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Out of 100 Nobles watching…
92 were impressed!
5 were not interested in the farce
3 found most characters unlikable

Once again, I’ve put off reviewing something I read a few months ago. I wasn’t ruminating on Prison School or anything, just distracted by real life. Prison School was an enjoyable read that had a much longer run than I initially anticipated. It may have been the perfect comedy to enjoy while I was bedridden with CoronaFlu. The series garnered quite the reputation and when it finished a few years back it thoroughly received the ire of its readership for what was considered a rather lackluster ending.

Frankly, I ... don’t really understand what all the fuss is about but then again maybe people for some reason interpreted Prison School as anything other than a farce. If you took the series seriously as some sort of drama or something I suppose I could see being upset by the ultimate end of the series, but to me at least, the entire series was a comedy farce and ending pointlessly on a vulgar joke was a fitting and perfect end for it in my eyes. Many characters got more closure to their storylines than I would have been led to believe by the fandom, but it does leave a lot to the imagination. Of course, being able to binge the whole series in a week makes me dull to the pains of reading a weekly or monthly serialized work. I know all to well how perspective can change when you’re slow-dripped something you care about.

Author Hiramoto Akira’s art is what drew me to Prison School. Years ago, I would see panels from the manga or magazine covers featuring his soft yet darkly shaded unusual realism. I enjoyed his plotlines and ability to bring threads sometimes dozens of chapters apart together in payoff that almost always surprises the reader. I thought plot threads could be a little long and drawn out at times but having read nothing remotely like Prison School before I really can’t complain. The series is filled with memorable meme panels that can be reposted for decades to come (though I don’t see them much these days).

Prison School was a strange one and it certainly isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. Fairweather fans and tourists of Otaku culture would likely be horrified by the series. If you want the strange saga of an innocent girl who just loves Sumo, a “Submissive and his Queen”, a man who loves “The Three Kingdoms” a little too much, or some of the best Yuri ever printed to paper then maybe give it a read.

Out of 100 Nobles watching...
0 were impressed!
there were no nobles left in the theatre to question

The designation for a show on MAL for a rating of one is "Appalling". I can think of no better descriptor for School Days.
I would not categorize the show as misery porn as that would suggest it had an interesting enough plot to be porn.
Some people may suggest as the show is an adaptation of a VN bad ending route that the nonsensical and alien interactions of the characters are somehow justified, but I was savvy to this and still just annoyed. It was not entertaining. It was not ... worth the payoff. It was just appalling.

The OP and ED were nice.

Out of 100 Nobles watching…
75 were impressed!
15 thought there wasn’t meat on the bones for the story
10 weren’t that impressed with the artwork

Tedama ni Toritai Kurikiya-san is a manga in the unfortunately niche genre of gyaru romance. It follows a dumb as rocks girl trying to get her childhood friend to confess to her. The story has an interesting hook that the male lead is a comedically honest and straightforward person so when the lusty heroine tries to play the games typical of the genre her plans usually backfire.

The series kept things very brief at just under 40 chapters so perhaps my complaint about ... a thin plot is unwarranted, I would much rather praise the story for remaining mostly concise. A number of extra characters were added to pad the course of the story but most of them were enjoyable and fun.

The artwork had lots of cute and expressive panels but overall, the series isn’t particularly detailed or noteworthy.

Apologies for the rather brief review but I took large breaks between chapters and have been studying Japanese rigorously so only take my criticisms so harshly. I hope the author continues to make more manga. I saw something about a horny nun story they were doing but not sure what they’re up to. At the end of the day if you’re starved for gyaru romance stories this was one of the better stories I’ve read so far.

Out of 100 Nobles watching…
100 were impressed!

It’s finally here, the last chapter of Dungeon Meshi is finally out and the series (barring any epilogue or supplemental material) is over. There are so many manga that run endlessly, feel like they will never end, or peter out with a whimper. I cannot give enough praise for a work like Dungeon Meshi that has a good structure and ends concisely. The series ran a good many years for something that did not break 100 chapters, but that is simply because Ryouko Kui (九井谅子)created something that has such attention to detail. The world of Dungeon Meshi is carefully ... crafted in both conception in execution. Every detail throughout the work has a purpose and has a power to it that pulls you into their world.

It’s kind of hard to write about something that you’ve finished reading as it is slow dripped to you for almost a decade. So, I will just write about things or details I liked about the work. Japanese western style fantasy tends to lean towards a more videogame style world or mechanics system, the field of material out there is full of Isekai which really helps Dungeon Meshi stand out as a perfectly executed Dungeons and Dragons style world. The author writes to classic tropes including elves, dwarves, halflings, and gnomes but they took great pains to give every race and culture in their setting their own unique characteristics that help them stand apart from each other more than many official D&D material will. Kui gives us many windows into the lives of the people of her world, many times by showing and not telling. For example. the general demeanor and appearance of Marcille the elf let’s you as a reader infer that she is a half-elf long before the story tells us outright. There are many wonderful extra excepts from the manga where the author has done character studies drawing every character that they can in another characters clothes to ensure they are distinct enough no matter their race to tell them apart by their features and not their outfits.

All that preceding text has yet to even praise the creativeness in the authors monsters and concept of the manga in general. Monsters and how the characters prepare and eat them are interesting and creative and anyone with an eye for detail or a dungeon master should be taking notes. Like few other works of fiction have done before it, Dungeon Meshi portrays “pure evil” in a way that is not contrived or hammy. It's done. It's finished. You can pick it up and read it all and be satisfied! I love it and it’s great. Thank you. Goodbye.

Out of 100 Nobles watching…
50 were impressed
25 were lost in context
20 died in a CG Hindenburg
5 died of chuunibyou

Despite my terrible score, I did not think “Hellsing: Ultimate” was an unenjoyable experience. “Hellsing” (the Manga) was a pioneer of style that exploded in niche popularity from a doujin 1-shot written by its creator Kouta Hirano. The series started publication two years before the term “中二病” was first used and I can see it as nothing short of the gold standard manifesto for a Japanese middle schooler in the late 1990’s to form dark and brooding power fantasies. “Hellsing: Ultimate” was mostly fun to look ... at with a competent cadre of animation studios taking turns doing the ~50-minute episode specials. It had an absolutely killer sound track which really helped the nonsense go down smoothly. The rule of cool and edge made the entire experience a fun ride and if the purpose of the series was to make me want to read the original work just to know what the f was going on then the project was a success.

The pacing of the series was awful. Huge swaths of story were clearly not being told such that anyone who has not read “Hellsing” would have a very hard time remaining invested in the plot. This was clearly a project meant to highlight moments the author or producers enjoyed and nothing else. To that end as a stand-alone work I felt it was lacking. Vampire Cop is cute, R.I.P Rip Van Winkle, and the literal Nazi Catboy still has me confused how he’s not clipped and posted more on the internet. Shit’s wild.

Hirano himself insisted on the heavy use of CG desiring the action to look "realistic". I repeat, the man insisted on spending MORE THAN TRADITIONALLY ANIMATING THE ACTION WOULD COST to include the shitty CG seen in this series. Bananas.

Out of 100 Nobles watching…
70 were impressed!
10 found the handling of the material distasteful
10 thought the story was dragged out
10 didn’t think the romcom was particularly funny

If you are anything like me, you are hot for gyaru like a two-year-old is hot for dinosaurs. Don’t be dissuaded by my particularly harsh initial criticisms. Gal Gohan was an overall pleasant read and I think that if you are into this particular phenotype of JK-girl then this manga is required reading. I would say it wasn’t great, but it was certainly enjoyable, and enjoyable is worth the effort with a sub-100-chapter series in my book. Just note ... that my bias leans towards being positive towards anything gyaru so I could see the content of this story not appealing to certain people and the subject matter being very distasteful to others.

Before talking about any spoilery gripes let me just praise Gal Gohan a bit. It was relatively short, completed its story with essentially no hang-ups, and it ended definitively. It was also nice to look at. I really enjoyed the lanky aestheticism of Marii Taiyou’s art style. Sometimes ears would be a little large and detailed or fingers would be long and crinkly, but it was that sort of odd detail that gave the manga an appealing look. The characters have a realism to them that is reminiscent of artists like Shindo_L, not that they are realistic looking, but character design is well toned, shiny, and soft in such a way that is more common in doujin rather than regularly published manga series, which is fitting given Taiyou’s other works.

My largest criticism of Gal Gohan would be the longevity of its material. The very nature of the series puts it in an odd place. The story is about a romance between a high school teacher and his student which by its very nature is on a tightrope. There is only so long that the story can be dragged out and someone can be put into wacky situations before a character’s ignorance falls into the territory of passive consent. Gal Gohan failed in this regard putting the main characters in comical situations more farcical than what would be seen in the most depraved of porn narratives. It was just unbelievable most of the time. I genuinely laughed out loud at about one gag in the entire story with the rest of the material being mostly tired tropes. So, Gal Gohan falls into a category of rom-com that I have yet to name. Essentially, it is not actually a rom-com – it is a romance story with comedic elements, and if executed less than optimally (like in this case), it will simply use rom-com tropes to pad content. The focus of stories like this are the actual romance, drama, and tension. We all know how the story ends and want the sweet bits that lead us to that end goal.

Gal Gohan had MAYBE five to ten chapters that seriously tackled the material such and Mr.Yabe’s position as a teacher, “is Miku just infatuated with Yabe because he was the first adult to believe in her?”, and “how do you get over the taboo of such a relationship?”. My feelings about the story are vindicated by the authors own note left in the final volume of the manga stating the story was initially planned to end in five chapters if it did not review well. The series is simply eight or so chapters of content, and sixty chapters of fluff. A lot of it is delicious brown gyaru fluff, but it is fluff. It’s a short enough series that it’s not a problem, but it leaves me waiting for a more competent true gyaru romance.

Out of 100 Nobles watching…
95 were impressed!
5 didn’t like the one filler episode and old car CG

I was certainly apprehensive to dive in watching Stand Alone Complex after watching the original film and finding it to be such a masterpiece. Most of my memories of the show were from days of my youth watching adult swim. At that time, I would usually watch the Inner Universe OP, vibe to the strange lonely wistfulness it would instill in me, and then watch something else because I found the episodes too slow for my kid brain. Returning to watch the show properly now I found it to ... be an engaging and thought provoking episodic sci-fi crime show.

To get what little bad there is out of the way I will say the show was (obviously) not budgeted the same as the film and as such doesn’t always have the same polish in its animation. Despite saying that, the animation is still almost always nice to look at and has wonderful character details and key frames planted all over the place. There were two of the twenty-six episodes I’d consider “bad.” One was an extremely thinly veiled recap episode where Major Kusanagi sits in an internet chat room “collecting intel” by receiving a recap of the entire shows events so far via 4chan posters. The second was simply a very slow but necessary set-up episode for the final arc of the season.

Pretty much everything else throughout the season was a joy to watch. The plots were usually engaging and interesting with a mixture of satisfying, bittersweet, and sad endings. Most of the content in the show is easily consumable as one-off detective drama. The setting of GitS is extremely well established and most of the members of Section 9 have thoughts, feelings, pasts, and goals.

Sound design was fairly on point not counting the occasional opening hatch stock sound. It was a fun game playing with my friend spotting every time the show would use ANOTHER new bgm in an episode. It took about the first six or seven episodes for previously used themes to start showing up. “Lithium Flower” and its description of an odorless tasteless metal makes for a pretty good ED, but the OP of SAC is really the core vibe of the entire show. The Nier franchises “chaos language” is a fun concept of human language combining and turning into what is to us unintelligible, but I personally am a fan of Yoko Kanno’s lyrics interchanging between multiple languages as a reflection of the inevitable cultural mingling of out species in the future.

The entire show is, without sounding too contrived or like a meme, full of “s O u L”, which is something something poetic given the nature of the shows reflection on what makes us human and the soul or “Ghost” being a common theme in episodes. I may reflect more on it in the season 2 review, but there is something overall pleasant about scuffed late 90’s – early 2000’s CG that was made when the technology was new and exciting versus what is commonly seen in modern anime where many 3d assets are simply used as an out-of-the-box solution for making a scene to cut costs. I think the new Trigun or some other recent projects are probably good examples of trying to break the mold of lazy CG (I’ll have to watch new Trigun to confirm after rewatching the original with the boys which I am currently doing), but it really is something to think about. “Why does the shitty CG crowd in Ghost in the Shell have more natural movement and life than a shitty cg crowd in a show made over 20 years later?” Is the answer just “love” or “heart”? More on that later…

Final thoughts, people really be out here saying bland as “*uvk basic waifu is the goat” when we have classic waifus like Motoko Kusanagi out here completely mogging any competition.

Out of 100 Nobles watching…
100 were impressed!

Mob Psycho has finally come to an end. This final season adapts the remainder of the manga so it is here that I’m delighted to say that Mob Psycho has ended perfectly. For two season Mob delivered on all fronts stylistically and emotionally and in this final chapter Mob Bones continues that practice. The story in all aspects takes a Superman character and tells a story of a boy going through puberty and coming of age. The series contains some of the best Shonen battle animation I’ve ever seen sure, but the over-the-top animation is never the point of ... the story. It’s a story about growing up, self-improvement, self-acceptance, and relationships.

It is very rare for something to remain good for the full course of its adaptation. Attack on Titan for example only made it two seasons before experiencing a significant drop in animation quality. Mob is a delightful experience that tells its entire story in under 50 episodes and it does so without ever compromising itself. The series in my opinion was far more moving than the vast majority of content I’ve watched in the last few years and I genuinely think it is currently the best Shonen ever made. I implore you to watch all three seasons.

Out of 100 Nobles watching…
80 were impressed!
10 were disappointed with the way the series just fizzled out

Honestly, I finished Kaguya when the final chapter was published over a month ago, but I’ve sort of just been sitting on writing this review trying to avoid having to put my foot down on any sort of opinion regarding it. Ultimately Kaguya was an entertaining read that did a lot that felt fresh to me although admittedly I am not much of a reader of rom-coms and high school romance plots so take that opinion as it is. The story was served best when it was sticking to ... the original premise of the love war between characters, and the high school level drama. The looming overarching “bigger problems” that the series foreshadowed never paid off. They were uninteresting, and you would generally be left reading them waiting for the story to go back to whether the main characters would confess or not. I would say the entire series is worth a read, but the story really goes into a lull after the Christmas party arc feeling like it was just trying to find itself and after the way the last twenty or thirty chapters of the series kind of just fizzled out, I personally am a believer in the rrat that Aka Akasaka was just done with the series after his divorce. There’s some truly wonderful content in this story, but so many characters are just never paid off when given so much build before the stories final act. It just feels like Akasaka didn’t know what to do with the series. They had any myriad of options most easily would have been small spin-off stories for side characters, but until those are announced I remain disappointed.

I honestly really wanted to jump into reading Akasaka’s other work “Oshi no Ko”, but after the way they ended Kaguya I think I’ll wait until it’s over so I’m not left waiting months or years for a series to potentially die with a whimper.

Out of 100 Nobles watching…
60 were happy to see one of their favorite manga adapted into an anime
39 were displeased to see one of their favorite manga adapted into an anime… by Mappa
1 IMPLORE you to read the manga

Chainsaw Man is by and far one of my favorite manga I’ve read in the last decade. I think no matter what my criticisms I may have in this preliminary review this adaptation will be loved by a LOT of people. From what I’ve seen the show has some truly impressive visuals, a great musical score, and very solid voice casting. In just the first few episodes ... many scenes have made my eyes wispy from the sheer experience of seeing the material adapted from the page. I truly believe Mappa has put their best foot forward and given their all to adapting this property… I just wish it was someone like studio Bones instead.

There’s something of a curse on me. It is what I would call the “C.G.eye”, and in my many years of watching animation I’ve found you either have it/learn it or you don’t. There is absolutely nothing wrong with watching Chainsaw Man and thinking “this looks incredible” and your opinion is totally valid. As I mentioned earlier, I was impressed with many of the shots in the show so far. That said, I cannot despite every fiber of my being not wanting to, help but notice when the CG in the show looks “off”. I’m really not professionally trained or savvy enough to point it out. I don’t know if it is the lighting, the frame rate, the rigging of models, or what have you, but a lot of, specifically the combat in the anime looks uncanny or strange to me. It is painful watching a show that you know despite giving it their all, Mappa knew with their CG they couldn’t pull off something like “Chainsaw Man standing on a pile of corpses laughing maniacally” in the same way that the manga panel pulled it off. So, they changed the visual to something they could do that would look okay. Just okay. It is fine if you love how Dorohedoro, SnK: Final Season, or Chainsaw Man looks, but to me, for Chainsaw Man, the thing I love so much? It is unacceptable. Sorry.

I tried my best not to get my hopes up for Chainsaw Man initially planning on getting nothing more out of this show than some good screencaps of stills, and a high-quality Power figurine or something. I am disappointed, but will keep watching. After all, a mediocre adaptation cannot take away my love of the source, and I think this is far and above better than mediocre. Despite my efforts I absolutely did get swept up in the hype and hoped for something perfect, but at the end of the day it is just another Mappa adaptation. Why couldn’t it have been someone like Bones…

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Finished the season and my opinion remains mostly the same. It's a very difficult task adapting a property like Chainsaw Man into a 23 minute anime, and I believe Mappa did a serviceable job with some very nice looking shots as well as a lot of very uncanny or outright terrible looking scenes and set work that at this point is a signature of the studio. It's an adaptation that can serve as lovely bait on a hook for non-anime watchers to watch more anime, but if you really want to appreciate the pacing and story of Chainsaw Man that is best left to the original work.

CGi Hallways, Chainsaw Man, Curse Devil, Snake, Ghost, Rotoscoped Aki and Himeno all looked like dog shit and if you honestly think otherwise and aren't just being a reactionary defender the industry has warped your perception of quality with its constant deluge of shit. This adaptation was "fine", but it certainly was not a work of art. Don't let panning slow shots, a good sound track, and nice ED's fool you.