An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

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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Saving the Day with Food Tourism – LBX Girls Spoiler Review

The best way to describe LBX Girls in brief is to imagine that Muv Luv Unlimited and Yuki Yuna is a Hero were somehow hybridized – you have an every day normal person suddenly transported into a world under siege by horrible aliens, but granted the ability to fight. Most of the time, though, we spend with cute girls doing cute things, in a show that tries to be more about the slice of life than the war for the survival of mankind.

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Colorful Life – Iroduku: the World in Colors Spoiler Review

Several times in the past I’ve talked about shows I’ve termed “Slice of Nothing”. Typically, these are Slice of Life shows (and thus they don’t present an overarching plot) without another genre to contribute direction. It says nothing about their quality, they can still be good or bad in their own rights, but they tend to be meandering and low-key, and not stories in which much if anything is accomplished or achieved.

But it is possible to have a show that’s basically pure Slice of Life that doesn’t become Slice of Nothing. For example, we have Iroduku: the World in Colors (aka Irozuku, depending on who you ask).

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