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I picked up The Ancient Magus' Bride manga late last year and quickly fell in love with it, just in time to gleefully learn an anime adaptation was coming out. At the time, a common complaint against the manga that people were hoping to see fixed by the anime was the pacing; many readers felt the story moved much too slowly.

Personally, I never agreed with this verdict. To me, the manga's pacing felt as comfortable as a hot cup of English tea. Now that we've come to the end of the anime, I can't help but feel a certain amount of vindication as the ... general consensus of the anime community seems to be that the anime moved too quickly. Haha, I told you so!

Seriously though, WIT Studio decided to do something so ambitious that it's hard to fault them too heavily on it - they covered all 44 chapters of the manga that exist to date. The audacity of this is why I didn't mark them down further for the anime's swift pacing - in a world where shows like One Piece have deteriorated greatly in quality for sticking to a strict 1 episode, 1 chapter rule, Magus' Bride goes all in and uses all of its content to craft a relatively good end result. That said there's something of Magus' charm that is lost when it moves to quickly. More importantly, there's something of the relationship between Chise and Elias that feels relatively incomplete when the story moves too quickly, and that relationship is such a central aspect of the series that it alone holds everything else in the anime back from quite reaching masterpiece level.

Overall, the end result of The Ancient Magus' Bride anime is still quite good - the music and art are nothing less than superb - but I cringe for the people who are watching the anime before reading the manga. I know there's more to the story and many of the people most upset with the anime adaptation don't, and that's the most frustrating thing about how this series was handled.

If you enjoyed The Ancient Magus Bride but felt like there was something lacking, I implore you to check out the manga. The pacing may feel odd to most shonen fans, but trust me when I say its that way for good reason.

At first, I thought my dislike of Hibi Chouchou might be a personal problem - I was neither popular nor shy in high school, so immediately I had trouble relating to the concept that being liked by your peers too much could be a problem. As I continued onward though, I found the high school's shaky environment causing convoluted problems (she's too popular so her boyfriend gets bullied... except not really, as its exclusively played for laughs except as an excuse to keep the main couple apart?) to be the least of the series problems.

Neither our hero nor heroine are particularly interesting characters - ... there's a fine line between a character who is quiet and a character who has the personality of cardboard, and Hibi Chouchou crosses it in spades. I find myself more invested in other characters besides the main couple most of the time.

Speaking of these other characters, there are sideplots involving these characters which are never resolved. This would be easier to forgive if the manga wasn't as long as it was, but it easily could have dedicated more time to this, especially when the pacing of the story is painfully slow.

Ah yes, the pacing. Hibi Chouchou's biggest problem is it suffers from bad pacing. The story is pretty much over by the end of the first year, and the rest of the time is spent on pointless filler and the aforementioned unresolved side romances. You get the feeling that Hibi Chouchou is trying to be the next Kimi Ni Todoke, but the chapters lack the sense of yearning and tension Kimi Ni Todoke's had, probably because I simply don't care enough about the characters.

In the end, Hibi Chouchou feels like its following the standard shoujo manga template used for many of the genre's most beloved hits, but lacks all the life that makes those series good. The result is an all-around boring and unsatisfying read.

Romances with a significant age-gap, especially when one character is just entering adulthood, are tricky business. There's a million ways they can go wrong. A Kiss on Tearful Cheeks serves as one of many examples of what not to do when writing a May-December romance.

Our 17-year old heroine is dating a 24-year old and it takes very little time for her boyfriend to begin to seem creepy and possessive. Neither character in the story has the emotional maturity to handle the relationship and things that are precursors to abuse are treated as romantic. Our heroine is submissive in every way and pretty much lets ... her boyfriend do whatever he wants. Meanwhile, the boyfriend's attitude goes beyond a cute level of jealousy like the manga tries to play it off as; at one point, he goes out of town and makes his girlfriend promise not to even leave her house because he doesn't want her around other men.

A Kiss on Tearful Cheeks is every complaint you've heard about age-gap romances brought to life, and is best avoided.

(SPOILERS for the first episode.)

A likable protagonist? In my isekai anime? It's more likely than you think.

In fact, our hero's likability is pretty much what saves Overlord from becoming a huge bore. As Momonga, Satoru Suzuki is extremely overpowered, as you might guess from the show's title. Time in and time out, he manages to use his gaming prowess to defeat his enemies.

Thankfully, the show manages to be less like another No Game No Life and more like One-Punch Man in this regard; under the overpowered skeleton surface, Momonga is a genuinely relatable everyman. He's the kind of dork who communicates with his ... fellow players using cartoonish smilies that contrast with his creepy avatar and spends the last day of his favorite MMO's existence screwing around with all the power he's amassed throughout his time playing. Seeing him so all the silly, sentimental things I could see myself doing if one of my favorite games was closing got me firmly on board with him as a character.

That's not to say our hero, along with Madhouse's stellar-as-usual artwork and sound, can save the show from every single flaw though. One of Overlord's biggest issues is in its pacing. While earlier episodes go by at a pretty steady pace, the overall arc starts to slow down in later parts and eventually goes full on One Piece shonen battle pacing by the end. While you might be able to tell from One Piece being firmly placed in my favorite anime that this didn't really bother me, I can see how it can feel slow if you're not the kind of viewer who is used to it.

As far as genres I'm not as big of a fan of there are also times the show teeters towards becoming a harem anime, with scenes where female characters argue over the usual harem crap. This was annoying and honestly felt kind of out of place with everything else, especially with Momonga himself being uncomfortable with it.

Another shortcoming of the anime is standard for the isekai genre at this point: the world of Yggdrassil is just your very bland, standard MMO. There's not much to see that's unique here.

Overall, while not perfect, Overlord pleasantly surprised me. It's one of the first Isekai anime I've watched where I honestly related to the protagonist, and I enjoyed the shonen elements. I look forward to catching season 2 of this show in the future.

All aboard the hype train!

Moon Pride is the music video for the opening song for the first season of Sailor Moon: Crystal. It was released before the first episode of the series as a promotional video and contained some of the first animation we would see for the upcoming series.

Much like the actual artwork for the show's first season, the music video is a mixed bag of high-quality 2D animation and 3D effects sprinkled in that don't look quite as stellar. What you can't fault is the song though - the opening theme fits the show's aesthetic and attitude nicely.

Overall, Moon Pride is a ... good promotional video featuring some original animation that helped promote one of the decade's most hyped reboots.

She's a grandma (Obaa-chan) with a computer in space!

Computer Obaachan is a silly, charming little music video targeted at children about a space-traveling grandma and her supercomputer, and that's pretty much the entire story. Throughout the short Obaa-chan fiddles with her computer and takes a spacewalk. The short is whimsical in its art, song, and execution. The song will easily get stuck in your head.

The artwork has a storybook vibe to it and while it repeats animation several times, it avoids getting too stale this way.

This is a fun little retro video that may be worth sharing with small children too!

Ask yourself: Are you a huge meme? Do you enjoy meme-tastic entertainment? Personally, the answer is yes, so naturally I enjoyed the absurdity that was Galo Sengen.

Seriously, I have no idea what just happened, but it was fun.

To make things even more absurd for my monolanguage-speaking self, I didn't find the subtitled version of this, so if there is a story or really any characters I couldn't tell you. I don't think there is, but if I'm wrong and the lyrics explain something deep and meaningful, hit me up and I'll watch it again with the subs.

The art is silly and crudely drawn, as ... you'd expect from anything to become a huge meme.

The song itself is quite catchy.

Seriously, this is a super short required meme, so give it a watch and see the madness for yourself.

Between being a fan of the writer and the studio, it's safe to say Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid is the biggest disappointment of an anime I've ever personally had the displeasure of being exposed to.

Tooru is a dragon maid. Let that sink in for a moment. She is a maid who is also a dragon. It's in the title. It's brought up in the first episode. And then... it honestly rarely comes up that much again except for rehashing the same old gags. Instead of anything to do with worldbuilding or her dragon-like aspects, Tooru's main personality trait is her creepy-level obsession with Kobayashi. ... By the third episode, this behavior has lost all of its charm and is just boring and annoying to have to rehash.

Thankfully, or so it would seem at first, the show realizes this is getting old and decides to bring in a variety of other characters. The best episode is the first one after our second dragon is introduced - it's more cute and charming and fun than any episodes that actually center around the main characters. Unfortunately, the next episode after that decides to take this character and use her as a method to sexualize ELEMENTARY-AGE GIRLS in a way that made me feel physically ill.

Kobayashi-san Chi no Maid Dragon is a show that goes from annoying and boring to absolute moral train wreck in 10 seconds flat. Sadly, its popularity says a lot about how anime can continue to get away with scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel.

Anitore! EX was a show advertised as if it could be something really unique, but ultimately turned out to be appealing to the lowest common denominator.

The idea behind the show, supposedly, is that it's an exercise anime, where you do exercises along with the characters. However, the actual show puts the camera at angles that make it clear the actual goal is to be pure fanservice.

It's not really the fact that fanservice is involved that bugs me (because of course there was going to be fanservice when you have cute anime girls) so much as that this comes at the cost of actually being ... an exercise show. The camera angles and pace are not beneficial for someone trying to follow along.

In the end, I'm not sure if Anitore! EX was an idea that got destroyed by producers who said "more cute girls" or if it was always going to be cute girl trash that decided to use bait and switch advertising to appeal to a wider audience. Either way, the final result is pretty darn useless.

My kneejerk reaction to 00:08 was to call it abysmal drivel and be done with it. From my rating, it's clear I haven't completely changed my view - nothing really happens in this short and I don't see any sort of deep message like some reviewers did.

However, there's a wide berth between a 4 and, say, giving it a 1 like I could have done, and I didn't just give 00:08 some credit because the art was nice or the sound was good. The reason I decided that 00:08 needed to be given a little bit of recognition is that it was just weird ... on a completely other level. The short is so non-objective and so out there that I felt like I was having a strange experience and showed the video to others in hopes of getting a similar reaction.

This means, like it or not, 00:08 managed to make me feel something unique from other arthouse films, and for that I have to say that it was a success in some way.