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Mar 30, 2018
Japanese high school is such a fixture of anime, especially in the slice of life genre, that any series that takes place in literally any other setting basically gets bonus points for the novelty. I like to think I'm more discerning than that, but I'm probably not.

In Hakumei and Mikochi, you get exactly what you might expect if you take the usual slice of life formula but swap out the setting. While in most slice of life series, the setting-swap-out is just some different after-school club that only marginally changes things, here there are two substantial swap-outs. First, and most obvious from the synopsis, is ...
Mar 27, 2018
Every now and then, I watch a series whose greatness defies description, and A Place Further Than the Universe is one of those. It's the sort of show where the sort of review I'd want to write is one with flowery language talking about grand adventures and making big changes that define your life and so on.

In the end, all I can really say is that this show checks all the boxes, and does it in a way that I can't really even compare it to any other series out there. You have a well-done story about four girls each chasing after their own goal ...
Mar 27, 2018
I usually hate it when a character is invincible and has no chance of losing. But that's probably because those sorts of characters are always in shows like One Punch Man, where stakes are pretty high. When the main struggle of a story is a middle school boy trying to prank a middle school girl, yeah, having the middle school girl not only be impervious, but a perfect retaliator… It makes for a great, if at least somewhat predictable comedy.

The other thing you should know going in is that a substantial amount of the pranking and teasing isn't necessarily the innocent, imaginative school material of ...
Mar 25, 2018
Yuru Camp△ (Anime) add
Slice of Life Cute Girls Doing Cute Things show all follow the same formula. You take some sort of hobby that's niche, but not too niche, and you have a bunch of cute girls going to school, eating food, and occasionally doing that hobby. When you see complaints about the CGDCT "genre", that's why - they're all the same show with slightly different characters and a slightly different premise, with no real substance beneath it.

Laid-Back Camp seems to fit that description on the surface, but this really is a shining gem in the genre. Why it escapes the bog of mediocre CGDCT can be boiled ...
Mar 24, 2018
Mixed Feelings
Based on the premise and quality of the art and animation, I really wanted to like this show. But even in just the prequel OVAs, there were some warning flags I really should have paid attention to, because they forecasted the subtext of the rest of the series pretty well.

In the fewest words possible, Ancient Magus' Bride is a quintessential girls' escapist fantasy. In a sense, it's a bit like Sword Art Online in that it knows its target audience very well, and feeds them exactly what they want to see. In the case of Ancient Magus' Bride, this generally revolves around "a unique power ...
Jan 1, 2018
It was interesting to see a synopsis so superficially similar to Kino's Journey the same season that a Kino's Journey reboot was airing. I checked the first episode out of curiosity, fully expecting to drop it afterward with my curiosity satisfied. I was not expecting an experience that not only competes in Kino's mindspace, but in my opinion exceeds it.

I've had the hardest time trying to explain why I like this show so much. If I were writing an English paper about it, I'd be using the word "juxtaposition" a lot. The theme is deadly serious - survival in a post-apocalyptic world - but the ...
Jan 1, 2018
Just Because! (Anime) add
Mixed Feelings
I'm not really sure what the fascination is with love polyhedrons and love chains - these small groups of platonic friends who are in a hopeless network of mostly-non-mutual attractions. You can see this in similar, recent series like A Lull in the Sea (Nagi no Asukara), Waiting in the Summer (Ano Natsu de Matteru), and Glasslip. Maybe it's just a simple way to pump some drama into an otherwise "boring" romantic storyline, or at least to give something better than the Will-They-Won't-They that two-character Romance stories tend to be.

The cast, arguably the most important part of any romance-centered story, is somewhat of a mixed ...
Dec 25, 2017
I was late to the party on the original series - I didn't really get into anime until 2011, so going back and watching a 2003 anime in glorious 360p was a bit jarring. Despite that, Kino's Journey still left a sizeable impressionable, despite my bias against its visuals. It was, to use a tired phrase, thought-provoking, and it was told from the perspective of perhaps one of the greatest neutral characters I've ever encountered in fiction.

As a reimagining of the 2003 series, how does 2017 Kino hold up? For sure it looks a lot prettier. They clearly put a lot of effort into the ...


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