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After 47 episodes over the course of nearly two years, Alicization has finally drawn to a close. I can see why there was so much excitement going into it; as a whole, this arc has had some of the franchise’s best moments, albeit also some of its worst. But when I look at just this last quarter, I can’t help but feel disappointed that this is how it all ended.

Sword Art Online: Alicization – War of Underworld 2nd Season is a series of well animated fight scenes. As the culmination of the arc, there’s an effort to give every character a moment in the spotlight, ... though as impressive as all of these fights are, I just wish there was more going on. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a show that’s primarily composed of fight scenes, as SAO has demonstrated before with Alicization Rising. But whereas that arc had a constant sense of forward momentum, most of the encounters here feel superfluous, as if the show is just spinning its wheels until it’s time to advance the main plot.

By which, I mean Kirito. At this point, it’s basically established that Kirito will win any fight that he takes seriously, so there are really only two ways that the series can create meaningful tension: either by putting him in situations he can’t fight his way out of (it would be neat if this happened more often!) or by removing him from the equation so that the other characters are the focus of the conflict. In this sense, putting Kirito in a coma was inevitable.

But at the same time, the franchise is so obsessed with Kirito that no one else is allowed to do anything meaningful. Rather than taking this chance to demonstrate how capable the others are on their own, we just got a season and a half of everyone waiting for Kirito to come solve all of their problems. Like, there were two major antagonists in this arc; would it have been that unreasonable for someone other than Kirito to defeat one of them?

Speaking of, SAO still needs to work on its villains. Between xenophobic serial killer and sociopathic serial killer, we’re not exactly dealing in shades of gray. They’re cartoonishly evil and not terribly interesting, and I hope that Reki Kawahara eventually figures out a way to establish how bad a character is by means other than either exposition or sexual assault. In this case, we’re told how evil PoH is, but wouldn’t it have been more compelling if we had actually seen all of the murders he had been responsible for back in season 1? I’ve read enough fanfiction about Aincrad’s supporting cast that he still had some sense of magnitude for me, but I think for most people, he was just another one-dimensional baddie.

Still, for all of my criticisms, War of Underworld is not without its virtues. For one, it’s SAO’s gayest arc yet.

“Amatsuyu “Joro” Kisaragi is your typical dense harem lead who is showered in affection by a cute childhood friend, a mature student council president, and many others as the series progresses” – this is the false pretense that Oresuki presents to cover its true premise: that Joro is aware of this trope and is actually a manipulative scumbag invoking it intentionally to pick up girls. However, one of these being true does not negate the other, and both are layers of the show’s narrative.

Oresuki is a show that is about subtext and layered narratives. Basically every character in the show lies about what motivates their ... actions at one point or another, and this is made extremely clear from the very beginning. In doing this, Oresuki is tasking the viewer to try to discern where their real intentions lay. Rather than the text itself, Oresuki prompts the audience to read the subtext.

However, treating subtext as text does not erase the original text. As a better show once said, “People have several faces… and they’re all real.” Oresuki adopts a Kantian philosophy where the morality of an action can only be judged based on the intention behind it, and in doing so, it ignores the action itself. At one point, Joro is chastised for doing a good deed, because his motivations are deemed to be selfish. If one is committed to the idea that subtext is the only thing that’s real, then everything else must be fake.

In training the audience to only read subtext, Oresuki demonstrates how dangerous this perspective can be. After the first few arcs, the viewer becomes unable to judge a good deed for itself. There was one character who ended up being completely benevolent in their actions, but I still was convinced that they couldn’t be trusted long after they were introduced. If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

With all of that said, I do think that the ideology of Oresuki is usually on the right track. Joro loses all of his friends as a result of his scheming in the first arc, and though he tries to scheme to regain them at first, he is only successful when he ultimately drops all façade and tells them directly that he wants to be friends again. There are no shortcuts or cheat codes when it comes to relationships, and if you want something real, then it has to start with you.

I get the sense that Rakuda said everything they wanted to say in the first volume of the series, and didn’t really know how to follow it up. To a certain extent, Joro keeps making the same mistakes over and over again, although I’ll charitably read that as understanding that it would be difficult for a misanthrope like him to so easily change their ways. Fittingly, this season ends with another of Joro’s schemes backfiring, and him being backed into a corner as a result. His immediate impulse may be to devise a new scheme to escape this situation, but if he wants to show that he’s learned anything over the course of this season, then he’ll need to finally be honest about how he feels. We can only wait and see.

So, is Oresuki good? No, absolutely not. It pretends to be a subversion of a genre, but ultimately doesn’t amount to more than just being the thing that it’s aping with a few more winks at the camera. But I had a lot of fun with it! There are a lot of ideas here that I thought were interesting to engage with, even if I disagreed them. Maybe my experience was mainly the product of my taking a philosophy class at the same time that this was airing, but if you like to play with your trash, then I think that Oresuki is worth a try.

“Kohinata Miku, you’re my sunshine. I feel warmest when I’m next to you, and I’ll always come back to you. It’s always been that way, and I’m sure that it’ll stay that way.”

Symphogear is a series that’s not for everyone. In the words of ANN’s Nick Creamer, it’s “a singing idol mecha yuri romcom battle melodrama with JoJo's sense of irreverence and a lot of fanservice,” and that amalgamation is no doubt going to scare some people off. But considering that this is a review of the show’s fifth season, I’m assuming that everyone reading doesn’t need to be convinced that this combination is actually ... the coolest thing ever. And given that, rather than asking how Symphogear compares to other anime, I think the more important question is how XV stacks up against the other seasons of Symphogear.

So then, what are the makings of a good Symphogear season? Through careful research, I’ve narrowed it down to three factors: coolness, escalation, and gayness. As a series, Symphogear is constantly punching past the limits of its internal plausibility, and it gets away with it because it does so confidently and with style. And somehow, it manages to continue to top itself with each consecutive season. And most importantly, it does all this without ever losing sight of its emotional core. I think the best seasons of this show are the ones that have maximized these elements, so let’s see how XV compares.

In regards to our first criterion, Symphogear has never been cooler. XV is the final season of this franchise, and the Symphogear Project team didn’t pull any of their punches to make sure that it got the ending it deserved. There's a tangible passion behind every moment; the transformation and fight scenes are the franchise’s best, and basically every other episode was stunning enough to be the finale of a lesser show. What’s more, there’s a lot of fanservice in the form of callbacks to favorite characters from previous seasons, which helps to cement that this really is the end.

Managing escalation can be difficult after five seasons. It’s important to continue to raise the stakes so that there’s still tension as to whether our heroes can prevail, but after you’ve already punched God, it’s really hard to do that without moving too far into the realm of abstraction. Fortunately, XV’s writers understand that even when it seems like you’ve reached the top, it’s still possible to escalate past that by changing the focus to more personal conflicts. Like sure, the fate of the world is on the line again this season, but Hibiki is fighting to save something far more important: her wife.

Through all of the twists and turns that this series has gone through, the one constant has always been the bond between Hibiki and Miku. Despite that, Miku has far too often been relegated to the sidelines in past seasons, so I’m glad that the final season was created with this relationship at its core. These two have been through too much over the course of this series, and I hope they'll have the chance to be happy together after everything is over. They’re so soft.

So Symphogear XV succeeds in all of the criteria I put out at the beginning of what constitutes a good Symphogear, but honestly, those are all arbitrary and don’t really matter. I could spend the rest of my life identifying factors and trying to explain why those are what make Symphogear work, but I think its essence is one that ultimately escapes explanation. It's not a perfect series, but it's one that is always unabashedly itself, and at max volume. It’s brought so much joy to both fans and staff alike, and though I’m sad to see it go, I’m also so happy that it even existed in the first place. Symphogear will always be special.

It’s been eight years since the previous season of Index, and six years since I started watching anime. Index was one of the earlier series that I saw, and at the time I really enjoyed it. However, a lot has changed in my life since then, and I’m not the same person I was back in 2013. I’ve been looking at this third season as an opportunity to reevaluate the series, and unfortunately, it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Many of the preliminary reviews suggest that this dissatisfaction is purely with the quality of this particular adaptation, but I feel the source material isn’t blameless ... in this matter.

First off, I’m going to talk about the author of the series, Kamachi Kazuma, who is best known for the absurd rate at which he puts out light novels. A while back, there was a period of over two years in which he managed to release a volume every single month, and though he has slowed since then, his publishing speed is still well above just about anyone else in the industry. This rapid release schedule is a powerful tool for increasing audience engagement, since there will almost always be a new release to keep him fresh in mind, and it also generates pressure for readers to stay up to date or risk falling behind.

However, while this model was no doubt successful in getting his work acknowledged, it is also to the detriment of its quality. For some arcs, it feels as if Kamachi was only putting something out for the sake of it, and not because it contributed to the overall narrative. Some of the middle arcs in this season drop a lot of information on the viewers to keep track of, but end up hardly mattering to the main plot. There’s so much going on, and a lot of it doesn’t amount to anything.

Another product of this release schedule is how the powers have been simplified over the course of the series. I still think that Academy City is one of the coolest settings in any anime that I’ve seen, but only because of how unique and thought-out all the different powers that occupied it felt initially. But as the rate of releases accelerated, this deliberateness was lost. Gradually, the new abilities introduced have become less interesting, and even the application of existing abilities has become less creative. This is best illustrated through Vector Change, a power which is limited only by the imagination of the user. Accelerator’s greatest strength over the first two seasons was the flexibility of this ability, but now he primarily uses it as a force field and those dumb tornado wings.

But yes, I’m not going to disagree that this adaptation is rough. This season covers the last nine volumes of the original light novel, which is a lot of material to cover (for reference, the first and second seasons covered six and seven volumes, respectively). A lot had to be cut to fit everything into 26 episodes, and the gaps are apparent. The biggest casualty of this is the characterization. It’s a frequent occurrence that the villains from previous arcs return as allies in new arcs, though the process by which their allegiances shift is often unaddressed. This material ties in with the series’ main theme of great strength coming from the unification of different perspectives, but it doesn’t get the attention it deserves. The show ends up having an impressive ensemble cast, but with all the material that has been removed, any episode that tries to follow too many of them comes across as completely incoherent.

It’s always interesting to revisit media you’ve consumed in the past, and see how your opinion has shifted on it over time. Unfortunately, Index doesn’t hold the same appeal that it used to, but I’m still going to try to end this review on an optimistic sentiment. We’ll also be getting a third season of Railgun this year, which has always been my preferred side of the franchise. I plan to cover it as well, and I choose to believe that it won't let me down in the same way.

Hoshiiro Girldrop was one of my favorite animes of last year, and I went into the second season with the expectation that it would be similarly meaningful. And when it started off, I had every reason to believe that it would be. Needless to say, every episode was easily the highlight of its week, and I watched each one at least 28 times (maybe twice that for episode 10, which I’m sure other viewers will understand). But looking back on this season now that it’s reached its conclusion, it doesn’t fit together as neatly as I would have hoped. It sacrificed cohesion in favor of ... maximizing the bombast of every individual episode, and while I’m sure will appeal to some viewers, it fails to capture the magic that made the first season so special to me.

A major factor in this is that Daichi’s role in the story has been significantly reduced. I think that this likely because Daichi became a rather controversial topic in the fanbase after he broke up with Sosogu midseason, and that many fans were only interested in content related to the Drop Stars. However, Daichi’s motivation for his actions (insecurities over feeling that he was getting in the way of Sosogu’s growing career) resonated deeply with me, and it was the resolution to this arc that made the show so personally affecting. But I know that not everyone is a Daichi apologist like I am, so I can understand why they chose to handle him how they did.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if the writers were a bit too concerned over catering to their audience. The first season had some bold choices that definitely risked alienating parts of the audience, and everything in this season felt sterilized in comparison. Many of the moral complexities that had been previously introduced, such as Korona’s connection to the Yakuza or Erika’s custody battle with her ex-husband, seem to have been dropped without explanation. This gradually reduced my investment in the characters as the season went on, though I think the writers more than made up for it in the homestretch. I wasn’t expecting an anime to have such a nuanced take on the role of social media in our lives today, and I found the climax of the season to be both engaging and informative.

In conclusion, the Pop Team Epic Special is a delightful showcase of experimentation with different mediums. Nearly every art form explored over the course of the main series makes a reappearance, along with the new addition of clay work. I don’t think any of the segments are going to have the same longevity as some of the highlights from the main series, but I also don't think that's the point. All I care about is that the staff were able to have fun making something that they thought would be interesting, and on that front, this is a huge success.

Fall in love again next week~

With a multimedia franchise like BanG Dream, it can be difficult to figure out where to start. While this may be labeled as the second season, it’s also something of a soft reboot, and intended to be viewable even if you haven’t seen the first season. But at the same time, this season doesn’t include formal character introductions, even for characters who hadn’t been present in the first season, so new viewers may be a bit lost initially. If you want to consume some other material before jumping in, it probably wouldn’t hurt, but at the same time, if you’re interested in the franchise because ... you saw some 4komas on Twitter or whatever, that’s probably enough.

But if you are going in blind, be prepared to be overwhelmed by the size of the cast. Between the project’s five main bands, there are 25 characters, and this is key to the franchise’s success. At least one of them is likely to resonate with any given viewer, and there isn’t a one of them that isn’t someone’s favorite. Still, it’s a tall order to give each of them sufficient screen time across 13 episodes while still telling a coherent story, and to accomplish this, the first half of the season mostly has the main plot take place in the background while each band receives a dedicated episode. These episodes needed to balance establishing the identity of each band for those in the audience who weren’t familiar with the events of the mobile game with also delivering new content for more experienced viewers, and unfortunately some attempts were not as graceful as others. I think that by the end, every character had gotten at least a few good moments, but depending on your allegiances, you may walk away from this season a bit disappointed.

Once all of the introductions out of the way, the story is able to move the main plot into the spotlight, and this is where the season really shined. The passage of time is glossed over in a lot of anime, but a year has passed in the world of BanG Dream, and the effects of this period are tangible. This means that each group has had sufficient time to settle into a comfortable dynamic and grow as a band, but it also means that the specter of graduation is looming. Some of the bands have members in different years, and while none of them have been separated yet, this threat sets the stage for the main conflict of the season. The time of a high school band is fleeting, and the characters are forced to consider what it means to treasure these bonds.

Anyway, it’s probably worth mentioning that nearly the entirety of the season is animated with CG. A few years ago, this may have been a deal breaker, but by now anime has reached the point where this is a viable production method. If there’s one place where the animation falls short, it’s that facial expressions tend to be a bit stiff. But besides that, the CG is a step above what was featured in the previous season, so I’m considering it a success.

It took me a while to warm up to BanG Dream, but I’m glad I did. I love the sense of community that exists across its cast, and it’s been interesting to see how the dynamics have shifted over time. A third season has already been confirmed for the beginning of next year, and I’m curious to see how the situation with RAS will be resolved, and whether graduation will be explored further. Whatever is on the horizon, I’m looking forward to it.

The challenges we face during our adolescence may be irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, though their magnitude in the moment can feel overwhelming. It's no surprise then that media which intensifies these issues through supernatural phenomenon would be popular, since teenage audiences feel as if the weight of their problems is understood. However, does this media actually help its audience to overcome their problems, or is it merely wish fulfillment to escape from them? Seishun Buta Yarou may have something compelling to say about the adolescent experience, but it's unfortunately buried under layers of tropes and cliches.

But of all the elements of the ... show that feel superfluous to the narrative, the protagonist Sakuta sits at the top of the list. Unlike the girls of the show, he doesn't undergo any development over the series, and only exists as the self-insert lens through which we view their arcs. He hardly exists as a character, and his only trait seems to be his tendency for frequent dehumanizing sexual harassment directed at basically every girl he meets. He's presented as the catalyst that instigates the girls' growth, but instead he just comes across as a plot device that knows exactly what to do to solve their problems for them.

Speaking of, each arc of the show is modeled after a classic thought experiment, and wow do I wish they hadn’t done that. Not only do these allusions not add anything to the narrative, but their integration feels completely unnatural. (“Surely you’ve at least heard about the cat in the box, right?” a friend asks the protagonist, nearing the end of the first episode) Seishun Buta Yarou is hardly the first series to have pulled this allusion, but at this point, referencing Schrodinger’s Cat seems like shorthand for a light novel thinking it’s smarter than it is, and I can’t think of anything else that had the audacity to follow it up with “Have you heard of Laplace’s Demon?” three episodes later.

As for the contents of each arc, the conflicts that the girls deal with mostly come off as artificial. Still, even if the substance itself is lacking, I can’t fault the presentation. The animation and vocal delivery is expressive, and it’s also neat how there's some overlap between events that help to make each one feel less like an isolated incident. However, I think that Seishun Buta Yarou’s most compelling asset is how the characters behave outside of the central narrative. Despite everything else, it’s fun to see these characters relax and bounce off of each other. It's a shame that the show's best feature is also its least central.

My feelings towards Seishun Buta Yarou are conflicted. I went into it expecting a cross between Monogatari and Oregairu, and that’s not really what I got. It took a while for me to accept the show for what it actually was, but once I did, I was able to find a genuine emotional core underneath all of the light novelisms. Ironically, I think the more interested you are in this genre, the less likely it is that Seishun Buta Yarou will appeal to you. It leans hard into its genre trappings, and your enjoyment will be largely determined by your tolerance of them. Still, if you're a fan of deadpan loner protagonists, you could do worse.

When SSSS.Gridman first began, people really didn’t like it. I think a lot of the surface-level elements turned people away, especially since the first few episodes were fairly slow and predictable. But once the show actually got going, the actual content there kept us coming back week after week, and it ended up being not just one of my favorite shows of its season, but of the year as a whole.

Gridman is a precarious mix of genres, balancing seemingly everyday school life against giant mecha fights. The former goes against what people expect from mecha anime, and is likely responsible for the show being labeled ... as slow. However, these two disparate halves somehow built off each other, with the tension of the daily life feeding into the catharsis of the action scenes. Since it's the more mundane material that seems to have garnered the most criticism, that'll be the focus of this review.

Interestingly enough, this means I really don’t need to talk about Yuta. While he may pilot Gridman, his amnesiac protagonist bit gets in the way of him having a particularly interesting school life, and instead Rikka steps forward as the protagonist. Rikka is the more emotionally-driven of the two, and while she’s aware of all the kaiju shenanigans going on in the show, it’s never really her main drive.

Instead, Rikka’s conflict is her trying to reconnect with Akane, the antagonist of the series with whom she used to be close friends. Akane creates the kaiju that terrorize the city, and it would be so easy to just view her as the villain, especially since this is how she presents herself. But unlike the other protagonists, Rikka doesn't look at her through this lens. By refusing to play on Akane’s terms of mecha and kaiju, she is the one who is able to genuinely reach out to Akane and save her from her isolation. This story of reconnection could have been treated as secondary to the main action, but instead it’s given the same level of attention, receiving much of the show’s expressive animation and relatable character moments.

Also, the show absolutely nails atmosphere. Though everything seems mostly normal for the first half of the run, the show's use of its claustrophobic camera and tendency for long pauses serve to constantly instill a sense of discomfort in the viewer as they try to figure out why the world seems off. The summer heat is tangible and oppressive, and the rainy days are all the more miserable. The soundtrack goes a long way to sell these scenes, and the opening and ending are both fantastic.

Briefly, I’ll talk about how the show handles homage. I think a lot of the criticism leveled at the show is based on it being too steeped in references to other shows, to the point that animator for the original Gridman Obari Masami complained that they weren’t doing anything new with the material. With that said, I don’t mind having these callbacks as fanservice to fans of the original, especially since they don’t conflict with the story being told. Plus, how upset can I really be over all of the character designs being based on obscure Transformers? That’s adorable.

In conclusion, Gridman is just really good, you know? If you’ve been on the fence about watching Gridman because of the initial negative reception, I'd say it's worth trying for yourself. I'm still not entirely clear why so much of the community is down on this show, but I absolutely loved it, and I hope that more people will give it a chance.

Mod Edit: This review was originally written for the final 4 episodes which was previously a separate entry and was subsequently merged into Satsuriku no Tenshi.

At the time of my writing this, the main page for Angels of Death is sitting at a 6.92, and the top reviews are either negative or not seriously written. However, this was one of the shows I enjoyed most during the Summer 2018 season, so I wanted to write a brief review on its behalf.

A major contributing factor to these low scores is that people don’t know what to expect from this show. You wouldn’t know this from the ... synopsis above, but Angels of Death isn’t really a horror series – it’s somewhere between a buddy comedy and an otome game, except that all of the suitors want to murder the lead rather than date her (Half of them do still want to date her though). It’s difficult to encapsulate the series in its entirety, but that absurdity is part of the fun.

It might clear up some details if I talk about the source material that this anime is adapting. Although a manga exists, Angels of Death originally started as a freeware RPG Maker game. If you’ve ever played Yume Nikki or something like it (My personal favorite is Irisu Syndrome, which does have a free English translation), you know that these sorts of games can be surreal experiences, and this adaptation absolutely nails that tone while still poking fun at its genre conventions. I haven’t played the game myself, but I’ve been told that the plot of the anime diverges, and I’m definitely interested enough to check it out.

The strength of this series lays in the rapport established between its two leads, Rachel and Zack. The two are an odd couple, but they play off each other really well comically, and it was great to see their dynamic evolve over the course of the show. As they rise through the floors, they go from mutually using each other to actually caring about each other’s wellbeing, and this development is strangely endearing. There was one arc about halfway through the series in which the pair is separated, and those episodes felt empty, but they also made me realize how much I cared about their bond. Despite being a campy horror comedy, Angel of Death’s central relationship is a lot more developed than most anime romances, even if it is founded on murderous intent.

Angels of Death definitely wasn’t the best show of the Summer 2018 season - its middle section dragged on, and it probably would have helped if it had been cut down to a standard 12 or 13 episodes – but there’s nothing else quite like it and I’m glad I watched it. There’s no other show where characters are as likely to get oddly sentimental about their blades as they are to conduct a trial that wouldn’t be out of place in the Ace Attorney franchise, and it was this emotional range that kept me coming back each week. If any of this mess sounds entertaining to you, then I wholeheartedly recommend you check it out.

“this badminton anime has had like 6 or 7 different characters break down crying in the first episode. badminton must be absolutely miserable” -@shaun_jen

The protagonist of a sports anime will typically have some talent that makes them eligible to be the protagonist – Kuroko lacks presence, Hinata jumps high, Sawamura has flexible wrists, and the list goes on. This is an ability that they have, that no one else will be able to develop, no matter how hard they try, and it’s what gives them the edge over their competition. Hanasaki Ayano has every talent there could be when it comes to badminton – handedness, ... reflexes, etc – though it’s never quite that simple.

Ayano isn’t just talented; she’s also worked hard to hone her skills through a childhood of practicing against her mother Uchika, a champion at the sport. However, said mother’s love was conditional on whether she was able to beat her peers, which forced Ayano into a mindset of viewing the game only in terms of winning and losing, and destroyed her ability to simply enjoy the sport or have any respect for her opponents. Ayano plays not for a love of the game, but for her mother’s approval, and the only joy she seems to find in it is the sadistic glee of destroying those who dare believe that hard work will get them anywhere.

So, what about hard work? Luckily, Ayano isn’t really the protagonist of Hanebado – that honor goes to Ayano’s senior and rival, Aragaki Nagisa. Aragaki is definitely talented (though not on the same level as Ayano), but her true strengths lie in the effort that she puts into every match she plays and her love of the sport. That said, this effort often crosses the line into self-destruction, so her behavior isn’t to be emulated either, even if it is a step above Ayano’s. Still, she embodies the ideals that hard work and perseverance are able to overcome talent, and that winning isn't all that matters, and for that, the show roots for her.

In the end, Hanebado is a messy show. It challenges the quixotic foundation of the sports anime, and while it ultimately affirms it, it only is able to do so by being willfully ignorant of its own flaws. It can be repetitive in its ideas, and often borders on melodrama. But for all of its missteps, Hanebado also gets a lot right. The animation for the badminton matches is stunning, and it nails the catharsis factor that’s essential for any successful sports series. If you're looking for a sports series with more focus of the drama outside of the game, and you're willing to deal with tonal whiplash and other issues, then Hanebado might be the show for you.