Back to onespankman's Profile onespankman's Profile

It feels almost pointless to review Girls Bravo. It came out almost two decades ago, it’s not aged particularly well, and basically nobody cares about it. Answering the question “should you watch it” feels pointless, but for a surprising amount of people, that answer is yes.

Girls Bravo is not particularly groundbreaking, it’s not particularly… well, good. I enjoy it, but I only enjoy it because I enjoy fanservice and harem bullshit. What makes it remarkable now is just how easy it is to watch compared to its contemporaries.

The first half of the 2000s was an awkward period for male-targeted romance anime, where Rumiko Takahashi copies ... had gone out of style, and boring Love Hina likes were dominant. This era produced almost nothing watchable, even fondly remembered shows like Shuffle! feel painfully boring now.

Before now I’ve never been able to make it a single cour into one of these, and most are two cour. The sole exception to that is Gainax’s weird 2001 hidden gem Mahoromatic: Automatic Maiden — itself a bit too original to explain the era’s conventions.

What makes Girls Bravo so unique is its lack of originality in characterization and plot, and great production. Aspects of Girl’s Bravo’s production range from good — like its soundtrack and voice acting — to great — like its direction and animation. The only bit you might find annoying is Tomoko’s voice (I’ve watched enough anime that I find this kind of voice charming, but that’s unlikely to be anyone else’s experience).

The direction is quietly fantastic, economically cutting around movement when needed, and going all out at other times. Oftentimes an episode will have an A and B plot, and sometimes they intersect in a single shot (character in B plot is in background, character in A plot is in foreground and such). The amount of animation in backgrounds here is kinda insane from a modern perspective; this technique’s mostly been abandoned in modern TV anime — especially trash harems. It’s refreshing to see here.

The fanservice is quite good. This production came at the tail end of TV anime’s free nipple era, and most episodes start with a shower scene, so there’s that. It doesn’t leverage editing and direction to excite the viewer in the same way some modern anime do (think that one scene from Chainsaw Man); most fanservice is limited to showing the viewer a tiddie or implying the main character saw something, but it’s good for its era. There are occasionally moments where it gets impressively, hilariously shameless. Like, there's this one scene where the female MC just fellates a banana for almost a full minute, while the old man selling her that banana rants about his love of fruit. In moments like that the show is genuinely funny.

The overarching plot and setting involve more fantasy themes than I expected. There’s space travel, ghosts, teleportation, and magic. It’s never exactly clear how any of this works, and in a comedy show like this, it doesn’t need to be. To briefly explain the plot, there’s two planets, Earth, and Seirin, a planet exclusively populated by women. It’s possible to move between these planets by teleportation using bathtubs (or something, don’t really understand how this works). Our MC is allergic to all women except the female MC Miharu, who also has strange magic powers.

Its individual episode plots are good enough, and as you’d expect of this era, occasionally delve into incoherence. Episode 7’s plot goes: the gang needs to find the main girl’s sister a husband, so they head outside with no plan. After being spotted by a rich girl stalking the MC, they walk by a show advertising Honda motorcycles, so the childhood friend character hatches a brilliant plan: the girls will go on stage to advertise the motorcycles, then leave, put on animal costumes, and just kinda walk around. Around this time, this show’s stock loli character is out luring men by sitting on a park bench and crying, when all the men (one of which is a big yakuza dude) get a text message from the rich girl, containing a picture of the stock shy girl character, so then all the men go after the main group. A bunch of men surround our characters, so they run away. Then the rich girl’s brother — this show’s stock weird pervert character — shows up and leads the stock loli back to the MC’s house, where he tackles the shy girl into a bathtub, causing all three of them to teleport directly into the main girl’s sisters bath on another planet, who reprimands them and sends them back.

That explanation ran longer and sounded even more incoherent than I expected — but it doesn’t quite feel that weird as you watch it. Insane plots like this are a staple of this era’s comedy anime, and I love them here, even when they’re a vehicle for product placement.

I should qualify this praise by once again stating, this just makes the show watchable. It does exactly the uncomfortable things other anime of its era do, including loli fanservice and joking treatment of sexual assault. There’s a stock pervert character whose entire personality is sexual assault, things can get real uncomfortable.

Most of the characters aren’t developed past their basic archetypes, and the MC is exactly the annoying wimp you’d expect. Further explaining the girls’ personalities seems kind of pointless because they really are just: airhead mascot character, violent childhood friend, shy girl, rich girl, and child. You might also be able to count the weird shrimp thing in that… point is they’re conventional and boring.

This all makes the show worse, but it also makes it valuable. Girls Bravo is a perfect encapsulation of its era, good and bad, in a uniquely watchable package. I didn’t always love it, but it never bored me. It never drew out will-they won’t-they tension beyond its welcome, it never bored me with an episode plot. It is — if nothing else — a history lesson.

Maybe I’ve spent too many words advocating for a show I don’t even like that much, but to anyone interested in this era, or in better understanding current male-oriented romance anime, this is a must-watch. If you don't have that specific sort of academic interest in harem anime, and don't like trash harem generally… it’s probably a skip.

The trailer for Mari Okada’s latest project implied something amazing. Moody and high concept, with beautifully rendered backgrounds, smooth animation, and a killer soundtrack. It had the makings of a masterpiece, and a great studio to back it up.

When it quietly released on Netflix this January, I was excited to watch, though its score caused some trepidation. Indeed, all those elements the trailer promised are here in some form. If this film succeeds in any regard, it is aesthetically.

Okada’s direction is sharp as ever here, as is every other aspect of the production. Its soundtrack is consistently strong, though misapplied occasionally. The voice ... actors all give good performances, and the sound editing is as good as any other theatrical release. While it doesn’t quite measure up to Ghibli and CoMix Waves’ latest offerings, it's an impressive achievement for a back boiler MAPPA project.

Where the film falters is its script. Okada is a fairly consistent scriptwriter, and she’s shown both inventiveness (Maquia) and ability to execute on convention (A Whisker Away). This script is no doubt her most ambitious, and it falls short in a few key ways.

The characters aren’t great, particularly the side characters. I couldn’t tell you their names. I’m an advocate for the fat comic relief side character, but this film’s is more annoying than funny. He cracks maybe one funny joke across the whole runtime. One side romance is bizarre and left completely unresolved. The villain is never a legitimate threat, he almost gets beat up by children more times than he thwarts the protagonists. Among our three leads, there’s one uncomfortable spoilery relationship I can’t get into. The female MC’s main character traits are lying all the time and refusing to disclose key information. She's frustrating to watch, though her arc eventually leaves her in a better place. To give credit where it’s due, the character designs are all great. I may not remember their names, but their faces will stick with me.

The plot is extremely confusing. As far as I can tell, a town is trapped in a purgatory-like state of stagnation following a disaster at the town’s steel mill. None of the residents age, and time does not pass. That much isn’t hard to understand, but the film insists on burying this information forty minutes into the runtime, well past the time we should be invested in the story.

I’m accustomed to strange plot structures, but this one creates a big problem. Rather than building emotional investment in the characters in the first hour, the audience is left grasping at straws trying to piece together what the hell is going on. Once we’re told directly, things only get more confusing. The climax is borderline incoherent, though speaking any further would get into spoiler territory.

All of this confusion may work in a more abstract setting, but this film’s otherwise straightforward plot demands the audience understands the specifics. This confusion eventually reaches a breaking point. The audience realizes they’re not going to figure it out, and all emotional investment goes out the window.

A particular recurring element unintentionally mirrored my experience. At the very beginning, we hear a radio DJ replying to viewer messages. The characters ignore the broadcast. This plays again at the very end, and the main character yells at the questioners about the joy of living. This was meant to hammer home the film’s themes, but instead served as a powerful moment of catharsis. I was yelling at my TV at this point, frustrated by the unanswered questions and strange writing decisions. Both I and the MC had arrived at the same point, yelling about the absurdity of the media we were consuming. At that point I just laughed.

I tried to like this, I really did, but the plot lost me. Even so, I can’t help but respect the attempt. Okada could have pulled back, written a conventional tearjerker script, and I’d have probably loved it. She chose an impossible challenge instead.

Though it ended a glorious dumpster fire, I respect the effort. This is worth a watch if you care about Okada, just be prepared for disappointment.

This special is pretty good. It's a basically a normal municipality-promoting episode of Jashin-chan, plus a Fist of the North Star parody. The animation is a bit worse than that of X (as is directly pointed out by Jashin-chan at the start of the episode), but the art direction is still attractive. It looks worse than the show, but it's not enough of a downgrade to make the special bad. We get two new songs for the opening and ending, both of which are good, but lack proper visuals.

We get plenty of Jashin-chan’s typical fourth wall breaking humor, with some references to the Furano situation ... thrown in. If you're unaware, a few episodes of X raised funds by advertising municipalities, the idea being that fans might send them money through the hometown tax system. One of these cities, Furano, refused to hand over the money they'd agreed upon (after their episode had already aired), claiming its content was unacceptable. The City Council cited a joke about selling organs, confirming that they have the weakest sensibilities on the planet. It was a real shitty move, and it's nice to see the staff poking fun at it.

The special follows a meandering travel plot, where Jashin-chan goes on a wacky adventure, meeting every character in the process. This time the city being promoted is Takamori, and they push the local specialties less than they did in previous promotional episodes. It's still not compelling on its own, but provides ample opportunity for entertaining character interactions. If you're still here after three seasons, that should be enough. Moderate your expectations if the plot synopsis misled you into thinking this was an alternate timeline.

This is as much a status update as a new episode. The dialogue at the end implies we’re getting another season, I just hope the crowdfunding makes enough money that they can chill on the hometown tax episodes. I would sell my organs if it meant getting less of those.

Watch this special. And if you're a true Jashin-chaner, don't send your taxes to Furano.

There is no genre in otaku media more notoriously stagnant than harem. Since the progression of anime romcom from Rumiko Takahashi-style love polygons to Love Hina-style harems, the genre’s tropes and structure have changed very little. Plenty of good shows have been cast in that mold, but for most of its reign viewers have craved an antidote.

The typical harem anime progression looks something like: protagonist is introduced, meets a series of girls, girls fall in love with him, drawn out will they won’t they tension, manga stops making money, protagonist picks winning girl. This formula is not without strengths (seeing your favorite win is an ... unparalleled high, and the internet arguments are fun), but the extended period of romantic stagnation before the conclusion can create boredom.

A clean solution to this structural problem is polyamory. Rather than waiting for one girl to win, every girl wins. The possibilities after that are endless. Tension between the harem members, lesbian romance, and straightforward friendship are all paths with distinct strengths. Hyakkano does all of these, and makes it all even more efficient by way of a clever plot device.

All of Rentarou’s hundred soulmates instantly fall in love with him upon first meeting eyes, skipping the extended “developing feelings” phase present in most romances. This keeps the pace satisfyingly quick, and explains why women are willing to date a man who already has like seventy girlfriends. This doesn’t completely eliminate early romantic progression. Rentarou still needs to convince his soulmates to go out with him, and all of them have a reason for loving him more compelling than the stock harem “he saved me from a big monster” or “we met as kids”. This preserves the best parts of early romance, and spares us the moral implications of a magic bond forcing two people together.

This structure can’t work without great characters, and Hyakkano does not skimp in that department. Rentarou Aijou is one of the best harem protagonists of all time. He’s earnest, hard working, and emotionally intelligent enough to avoid typical romance anime misunderstandings. He genuinely cares about all his girlfriends, and is willing to go to absurd lengths to make them happy (like in that Schrödinger's kiss scheme). Basically, he has immense rizz outside the magic. It's never confusing why any of his girlfriends want to date him, his 100 rejections in middle school make less sense.

His first two girlfriends, Hanazono Hakari and Inda Karane, are both wonderful and compliment each other perfectly. Karane at first appears to be a simple parody of the tsundere archetype, but her rivalry/friendship with Hakari and perpetual role as harem tsukkomi give her plenty of comedic mileage beyond that. The way Hakari’s aggressive romantic moves force Karane to action is always entertaining, as are Hakari’s reactions to the introduction of new girlfriends.

Yoshimoto Shizuka fills the quiet girl archetype, and does so well. She’s a nice shy counterbalance to the first two members of Rentarou’s family, and the way she struggles to engage in harem activities due to social anxiety is always charming. That creates cute moments when the other girls go out of their way to include her. The author has clearly considered how each member’s introduction will affect the harem’s chemistry.

What surprised me most about this show is just how well its romance works outside of comedy. The buildup of Rentarou’s relationship with Shizuka was genuinely heartwarming, as was his decision to ask both Hakari and Karane to date him. The romance works more than I ever expected from a show about one man dating one hundred girls.

Kusuri’s name means drug and she loves drugs, but hasn’t done meth yet. So, she’s relatable to me personally, and I love her. Her presence revives a great trope that got lost in the Takahashi-Love Hina paradigm shift, the magic potion plot. Kusuri's entire plot function is pumping out magic potions, in more variation than is typical. She still hasn’t made meth though, can’t wait for that episode.

I’ll stop myself with the character breakdowns here, but everyone I’m leaving out is just as awesome. There’s one character in particular the show keeps a surprise, and I don’t plan on ruining that. Bottom line: these characters are never one note, and have meaningful interactions with each other, not just the protagonist. That automatically makes the cast more engaging than that of most harem anime.

I was initially worried about the adaptation due to studio choice. Bibury doesn’t exactly have a great track record, even their good shows look pretty bad. Thankfully, the staff pulled through on this one. The show has fantastic art direction and consistently good animation, both of which compliment its tone and match the humor perfectly. The fanservice in particular benefits from this (and there is plenty of it). That’s a key part of what elevates this above its contemporaries.

Hyakkano is a genuinely innovative show that delivers the best parts of harem anime (confessions, fanservice scenes, emotional character arcs, absurd comedy, and gay stuff) as efficiently as possible. It is a landmark achievement, and it gives me faith harem, and anime romcoms are alive.

After three days diligently hiding from my roommate that I was watching this crap, I bring a review.

I’m Strong Even though I’m Level 1 (don’t remember the actual title) is the archetypical bad isekai. Every quality you’d expect is on display here. Terrible art and animation, one dimensional characters, a complete lack of meaningful conflict. Everything, all executed in such a bland, uncreative way I’m almost impressed with it.

It‘s lighter on insane moments than similar works, but still has a few bangers. Like when the MC breaks a strike by knocking out all of the workers with magic bullets (the adventurers guild would otherwise have ... had them killed). Or how the MC heals people by shooting them with magic “healing bullets”. Which yes, is funny every time it happens.

The central plot conceit is that the MC (called Yoda by one character which is funny so I’m using it) has maxed out drop rates, and is isekaied to a world where every resource drops from dungeons. That sounds like it would significantly alter how the world functions, but it's treated as an afterthought. The entirety of the worldbuilding is: anything left alone outside turns into a monster, so garbage has to be burned, and different towns control different resources. That’s it.

The fights illustrate the show’s general approach to writing. Once we move past basic dungeon fodder, the heroes face a big goofy-looking ass gorilla, which they beat by hitting real hard. Yoda gets a sweet revolver out of it, making him slightly more like Hajime Arifureta. Next they fight a bicorn that blocks Yoda’s attacks with a magical barrier, they remove the barrier by hitting it real hard, then kill the bicorn by hitting it real hard. They fight a goblin who grows larger by absorbing attacks, and beat it by hitting it real hard.

The fights are almost all resolved by hitting the enemy harder, and this kind of brute force, low-effort writing defines the show’s atmosphere. It’s not meant to be taken seriously, and is written such that it’s almost impossible to. The show even directly asks you not to think too hard about it (after a character somehow bakes a cake using a campfire). I could take this as insulting, but I’m happy to oblige its request.

This casual, stupid atmosphere renders the show surprisingly watchable. It seems everyone involved in the production knew what they were making and weren’t taking it too seriously (this is especially evident in the improvised eyecatches). The terrible art direction, off-model characters, and embarrassing animation take on a less offensive character in light of that.

Normally I wouldn't sit through an entire show this bad, but this held me. I wouldn’t recommend it to most, though. You should watch this if, and only if, you’re titrating your bad isekai dose in preparation to binge Arifureta. Or if you’re an insane isekai junkie like me, but these are the trenches my friend.

Blue Giant had an impossible task set before it: adapting 10 volumes of music manga into a single film, including multiple climactic performances.

The foundation of that had to be good music, and Blue Giant’s is universally fantastic. The players here had a uniquely difficult job, they didn’t just have to play well, they had to act with their instruments. Their performances wonderfully capture the emotions of the characters, and their level of experience. The drummer did a particularly good job, replicating the play of a developing amateur. You can feel the characters’ passion in their instruments; even as they struggle to articulate their feelings towards ... jazz, the audience understands completely.

It had to take some shortcuts. Its visuals are an uneven mixture of good 2D animation, awkward CG, and sublime sakuga. Occasionally, its sound design falters. I can recall a few moments where the soundtrack overpowered the dialogue. Its plot is compressed, the entire history of a band in just two hours. Obtrusive interview clips are spliced in at random. There’s one plot point in particular that’s left field and disrupts the narrative.

Its flaws are numerous, and obvious, but don’t hold back its infectious energy. Love of jazz drips from every second of Blue Giant, the feelings of its creators conveyed in every image and frantic sequence of cuts.

Blue Giant is rough and uneven, its parts are dissonant, its animation rough, its narrative inconsistent. It rushes, gets ahead of itself, stops for a moment, and those dissonant parts suddenly collide in an explosion of emotion.

Much like jazz, its flaws create interesting emotional intersections. That plot point I didn’t like pays off soon after. The CG animation just starts to work out of nowhere.

Out of dissonance and imperfection emerges emotion. That's the soul of jazz, and of Blue Giant.

To compile a list of Blue Giant’s faults would be to miss that soul. Much like the amateur drums of the movie’s band, its faults imbue the finished product soul. In this case, the soul of the art it portrays.

They may not resonate in that way for you, you wouldn’t be wrong for having that experience. But if you love jazz, or artistic passion, hear Blue Giant out.

Isekai Cheat Magician is best described by a string of 48 vomit emojis, and the word “mid”.

I’m as big an isekai junkie as anyone, and it still took me over a year to get through these 12 episodes. I’m not even going to bother snagging a free MAL entry by watching the extra episode that aired with the rebroadcast (because this was somehow broadcasted on Japanese TV twice).

The general understanding of Cheat Magician is that it’s generic garbage, but that undersells just how difficult it is to sit through. It is front to back boring, nothing it attempts works. There aren’t even any insane plot ... twists, it's difficult to imagine what thought process produced writing this unimaginative. The horrible art and animation compound all the resulting boredom.

The OP is by Myth & Roid, a band that’s opened for a bunch of much better isekai. The song and visuals are pretty phoned in, but if you go to the YouTube upload of it, all the comments say some variation of “this is the best part of the show”. As unlikely as it appeared, they are correct. This anime’s mediocre OP is an oasis, the sole 5/10 respite from this 1/10 anime.

The plot is, the protagonist and his childhood friend get isekaied, then they fight a monster, then they learn magic, then they fight some people, then they fight some monsters, then they fight some people. Truly riveting.

The protagonist is nice, and wants to protect his friends. The childhood friend character is nice, and wants to protect her friends. The other characters… there’s an elf girl… there’s like this spirit thing that gives the MC wind powers… the other character on the poster taught the MC magic, I think?

The final arc centers on a civil war, and the MC just blindly sides with the people who summoned him. We don’t even know what the war is about, it is confusingly lacking in detail.

The MC’s "character arc” hilariously ends with him committing his first homicide. Because he’s “given up his humanity” or something. So, the message of this anime is: killing people is okay, but only if they’re the bad guys.

This review is low-effort as hell, and so is this anime. It is not deserving of thought. It is not fun bad, it is not interestingly bad, it is as straightforwardly bad as anime can be.

🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮

Mid.

The best isekai paint honest portraits of otakuism. Classics of the current movement like Re:Zero and Mushoku Tensei use the isekai premise to examine what their otaku protagonists want, what they need to grow as people, and how aspects of their otaku identity can help and hinder that growth. They present a holistic understanding of their subject matter through the lens of isekai.

Arifureta paints a portrait every bit as honest, though not on purpose.

Do not mistake my recommendation for a positive critical assessment. By the standards of any reasonable critic, Arifureta is terrible. It’s a juvenile power fantasy with all around horrible production values, and ... no thematic depth or interesting plot mechanics to compensate. But a straightforward critical assessment misses most of what Arifureta has to offer.

Manga and light novel authors have a surprising amount of control over adaptations of their work. Due to a quirk in Japanese copyright law (Moral Rights or jinkaku-ken), authors often have the authority to approve or disapprove adaptations and fan works.

This is often a positive force, it’s what allowed Takehiko Inoue to hold out on Slam Dunk adaptations until he could personally sit in the director’s chair - the result being The First Slam Dunk, the best sports anime of all time. Arifureta represents the opposite side of that coin, having swapped studios from the reliable White Fox to the reliably terrible asread. last minute on the author’s demands.

To fans of Arifureta, this was a horrible curse that doomed the anime to failure. I won’t deny this made the anime worse, White Fox’s isekai adaptations most proximate to Arifureta’s production, Re:Zero and Cautious Hero, are both impressive technically, and that quality would no doubt improve Arifureta in a straightforward critical sense. But Arifureta is not an anime that cannot be assessed straightforwardly.

I could write pages on how bad Arifureta is, but I’m not here to do that. Nobody is interested in hearing a teardown of Arifureta. I’m here to make a much more difficult case, to zealously advocate for Arifureta as one of the greatest works of garbage media ever crafted.

I try to be fair to fans of works I criticize, so to fans of Arifureta: I get it.

After 25 episodes + 4 OVAs, I kind of love the cast’s dynamic, and the larger plot isn’t a conceptual failure. Hajime is fighting god, and his class is fighting in the war that god puppeteered. That’s an interesting structure. I understand what a good version of this might look like, but Arifureta is not that show.

Arifureta’s garbage CG, consistently off model characters, underlit backgrounds, and bland art direction make it impossible to take anything it presents seriously. That takes the uncomfortable edge off all of the show’s uncomfortable edginess. We watch the protagonist kill people for no reason, and are able to laugh at it since it’s so incompetently presented. In a backwards way, the poor production makes the show more enjoyable.

Much of the edginess stems from our protagonist, the coolest mf ever, Hajime.

He’s so badass and edgy that he just kills people for no reason in like, every episode. He declines every side quest he’s offered, waffles about if he should bother saving hundreds of lives at minimal personal cost. Then he accepts every one anyway. And that occupies about 20% of the show’s runtime. You could say that’s real annoying, I say that’s just the cost of edge.

You see, Hajime was betrayed, shot into the depths of a labyrinth by his bully. Then he got his fricking arm blown off by a bear, and had to start eating monsters raw to survive, and that gave him sick ass monster abilities, and made his hair white for some reason. The production staff made the striking choice to make monster blood piss yellow btw. He also gets a demon eye at some point (like Rudeus Mushoku Tensei), but I forgot why.

His whole class thinks he’s dead, except for this one healer girl who had a crush on him pre-isekai, who made a promise to protect him or something.

This is a genius set up for escapist wish fulfillment. Isekaing his entire class allows Arifureta to tap into the high school social dynamics its presumed target audience is escaping from, and making them all think he’s dead creates fertile ground for interesting encounters when he reunites with them only for them to realize he's become the coolest mf ever and has a harem and a daughter and is willing to murder people for no reason and has a cool ass eyepatch and has 100 cool ass guns and a fricking pile bunker and a motorcycle and a humvee and white hair and a 13 inch penis (presumably).

The personalities in that harem are pretty cool too, epic even. Not going to bother describing them though, would take too many paragraphs.

There’s more to this anime than Hajime and his harem though, supposedly.

Right, plot. Arifureta’s plot is impressively shameless, and I really only need one anecdote to illustrate that, so here’s 6:

Hajime's bunny girl companion almost drowns (after randomly seeing a talking fish) so he mouth-to-mouth resuscitates her, only for her to leg lock him out of nowhere and start frenching him.

Hajime beats a dragon by shoving a pole up its ass, then the dragon starts talking and moaning + begging him to stop, but he pushes it further in (he doesn't give a fuck). This is all in front of his teacher and classmates by the way. Then the dragon turns into a human and joins his harem (serving as resident Darkness clone).

Hajime rescues a mermaid child from a ring of slavers (who somehow kidnapped her from a city in the middle of the ocean). Then he jumps into the sky carrying her and says “look at these fireworks” and blows up all of their hideouts. The mermaid child then stops calling him “onii-chan” and starts calling him “papa”. Upon conclusion of this arc, all of the Hajime harem members simultaneously ask him to impregnate them.

Hajime mouth to mouth resuscitates his teacher (whose legs start squirming around halfway through), then he shoots his classmate in the face as he's already bleeding out. His harem congratulates him for this gracious act of kindness (shooting him means his teacher won’t feel responsible, or something).

The bunny girl gets covered in slime then nutted in the face by dungeon traps.

There’s also this one part where Hajime is throating meat in a dungeon, really chowing down, and that one goofy running sound effect plays. That went hard.

What goes harder than the meat is the soundtrack, which combines electronic and jazz elements. That works surprisingly well with the light dark fantasy vibes. That’s like, the single genuine point of praise you’ll find in this review.

The note this anime ends on is truly remarkable. As Hajime drives into a random desert on his magic humvee with his full 4 member harem + mermaid daughter, he narrates the following badass (definitely not cringey) line:

"All who get in my way are my enemies, and I kill all my enemies, even if they're a god".

I just wrote that from memory, so it’s probably wrong, but as an indiscriminate killer myself, it speaks to me.

This batshit insanity props up all of the boring set dressing surrounding it. We never get opportunities to think about how hollow the world building is, or how almost every character outside the main harem has no defined personality. Any time you’re at risk of getting bored, an explosion happens, or an inexplicable fanservice scene, or Hajime shoots someone in the face in front of all their friends.

In its bumbling ineptitude, Arifureta paints a more honest portrait of garbage isekai and the wishes of contemporary otaku than better anime could ever hope to match. If Re:Zero and Mushoku Tensei appeal intellectually and critically, Arifureta appeals on the basest lizard brain level. If you’re the type of person that works for, it’ll be fun as hell (at least when it isn’t boring).

You should absolutely give it a watch, especially if you’re one of those annoying people who thinks Luffy should just kill all the villains, you’ll get a real kick out of it.

Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu is something of a forgotten relic of the early 2010s. It’s not uncommon to hear it mentioned in discussions of the era, but praise for it is always qualified in some way, usually by a suggestion that it has probably aged poorly. That’s not entirely unwarranted.

Baka to Test is tropey to be sure, and feels generic in ways typical of its era, but what was good about it in 2010 is largely still good today. It has strong comedy, expressive animation, and good characters; that keeps it consistently enjoyable (at least when the high concept ideas aren't at center stage).

Those ... high concept ideas do seriously get in the way of the show rather frequently. There are two of them, one far more obtrusive than the other. The first is a grades based ranking system which sorts students into classes lettered A-F, higher ranked classes receiving better facilities and resources. The other is summoner wars, a summon based interclass battle system so convoluted I won’t bother explaining it here. Classes can exchange equipment based on the results of summoner wars between them, which any class can declare at any time.

The school's academic caste system is a fine idea that's even executed fairly well, but the summoner wars are a fundamentally bad concept only helped somewhat by the specific rules introduced in each one. Since power in those summoner wars is entirely determined by academic ability, strategy centers on getting favorable matchups based on knowledge in specific subjects. That isn’t used to its full potential for most of the show though. Class F happens to have one A level student, Mizuki Himeji, who automatically got a zero for being sick on entrance exam day, and throwing her at the opponent supplants all potentially interesting strategy in the first summoner war.

Writing about all that gave me a headache, and that’s really the problem. The complexity of this mechanic clashes too much with the low-stakes comedic vibes that make the show enjoyable in the first place. Thankfully, there is a rule that a class can only declare a summoner war once every 3 months, which keeps them at bay for most of the show’s mid section.

When they return in the last few episodes, they’ve improved quite a bit. They rely more on strategy than did the first one, which was centered more or less on just comparing grades to decide who wins, and take themselves a bit less seriously, thus clashing less with the comedy. Despite my complaints, their worst qualities don’t occupy enough space to ruin the show.

The true core of Baka to Test is its comedy, which dominates the runtime. And, while Baka to Test is rightfully recognized for its adherence to comedy anime tropes, it makes admirable efforts to improve on many of them.

The whole "heroine attacks protagonist" gag hasn't really been funny since Urusei Yatsura invented it, and Baka to Test subverts and improves on it in hilarious fashion. Every time resident tomboy tsundere Minami Shimada beats up our protagonist, a character named "Muttsulini Voyuer" dives in to try to get panty pics. That's a pretty funny gag, at least the first couple times, and Baka to Test is rich in such material.

It does have a tendency to run good jokes into the ground. The “heroine is bad at cooking” gag is used fairly conventionally here, and the context surrounding each application isn’t enough to make it funny. But there’s a big difference between not funny and painfully unfunny, and when it fails to get laughs, Baka to Test sticks firmly in the former category.

It’s also a good deal gayer than I expected, which is welcome even if most of that gayness is wasted on one line jokes. Some of this feels a bit outdated, but it never gets close to problematic. The best application of it is class A vice president Kubo Toshimitsu, who has a gay crush on MC Akihisa Yoshii. He’s consistently funny, and officially makes this a harem anime by the “at least three love interests” rule.

Being a 2010s romcom anime, it has its share of incoherent episode plots. Episode 7, for example, centers on an amusement park where the entire cast got jobs so they can trick two characters into coming for a wedding experience thing, then get them to sign marriage paperwork, and also appear on a random quiz show. Then this punk guy shows up, and harasses the main cast, so they beat him up.

That’s all utterly insane, but it provides excellent ground for comedic character interactions, and since the events don’t have wider plot implications, it works surprisingly well.

Stuff like that is the core of the show, what makes it so enjoyable. When the character interactions and the comedy therein take center stage, rather than complex plot mechanisms, Baka to Test is fun as hell.

To someone watching 13 years after it aired, this anime cannot possibly feel fresh and original, but on the strength of that core, Baka to Test is still good.

One of the more impressive animation productions I've yet seen. A particular strength is its subtle character animation, but it succeeds at all it attempts. That makes sense, a film about the great Japanese painter Oei and those in her orbit demands detailed artwork.

Sarusuberi doesn't have great narrative ambitions. It portrays a series of vignettes covering a small portion of the protagonist's life, and doesn't conclude any of the narrative arcs it alludes to. This blunts emotional impact, but focuses the viewer on its themes. It's a reflection on the artistic process, though it has little to say about art itself.

Oei never has any great ... epiphanies, the film instead subtly conveys how her experiences influence her art. She can't draw women in sex scenes convincingly, and the people around her imply it's because of her sexual inexperience. So she goes out to a brothel, and when we next see her drawing erotic art, the woman in it resembles the sex worker she met that day. Most experiences Oei has tie into her art like this, and it provides otherwise disparately connected scenes clear narrative purpose.

The film has some interesting things to say about how a lack of technical proficiency can enhance a work's impact.

Oei's painter kohai Zenjirou's lack of technical skill gives his sex scenes an allure she cannot capture. She’s sure her art is technically superior, so this frustrates her, and to resolve the cognitive dissonance she further invests in her feeling of superiority. She works hard to improve anyway though.

That’s a surprisingly accurate reflection of what visual artists are like. Technically skilled artists are a dime a dozen, as are creatively inspired ones. People who have only technical skill often feel superior to those who only have creative inspiration, vice versa. But a great artist needs both, and regardless of how self-critical they are, they can get better with practice and study.

The dialogue has a satisfying pace that wordlessly informs the viewer as to the personalities and relationships of the characters. The way Oei pauses before answering Zenjirou's questions, but immediately answers Hatsugoro's questions informs us as to her disposition towards them.

Likewise, the editing and sound design inform us as to the thoughts and emotions of Oei's little sister Onao. She's blind, and her mood is different on a summer morning, rich with audible and olfactory stimuli, than on a winter morning, where snow absorbs most sound. This is communicated through careful camerawork and editing, often changing angles to signal that she's picked up on something we expect to be received through visual stimuli.

Explicit symbolism is layered throughout the visual tapestry. This is an East Asian film, so of course flowers are a primary symbolic tool. Many of the backgrounds, effects, and locations replicate the work of the historical Hokusai and Oei. It’s a nice atmospheric touch that works regardless of the viewer’s familiarity with their work.

I greatly appreciate the film's attitude towards sex, sex workers, and erotic art. Sex is generally treated casually throughout the piece, and sex workers are regarded with appropriate respect. Homosexuality is not treated as exceptional or aberrant. Erotic art is considered to be of equal value to all other art, a view I particularly enjoy living in a society that very much looks down on erotic art. I should moderate my praise somewhat, as this is largely reflective of the society it portrays rather than a moral stance of the film, but I still found it refreshing.

The narrative and characters may have only the barest traces of arcs, but this is a carefully constructed film, and it pays off in every important way. It isn't intensely emotional, but it paints an enthralling picture that keeps the viewer engaged throughout its run.

It is a meaningful, worthwhile experience. I recommend.