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Violet Evergarden is a slow and methodical journey following the eponymous character as she performs her job as an Auto Memoir Doll touching people's hearts and having her own heart revealed in the process. A slow show which on the large scale tries to deal with war and its aftermaths and on a small or personal scale deals with the pain of saying farewell, Violet Evergarden exceeds in delivering small but focused stories and engaging one with its world.
Personally, I wasn't on the hype train for this show nor was I really feeling it for the first couple of episodes. Well, after a four month ... break and somewhat of a marathon of the last eleven episodes the show had to offer I can definitely say I am on board with it.

Let's get the obvious out of the way first: Violet Evergarden is a show that is polished to a mirror sheen. It is stunningly beautiful in basically every way possible. From the fluid animation to the amazing quality of the art right down to the music and folly there's narry a fault in presentation.
This all serves quite an important purpose: immersion. One of the things I noticed really soon after starting to watch the series again is how easy it was to lose myself in the world. How quickly I would get wrapped up and how hard it was to let go.
The score supports each and every scene very well while also being subtle. The animations are fluid and lifelike, faces are expressive and seem real and the work on the folly makes every movement of Violet's metal arms, every step, every action have weight. Every aspect of the presentation interweaves seemlessly to create a realistic and lifelike, yet at times otherworldy experience from which it was quite hard to dettach myself sometimes.

But does Violet Evergarden use all of this in its favour? Or perhaps does it squander it all? Oh why am I playing coy? By the score I'm sure you can figure it out. It does a great job using the presentation to its advantage in telling its stories. Yes, stories. Violet Evergarden does have a more overarching story, one where Violet has to find her heart and say goodbye to her past, but this story is told through lots of smaller ones where Violet helps others be at peace with their goodbyes.
Violet Evergarden is a story all about these goodbyes whether from a loved one passing or having to move away into a foreign home, the anime daftly crafts these twenty minute stories in such a way that you not only have time to get to know the characters, but also to get to feel for them when the climax is finally reached.
Now it's arguable that it does manage to do this by relying on some tropes and cliches, but I didn't find it to be an issue. Generally you'll find familiar setups to stories, but the resolution and the path to that resolution is mostly brand new.
In all of these stories there's a quite reverie on the part of the show. It doesn't reject the painful parts of life, but rather would have you embrace them and look to the future. A lot of the episodes in the series have this kind of message. Remembering the past and having an appreciation for how fleeting the time spent with loved ones is is an important theme in Violet Evergarden. It embraces the passing of time, the passing of people as a natural part of life to be held dear just as much as any other event in ones life.
This message resonated with me quite a bit and it is one of my favourite themes in media. For one who often finds himself contemplating the passing of time and the baggage that comes with it like me, Violet Evergarden is really good because of its slow and reverent approach to the subject.

I've talked a lot about Violet Evergaden (the show) up until now, but just as important of a component to what makes it good is Violet Evergarden (the character). See, the show is one of those where a character has to piece themselves together after a life-shattering event. Violet is our initially emotionless protagonist that by the end of the story should find her feelings. Being that she is a weapon of war without a war to fight in, thrust in a new peaceful world the show takes the opportunity to have us experience and discover this world together with her. As she slowly heals the wounds of the war during her journey we get to experience this healing in close intimacy. The fact that she is a frank, no nonsense, and honest girl also means that there's little need for cumbersome inner monologue which might work well in a book, but in my opinion detracts from the immersion in an audiovisual medium like anime.
Violet's arc in the show is subtle. Most of the time. She goes from not understanding others' emotions to being a star Doll in just one episode, but we'll let that slide since otherwise the show would entirely be about her becoming a decent Doll rather than the her journeys as one. Each episode is presented as another client asking for Violet's help. And each episode concludes with Violet having affected the life of a client in a profound way, but also having the wall around her heart slowly chipped away.
By the end of the show I felt as if I had spent a whole lot of time with this girl and had come to known her really well and she undertook this journey with me. She didn't know herself at the beginning either so her journey was not only impactful for her, but since I undertook it alongside her it had a much bigger impact on me as well.

Now as much as I praise the characterisation of Violet and how impactful the small stories are, I would like to point out that in the grand scheme of things none of the characters besides Violet are more really more than one-off characters. Sure, some are recurring, but they rarely matter beyond their first appearance. And this may be a fault for some.
It also can feel like the show is quite aimless. There's no real set-in-stone goal for Violet. The show is about her aimlessly wandering through life and only by happenstance does the journey actually help her. She doesn't actively search for anything for most of the show which again may be a detriment.
It can also at times feel like the drama is laid on thick and combined with the show being rather aimless it makes it so that the thick drama is also kind of pointless. I didn't personally feel this way since I got immersed enough and attached enough to even the episodic characters that I did care for their plight, but I can see how for some it may not be this way.

The faults of Violet Evergarden I feel are overshadowed by just how much it does right. From impeccable presentation to an impeccable philosophy this show gripped me like not many others have. It might not be your cup of tea if you don't like episodic shows, and it might not be your cup of tea if you hate having excessive amounts of drama in your shows. But if you like a more pensive look at life, if you have an appreciation for shows which try to say something about life, or maybe even if you've been forced to say goodbye to anyone in your life then maybe Violet Evergarden is for you.

If you're a bit newer to anime and/or tend to exclusively watch whatever is airing in the present season you may think that in the past all anime that was made was good and there were no rush jobs made seemingly for the sole purpose of being made. Wrong! There's plenty of those and Himiko-den or The Legend of Himiko is one of them.

Seemingly based on a PS1 game Himiko-den has a moderately interesting premise, being an isekai of sorts in a fantasy setting based on feudal Japan featuring the battle between the good forces of Yamatai aided by the power of a holy flame ... called the Bokka against the invading Kingdom of Kune. Magic and mysticism play a big part in the anime with the holy Bokka guiding our more or less intrepid heroes and the Fountain of Darkness aiding the opposition.
Well all that sounds like something I could get behind. It would not be a hard thing to make an interesting or at least cohesive story with those elements. It should at least be sufficient as a competent time waster. Well, it certainly wasted my time though not in the way I had hoped.
Himiko-den stumbles and fumbles around in every way possible to make a confusing and grating experience that serves well as a guide as to what not to do with your story.

We begin the story with the invasion of Yamatai. The guardian of the Bokka decides that the best place to hide would be with the aforementioned holy flame. Well, it would be a good place to hide if the people of this land didn't all have the innate ability to teleport wherever they pleased by using the power of editing. The main antagonist, someone who looks like he is simultaneously both a member of KISS and the pope wanders into the chambers and kills the people there and throws the guardian's baby named Himiko into the fires of the Bokka. Fast forward a few years and Himiko is in modern-day Japan and 15 years old. Nothing really happens in the modern day before she and her friend Kutani are teleported right back to Yamatai, this time not through editing but through the totally not made-up-on-the-spot powers of the Bokka.

I can't quite get it across through text, and you shouldn't watch this anime yourself, so trust me when I say that the anime both manages to move way too fast and way too slowly at the same time. That small paragraph takes up the majority of the first couple of episodes. Throughout the entire show you get this feeling that nothing really happens, but at the same time the story wooshes by you faster than a jet-powered Formula 1 car.
Either the anime occasionally cuts out character interactions and plot developments or the anime is so boring I very frequently lost and regained consciousness for minutes at a time while watching it. As I said earlier characters teleport from place to place with editing magic, some actions happen in the background with no explanation given afterwards and our band of heroes manages to always pull out a win just because they can rely on the macguffin that is the Bokka's power. It's never properly explained what it can do, at one point it's a shield, then it's a sword, oh now it causes an explosion, oh look it can make you see far away, oh wait now it projects a big image of your face to anyone else who can use the power. I wouldn't really dwell on it too much, but the woeful directing and editing combined with the plot armour the Bokka provides gives the anime a sense that nothing can ever go wrong for our main characters and nothing ever does. Everything works out perfectly all the time forever.
That's not even where it ends. When the anime is not off confusing me with random cuts and missing story it's off confusing me with plot points and conflicts that are brought up and solved almost instantly or conflicts which are brought up, built up, and be solved but which don't matter to the story at all. Things happen in the anime more or less to pad the runtime. There's no rhyme or reason to some of the plot elements brought up and when it does have a side-story that could go somewhere it wastes it by solving it in the worst way possible and leaving you with an empty and frustrated feeling.
In the end, the main story doesn't matter because every conflict will be won with no effort and the side-stories don't matter because they're either vapid or botched.

So I guess that leaves us with at least having relatable and interesting characters or an intriguing world to explore. Well, considering that the anime is called The Legend of Himiko, and the title character does absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing, for the entire run you can guess what the rest of the characters are like. They're all one dimensional and boring. There's this semi-harem going on with some queen candidates for Yamatai, but all the queens are made up of at most two character tropes and the story would be the same if all but one didn't even exist. Himiko and Kutani are basically the same, Himiko is a freightened high school girl and Kutani is a hot headed idiot both of them move through the story as if railroaded to just get to the end.
In short the characters are flat and uninteresting and hardly worth more than a glance just to see the admitedly alright designs.
The world is just a recreation of feudal Japan, but with magic and it's not even all that magical. If not for the flying mountain that serves as a base of operations of the evil guys and the Bokka it would basically just be feudal Japan, but more bland.

When it comes to its artistry The Legend of Himiko looks like it was both drawn and composed for on either a small budget, a tight schedule or both. Character models are inconsistent, faces have a tendency to morph around, sometimes during speech. There's not a lot of movement and what little movement there is is choppy. The soundtrack consists of the same spooky sounding song played over and over and some in-universe lady playing on a flute she keeps dropping on the floor and it sounds exactly what you'd expect a mistreated flute to sound like.
I wanted to find something good to say, at least here, but I can't. The most I can muster is that I guess the OP song is half decent, at least until it doesn't get repetitive.

In conclusion, The Legend of Himiko is an uninspired isekai seemingly made without any energy or budget put behind it. Its bland and uninteresting story is rivaled only by its bland and uninteresting art. It's a relic of anime of days long gone that has been forgotten and for good reason. While I personally think there's worth in remembering the mistakes of the past many do not and would probably be glad to forget The Legend of Himiko which is just one big pile of mistakes.
If you're looking for older anime to watch and happen across this one then I suggest staying away. For some good isekai there's the Vision of Escaflowne and if you're just in the mood for a classic fantasy world Slayers is for you.

Japan has an affection and an affinity for making movies and TV shows about giant things battling each other. The kaiju genre of film is one of Japan's most well known exports with Godzilla being a recognisable icon no matter where in the world you are. And not just kaiju films, but also things like Gundam or Power Rangers feature giant robots that fight to protect a city (which they usually end up trashing).
The Rayearth OVA is that kind of anime. It's basically what would happen if you took Power Rangers made the rangers cute anime girls and added a whole bunch random fantasy elements ... to it. It's an odd mix to say the least.

The best part of this OVA is definitely its presentation. The anime looks great with its character and monster designs and overall aesthetic. It knows how to use colour, portraying the world as bleak and dark yet maintaining splashes of colour for the characters you're supposed to follow so they pop out. There drawings are detailed and nowhere in the animation does it feel like they slacked with all of the explosions, buildings collapsing and monsters firing giant laser beams looking impressive.
There are faults here too however. The backgrounds are rather indistinct, the entire anime takes place in Tokyo, but most of the time you can't really tell where everything is happening. This could be attributed to the OVAs overall dark colour palette and to the fact that most of the city gets reduced to indistinct piles of rubble anyway.

Speaking of piles of rubble, let's talk story. Rayearth is about three girls Hikaru, Umi and Fuu who get chosen by deities to be the protectors of our world the eponymous Rayearth. When the world gets attacked by the forces of a parallel world called Cephiro it's up to these three girls to pass their deity's test and become giant mech/monster hybrids and destroy the city... I-I mean save the world.
There's a few problems with how Rayearth executes this premise, and I will preface my listing my grievances with the saying that I have not seen the TV show or read the manga so I went into this blind.

Firstly, there's no sense of weight to the plot. Events happen in the show and their strung along in a nice sequence, but it feels like most of the scenes are standalone. There's no impact and at times it feels like things are happening just because. This, I feel, can be mainly attributed to how none of the characters in the show get any development. There is some attempted arc for the three girls but it comes off as forced and artificial, it's less of an arc and more of a straight line. One moment they're unsure, scared and in despair and the next BOOM they're a giant fire-breathing lion vanquishing their enemy with ease!
Secondly, the show is just plain confusing. The total running time of the three episodes is somewhere around 120 minutes yet for most of that time I had no clue why things were happening as they were on screen. Sure, the anime tries to explain itself somehow, but in all of its attempts it just somehow becomes more confusing. The motivation of the main antagonist is foggy at best, and to top it all of it ends on a very weird note and quite abruptly at that. It feels like they had a story written for a much longer series, but had to cut a lot out to fit three episodes. Remember however, that this is a completely original story written specifically for these OVAs that has nothing to do with the TV show or manga so how and why is all of this so confusing?

And the confusion doesn't end there either. There's more! Besides having a plot that's reminiscent of a maze with no exit it also can't get it's main theme straight. An important and often mentioned point in the show is the friendship between the three main girls yet for most of the show the girls get separated and only towards the end do we see some semblance of teamwork from them. The rest of the time we only get periodic reminders on how they're best friends and how important that is. Not feeling that butchering a story about friendship is enough, on the Cephiro side of things they try to shoehorn in a forbidden love story wrapped in a tale about nature. Basically, the fairy queen that governs nature and a high priest love each other, but that's a no-no so the world becomes barren. What's the message they're trying to send here? Don't fuck with nature? I don't get it.

Rayearth the OVA is a somewhat pretty looking and utterly confusing OVA that was probably made for people who've already seen the TV show and have some sort of connection and pre-existing knowledge about the world and characters. Coming in as an outsider who has no idea about any of this it comes off as a very confusing and confused anime that will ultimately leave you scratching your head and wondering why you wasted your time on it.
I did not enjoy my time with his OVA at all and I wish I had spent it somewhere else instead and I suggest you do too unless you have some knowledge about the world or like seeing giant monsters battling it out and destroying a city in the process.

Nowadays we tend to see a lot of anime series not get a proper ending after a one or two cour run. This can be mostly chalked up to anime being really expensive to make and it just not being worth the time and money spent on a full adaptation versus a shorter series that serves more as an appetizer for the manga or light novel or what-have-you. There might also be the, albeit rarer, case of anime original series that start and are never given a proper ending for various reasons.
Early Reins takes the best of both of these worlds and is a 2003 ... anime original OVA that serves as an appetizer to something bigger that doesn't exist and doesn't really get a proper ending. Lovely.

The anime stars a cast of six beautiful women on a train in the good old days of the wild, wild west. Sadly, the anime never really gets a chance to expand on the character of more than about two of these women, them being the eye-patched Lola and the sheriff-in-training Margaret. The other four get baseline personalities and never really do anything to stand out on their own. I'm pretty confused as to why the anime even chose to have such a large cast for such a short story in the first place. I guess having more good looking women on the cover would increase sales? That would be the only reason I can think of since besides Eyepatch and Margaret they don't really do much except shoot some guys in an admittedly pretty cool scene, but I'll get to that later.
Getting back on track, as far as the characters are concerned the anime is about Margaret's growth as a sheriff and her rising to the occasion of defending her train along with veteran cowboy Lola. Owing once more to the short runtime the growth is also handled rather haphazardly, but it's a genuinely good effort and I can't say I didn't get at least somewhat attached to Margaret by the end.

Well, I may have gotten even more attached if the dubs voice acting didn't sound so unintentionally funny and forced. Pretty much every actor in the show tries to pull a hard southern accent, some with more success than the others. Margaret and Eyepatch, the two characters with the most lines are fairly alright in that regard since their actors don't try way too hard, but oh dear god do some of the other characters sound ridiculous. I especially would like to point out Mona Marshall's portrayal of a rancher girl that sounds as if someone is constantly strangling her. Well, at the very least the dub's at least hilariously bad instead of being just bad or downright insulting to the ears.

And speaking of things that are not bad: the story is actually surprisingly fun. It's a pretty simple train robbery scenario that gets played out over the entire forty minute runtime, but it has enough bits and bobs here and there to at least be fun. If you expecting anything more thought provoking than some good old wild west shootin' then you're out of luck. Even though the anime tries to pull a plot twist near the end, it really doesn't come as any surprise and it's solved about as quickly as it comes up. And, speaking of the ending, it teases a future story that never came into fruition which actually makes me kind of disappointed because I would love to see what they could do with this setting if the got more time.
Where the real fun lies is in the creative ways in which the anime lets the girls shoot people. Ok, maybe creative is an overstatement, but it's still quite fun watching a group of horseback riders get mown down by a rich girl turning the crank on a gatling gun from a train. It's just about as fun as all the more controlled shoot-outs that happen throughout the anime that get solved in one well placed shot and possibly a Max Payne-style jump to the side. It's all great fun and it's really what makes the anime somewhat good. There's not a moment of boredom during the entire thing and the pacing is quite fast chugging along from action scene to action scene lest you get bored by the unimportant plot and occasionally nonsensical dialogue.

However, I will concede that the action is nothing outstanding and that it's only really fun the first time since there's not a whole lot of creativity put into it. Even the animation can be rather stiff at times and it generally never looks as good as it could be. There's even quite a bit of CG used to make birds-eye view shots of the train and some of the buildings in the beginning. The CG really doesn't look bad, it's just that it's clearly noticeable which shouldn't be the case. Compound that with the lackluster animation and the only thing that sticks out for this anime design-wise are the character designs which integrate your usual pretty anime girls into the western atmosphere quite well, and the western setting itself which not many anime have. It's too bad that the setting is wasted on such a short romp through it. I still pine for the day when I will see a truly great anime with a pure wild west setting.

To end it all off, Early Reins is a very okay attempt to make a short western anime. It's got fun shoot-outs, some fun characters and a forgettable story. It's held back by shaky production and some poor decision-making like trying to have way more characters than they knew what to do with. If you have forty minutes to spare and want something quick to hold your attention or you want to see what an anime with a wild west setting might look like then I recommend you give it a watch. Though the English dub isn't anything I would call good or even passable so I'd suggest watching it subtitled. Then again, the hilariously botched southern accents were kind of fun to listen to.
Thanks for reading and I'll see y'all around.

If there's two things Japan is known for these days in the minds of geeks everywhere, not just otaku, it's for creating an entire genre of video games know as JRPGs and for animated pornography. Of course, not all of their animation is pornography some just teeters on the edge always showing a bit too much female (or in exceptional cases male) skin, but never biting the bullet and going all the way. And who says JRPGs can't be almost pornographic too?
Princess Minerva is an anime based on, but is a prequel to, a video game about a group of extremely scantily clad women trying ... to defeat yet another scantily clad woman. With such a premise I see no way that this could turn out as anything but a masterpiece... of schlock.

The anime begins by introducing you to the Kingdom of Whistler, ruled by King Whistler XII. Aside from basically every resident of the kingdom having an unfortunate name there also seems to be a rule that women can at most only barely cover themselves just enough so that this won't be classified as outright porn. This is one of *those* fantasy settings, the ones where the women get to wear bikinis into battle while touting them as the most powerful armour in existence. I'd personally prefer it if they wore cats.

Anyway, soon you also get to meet the lovely Princess Minerva herself voiced, in the ADV dub, by Jessica Calvello whose ear-splitting shrieks and window-shattering laugh will destroy your sense of hearing before the anime even hits the five minute mark.
The entire dub is absolutely horrendous and I have no idea how anyone thought that these performances were anywhere near good. From the outright annoying as in Minerva's case to the outright hilarious like Tiffany Grant's rendition of the holy cleric Orlin or the main antagonist Dynastar voiced by one Pam Rosenberger who I'm not exactly convinced wasn't just someone whom ADV just found on the street and gave a role to, Princess Minerva's dub cast is sure to never let your ears rest.

Oh and don't worry, the characters themselves are about as laughable as the dub's voice acting, which I'm sure in some twisted way means that the actors did a good job. None of the characters really get any development besides “this is a cleric” or “this is a warrior”, and sure you could attribute that to the very short time the anime has to work with, what with it only being around forty minutes in length, but then I'd at least expect the main characters to be somewhat well defined, which doesn't happen.
They try to give Minerva a coming-of-age arc where she goes from being a spoiled child that does whatever she wants while ignoring her best friend and bodyguard Blue Morris (remember what I said about unfortunate names?) to actually being a decent human being. The arc falls flat on it's face though, and it falls about as hard and fast as a broken elevator from the last floor of the Burj Khalifa. The problem is that the show never really spends any time on the development instead opting to have Minerva have an instantaneous change of heart within the last five minutes of the show, after which she just goes back to being a brat anyway and then the story ends.

Basically, after spending around forty minutes watching Minerva prance and “coming of age” the story ends up exactly where it began. And that's not the only thing that stays the same. The villain gets defeated, but since this is a prequel to the game she can't really be defeated so she is shown to be just fine mere seconds after seemingly getting blown away by a massive explosion.
You could argue that the show is more about getting together the cast of women warriors that you play as during the game, and you would be right. Except that getting the cast together is as simple as organising a tournament and having them all meet beforehand by coincidence and make friends. I hope you didn't get excited at me mentioning a tournament because if you want some kick-ass fights and nail-biting suspense you're going to have a bad time. Not only is the tournament cut short, but the fights that are shown are also nothing more than some laser blasts and maybe a few waves of a sword.

You'd think the show would take a bit of a chance to flex its muscles especially since it does take the time to show some fights, but what you get instead is extremely stiff animation and action scenes that are nothing more than some flashy effects to cover up the lack of any actual movement or choreography. I suppose that's the way it is in the games, they are JRPGs after all, but does it really have to be this way in the anime as well?
There isn't really any effort put into the character animation and design either. You'd think that having extremely intrusive and ridiculously skimpy armour that they try to put front and centre in every scene would at least make them try and make the designs look good, right? To their credit, they don't look as bad as they could look, but that's hardly a compliment.

In the end Princess Minerva is one of those titles that everyone with even the slightest bit of sense should stay away from. I'd be lying if I said that some of its gags didn't get a giggle out of me, but some few second long giggles aren't worth sitting through forty minutes of a mindless and, frankly, soulless anime. Unless your masochistic desires have surfaced or you just have a desire to watch something that's harmlessly bad, stay away from Princess Minerva.

What's the best thing after a stressful day at work? Unwinding with a bit of alcohol of course!
That's basically the gist of this little short called Osake wa Fuufu ni Natte kara. It's all about married couple Sora and Chisato enjoying their couple life by having Chi-chan get drunk.

It's a three minute short so you shouldn't expect much in the way of story, though the anime did surprise me by having, of all things, a two episode arc detailing the couple's first encounter. That was a nice touch the show decide to put at the end to give a bit more closure and also as ... a chance to have more cute moments with the two.
The entire show is built around these cute moments. Nothing really matters aside from these. Well, maybe aside from the drink recipe you're shown in every episode. If you feel like it you could probably make these drinks on your own since they're really simple, I however haven't tried it.

What else is there to say, really? The animation is below average, being mostly very still. The music may as well be non-existent and as mentioned above there's really no story to speak of.
What you see is what you get: a lovely, perfect couple and some drinks which make Chi-chan go all red and adorable.
I recommend watching this once a day, or once a week since it could get old watching what is essentially the same few story beats over and over again.
If you do decide to give this anime a try you'll find a relaxing three minute show that will make you wish you had a wife like Chi-chan or a husband like Sora and maybe also a cold drink in hand.

As you walk in to the beautiful wooden building, finally at the end of your journey. Your weary feet aching for a relaxing bath, and a slight hunger is tugging at the back of your conscience. You look ahead and notice a tiny figure walking towards you, the silhouette has two triangle shapes at the top and long flowing hair waving back and forth with her every step.
The girl is now right next to you, and you can see her clearly. It's one of the attendants of this inn, but also a fox complete with fangs, tail and tiny ears on top of her head ... covered with wheat coloured hair. Before you can speak a single word the fox-girl bows politely and exclaims: 'Welcome to Konohanatei!'.

Hopefully that beginning paragraph gave you a bit of an idea of what to expect from Konohana Kitan. And if not then maybe I can give you a better idea in the following paragraphs.
Konohana Kitan is an anime all about the inn Konohanatei, its attendants and its godly and mythical guests. It could have easily been yet another throwaway slice-of-life show focusing on a group of cute girls, but luckily good direction and artistic sense go a long way to help the show stand out. The slow and laid-back attitude of the anime combined with the at times breathtaking shots and sounds create the perfect atmosphere in which you truly feel like you're a guest at the inn too, enjoying your limited time there while making wonderful memories.

As soon as you look at the poster of the show you may notice how bright the show is. It's vibrant and colourful, giving you the impression of seeing the world through the ever-upbeat main character Yuzu's eyes. Just like her you will experience everything the world has to offer for the first time. Yuzu, like the viewer, grows up raised by a human and has to learn the ways of the gods and those of the attendants from scratch. It's a journey through which the anime takes great care to lead us.
There's many character moments between each of the girls and slowly we get to know them and their relationships with each other. One wants to become a priestess, the other has a hopeless romance with her childhood friend, and another is a cursed doll that's never had the joy of being played with. Being that the anime is only twelve episodes and the manga is still ongoing we don't get thorough explorations of everyone, but what we do get is enough to make me attached to these girls. By the end of the anime, I felt, like Yuzu that they were my friends. Konohanatei had turned from the rest stop at the end of my journey, into a second home.
It's not just the girls that we get to know, the show is mostly centred around having various guests at Konohanatei and having Yuzu and the other girls more or less soothe or alleviate their problems. In fact I'd say that it's the guests that are the absolute highlights of the show and bring the best out in the direction and art.
In episode five there's a part where Yuzu takes a slow walk through the garden, umbrella in hand for it is raining. The rain clouds darkened the sun and so the entire scenery is black and white except for the brilliant midnight blue flowers surrounding Yuzu, and Yuzu's umbrella. The sound of the rain is accompanied by the slow plucking of an acoustic guitar and the clattering sounds of someone weaving on a loom.
The combined beauty of all those elements completely sold me on the anime and now here I am, gushing about it to you, dear reader.

Throughout the show there's many little moments like this interwoven with the usual comedy befitting a slice-of-life show. Bittersweet moments that give each character a bit of background and personality. From a retired god of battle using his old katana to create a toy for a child to an old lady carefully crafting a yukata for her daughter every moment feels like it has weight, a fleeting moment in a person's life that you get to experience alongside them.
The comedic moments that come to complement the more melancholic scenes are non-disruptive. They're quite often loud and involve quite a bit of slapstick, but it feels natural. They're not here to make you laugh out loud either; they're here to relieve a little bit of the sadness.

The third part of the show, closely tied to the comedic side is the rather downplayed, but often brought up romantic element of the show. Almost immediately you'll be able to see couples forming in the show between the girls and the show does provide some adorable and heart-warming moments for the couples, but it never explicitly does anything. Don't expect anything like a kiss, the most you're going to get is a little bit of hand-holding. But is this necessarily a bad thing? I think not. I think it fits with the rest of the show that the romance is not explicit, that all we get are warm gestures of love, but never get to see the fruits of those gestures. In a way, it makes the viewer appreciate these little moments more putting an emphasis on the journey rather than the destination. We already know that both parties love each other, but how they show little bits of their affection during their daily lives that is what we don't know. And the anime is more than happy to show us.

Konohana Kitan is the kind of show that doesn't pull or try to aggressively grab your attention every moment it can. It knows how to take its time and let the viewer be taken in by the scenery, characters or sounds. Like a proper inn attendant it only suggests things to you, and never outright orders you around lest it be rude and improper.
If you want a laid-back and relaxed anime experience where you can take in all the sights and let yourself be charmed by a world of subtle magic and gods then Konohana Kitan is a great show to watch. Let yourself slip into the world it builds and enjoy your time at Konohanatei.

As you leave through the same old door you came in you look back one last time at the tall old inn that and at the attendants that have shown you so much hospitality. Everyone is here now seeing to your departure, seven heads with ears on them, seven tails and one little well-dressed doll. You take a deep breath of the crisp autumn air and wave one last goodbye to these wonderful people.
After taking a few steps, from behind you you hear the staff's last words to you: 'We hope you enjoyed your time at Konohanatei! Please come again!'
You walk on, knowing you have still have a long road ahead of you.

There's many anime out there about being stuck in a video game, like Log Horizon, and there's also a few about playing video games, Quanzi Gaoshou comes to mind here, but none of them really explore what happens when you fall in love with an online personality, a character. Net-juu no Susume tells the story of Morioka Moriko and Sakurai Yuuta who fall in love with each other through the power of MMOs.

Going into the show the first thing you're going to notice is how bright and colourful and welcoming everything is. The visuals immediately should tip you off that this isn't going to be ... a very heavy romance with a lot of drama.
The backgrounds look really good and that the character designs are quite unique and creative and give the show a sense of personality that pulled me in from the first second. The animation on the other hand is nothing to write home about, it works and there's no moments that it's bad, but it never shines either.

At its core Net-juu no Susume is a love story; a love story which is told in two different “worlds”, so to speak: the world of the MMO and the real world.
While both characters eventually meet and fall for each other in the real world, we first get to see Moriko's perspective and how she progressively falls more and more for Sakurai's character. And as the pieces start falling into place for Sakurai he eventually develops feelings for Moriko in real life.
It's a sweet story that doesn't try to insert needless drama though it has heavy amounts of coincidences to make everything possible. Should you be able to look over those coincidences the show will reward you with one of purest love stories I can think of in anime.

While the love story is pure and very sweet there's some faults that I can point out and the most glaring one is the fact that neither Sakurai nor Moriko really act like adults at any point in the show. It doesn't make a difference that they're both around their thirties, they still act as if this was a high school romance. So if a mature love story is what you came here for then I am sorry to disappoint.
Another fault would be the way the show writes in side-characters only to have them do absolutely nothing. Out of all the side-characters introduced, and there's plenty, only two really have any actual purpose while the others are mostly window-dressing to make the world feel more populated.
I've mentioned before how the show uses a lot of conveniences and coincidences to move itself along at a reasonable pace and here comes another one of the problems: it's not a realistic portrayal of what a relationship over the internet would be like. Depending on what you expect from the show this may be a huge downside. As an example: all of the major players in the show live in the same town and can meet whenever they want, often times this is exactly the opposite of the situation that two people dating online have where they usually have an insurmountable distance separating them.

Where Net-juu shines, I think is in its characters. Yes they're not realistic and yes they aren't very deep as characters, but taking them at more or less face value you will be able to enjoy a very adorable main couple that perfectly fits the shows overall tone. The show is worth watching if only to see Moriko stumble through life as she tries her best to live her life the way she wants to (which just means playing MMOs all day).

Net-juu no Susume is a rather short anime with quite a few flaws and only really one trick up its sleeve. It tries to present the cutest most fluffiest romance story you have ever seen and it manages to do it really well. Some people might find the lack of depth to be a detriment and I can't blame them, but if you're looking for an anime to help you unwind or relax then I think it's great for that.
Sometimes I just need an anime like this to help me look on the bright side of life and it came at just the right time which is why I gave it such a high score.

If you're here reading this then I will assume you had at least a passing affection for the first season of New Game and will try focusing on what is different from the first season. I will be giving my overall opinion too so if you want to skip straight to the second season of the show for some reason I will try presenting the anime as best as I can.

Right from the title the second season of New Game!! let's you know it means bussiness because it now has two exclamation points! Everything is going to be more intense! Drama, action, game development, furious ... blushing! You're in for a ride now!
Or perhaps it's just going to be more of the same with a few extra bits and bobs to change up the pace and make for an even better season than the previous one.
New Game's second outing is extremely similar to its first, so if you liked last year's season you are probably going to enjoy this one too. That being said there are several changes, some for the better, some for the weirder which make this season just a little bit better.

Right off the bat the anime shows us that it's grown up by throwing some mild fanservice our way. The first few episodes of the new series are full of either hardcore lesbian bait or shots of characters in cute and/or revealing outfits. It seems like a lot of experimenting went into these first episodes figuring out what identity this season is going to have, particularly since the main new changes have yet to be implemented. It had to differentiate itself somehow for the time being so the writers opted to go for some fanservice which at times flows well enough into what is happening while at other times is just shoved straight in your face (I'm looking at you Cowoba!). I don't particularly mind these scenes, but I will concede the fact that they are not very fitting of a „Cute Girls Doing Cute Things” show like this.
Some of the more minor changes in that are perhaps worth bringing up before moving onto the main course include shifting character dynamics. The returning cast is shaken up a bit by changes in management at Eagle Jump and must adapt to their new jobs. This makes it so that while the main casts personalities start off largely the same they do show some change as the season progresses, making it feel less like a rehash. The first season had some character progression too, mostly for Aoba, but this time the anime tries to give each character, or pair of characters, a chance in the spotlight to either further develop them or give them more screen time than they had in the first season. In fact, the latter half of this season is quite fond of giving almost entire episodes to characters besides Aoba, Hifumi and Yagami who ate up most of the screentime last season.
In terms of the plot we also get to see a game being made from scratch all designed and programmed by the characters we came to know and love. Because of this the anime does manage to establish a better connection to the overarching goal of the season and gives you more incentive to care. You want Aoba and the gang to succeed in making a good game because you've seen how hard they worked on even just coming up with ideas for it. However, as with the vast majority of Slice-of-Life shows focusing on an all female cast the plot is secondary here. The added depth is welcome, but it's nothing major and it doesn't need to be.

Arguably the biggest change to this season is the understandable and somewhat necessary addition of two new characters. I say understandable because the show needed to drastically shake itself up somehow to keep itself fresh and adding to the main cast is a good way to do that. Combine this with the previously mentioned changes and more focus on previously sidelined characters and this second season of New Game decently fresh.
The two newbies we get are Momiji the stone-faced and competitive artist and Narumi the prim and proper programmer. They largely fit into the already existing cast well and with both being students looking for a future hire after studies they bring a competitive air into the show and actually manage to create a little bit of discord between themselves and some of the other characters. I feel like this is where people may have a bit of an issue, up until now things have mostly been rose coloured with only the occasional tense moment which never really came from friction between characters. And here we get introduced two new characters whose first order of business is getting way too serious about their job. I can see how that might ruin the overall relaxing atmosphere of the show, but I personally didn't mind it at all.

Speaking of breaks in the rose coloured world of the show: season two manages to create some genuinely touching moments of character development, specifically between Yagami and Aoba though much of the crew get at least small moments like this. These scenes aren't anything ground-breaking, but they do their job well and one scene around the middle of the anime and one at the very end actually manged to get me emotional with an intensity I never thought the show was capable of.
Now mind you scenes like that are very few and far between and the anime will never compete with the likes of, say, Clannad, but again it was a nice change of pace and they were well executed.

The returning cast of the show also goes through some changes, some more than others. For example, Hifumi is put in charge of the team making her have to get over her fear of talking to people, Ahagon gets trainees which shows us a caring side of here we didn't really get to see before and Hajime gets a job designing mini-games where we get to see her being her usual self – I suppose she didn't really change. In fact, with the focus being shifted away from just the character team to the overall production team some characters are left in the dust which is kind of weird considering that they do get an adequate amount of screen time. The writers just don't seem to know what to do with them, Yun and Hajime are a good example of this. They both get segments of episodes dedicated entirely to them as they did previously, but curiously they stay largely unchanged for the show while everyone around seems to be moving on. Even weirder is how disconnected they feel from the rest of the cast in hindsight. They don't really interact in any meaningful way or change much of anything. They have their same old gags and side-stories that they had before.
I suppose with a cast as large as this something's got to give. Though overall I feel like the show did a good job sprucing things up, adding new elements and changing the old that new season didn't feel like a total repeat of the first which considering the overarching plot it absolutely could have.

The anime makes no effort distinguishing itself in the art or sound departament though. The art is style the same ultra-colourful, ultra-bright style that could blind you if you stared at it too long. It's generally pleasant to watch however, and doesn't have that many, if any, inconsistencies or faults. It does it's job at being a cute and fluffy Slice-of-Life show really nicely.
Now would be a good time to also mention the dub which is relatively well acted, with the exception of maybe the game director Hazuki, though I can't help but feel some roles were horribly miscast. English dubs aren't the best when it comes to moe, mostly due to the lower pitch of western women so when you hear a character who had a relatively high pitched voice in Japanese have a lower voice or other characters who sound like they have entirely different personalities it can be a bit jarring. A couple of the faces and personalities just don't mesh with the voice coming out of their mouths (But maybe you want to listen to the dub just to hear Aocchi mispronounced as Ouchie which was just hilarious).

All in all New Game's second season is what a sequel to this kind of show should be. It keeps much the same formula, but changes enough so that it doesn't feel like you're watching the first season again. It's a good effort, and one which could be met with a bit of resistance to the sheer amount of change happening, what with the first season being rather stale. I definitely enjoyed my time with New Game!! and would obviously recommend watching it if you liked the first season even a little bit. Maybe all the changes will make you like this season even more. And I did joke about how only weirdos would watch the second season first, and while that is still true, I also feel like this is self-contained enough that if you wanted to just watch this then you could though I would not recommend it.

Imagine my surprise when I saw that there was, for some reason, an anime based on one of the first ever computer role-playing games. Now that wouldn't be all that unusual if the game in question was made in Japan, but Wizardry is an American property originally developed by two college students. I never thought the series would be popular enough in Japan of all places to receive an anime adaptation of any sort, but after looking into it a little bit it seems that even to this day there are still some spin-offs released in Japan.

But enough about the game, we're on MyAnimeList and ... I should talk about the anime not a game that my grandpa would've played.
Where to even begin? There is not much to say about Wizardry. As far as anime go it's quite innocent and doesn't having anything that would make someone frustrated or angry or any other undesirable emotion. It just sort-of is.
The anime starts off presenting some of our party members mid-battle showing us exactly how skilled or cheap they are since they seem to be one-shotting all the monsters in the area. They're probably grinding low-level monsters for exp. The plot to the anime honestly matters very little, all you need to know for the purposes of this review is that there's some evil bad guy living at the bottom of a dungeon and that our group of heroes originally comprised of Alex the guy with a sword, Hawkwind the god damn ninja and Shin the other guy with a sword go into the dungeon to maybe defeat the bad guy. They don't know, they're not quite sure yet.
Along the way they meet the mage Joeza who for all intents and purposes serves as a heal-bot, Albert who I don't know why he even exists, and Shiela the female mage who exists to make this less of a sausage party. These chance encounters with new friends prompt our intrepid trio to actually go after the bad guy for real, because I guess they don't have anything better to do today.

From that rather long-winded description you can probably puzzle together most of what happens in the anime without having seen it so I won't go into detail. Suffice it to say that the story doesn't leave any sort of impact after it's gone, even though it so desperately wants to, having not one but two named characters die. Wizardry only has 50 minutes to cram in a bunch of fight scenes, a romance subplot and a few dramatic character deaths along with the main story and the lack of time for developing any of the characters or plot really shows.
Mind you, with the set of characters and plot that we do get I don't know if a longer running time would've made much of a difference, but I think it would've at least helped in not making the more sad scenes fall flat on their face.

The anime is really like a dive through a dungeon in one of your grandfather's old computer games. You have a party of characters and you fight monsters, simple. Since we've established that the characters might as well be faceless ragdolls and that the story is as basic as they get all we really have left are the fights. So how are they? Not very good. The art in the fights, and just in general, is pretty good, mind you. And that is definitely the only thing even remotely praiseworthy about Wizardry, is that most of the time the art is at least above average (maybe except during the scene with the guy who has abs that look like they were drawn on with a permanent marker). The good art is not helped, however, by the downright boring fight coreography. Most fights end in one or two hits and those that don't are usually solved by random magic pulled straight out of the writers' asses and the game manual. The spell effects are nothing to write home about most of the time the spells just looks like some coloured mist that envelops the target. There are some that have decently satisfying effects but there's only like a couple of those and they're still used poorly in fights.

Since I was somewhat praising the anime just now I'll throw it a bone and say that the ending song was pretty good. It's the only song that I noticed all throught the anime and that's just because it was front and center during the ending sequence. For all I know the rest of the anime could be devoid of any music.
Now, to take that praise back in some way because I don't feel the anime deserves being praised so much otherwise you might think it's actually good I'll go into the overall look and feel of the anime. So, overall the anime looks pretty drab having dark colours and backgrounds with our main party being the only slight splotches of colour, though their colours are also muted. Wizardry is just not pleasant to look at, and while you could say that they're in a monster infested dungeon and that it's supposed to be dark that still doesn't make it any less drab. They could've used a torch's light to give the place a warmer feel on occasion or used colours other than musty blue and grave dirt brown. You can give the viewer the feeling they're in a dungeon without boring their eyes to tears.

Well, that's pretty much all I have to say about Wizardry. It's a weird little OVA that I found worth watching just because of how odd its heritage was. You may not feel the same way however, so if you're looking for some good old fantasy anime to watch then I suggest you look elsewhere. Wizardry is certainly old but it is far from anything I would call good, the best praise I could give it is 'harmless.' So if you're in the market for some anime that simply suck up 50 minutes of your time without giving you anything worthwhile then go for it, otherwise stay away.