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Maybe it’s just that I’m a sucker for down-to-earth, character-driven dramas but this was certainly a good watch for me, even though they did start to lose me a bit during the shogi matches.
This is an anime about a boy who finds solace in shogi. Maybe because, despite everything he has been through, it's the one thing that will always be there and has always been there.
What strikes me about the life of Rei is how simple it is, but that is exactly why it is so charming. Everyone goes about their day, talk to the people they talk to, eat the food ... they eat, maybe give themselves a little treat because a compliment they got hit the right spot. And then, a driver who was too piss drunk to be on the road rams into your car.

Tomorrow would have just been another normal day, if I hadn't gone out tonight, you might think.

This story shows the ripples of disaster that disrupts Rei's daily life. But he always finds a way to find a comfortable place for himself. Whether it’s through honing his skill in shogi by going against great players or by spending a warm evening with the sisters, he always finds a way. This could be to show that life won’t always be the same. Everyone struggles even when they’re at their best, but one can also find rays of light in a dark place. Rei had a difficult childhood, and still leads a life that he often finds to be confusing, sometimes overwhelming. But, every so often he forgets about all that when he finds one of those rays of light.

3-gatsu has a very relaxing nature to its storytelling. Even at its most intense moments, it isn’t exciting, better described as simply engaging. All the characters are able to form a solid cast that show off their quirks to distinguish themselves within the sizeable cast and act as connections to different parts of Rei’s life. I don’t feel the need to comment on production, as its quality speaks for itself.
I have a few unanswered questions that I imposed to myself, regarding the plot, such as Rei’s name (which means ‘zero’) and what significance could the way he plays shogi have to his experiences and behaviour. Well, this isn’t an English paper I’m writing for the end of term, it’s a review, and hopefully you have found a reason to watch or continue watching this show.

Monster, a highly acclaimed anime by the people that have watched it. Does it deserve it? Well, overall, I think that mean score should be around 0.2-0.3 lower. Also, minor spoiler warning.
We see the main character, Tenma, go on a gruelling journey as he attempts to end the life of someone he saved in a surgical operation years ago, due to the huge numbers of people they had killed and possibly will kill. I found this burden on him quite sympathetic: this burden that every time someone is killed by him, Tenma indirectly counts himself responsible. However, for the rest of this journey we ... see him stay his usual gloomy, depressed self as he meets people and saves their life after he slightly helps in endangering it in the first place. I really wished that he were more of a compelling character, being the main character and all that, or if any of the slight developments ,through the various people he meets, that happen to him actually stick.
The next thing is the various people that he meets. This takes up a huuuuuge part of the story, and I did quite enjoy their subplots and their slight impact on the story, but by slight I mean very, very so, because their impact on the story, while existent, could have been made through other shorter ways and could have been maybe even been compressed into the actual main characters.
The premise of Monster was alright. There were some interesting themes and philosophical concepts that were introduced at first. However, I sort of felt that these slowly started to slip away as the story progresses. One was the concept of everyone’s life being equal and we don’t really see that play a role until it is mentioned in the last few episodes once or twice.

Now that I have angered enough people that believe this to be a masterpiece, let’s get on to why I didn’t rate this any lower.
The mysteries in Monster are quite well set up. The small bits of information that you get from all those characters might help you to build up a conclusion in your head, but that might fall apart with the next piece of info! This does happen over quite a long time and the pacing is another one of my lesser liked aspects of Monster, so this was not a complete positive in my opinion.
The music wasn’t very loud, so not very noticeable but I remember hearing some small, eerie parts. I even went back to listen to their full versions on Youtube and they are quite good and suiting for Monster. The art isn’t exactly your typical bling-bling pwetty UwU thing that was even more popular at the time and that is really for the better, seeing as this is a very mature and psychological show.
To top it off, there’s Johan, that guy Tenma’s trying to kill. Not really a spoiler, don’t worry. This was clearly established around the 5th episode.
Johan is one of the scariest characters I have ever seen in any fictional media. His personality, backstory, all that is interesting but what really strikes me was that very fact: his ability to inspire fear in me so easily. Not through jump scares or sheer shock factor but mostly with his presence and dialogue. I am not even completely sure how the author managed to make it this way, but hey, it’s pretty cool.
That around sums up everything that I really want to say about this show. I didn’t think the plot was all that deep or interesting as some say and the characters aren’t that well written, but it had its fair share of positives. I, however, do sort of regret watching this one 74 episode anime when I could have 3-6 other anime that I could have maybe enjoyed more.

P.S: If there are any points on which you’d like to correct me or advise me, I’ll happily listen to them as I didn’t completely understand Monster myself and to be honest, there are a few moments here that I was just using fancy vocab for the purpose of the review without really understanding what I’m trying to even say.

Like any Slice of Comedy that follows the formula of having characters do the same thing but slightly different, you will only enjoy Uzaki-chan if you like Uzaki-chan.

She is pretty damn annoying from a 3rd person point of view so I can only imagine what Sakurai has to put up with. As the series goes on, she eases up on the teasing and gets closer and more open to Sakurai which I found really cute. Along with the 2 mains, we have some supporting characters, that are quite enjoyable and add quite a lot to the scene.

What I didn't enjoy about this show ... however, is how sometimes, especially in the earlier episodes, they would pause for 3 seconds at a time, to continue with the dialogue. Doesn't seem like much, but, YOU try having a conversation where everytime the other person speaks, you have to wait 3 seconds before replying.

The animation was below average. It was just below the bar, if you ask me. The last episode really delivered in terms of animation and comedic timing, which makes sense, since they would have probably poured the remaining budget into it.

My final verdict is that it is an enjoyable show, with interesting side characters and fair animation but you will not like it at all if you don't like Uzaki's personality.

I didn’t particularly like any aspects of this movie that are really the guiding factors of how good a movie is. Those are obviously the story, characters and my enjoyment.

The story was kind of weird. I think it’s indirect way of story telling was supposed to make the viewer think about how this world is being built and the different things that these characters could be representing. All that went straight over my head. I just understood that a kid is trying to heal this curse mark from a boar he fought in the first minutes of the movie and he ends up falling in ... love with female Mowgli.

Now, the characters.
I didn’t find them especially great either. Again, I’m sure there’s some genial metaphors and hidden meaning behind the roles they portray in the story but none of that popped out to me. The main character didn’t show much emotion at all. That lady who ruled the village was not a great antagonist. The mononoke hime and the spirits didn’t get enough lines to really see any of their personality, other than they’re wild and they have primitive instincts.

The technical aspects of the movie are easy: I don’t like Ghibli’s art style. Many characters in the same movie and between movies have extremely similar designs. But, I can’t neglect the fact that the animation is great by today’s standards and outstanding by late 90s standards. I feel the direction in some scenes could have been better, though. I cannot exactly pinpoint which ones, but I can vaguely recall thinking that. I never really noticed the sound, but maybe that’s a good sign. You usually don’t pay attention to the sound design unless it’s really bad. Background music was good, which is to be expected.

Conclusion: the story and characters in the Ghibli films I have watched so far have not been so great or memorable. Especially not their character designs. But, I didn’t have a completely terrible time watching them and the same applies for Mononoke Hime.

This movie was slightly better than Phantom Rouge. SLIGHTLY.

That slightly comes from the fact that some characters that hadn’t been seen in a while had been shown (Zushi, Wing, Bisky and Hisoka) and the animation was pretty damn amazing. The background music was really enjoyable, too and they were mostly versions of the openings and endings played on piano.

The story isn’t that appealing. One of the villains has a small character development moment but everybody else just is sorta OP and dies due to Deus Ex Machina.exe.

Major spoilers ahead. This is kind of a rant so you don’t really need to read past this.
Now, ... the story is pretty eh. A secret organization form long ago comes back to kill every Hunter with DARK NEN. Seriously? Dark Nen? Ok, but, the Heavens Arena is here. Maybe, there is going to be some twisted death match tournament that takes place? Nope, the villains slowly die off in generic fights and the big bad dies because of the POWER OF FRIENDSHIP and MY DESIRE TO PROTECT MY NAKAMA. But, again, the fights were pretty damn well animated, so I’ll give them that.

This was disappointing, even for a movie based on a shounen anime. My expectations were a bit higher than normal, since I thought, "This is HxH, surely the movies are better than your average shounen-based movie!".

Yeah, no.

Seeing as this is a movie and it is based off of a Kurapika side-story, I wish that he got more screen-time. The story itself is pretty mediocre and it features the #4 Phantom Troupe member that Hisoka replaced. The fights were extremely bland, just some people jumping around and punching each other, definitely not like your usual HxH fights.

I thought the plus to having generic fights is that ... at least there would be some great high-speed fight scenes, but no, there was none of that either. I noticed that a lot of the background music were piano/slow versions of the main TV show's opening and endings. I really liked that part, at least.

Although, the characters were the same, there was something off about them. There was a lot of crap about saving your friends and doing stuff for your Nakama, which was not what I'd expected to be what mainly happened in the climax.

Conclusion: This was hard to watch and the ending didn't really feel all that satisfactory either. The villain was extremely meh, so, it felt like the only thing that would've changed if he died was that this movie wouldn't have a cliché battle shounen movie ending. Oh, and Kurapika would lose his eyes. But, as if that would actually happen in a movie.

The story is the same as just any other BnHA OVA so far: a training exercise. So, nothing special there. There was a lot of forced comedy and a lot of "stressful" situations. Seeing as this is an ONA, obviously, nobody important was going to get seriously hurt.

The art looked weird with this one. All the characters' proportions were pretty inconsistent and the animation was kinda choppy. The music is the same as the 2nd cour of the 4th season and I didn't really like the music of that part.

//minor spoiler//
The characters in BnHA are pretty boring and 1-dimensional. But, Bakugou got a ... surprising amount of character development. He actually seemed to care about his classmates. Still doesn't really remember their names, though.
//minor spoiler//

This was terribly boring to watch and the pacing was very weird. I think they could've cut out some unwanted dialogue like the characters just praising each other for no reason and the recaps. I feel like they could've cut it down to 1 episode or at least one 30 min episode.

I'll keep it short.

- The story mainly concerns a World War that seems to have aspects from both the World Wars in our world. Literally nothing else happens. Some really like this premise, anyways, but I don't see what's so great about it.

- The art and animation does not disappoint since this does have a movie budget.

- The same OST and ending from the anime. I liked them both and the OP.

- I don't like the only main character and all the side characters are her subordinates whose only personality is being a soldier and a drinking addiction. We see some higher officers ... too, but I didn't see much in them, either.

Conclusion: Didn't like it very much, and even most of the fans would agree that the main antagonist's motive is really cliché. I had to take multiple breaks watching the movie, since I just couldn't get into it. I sat through the last 30 minutes, though, since there was a really cool mid-air gunfight.

Hunter X Hunter is without a doubt, the best battle shounen I have ever watched and one of my favourite shows of all time. You’ve probably heard this before. Super cliché, right? I’ll back it up with a few paragraphs in a bit.
While watching this well-paced, thrilling anime, all I could think about is when I could watch the next episode. Togashi decides when the audience is ready for ground-breaking new information and delivers it like a champ.
This anime contains what some believe to be the best anime arc to be ever created. Although the Chimera ant arc’s beginning is definitely one of ... the dullest parts of the anime, it is essential to finish it to fully understand and enjoy the best part of it, which is around 40 episodes in (Yeah, it’s pretty long). I like to think of it as similar to the relationship between Clannad and Clannad: Afterstory.

The fights are unique for the genre in the sense that the audience gets lots of background information (this sometimes does come as redundant narration) behind each of a character’s actions, rather than just a flurry of attacks being engaged between combatants, which is definitely more aesthetically pleasing, though.
The last part of this TL;DR is to tell how lovable the main characters are in this show. Simply, they are just presented in a way where it is hard to not like them. The bonds between many of the characters, even side characters, are extremely interesting to see. However, like most, I wish we could have seen more of Kurapika and Leorio. (◞‸◟)

Arcs:
Hunter Exam (9/10) – we are immediately introduced to many characters we would end up seeing regularly through the show and get a small amount of information about this Hunter world. It also shows a variety of different characters and abilities and although many of them die or are never seen again throughout the show, we see a starting power level being set through them.

Zoldyc Family (7/10) – a very short arc in which we get to see a lot into the mysterious family of Killua Zoldyc. A very interesting thing we see is a huge power difference between Killua and the rest of the main cast. Regardless of its pros, the arc was pretty uneventful.

Heavens Arena (8/10) – The most important part of this arc is probably the introduction to the Hunter world’s superpower system, Nen. It is the best superpower system I have seen due to its very clear-cut rules and it’s very evident that quite a lot of thought went into it. We also see the main characters grow stronger and there are a few interesting fights as well.

Yorknew City (10/10) – this arc introduces a very cool villain group, the Phantom Troupe. From their personalities to their abilities, everything about them is amazing. This arc is focused mostly on Kurapika. Meanwhile, the other 3 try to provide Kurapika with support but he doesn’t need help. ‘Cause he’s OP. Just for this arc, though.

Greed Island (6/10) – 2 of the main characters are once again more prominent in this arc. My main problem with this arc is probably that most of the side characters are really lack-lustre and boring and are literally never seen again after they served their purpose of delivering a few lines.

Chimera Ant (9/10) – A weird species called Chimera Ant get really strong with the help of human DNA and pose a huge threat to humanity. I really want to give it a 10 but I can’t ignore that first part of it. Although, the ending was amazing, those first episodes left me quite unsettled with the whole experience.

Chairman Election (7/10) – Despite the name, this arc isn’t completely focused on the election. We do see a lot of Hunters, that are apparently really strong, introduced but their abilities aren’t showcased.

Scores:
Story (8/10) - The anime had a great ending, even though it wasn’t the ending to the series. It was very satisfactory and it will be interesting if the next arc can top the ones before it.

Art/Animation (9/10) - The art was pretty standard but the animation was really good; it was extremely smooth and when required it was very useful to convey the mood and intensity of the situation.

Sound (9/10) - I don't really care that the same 3 songs (that had the same tune) were reused throughout the series for the opening. The song itself was pretty catchy and sounded cheery, this was especially interesting in the CA arc, where things got pretty dark. The ending, however, was always changed very arc, and I really liked all of them. Some episodes, within the arc would also have a different ending to match the tone of the ending of the episode, which you gotta applaud.

Characters (10/10) – Once again, the characters are really lovable in this show, villains or MCs. (Except for the half a dozen Chimera Ants that got too much screen time but we don’t talk about them.) You'll probably end up having a few favourites among the side characters by the time the show ends because there are LOTS of worthy candidates.

Enjoyment (10/10) - Every arc ended up venturing through a different subject, entirely from survival to tournament to the mafia. I loved the various twists and turns, loved the intense music that would only play occasionally, so you knew that when it did, shit was about to go down. And I'll say it once more in this interview, I loved the characters.

Overall (10/10) - Looking back, objectively, this anime does have some flaws but when I finished this anime, I looked back and wondered, would I ever have this much fun watching a show ever again? And the answer is yes because I'll just re-watch it next year.


P.S.: I've watched a few shows where I got that exact feeling and I find something great in another 1-2 months so I figured that I don't need to worry too much.

This review contains spoilers of the first 2 episodes.


The Tale of Tanya the Sociopath's beginning concept is quite interesting, imo. Although, I was always confused as to why there was nobody and I mean, NOBODY who ever questioned why a 10-11 yr old girl was so good at making military strategies. And it doesn't seem like minors joining the military in this world is that common either.

Story (4/10): Again, I quite liked the concept of a God-like being sort of using this arrogant, atheist, salary man as an experimental piece and seeing if his faith in God increases when he's put in more dire situations ... and this dire situation is early-20th century "Germany". The story ends up going more in the direction of the complications of the war. If I knew more about the details about the World Wars and if I liked the political and military genres more, I might've found this more interesting.

Art/Animation (6/10) - The art is pretty standard and the animation is good enough. There were some awful CG shots but the frequency was low enough that it wasn't a problem for me. The flying magic battles were always well done and I have no other real complaints.

Sound (7/10)- The opening and endings were both pretty darn good. At first, it just sounds like noise (like most EDM) and then 15 seconds, you start to jam to it. I thought that this anime didn't have any OSTs and apparently it does. I thought that was just some 'epic' music the sound directors added in. Didn't like it too much.

Character (1/10): There's only 1 main character and she's pretty dull. She just seems to not care when her comrades die and that doesn't really make her evil, just insensitive. And even so, the anime keeps on saying she is the psycopath inside a little girl's body to the point where that lines loses meaning. The character designs and personalities didn't stand out to me at all, meaning I would forget them after their 2 minutes of screen time.

Enjoyment (2/10) - The Saga of Tanya the Sociopath was quite hard for me to watch since my mind ended up wandering off a lot to keep me awake. Again, part of it might be my fault for not having watched much anime in this genre and also universally having no real liking towards it.

Overall: 4/10
Watch it if you think you would be interested in watching a young girl with a deep hatred for God making her way up the military ranks in a World War with lots of focus on the military and strategy aspects of it.