Back to AnimeEnjoyer420's Profile AnimeEnjoyer420's Profile

MAR is a series that embodies a lot of the worst qualities of shounen anime and brings nothing new to the table. Almost immediately, the story steers itself into a ditch with an interminable Tournament Arc that lasts well over half the run of the series. While there are a handful of decent moments in the 70 or so "X vs Y" episodes that follow, most of it is an agonizing waiting game, slogging through one utterly predictable fight after the next, with no sign of plot progression for dozens of episodes at a time. When the end of the Tournament Arc blessedly arrives though, ... the story fully goes off the rails into an extended denouement that is totally confused, full of questionable narrative choices and other decisions that make it apparent that they had no real plan for where to take this story beyond the Tournament Arc. The ending is heavily telegraphed and feels unsatisfying when it arrives, both because of the middling story content and the sense that it probably should have wrapped up about 20 episodes earlier than it did.

The writing is juvenile and character motivations are thin and riddled with cliches (oh, you want to become stronger so you can protect everyone's smiles? I've never heard that line before). Action scenes are often boring due to the lackluster animation - likely a necessary sacrifice to produce weekly TV for 2 years straight, but that's hardly an excuse when it cuts into the core appeal of an action anime. More unforgivably, the CGI used to animate the summoned Guardians is absolutely hideous and badly composited to boot. These are supposed to be the most powerful weapons a person can wield, but they have all the visual majesty of a guy summoning some stray PS2 assets. The character designs are also uninspired and feel like a conscious attempt to mimic Dragon Ball. See if you can count how many boys with similarly spiky hair are in this series.

So what was actually good about this show? Well there isn't much, to be frank. Dorothy is a pretty fun side character, though her obsession with the main character can be overbearing. The relationship between Dorothy and Diana (left vague to stay spoiler free) is one of the few compelling plot threads on offer here. Every once in a while, you'll get an interesting battle when 2 people have special abilities that combine in a unique way, though the obviousness of the outcome of every fight dampens any thrill you might get from that.

Overall, I can't say my time was well spent watching this thing to its conclusion. I recommend simply skipping it, but if you are at all curious and inclined to give it a chance, watch until the first fight of the War Game and you'll know by then if this series is going to do anything for you.

This one is lots of fun. The complete lack of a plot or narrative other than "girls are friends" doesn't become a problem because of the short runtime (all 12 episodes in total are about as long as 2 regular episodes of TV anime), and the show is funny and densely packed with jokes since it doesn't have a moment to spare. It even makes the punchlines land better in some cases ("brevity is the soul of wit", and all that).

The show is also gorgeous. Without the intense schedule demands of a full series, director Ryosuke Nakamura (Grimgar) directs and storyboards the entire series himself, ... which lends an added cohesiveness to the visuals from episode to episode. There's nothing flashy to animate in this series, so it doesn't always jump out at you, but the character animation is consistently excellent. Small moments like someone putting on their shoes are animated with a film-like attention to detail. Legendary art director Hidetoshi Kaneko (Trigun, Hajime no Ippo, Texhnolyze) also puts in strong work here. If the watercolor-like background art evokes Studio Ghibli for you, it's in large part because Kaneko got his start painting backgrounds on My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service. It's not an exaggeration to say the artwork is on par with those classics.

The main 3 characters in the series are lovable and their personalities mesh well together. Unfortunately, in such a short series, there are basically no side characters of note, with the exception of the teacher (it's nearly a guarantee that she will be your favorite).

The one significant complaint I have with the series is that the OP is annoying as hell, and that's a bigger issue than it sounds like when it takes up a full 1/4th of each episode's runtime. I recommend skipping it, but don't skip the ED since there is always a post-credits scene. Overall, this series is easy to recommend as a short burst of fun that you can watch start to finish in under an hour.

I love a good mystery, and Kubikiri Cycle does at least somewhat deliver on that, so it's hard to entirely dislike it. While it does get a little too convoluted at the end, the actual murder mystery portion of the series is the most sound and enjoyable part of it. It's the other parts of the series that are a letdown.

In particular, there are two elements that stand out above the others as critical issues: the characters and the dialogue writing. These problems are distinct, but related of course. The characters are insufferable virtually without exception, and a big part of that is the pretentious ... dialogue. Conversations feel about as authentic here as they do in an Ayn Rand novel. Characters talk in grand philosophical statements and go on endless, preachy monologues about their personal outlooks on life, most of which tend to be miserable and nihilistic. Even characters that are meant to be viewed positively tend to be gratingly wacky and quirky instead (I'm thinking of Tomo, the "blue savant" from the series' subtitle here). When the murders begin to happen, you feel nothing because the victims feel more like bundles of college undergrad philosophy essays that have been clumsily arranged into the outline of a human than real characters that you can identify and empathize with.

Visually, Shaft brings its B game to this series. On the positive side, get plenty of Shaft-isms here - the head tilts, the dramatic use of blacks and reds, and so forth - the animation looks good and occasionally great, and there are some strong storyboards late in the series. On the negative side, the 3D backgrounds look comparatively chintzy and there is too much use of camera rotation, almost as though the director decided he may as well take advantage of those 3D environments and spin the camera all over inside of them, whether or not it was appropriate for the scene. It still looks better than the average anime TV series, but probably will not rank among Shaft's best in that regard.

If you're really into mysteries (or a huge fan of the source author's better-known Monogatari series), you may give this one a try and find that you like it. I find it hard to recommend because of the unlikeable characters and a style of dialogue that I find deeply annoying, but if you can get past those issues, you may get more out of it than I did.

At the risk of being overly dismissive, this is a blatant attempt to capitalize on the success of the original Space Battleship Yamato, without any understanding of what made it work. The story and the central conflict between humans and an alien race called "the gods" is paper thin and unengaging. The aliens are a faceless menace, you only ever see their UFOs or humans being mind controlled by them, and it makes them seem unthreatening. The film makes no attempt to explain their goals or why this war is being fought, other than a vague sense that humanity became too technologically advanced. The setting ... is so vague and poorly thought out that it feels like being dropped into episode 8 or 9 of a 12 episode TV series, like you've missed tons of important setup and context.

The characters are boring and largely unlikable, and big plot twists involving characters being killed or turned into spies by the aliens fall flat because of how uninvested the viewer is in what's going on. Nudity and gore are used gratuitously for shock value, as opposed to being used sensibly and realistically for the setting.

Aside from some pretty good action animation, there's nothing to recommend here. Even the occasionally cool action is just empty calories, spectacle for a story that was never going to go anywhere.

This is a series that I desperately wanted to like, and it does have the occasional good moment, but generally speaking, this is a story with interesting ideas that is constantly failed by poor writing.

The core ideas here - a story about a group of boys that bond while being abused at a reformatory school in 1950s Japan, and which follows them after their release and into adulthood - are loaded with potential, and that brotherly bond between the characters is easily the strongest part of the series. The storytelling ambition to progress through its story and the lives of its characters rather than muddling ... through a status quo of its own making is commendable as well. Unfortunately, all the other elements are far weaker. From unnuanced villains that do the worst possible things simply because they are Evil to gross writing that has a lurid fascination with sexual exploitation, there is very little to recommend here in the way of storylines or drama. All the emotion in the story is drained away by the ridiculous overacting of the villains and the extreme, edgy nature of how things tend to play out.

Edginess is, unfortunately, the name of the game here. There's a tendency to frame this sort of thing as "adult" or "mature", and indeed it's even listed as such on Crunchyroll, where I watched it. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. The defining characteristic of the writing in Rainbow is really a sort of childishness, with a fixation on sex, suffering and unfair persecution that screams adolescence. Virtually every named female character in the series is either a prostitute or a family member of a character that is introduced into the story so they can be raped by a villain. Virtually every adult is an unhinged, tyrannical fascist or a huckster. While the series begs for understanding of its protagonists, misunderstood boys branded criminals by society for justified acts of self defense or revenge, it does not extend that understanding to any of its other characters, which are largely 1 dimensional and defined by their villainy. It even leads to more significant writing problems, where the logic of the story begins to break down unless you look at it through the lens of "this is a story written by an author that was just trying to write about people doing the worst things he could think of at the time", most unforgivably in the climax of the Anchan vs Ishihara story arc at the end of the 1st cours that I will keep vague for spoiler reasons. Suffice to say that the intended emotion of the scene lands more on the "so idiotic that it made me laugh" side of things than was intended.

These issues start to improve in the 2nd cours, but never fully go away. It does have some nice moments though, Turtle and Lily's story arc late in the 2nd cours is a rare high point in the series. Sadly, this only heightens the pervasive sense throughout the series that it could have been excellent if only it was written by someone without a sledgehammer sense of subtlety and a creepy fixation on prostitution and rape. I simply can't recommend it as it exists in reality though.

I wanted to like this series a lot more than I actually did. I am a sucker for stories about dads taking care of cute little kids, and this show did give me enough of that that I still felt mildly positive about it in the end, but this is a case of wasted potential more than anything else.

The central problem here is a lack of conflict, which is a surprise given the premise. Instead of a fish out of water comedy about a thug that's wholly unsuited to take care of a child, Kirishima (the main character) easily adapts, and he and Yaeka (the ... little girl he babysits) are inseparable by the end of the first episode. Similarly, all the hard edges have been filed off of the yakuza here and they're treated as essentially indistinguishable from legitimate businessmen. The show is very careful to never show the protagonists doing anything unethical, and the only illegal things they do (such as beating up members of rival gangs) are justified, even though, again, they are a criminal gang. This results in unintentionally absurd moments like members of the yakuza talking very seriously amongst themselves about only buying *legal* fireworks. It feels bizarrely neutered, and weirdly pro-yakuza to be honest. The yakuza boss supposedly needs someone to watch his daughter so he can run his criminal empire, but because showing him selling drugs or collecting protection money would be too edgy, you only ever see him hanging around his house and it's unclear what he actually does or why he'd need a babysitter.

There are some nice, heartwarming moments, particularly the episode where Yaeka visits her mom in the hospital, but it never stops feeling like it's missing something. If it had genuinely engaged with its premise instead of simply using the yakuza as a tattoos-and-piercings aesthetic and an excuse to have 4 men living in the same house for not-gay reasons, there could have been something interesting here. As it is, it's moderately entertaining fluff that leaves you wanting for more.

A lesser known work from Kazunori Ito, more popularly known for his work on Ghost in the Shell, among many others, this is a straightforward crime thriller about an average Joe getting caught up in a criminal conspiracy. Personally, I love these kinds of movies, so
I was already inclined to be generous, but this is just a really nice little movie. It moves along at a brisk pace, the animation is solid, the soundtrack is filled with bitchin' 80s guitar solos, and the action scenes are appropriately ridiculous and fun for the genre.

There are certainly some bits and pieces here that you can nitpick. ... Yuki is kind of superfluous, the plot is pretty conventional, and the length is a bit too short (under an hour even if you include the credits). But this is a very fun and easily watchable movie in spite of all that. One which could have fixed most of its flaws simply by adding on another 30-45 minutes of content and expanding into a feature length film.

12 Kingdoms is an antidote for the current wave of generic and uninspired isekai anime. The kind of series that shows that the narrative potential of this genre greatly exceeds what we're getting from anime with paragraph-long light novel titles about an "S-Rank cheat skill" or whatever.

It's not a perfect series of course, there are some fairly significant issues with pace, and an unfortunate early cancellation that leaves several storylines unresolved. However, if you can power through some of those difficulties, you'll find a richly rewarding story; a unique and fully-realized low-magic fantasy world to explore; and deep, satisfying character arcs. The series also looks ... fantastic. Not so much in the animation (which is just fine), but in the art direction, the usage of colors, and the background illustrations.

You'll also want to be aware that this series is a talker, not a fighter. It isn't as though action is non-existent, and the stakes are such that characters often have their lives on the line even when they aren't holding swords, but this is a series where much of the content revolves around politicians having conversations in rooms, not big bloody battles. If you're familiar with the live-action series Game of Thrones, think seasons 1 and 2, where politics was king and battles often took place off-screen, as opposed to big-budget action spectacle it became later on. If you're expecting epic fantasy battles or an ass-kicking heroine defeating her enemies in single combat, you're going to leave disappointed. But the story is far richer for its focus on building out its world and showing that many of the problems they're facing can't be solved by marching an army somewhere.

As mentioned earlier, the way the series is paced is really the largest concern here. It's divided up into a series of discrete arcs of varying lengths, and the change from one arc to the next can be drastic. Often, it will follow completely different characters at a different point in time than the preceding arc, which can make the story feel a bit disjointed. The most problematic part is the second arc, which is dropped in at the peak of the first arc (which tells the story of Youko becoming the Queen of Kei) and switches to a multi-episode flashback for a character named Taiki that lives in a completely different country, killing the narrative momentum that had been established to that point. While Taiki's story isn't bad and does help spell out the unique system this world has for selecting rulers (an extremely literalized version of the Mandate of Heaven, which I recommend at least skimming a wikipedia article about before viewing), it feels like a distraction from what had been established as the primary characters and storylines to that point. Worse, due to the cancellation, Taiki's storyline is never completed and doesn't end up impacting other storylines, so it feels even more irrelevant.

That frustration is one of the few things you can fairly knock this series for though. While I initially hated some of the POV characters (especially Shoukei, who is absolutely detestable when first introduced), that is by design, and their evolution as characters is rewarding to watch even when you initially hate them and don't care if they redeem themselves or not. Characters are not static, and seeing how their behaviors evolve over time in response to their growth is one of the best parts of the series. It's a beautifully written series all around that treats both its characters and its world with maximal respect.

One final thing to make note of is the cancellation. Reportedly, this was due to a combination of factors. One was that the main character of the anime is Youko, but the novel series does not have a "main character" and Youko is simply one among many, and thus her story concludes before the overarching story of the novels does. The belief is that once Youko's content from the novels was fully adapted, the TV broadcaster NHK felt that switching to a new "main character" would be unpopular and lead to falling ratings. Additionally, the character designer reportedly fell seriously ill during production, which probably made this an easier decision to make. Whatever the case may be, the cancellation resulted in 23 previously planned episodes being scrapped, roughly 1/3 of the planned run of the series, so you can likely guess how that affected the conclusions of some of the many storylines that 12 Kingdoms was juggling when it went off the air. An unfortunate but hardly uncommon occurrence in anime, but we will always be left wondering what could have been if the series had run to completion.

Sometimes when you have a complete dud of a series, it can be hard to know where things went wrong. Not so in the case of Helck, where there is one simple, glaringly obvious problem lit up in neon lights that makes the rest of it unsalvageable. Namely, it looks ugly as sin.

Modern Satelight is depressing for many reasons, but this effort on Helck has to stand as one of the studio's lowlights in its 20 some years of production. The character designs are poor, the animation is stiff in the best of times, but rarely deviates from its baseline level of "hideous". The action ... storyboarding is among the worst in recent memory, leading to a few fight scenes that had me outright laughing at how something this incompetent could make it to air. It suffers from many of the same problems that afflicted the similarly-mocked Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer last year, namely that the slavish devotion to 1-to-1 remakes of the manga panels for a beloved series, combined with next to no resources or time for production, resulted in a series with extremely low ambitions that nonetheless utterly failed to meet them. Whatever underlying charms there are to the original are totally lost in this adaptation, a failure so comprehensive that it's almost inconceivable that it could lead to someone who was not previously a fan of the series picking up the manga.

And to be clear, that is not the only failure here. There is a specific vibe to watching a feature film that was poorly adapted from a short film, where you can tell exactly when the original premise ran out of gas and the writer had to start throwing new ideas at the wall to fill out the runtime, even if they don't fit in with the original story. That's the vibe I got from the story here, which begins as a one-note gag comedy (Helck's really strong! He keeps easily winning the competitions to become the next demon lord even though he's human!) and eventually unspools into a tragic drama over the course of an agonizingly long flashback that lasts for almost the entire 2nd cours. These parts don't fit nicely together at all. The tone shift comes out of nowhere and it's almost absurd to look back at the early episodes of the series and see where it began before the "digression" that ends up being the main plot of the series after the gag comedy is discarded. While it's tempting to discredit the anime production for this considering how badly they dropped the ball in every other area, this is a panel-by-panel recreation of the manga's story so it seems to be an inherent problem with the story (or at least inherent to adapting it into a TV anime) and I'm not sure even a stronger hand at the till could have smoothed over that flaw.

At the end of the day, what you have here is a lackluster and poorly paced story given over to a seemingly-indifferent and resource-starved production team, making it less than the sum of its parts. While I have to assume there are positive things about the source material considering how many people like it, none of its positive qualities come through in this woeful adaptation.

Toriko is one of those shows where there's nothing too deep going on, but it's just a blast to watch. The story largely revolves around the eponymous Toriko, a "Gourmet Hunter" that battles monsters and a chef named Komatsu that cooks the monsters Toriko defeats into delicious food, which then makes Toriko even stronger. It's a very action-forward series, as one might expect from a WSJ adaptation. Most episodes feature at least one battle and most problems are solved with fists.

A key to why the series remains mostly entertaining throughout in spite of that frankly braindead approach to things is frequent action combined with strong ... pacing. Even longer story arcs like Ice Hell and Cooking Fest generally don't suffer from the pacing problems that shows of this type often deal with. Progress markers are clearly staked out throughout the series and Toriko becomes meaningfully stronger throughout the events of the story without succumbing to shounen power creep. The story largely avoids the problem of "Oh no, Toriko must fight the most invincible enemy ever!" -> "Toriko wins" -> "Toriko must now fight an even more invincible-r enemy!" by keeping things grounded and parceling out progression to its characters in the right amounts. This might seem like an esoteric dive into the finer points of outlining and planning a series, but it's a key reason that show remains compulsively watchable even after 150 episodes.

There is also a certain zany energy to the entire thing that I would hesitate to describe as "funny", but is entertaining nonetheless. There aren't really that many jokes as such, it's more about the inherent absurdity of everything in this series and the attempts to construct a plot around that insanity. For example, the main goal for the characters in the series is to, and I swear I'm not making this up, find and eat God, which will give them "control over all the world's ingredients". At no point do they give any sort of explanation for what this could possibly mean, and it ends up being funnier for having never been explained in even the vaguest terms, even as it becomes increasingly important to the plot as the series progresses. That sort of "just go with it" attitude is ever-present in the worldbuilding, where almost everything is named in the laziest possible way (almost all proper nouns in the series are "Gourmet [thing]"; Gourmet Age, Gourmet Hunters, Gourmet Eclipse, Gourmet Cells, just to name a few) and there are no attempts at reconciling most things or events in the series with any sort of logical reality. This will either drive you insane or become progressively funnier the further you get into the series, depending on how seriously you attempt to take it.

I also want to briefly take a moment here to shout out series narrator Kenjiro Ishimaru, who delivers some delightfully hammy narration in the food pun segments that precede each episode. Don't skip these, they're one of the best parts of the show!

There are, however, a few things from the series to take issue with. The animation is more functional than impressive, in keeping with the demands of producing weekly television for 3 years without a break. There are a handful of more impressive episodes scattered throughout (episode #22 from future One Piece series director Kouhei Kureta is a particular highlight), but the animation is not strong as a consistent rule and there are sometimes noticeable dips in quality. While there are some positive things to mention about the look of the series (the strong, creative monster designs coming most readily to mind), the overall visual aspect grades out to below average, which is sometimes disappointing when you want a highly anticipated fight to wow you with some sakuga and it turns out to be pretty basic instead.

The series is also a continuation of a longstanding and unfortunate shounen trend of marginalizing its female characters. Only 2 female characters have a significant role in the story; Tina, a newscaster joke character that mostly exists to commentate on action, and Rin, whose entire personality is "head over heels in love with an indifferent Toriko". While there is a certain "buff dudes being manly" vibe to this series that makes it harder to comfortably fit female characters in, there was clearly no effort made here. Unfortunate, though not a dealbreaker.

Overall, it's certainly not without its flaws, but it makes for a fun over-the-top action series that balances its story well and rarely suffers from the problems of "filler" or other dips in narrative quality that often accompany long runners. My recommendation to those interested would be to give it a try through the "Regal Mammoth" arc (roughly 2 cours worth of episodes) to get a sense of the variety that it brings in terms of shorter bits mixed in with longer and more involved story arcs, and decide to drop or continue after that point. The first episode, a One Piece crossover, is also skippable both in terms of relevance to the story (there is none) and quality (bad unless you really like One Piece).