Back to AnimeEnjoyer420's Profile AnimeEnjoyer420's Profile

Shouwa Monogatari is a sedate slice of life story about a multigenerational family living in 1960s Tokyo. Your enjoyment is largely going to depend on whether you can connect with the specific sense of nostalgia that it's trying to cultivate. While there are some bits that are culturally specific to Japan and not easy for westerners to relate to, I think it does a good job overall of building a general atmosphere of "the good days gone by" that most will connect with, the vibe of your gruff dad sending you to the corner store to buy a pack of smokes for him, playing baseball ... in the vacant lot after school with your schoolyard friends, that sort of thing.

The music and visuals do a good job in giving it that hazy nostalgic feel as well. The use of period music and commercial jingles feels authentic, and a post-credits scene after each episode showcases the real life locations they were based on and includes some old photographs from the time period as well to give it a strong sense of place. The art and animation are merely functional, but look nice enough aside from one or two bits of questionable CGI usage, and the character designs are pretty strong.

One area where it falls short, however, is the voice acting. It is often stiff at best, and sometimes bad enough to break immersion. The main culprit here is Chiba Shouya as the elementary school aged son of the family, Kouhei. It's tough to blame him fully since this appears to have been his first main role and he was only 15 or 16 years old at the time, but his acting here is completely flat and affectless. It becomes distracting when Kouhei is meant to be jumping for joy or shouting mad, but all of his lines are still being delivered in the same emotionless monotone. This was a poor casting choice and he was plainly not ready for the role at this point, though he has gone on to have an excellent career since then.

In the end, how you feel about this series is going to depend a lot on your patience for slice of life material and your ability or desire to feel nostalgic. If you can let yourself get lost in its golden-era "remember when everything cost a nickel?" vibe, there's a nice enough show here. However, if you're someone that typically gets bored by low stakes slice of life shows, this isn't going to be the one that breaks the streak for you. Likewise if you're not the type of person that gets warm fuzzy feelings for a bygone era that you never actually lived in.

Reideen is the epitome of a slow starter. Though it does find its footing a bit towards the end of its run, it's a show that requires patience in the early going, because the first 10 episodes or so are a real slog to get through.

One reason for that is the uninspired setup. If you've seen one "high school student is chosen by an ancient artifact to pilot a mech and defend Earth from an alien invasion" show, you've seen em all, and Reideen certainly does nothing to distinguish itself from that crowded field early on. Another factor is that the big mech action setpieces ... are absolutely horrendous. They are slow, plodding affairs that look like they take place in slow motion. The mech CGI looks terrible and fights generally take place at night to mask some of the ugliness, but instead that just throws a muddy color palette over the whole thing and makes it look even worse. The backgrounds are reduced to flat, featureless black plains during fight scenes as well, which gives the whole thing a distinct feeling of taking place in some sort of video game arena instead of reality. While the 2D scenes look better and have some occasionally strong animation, they similarly struggle with a dark and drab color palette that drains the energy from the show. Perhaps the most aggravating issue is the frequent re-use of animation in the mech scenes, specifically the scenes of Reideen being summoned or using his special moves. This can account for as much as 3-4 minutes *per episode*, and when you've seen Junki yelling "God Sword!" and the same exact minute-long animation of the sword flipping through the air 20+ times, you start to check out on the episode every time it happens, and the fight scenes are nowhere close to exciting enough to bring a viewer back from that.

But all of that is not to say that Reideen is a *bad* show. It puts its worst foot forward, and is too cagey about keeping its plot mysterious during the first cours. But once it gets into the meat of the story, there's an interesting little plot here about various factions struggling for control of Reideen, and a surprisingly deep exploration of how competing incentives within the military industrial complex can lead to irrational decision making and destructive policy. It takes far too long to get there, but the viewer's patience is eventually rewarded with an engaging series full of intrigue. The mech action never improves to the point that you could describe it as anything other than bad, but it does get *better* in the last few episodes as well.

One piece I would have liked to see them do more with is Midorino, the mysterious transfer student in Junki's class. While we do eventually get an explanation of what her Whole Deal is, far too much of the series is devoted to longing and mysterious looks between the two of them. And even after she's incorporated into the overarching plot, she has a handful of lines in the entire series and barely has anything resembling a personality. Considering that she's front and center in the series advertising, all over the OP, and so forth, you would expect her to have a big role in the series, but it's actually easy to forget she even exists most of the time. She has no real impact on the story and no presence even when she's on screen.

Overall, I would not call this series bad, but it's tough to recommend because it takes so long to get going, and mech fans that may be inclined to give it a chance will likely be turned off by the boring and badly-animated action scenes. Much of the best material comes when there are no mechs or crazy alien devices on screen, and it comes late in the series too. While it does improve to the point of being very watchable by the end of the series, I'm not sure it's worth the time investment to get there when all is said and done.

Murder mysteries and detective fiction are notoriously among the most difficult stories to write. It requires walking a tightrope, giving enough detail that a sufficiently clever audience member could solve the mystery, but not so much that the answers are obvious to all. Undead Murder Farce walks this tightrope expertly, parceling out little bits of information, never quite showing its hand about what details will ultimately be important to solving the cases. Each one is complex and convoluted, with 4 episodes devoted to each case (the leftover episode in the count is episode 1, which introduces our main detective trio), but all 3 can be ... solved before the final reveal by a person that is paying close attention and making a few deductive leaps.

This all might imply a series that is very stuffy or literary, but nothing could be further from the truth. Quite the opposite in fact. Like it's name, Undead Murder Farce is pulpy and bombastic. Action scenes are wildly over the top and surprisingly gruesome. The large cast of historical figures and public domain fiction characters lends itself to some truly insane moments, like Arsene Lupin teaming up with the Phantom of the Opera to steal a diamond while Sherlock Holmes tries to stop them, only for all of them to be attacked by Frankenstein and Jack the Ripper. And yes, I swear that last sentence is not made up.

However, the truly show-stealing part of this series is its main duo - Aya Rindo, an immortal disembodied head that solves crimes and her bodyman Tsugaru, an "onigoroshi" (roughly, "ogre killer") that Aya finds at the circus, battling other monsters and freaks for cheering crowds. The rapport between the two is the secret sauce that elevates this series from good to great. Aya is highly formal but also playful, peppering her speech with puns and playful jabs, while Tsugaru is a complete ham, never serious and always highly theatrical in everything he does. Their banter is delightful and Tomoyo Kurosawa's voice work playing Aya is tremendous.

One more piece that helps to elevate this series is the unique visual identity it has, courtesy of director Mamoru Hatakeyama, best known as the director of Kaguya-sama: Love is War. While it can sometimes border on excessive (the paneling used in the last 2 episodes is probably the least necessary of his many flourishes), the creative presentation gives it so much personality, and serves a dual purpose of effectively hiding the economical storyboarding, giving it the feel of a show that has a much larger budget than it actually does.

There are a few minor quibbles you can make with the series. The Royce agents that periodically show up are truthfully a little bit unnecessary, and the action-heavy final arc combined with an exhausted and overworked animation team leads to some intrusively janky animation in the last few episodes that is thankfully the exception rather than the rule. Even acknowledging those flaws, I still highly recommend this series whether you're a fan of mysteries or just silly, violent excess. There's something for everyone here.

Some context is necessary before diving into the review proper. This is a 3 episode OVA adaptation of a multi-route visual novel, with each of the three episodes covering one route from the game. The characters are the same each time, but each episode is standalone and there is no continuity between them by design.

From that preamble, you can probably guess the main issue with this series, right? The OVAs lop off a large chunk of the game's story (released as a separate game called Memories Off Pure) and have to condense hours worth of content in each route to a crisp 30 minutes that ... also includes all the necessary exposition that was skipped over. At best, we're getting a survey of each route, and it's difficult to be invested in Tomoya's relationship with each girl in such a short period of time.

The accelerated pace hurts this series more than most because of its premise. The series begins an undetermined length of time after the death of Tomoya's girlfriend Ayaka, and her absence and Tomoya's attempts to reckon with her death are a core part of it. Her life and death is covered in Memories Off Pure, but we only get the aftermath in the OVAs. With only a few very brief flashbacks depicting her, we hardly get to know Ayaka at all, which makes it hard to care all that much about her. In fact, her absence is deeply tied into the events in 2 of the episodes, and that works to its detriment as the tragedy of her death feels purely theoretical rather than something you feel along with the characters.

Another factor working against it is the visual presentation. The animation quality can generously be called "sub-hentai", and this manifests most negatively in the lack of expressive faces. This is a series where characters are constantly going through Big Emotions, but blank faced stares when a character should be anguished or overjoyed and mouth movements that don't match the voice dubbing create a disconnect with the audience. Many dramatic developments come across flatly because of the poor character acting animation.

This all sounds very bad, and to an extent it is, but there are a few redeeming qualities. The 3 girls, while largely adhering to common VN tropes, are varied in personality and tone, and their routes don't always go the way you would expect. One is even downright tragic, in a way that surprised me positively. The plot is pretty basic and short, but what we get is generally solid. While I would normally say you should just play the VN given that it greatly expands the plot, that is unfortunately not possible for most as the game is not translated into English as of 2023 (and given that it was released in 1999, is unlikely to ever be translated at this point). You're probably better off skipping this one, but if you're intrigued by the premise and aren't fluent in Japanese, this is likely the only way you'll be able to experience the story.

It's easy to be offended by a show with a premise like this, but let's just stipulate from the beginning that this is an age gap romance between an adult man and a high school girl. We all know the deal here from the synopsis. If this sort of a thing is a hard no to you, you probably aren't even reading this review. So, taking Koikimo on its own terms, does it succeed at creating a compelling romance? I will spare you the suspense, the answer is an emphatic no.

Before diving into the meat of what went wrong with this series, I think it's ... worth mentioning that the presentation does it no favors. Character designs are bland at best, ugly at worst, and the animation is consistently below average, with characters frequently going off model. This is even worse considering how unambitious the storyboards and layouts are, and the lack of any dynamism or energy from the direction keeps the series feeling listless even when it heads into juicy dramatic waters.

But no amount of inspired direction could have saved this series from its main couple. Yes, male lead Ryo is quite clearly stalking and sexually harassing 17 year old Ichika, but that is not even the fundamental problem here. The real problem is that the series never establishes any sort of convincing reason for why she would suddenly stop being uncomfortable with his behavior and fall in love with him. Really they don't even attempt this. Ryo's behavior ("borderline criminal" in the show's own words) simply continues unabated until a switch flips in Ichika's mind and she somehow realizes she was In Love With Him All Along because she's been Thinking About Him All This Time. It is laughably thin, and combined with their nonexistent romantic chemistry, never gives you any reason to want to see them get together, even if you are into this sort of thing.

The show does briefly threaten to become interesting with the introductions of age appropriate romantic rivals Tamaru (Ichika's classmate) and Arie (Ryo's coworker), but it's no great spoiler to say that they are tin cans being set up only so they can be shot down. The show certainly makes that clear right off the bat. Don't get attached to them, because when they're finished playing their roles as romantic foils, they may as well have vanished into thin air.

The side characters really end up being the oddest part of this whole tapestry, because over the course of the series, many of them find out about Ryo's obsession with Ichika, and every single one of them either accepts it or actively attempts to hook them up, including Ichika's own mother. At the very least they could have included some societal disapproval to put some sauce on the taboo nature of this whole thing, but in the interests of making sure the audience believes that This Whole Thing Is Actually Fine, no character is allowed to utter a word of criticism about any of this. It's both morally troubling AND bereft of any juicy drama that might at least make this soapy and fun.

In the end, I think that's where this series falls the shortest. It is committed to depicting a deeply taboo relationship, but only in the safest ways imaginable. Instead of being shocking or ridiculous, it just feels like any other low effort romcom, but with one of the participants aged up by 10 years. The main couple is extremely boring, both as a pair and as individuals, and if I'm going to ignore my sense of good taste and propriety to watch something like this, I would at least like to be entertained. Instead, Koikimo straddles the fence and ends up being too uncomfortable for normal viewers and too tame for perverts.

Overall Impression: A convoluted plot, questionable designs, and a memorably terrible protagonist add up to make this one of the worst shows I've ever watched to completion. I don't recommend watching it, even in the sense of gawking at a car crash.

Positives:

+ If you like goth twinks, there are a lot of them here.

+ The ED is pretty catchy, I guess.

Negatives:

- A stupid and unlikable protagonist. Officially credited as "Heroine", the main character of this reverse harem series is so unbelievably dim-witted that you will be screaming at your screen in frustration every time she puts herself in mortal danger out of sheer idiocy. ... We're talking "toddler wandering into traffic" levels of self-awareness here, and that's not even an exaggeration since *she does that exact thing more than once*. She's almost more like an empty vessel than a real character, she has no personality aside from being meek and the plot revolves entirely around her even though there is just nothing there to get interested or invested in.

- A time travel/parallel worlds plot that keeps you in the dark for 90% of the series runtime and then exposition dumps the answers to all the mysteries all at once in the last half of the series finale. To make matters worse, key parts of the plot are contradicted by the eventual explanations you get, including the central explanation for the protagonist's titular amnesia. It's a confusing mess that executes the few good ideas it has so incompetently that you'll leave the series with more questions than answers, even though the ending is intended to be definitive.

- A common problem with visual novel adaptations, the attempt to mash all the routes together into a single coherent story in 12 episodes leaves a lot on the cutting room floor. The bulk of the story is the protagonist cycling through abridged versions of the routes for each of the 5 main male characters, but it doesn't spend enough time with any of them to give you an idea of who the characters are or build any sort of romantic chemistry between them and the protagonist. Once a character's route has come and gone, you'll barely see them again for the rest of the series.

- Hideous character and color designs make this series a pain to look at. Each of the main male characters has a Spencer's Gifts mall goth look that was a decade out of date when the series came out in 2013, and has aged even more poorly since then. The hair and eye color gradients are distracting, and when combined with the costuming, make everyone look completely ridiculous. All 5 of them look like when you create a garish create-a-character in a video game and they start showing up in cutscenes. It's impossible to take any of the drama seriously when all of the characters look so outrageous.

- Uninspired voice acting, especially from the normally reliable Kaori Nazuka in the main protagonist role. Her line delivery is consistently bland and unenergetic, and all 5 main male characters have identically aloof line readings as well. There's little to differentiate any of them as characters besides their hair colors and clothing.

- Without spoiling anything, more than one route becomes troublingly abusive, and the abuse is handwaved away for being done out of love or something similar. As a straight male that is very much not the target audience for this series, far be it for me to judge you if you're into that sort of thing, but it made me uncomfortable. If you're looking for a series with an empowered female lead, you're not going to find it here.

Overall Impression: This is the season where the wheels fell off. Every bad tendency that Demon Slayer has displayed in previous years is amped up to 11 in the Swordsmith Village Arc and the action spectacle has eroded to the point that it's no longer capable of papering over serious and foundational flaws. Deeply disappointing that one of the most popular and celebrated anime series in recent years has devolved into this.

+ Positives:
While I was negative on the action as a whole, this is still a high budget Ufotable project and some parts are undeniably slick, and the fire effects in particular look quite good. ... Sidelining Zenitsu for the entire season was a blessing.

- Negatives:
There are a lot of problems with this season of Demon Slayer, but many of those can be traced back to a single, fatal flaw: it's one of the most atrociously paced TV shows in recent memory. The content of this season could have comfortably been covered in 4-5 episodes, but instead it's stretched past the breaking point to fill out 11 episodes, with super-sized, hour-long episodes on both the front and back end. There is simply not enough material here for a season of TV anime, and it is painfully, arduously slow as a result. The entire season is essentially 2 fights with a pair of upper rank demons, and sometimes those fights progress by as little as 30 seconds of in-story time per episode. One character spends 3 full episodes attempting to free themselves from a water trap, because 75 minutes of the show's run time doesn't even cover a sufficient amount of time in the story for a person to drown. Any drama or excitement in either fight is emphatically snuffed out by the dreadfully slow pace at which it plays out.

A related issue here is that the directing has never been worse. Demon Slayer has always used slow motion and mid-fight flashbacks in its action sequences to mixed effect (if we're being charitable), but both are egregiously overused to the point of parody in the Swordsmith Village Arc. It's not uncommon to get 2 or even 3 mid-fight flashbacks in the same episode now, often some insipid version of the same "demons killed my whole family so I want to kill the demons" sob story that you've already seen half a dozen times in earlier entries of this very show. These flashbacks are constantly wrecking the flow of the action scenes and forcing you to sit through interminable backstory that didn't need to be dropped smack dab in the middle of a sword fight. The overuse of slow motion has a similar effect. Instead of building tension like it's supposed to, it drains it by over-explaining obvious points to the audience instead of simply letting us watch the action. You may have noticed the shortcomings of this sort of thing in one widely-mocked sequence where Tanjiro explains at length that his sword is changing color and turning red, which viewers can simply see with their eyes instead of needing a paragraph's worth of dialogue to explain it.

Visually, this season is also a step back from previous efforts. As mentioned above, there's a pretty high floor with Ufotable projects, so the show rarely looks ugly or poorly animated, but it is simply not on the same level previous seasons. The CGI monsters, which often looked very good in past efforts, are passable at best here, and not as well integrated with hand drawn elements as you're likely used to. There is also far too much camera swooping and panning, notably in one sequence in the villain's lair in the season premiere where the camera spastically flies around the 3D environment like it's being directed by an 11 year old playing Garry's Mod.

And if all that weren't enough, the content of the season is remarkably shallow. Most of the season is fighting and flashbacks, and none of it illuminates the supporting characters much. Both major antagonists are perfunctory villains and don't even get the customary "actually they had a sad life as humans so you should feel bad for them" dying flashback like they have in previous seasons. Tokito and Mitsuri, the featured Hashira this season, get long flashbacks that only tell you what you already know about them (Tokito is emotionless after his family got killed and Mitsuri is boy-crazy but can't get married because she eats too much). While Tokito at least gets a 1 on 1 faceoff with a demon, Mitsuri is relegated to secondary character status despite being all over the promotional material for the season. She shows up to distract the big bad while Tanjiro handles the important parts, and that's her entire role. The finale (which I won't spoil here) at least has one significant plot development that moves the overall story forward, but otherwise the entire season feels like filler material.

That will ultimately be the legacy of the Swordsmith Village Arc, I believe. Overly long, distressingly paced filler that delivers neither a good story nor the kind of spectacle we're used to seeing from Demon Slayer that would at least make it easy to consume. Next time, just make it a movie.

Overall Impression: Mononogatari is a battle shounen/romance that follows Hyouma, a young warrior monk (for lack of a better term) with a burning hatred for tsukumogami (spirits of inanimate objects) after watching his older brother and sister get killed by one in front of him. He is taken in by Botan, a girl that lives with several tsukumogami as a family, to let go of his hatred and learn that they aren't just creatures to be destroyed. The premise sounds more interesting than it actually ends up being though, this is a pretty run-of-the-mill battle shounen with an identity crisis and a total inability to ... animate thrilling action scenes. It can be safely skipped.

+ Positives: Hyouma is an actually interesting main protagonist, and a convincing portrayal of someone whose grief has warped into hatred. He and Botan's tsukumogami have a fun rapport. The character designs are pretty solid. Very good OP and ED. The plot has some promise if they can figure out what to do with it in the already-announced second season. Botan and Hyouma's relationship is pleasant and mostly free of aggravating romcom cliches, but hopefully there's a bit more heat to it in the future.

- Negatives: Visually atrocious. The backgrounds have a horrible filter over them to make them look like faded photographs and it makes almost every scene look glaringly ugly. Poor compositing and things like characters' feet not lining up with the ground compounds the problem. Action scenes are boarded in the blandest and safest way possible and even then the animation is incapable of rising to the task. One particular action scene where Hyouma has a house thrown at him (you read that correctly) almost made me cry because of how cool it should have been on paper, and how pathetic it looked on the screen instead. The series also seems unsure of what to do with itself. Long stretches are simply boring or forgettable because it fails to identify a clear conflict or villain. While Hyouma is supposedly working his way towards destroying the paper umbrella, the tsukumogami that killed his siblings, you only ever see it in flashbacks, and a large percentage of this season just feels aimless as he screws around with random small time villains that have only a tangential connection at best to the paper umbrella. If it were a monster of the week type of series, that might be okay, but it's clearly plot-driven and it makes you constantly wonder what the point or the significance of anything that you're watching is. Hyouma's transition from seething rage machine to guileless dork is a bit too sudden. He's great as a guileless dork so the change itself is fine, it just happens too fast and leaves a lot of nuance and potentially interesting character building on the cutting room floor.

Overall Impression: Kekkaishi is a battle shounen series that follows Yoshimori, a teenage boy that can create magical barriers, and his childhood friend/rival Tokine as they protect the Karasumori site, a powerful magnet for ayakashi, which is sealed beneath their school. While relatively thoughtfully executed, this is a bland and uninspired action series at its base level, which makes it hard to recommend if you've seen this kind of show already, even though it's not terrible in isolation.

+ Positives: It's got some pretty cool monster designs. Director Kenji Kodama uses his experience from the eternally-running Case Closed series to pace this 52 episode series out ... nicely and not have major dips in animation quality or extensive recaps to cope with the demanding schedule. The second half of the series gets much stronger once the villain group Kokuboro makes an appearance and gives some direction to the plot. Madarao and Hakubi, the demon dog sidekicks, are good comic relief characters. Some individual members of the Kokuboro like Byaku and Kaguro are good villains in their own right.

- Negatives: This is like a pastiche of every battle shounen you've already seen. Aside from a handful of surprising moments that I wouldn't want to spoil for their rarity, this series follows a well established pattern that more popular peers like Bleach and Naruto have executed to greater success. It's thematically basic, the main character's motivation is to get stronger so he can protect people he cares about and that's it. The line "I need to get stronger" needs to be banished from the shounen lexicon and it gets plenty of work in this series. The main characters are too unlikeable, Yoshimori is obnoxious and Tokine is arrogant and naggy. The later addition of Gen to the group is no different, and his dark, brooding badass gimmick wears out its welcome fast. Few of the side characters other than the demon dogs add anything to the series. The first half of the series is a slog to get through, with aimless monster of the week battles that don't feel like they're progressing to anything. Consistently below average voice acting and poorly written dialogue makes it feel amateurish at times.

Overall Impression: Magical Revolution is a technically-isekai that's really just fantasy where the reincarnation element is mentioned only twice and barely matters to the story. It's an action/adventure/romance that follows Anis, a tomboy princess that invents magical tools to compensate for her inability to use magic, and Euphie, the daughter of a duke that is unhappily engaged to Anis' brother, the crown prince Algard. This is a yuri series and it doesn't hide that, but the romance often takes a backseat to action or court politics. Overall this was an engaging story with an excellent cast, thrilling action, and surprisingly strong production values from a ... studio (Diomedea) and a genre (isekai) that you might not expect it from.

+ Positives: Great cast, led by an excellent main protagonist in Anis (memorably voiced by Sayaka Senbongi, who recently had her big breakout role as the drunk bassist Hiroi in 2022's Bocchi the Rock). Tilty's barely-concealed insanity and Ilia's withering sarcasm also add a lot of fun to a series that sometimes needs it. The key characters get good, satisfying character arcs that resonate with each other thematically. The story is generally fun and interesting to follow, especially the first half. The animation is pretty strong coming from a lightly-regarded studio. Action scenes are exciting, in particular an intense setpiece with a dragon around the middle of the season, and effects are put to good use to mask the parts with less ambitious boarding. The adaptation, with composition done by Wataru Watari of Oregairu fame, is solid, with quite a few anime original scenes early in the series that improve upon the source material. While I won't spoil anything, the romance element of the story does deliver in the end, even if it sometimes gets pushed to the background.

- Negatives: Euphie's characterization is notably weaker than other key characters and Manaka Iwami doesn't have the screen presence or charisma to match Senbongi's Anis, so she is frequently overshadowed even when the story focuses on her. The third act is overly weepy, it feels like we get an episode and a half of uninterrupted crying near the end for material that frankly isn't resonant on a level that's emotional enough to justify it. Court politics feels perfunctory and neglected compared to the other competing story elements. There are a lot of potentially interesting political subplots that are simply left on the table because of the pace of the adaptation (3 volumes plus original content in 12 episodes).