of Senran Kagura. Actually, there are two seasons, but this time around I’ll be focused on the first season (Subtitled Ninja Flash!) since that covers the first game’s main storyline in terms of adapting the story.

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The Harem Reloaded – If Her Flag Breaks Spoiler Review

If Her Flag Breaks is a show that you think you have figured out in Episode 1. The introduction is somewhat interesting, but ultimately very basic. The Main Character, Souta Hatate, has an ability that allows him to see “Flags” (literal tiny flags on people’s heads, representing the gaming concept of an event flag that determines something will happen) and, with an instinctual ability, manipulate them. We see this with him breaking a man’s death flag (causing the infamous death-by-truck to swerve the other way) and later, when he joins his new school, by striking down a lot of friendly or romantic overtures with precision, breaking the related flags. This is the interesting part.

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Lame & Lazy – Luck & Logic Spoiler Review

Here I go watching another card game anime. To be fair, the last one I went through, Selector, gave me both a good time and a good card game to follow. Luck & Logic… well it didn’t do the former which curiously makes me disinclined to investigate the latter.

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FrankenMech – Jinki: Extend Spoiler Review

Jinki: Extend is one of those situations where I’m going to go ahead and spoil the tone of the review right at the start: it’s a deeply flawed show, where we’re mostly going to be looking at the storytelling problems in its construction.

To put it plainly, and get the biggest problem out at the start, Jinki: Extend suffers from cobbling together material that shouldn’t have been assembled the way that the show assembled it. This is a twelve-episode anime, but it follows a convoluted, multi-line story insultingly by jumping between scenarios and points in time with really no rhyme or reason, and in so doing it ends up squandering what good will it did manage to build.

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Advert in C Major – Takt Op. Destiny Spoiler Review

So, this one has a kind of odd pitch – we follow a sour musician, the superpowered human incarnation of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, and said human incarnation’s ordinary older sister as they take a road trip across the United States. Complicating everything is the fact that in this retro-futuristic world, which looks vaguely like the 1950s in its automobiles, architecture, and general style but is more like the 2050s in terms of its actuality and in some senses technology, everything has gone to hell thanks to the arrival of of squiggly black monsters who hate and hunt down music and can only be fought off by the magic music people and the conductors who guide them. Oh, and the whole thing is basically a prequel to a mobile game.

This probably sounds both patently insane and like it’s cruising for disaster, but give it time.

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