Gekkan Mousou Kagaku

This show very much feels like early 2000s Saturday morning cartoons. It's kid-friendly, with a fairly simple plot, and each episode has a mostly self-contained mini adventure. This show most strongly reminds me of Pokemon, but without all the fun creatures. There's a pair of bad guys who reliably show up every episode to interfere with our protagonists.

On the other hand, there's a bit of mystery in the plot. The basic arc of each episode is that the protagonists encounter a mystery that needs solving, and these mysteries also (conveniently) lead them to these mysterious artifacts that they're interested in obtaining

The ... show doesn't take itself seriously at all, and it's all the better for it. There are some absolutely wacky moments that had me bursting out laughing :D

Overall, the show isn't a must-watch show, but I've certainly enjoyed it.

Delusional Monthly Magazine - "Mo~~~ Over Scientific!" Yeah, you've just knocked yourself off that one.

Created by Ichigo Umatani, Gekkan Mousou Kagaku a.k.a Delusional Monthly Magazine is like a nostalgic trip back to your usual 2000s Weekend Morning cartoons being made for kids who don't care about the plot, they just want to see adventure and justice being served to the evil party. That's it, that's the plot.

Think of this show like Dora the Explorer, or in game terms, one of my all-time favourite action-adventure game shows: Nickelodeon's Legends of the Hidden Temple. The show's plot about otherworldly people living normal lives on Earth, the only ... thing separating humans from people like them are of marking on their bodies, which once hit with a piece of the treasure, transforms then into their origin kind of whoever they were from their homeland. That home is now gone, and they're living mundane lives on Earth on the fictional Most City, waiting for the "chosen one" to engage with their supernatural flock and unlock hidden treasures that await him/her.

All the involved people have to do is to go on different adventures, which for the publishing company that handles the Monthly Moso Science magazine, is represented by its members of science researcher Goro Sato, editorial assistant Jiro Tanaka, and wannabe househusband editor Taro. J Suzuki. Every client request that they accept, leads them to part of the treasure, aptly named a MOPart: pieces that form "the lost Atlantic" fictional Mo Continent, of which once all the pieces are gathered, said continent will "rise from your grave". The only problem is their enemy counterpart: the White Pegasus Company, led by its head Edward Chi, as well as the boy-girl identical twin duo of Perch and noin, which the trio must stop them from getting the MOParts before they do.

For the most part, the show keeps to its nostalgic Weekend Morning cartoon themes, which is nice to see, and its form of entertainment holds up from start to finish, albeit even if that attention was the span of only single-digit people (like me). Even the OP/ED theme songs have the feel of fantasy and mystery to it, which are decent songs in and of themselves.

The show isn't bad by any means, it's great for kids (which makes it weird that this is a late-night anime), but as adults who now have grown out of our nostalgic habits, it's just plain flat-out boring. All I can say is that it's there, but a nice try from the people who convinced the big anime executives to greenlight an original show that aims at nostalgia.

With that said, however, are the people behind the show Delusional enough to make this a tri-Monthly anime Magazine release? That, I'll leave you to decide.

Let's look at the current year, shall we? Uh, as I'm writing this, it says here that it is 2024. Mind explaining to me why this anime came out in 2024? Because this is something that should have come out in the '90s, and should have promptly been forgotten and only kept alive in a few 30-year-old people's minds because of nostalgia from a time in which their brains weren't particularly capable of judging how good an anime could be.

The most attractive thing about Gekkan Mousou Kagaku is probably its English title: "Delusional Monthly Magazine". When someone reads this title, they'd probably expect something bizarre ... and out-of-the-box, but instead all this anime has to offer is an extremely formulaic fantasy pseudo-comedy that goes everywhere and reaches nowhere. Everything you may find in this anime has been overdone to a point in which it's basically impossible to create anything even remotely original or actually entertaining.

Gekkan Mousou Kagaku has a very simple premise: there's a lost continent of mystic humanoid creatures (i.e. furries), and our protagonists want to uncover it, however, there's an evil enemy that will always try to interfere with our protagonists' efforts. From this extremely basic, regurgitated idea, we get the same formula almost every single episode: characters find a lead > they go to some place and start working on the case > antagonists show up > a battle ensues > the antagonists lose and threaten the main characters with attacking them again > repeat until boredom. Apart from a few episodes, this is the same thing over and over again, and each episode feels loosely related to the previous one. This follows the exact sequence that almost all '90s and 2000s TV shows aimed mostly at children followed: Dora the Explorer, Pokémon, etc. It's pretty much the same thing, but even then it feels rather watered down.

The plot in itself is not only basic, but boring, uninteresting, and heavily predictable: from the first moment of an episode you know how it'll surely turn out; any suspicion you might have about something will likely turn out to be the case. The monotony of all this anime's events is only ever broken by absolutely nonsensical interventions by one character or the other, for what would seem to be some extremely low-level comedic relief that should be accompanied by a label that reads "For 3 to 5 years old". One situation I can mention is a battle suddenly turning into everyone dancing for seemingly no reason, and while this might break the annoying repetition, it also tears apart the flow of whatever the fuck's going on, and only confuses you while you sit there and wonder what decisions in your life led you to wasting your time by watching this of all things in the world you could possibly watch.

If how monotonous the entire thing is wasn't enough of a deterrent for anyone who enjoys even the slightest amount of entertainment, Gekkan Mousou Kagaku is probably the most generic anime I've watched in a while. Almost everything here feels generic: we've got a charismatic male protagonist, a co-protagonist that works entirely as (crappy) comedic relief and tends to be contrarian, a loyal pet, a duo of antagonists who look alike and speak at the same time, and their evil-looking, cryptic boss. You've got the same jokes being repeated over and over again, that one catchphrase from the protagonist that just comes out as annoying, very basic, usually low-quality backgrounds and an ambiguous setting in what seems to be a mix of Japanese and European culture, with both modern and old technology, which gives the anime a vintage feeling which is odd more than anything else. The characters are extremely plain, the only ones that have even any amount of depth are supporting characters that only play an actual role later in the anime, but all-in-all every single character here feels like it is made out of plastic and written by an AI, or a 15-year-old (or by an AI using a 15-year-old's prompt).

Is there a saving grace to this anime, though? Surely Gekkan Mousou Kagaku can't be ALL bad... right?... well, no, there really isn't. The only highlights that can possibly be mentioned are some small details in the animation, such as some drinks having smooth bubbling animations, or a few other minor effects, and perhaps the design of a few characters which feel a bit fresh when compared to most anime characters (namely Tarou and Gorou), but that really is about it. The animation is lacking, specially in the facial expressions department, as at times the character's emotions might hardly match their facial expression, if at all, while at other times they'll keep a poker face when they should at the very least show a TINY BIT of emotion. Not only that, but the animation is generally choppy. The color palettes are honestly a headache, this anime is way too colorful and that contrasts a lot with its setting, which feels a bit old school and as such you'd expect it to be more muted and serious. There's a huge mix of colors everywhere, and some of them make some really awful contrast, which reminds you even more of all those '90s caricatures which had a bunch of characters with color combinations that stood out (such as green and orange, or yellow and purple). Not to mention that almost every single episode has the same 10-second sequence EACH FUCKING TIME a character turns into a Motalian, in which their transformation is showcased. This literally should have been released in the '90s, not in 2024.

As for the rest of the technical aspects: the sound design is lacking and the soundtrack is just bad: the OP is some crappy trap with some pop breaks, but it's horrendously cheesy and unoriginal, however, the ED is somewhat solid, while the insert songs are entirely forgettable and uninspired. The voice acting is hit or miss, the characters sometimes feel robotic and their voice acting falls off at times, making certain scenes (specially action ones) feel incredibly dull, as if they weren't terribly boring already. One example is a scene in which a character puts on a serious facial expression as the camera zooms in on their face: you'd expect them to passionately scream their next line, but instead they just deliver it very casually, creating some extreme dissonance between image and audio, just to put some contrast on that, if you've watched Shingeki no Kyojin, imagine one of those scenes in which the camera zooms into a character's face in a high-tension moment, and the character instead of screaming something at the top of their lungs, they just casually say "Move forward"... it'd suck, right?

There's not much else to say, the truth is that "Delusional Monthly Magazine" is simply a bad anime that can only possibly appeal to furries or children. It is completely lackluster in quality and entertainment, every single aspect of this show is lacking, and in all honesty it wouldn't be a surprise if the entire script was written using an AI, not only because of how basic it is, but also because it tries to be deep while absolutely NEVER explaining a massive amount of lore that would at least allow the viewer to understand what the heck is the entire plot actually about. If it wasn't bad enough, once you get to the end, you just realize you sat through all this boredom just so that it all ends as if it was literally a children's book.

Don't watch this, really, don't waste your time on this, there are over ten thousand anime out there, and 90% of them are better than this. There really is nothing to be found here.