Back to Smilomaniac's Profile Smilomaniac's Profile

Score 7 - This score is based on my enjoyment and not reflective of an 'objective' evaluation.

I actually really quite like the show and if there's something I enjoy about the in-his-40's something protagonist Sasaki, it's that he behaves not just like an adult, but he goes so much out of his way to be a sneaky drone in the most cordial way possible that you'll feel like pulling your hair out at how insipid and mild mannered he comes off, when in reality he's just a calm person who thinks things through and makes measured decisions.
On that note, while things do pan out for ... him when he does something, he doesn't come off as some sort of genius, he just does his best.

Meaning... Sasaki's just a good dude that you enjoy getting ahead in life for once. Good on you Sasaki, now what's that thing you did saving a person's life? You have powers? You've been recruited by the state as a field agent.

The story's progression and mix of themes is ludicrous, you have him traveling between worlds, exploiting modern technology in a medieval world, taking people back with him, a powerful magical mascot pet, magical girls, espers and many more things. It sounds like a mess but the story takes its time and doesn't just jumble it all up.

Hopefully this all sounds great to you, so here's why it's a 'mixed feelings' recommendation.
It's one of those 'they don't have the budget/skill but they try hard' kind of shows, where the visuals are choppy and often bad, but what they do with them looks fine. They're just barely scraping by, making important visual/action scenes just good enough.
Audio's fine (nothing special) and the music is bland, which is a real shame because if the music is on point it can elevate a show more than most animation can.

Where the show drops the ball, is that some of the developments just aren't interesting and especially how long one particular story drags out (saving a friend who just hasn't been set up well enough). The way it's resolved is fine, but it's a true missed opportunity where you could've had some real character development and have had Sasaki loosen up and get emotional over someone, rather than 'I must do the right thing'.

Finally, you have to take all of this with the fact that I'm biased in favor of it. The isekai portion is... okay, it's not as sloppy as it could've been, it actually plays a decent role throughout the season, but it's also not great and that's the feeling I get when reflecting on the show that I really like it, but it's just not great, in any way, and that might leave you wishing you hadn't seen it.

Personally? I want another season of this over stuff like the Classroom of the Elite S3 that we just had, because at least Sasaki and Peeps has some heart.

Score: 9 - My rating is based on how much I've enjoyed the show, not necessarily an objective evaluation of the quality.

Gushing over Magical Girls is, in my opinion, an ecchi show done right. You've got partial nudity, erotic themes and just enough lewd sounds and on screen behaviour to push the envelope without delving into porn.
But the single most important part of ecchi is fun and the show always makes sure to make the scenes humorous in some way and this is where I have to disagree with the people complaining about the characters, because you're not meant to get off on this.

While ... it's perfectly reasonable for people to feel uncomfortable with the school girls and one very clear prepubescent girl, I hope to goodness you don't equate them to actual children. Children do not behave like this, please get your head out of the gutter and readjust your world view.

A reminder: Entertainment and fiction is something you're not meant to take literally, but to approach from your own experiences and apply *some* of to your own life, in order to see things from a differently angle.

With that stupidity out of the way, you can expect the show to make fun of otaku obsession with magical girls and magical girls in general. It is a clever setup of tropes and actually builds some of the world around what such characters in real life might go through when not patrolling the streets.

What holds this back for me, from a perfect score is that the quality is not top notch. While it's clear that animators had a lot of fun drawing expressions and the various scenes, there's also a lot of repetition in areas, generic locations and you can tell where they've cut corners to save animation time, which is a shame.

Interestingly there is an official ASMR video on YouTube with the main character, if that's your thing, along with previews and other fun promotional stuff.

Score: 5 - More of the same, but worse.

Nothing in this season has stood out to me at all in any other way than it just not being as good as the previous two seasons.

The reveal of Ayonokoji's true past and a completely one-sided and uninteresting rivalry between him and Class A's leader does not do much for the story. The same can be said for Horikita's relationship with her brother which started out with an initial insane introduction and then deflated into nothing across three seasons, giving her some arbitrary growth but keeping her annoying personality. I can respect them for ditching the ... initial impression of their relationship and going another direction, but sadly it didn't become more interesting.

There's a huge drama about a student elimination and it begs belief that the classmates care so much and kick up such a fuss about it, one student becoming practically a PTSD psychopath over it, another spending absurd amounts of money on it. The special exams feel like a kick in the nuts, much of it being overcomplicated and then boiled down so hard that all tactics for the viewer fly out the window with extremely unsatisfying results.

Finally there's a bigger overarching plot and another hurdle placed in the way of our protagonist which also begs belief. Apparently the best and most prestigious school in the country is just incompetent on all levels with no fail safes, no invested staff to sound the alarm or intervene in any way.

Stories like this need positives to keep the viewer engaged and this season really lacks it. If there's a fourth season, it has a lot it needs to salvage.

Tl;dr it's a solid 8 and if you liked the first season, you'll like this one.

2nd Season of Tomozaki is here and it's been a 'second verse, same as the first' kind of experience, with our protagonist-kun still flowering socially among his Machiavellian class mates, diving through drama and friendships like a fish up a river, always fighting, always going forwards.
The story hook of the first season is nearly entirely gone, so if you expected development on the front that he's Japan's or even the world's best Smash player, that's not something the story wants to go into, despite it being a fairly significant ... achievement. Game or not, world's best is still world's best (or rather, rank 1, I guess).

It' also feels like the story is dragging out at this point with a romance plot being the red thread through this season with Tomozaki building up actual meaningful relationships with people with some substance to them in ... pardon my wording ... autistic detail.
Have you watched Lovely Complex? It's a comedy/drama/romance show from 07 that I love because it's just people being people, unreasonable, uncool but also a healthy amount of maturity that doesn't leave you thinking they're walking hormone bags.

My point is that Tomozaki, the show not the character, doesn't feel like it has real characters as much as it has idealized tropes from a visual novel and too much of their thinking is rationally explained.

What is interesting is the explanation of social dynamics in their class and how it's viewed from multiple perspectives, especially between Tomozaki and his rival/mentor Hinami Aoi. Tomozaki has grown a pair and challenges her on world views and values and both of them making good and bad arguments for good reasons.

Mizusawa, the blonde easy going and charming class mate, becomes a friend of his and has very interesting things to say that aren't necessarily obvious to people who find themselves to be similar reclusives and social outcasts, that the defensive behaviour you might pick up is repulsive to others. Don't talk yourself down, don't joke around all the time making yourself look like you're never serious, don't be a clown unless you want people to assume you're an idiot.
Do you want to be attractive to others? Not just romantically but socially? Then find confidence in who you are your achievements, what you've managed to accomplish and how you've figured things out. With every success you grow and become more confident and more outgoing.

And then you'll gain notice and it'll pick up, because once one person starts sniffing around you, others want to know what the smell is about and that's how you do it right.
These are crucial life lessons that a lot of people are missing in life, especially now as it's easier than ever to retreat into games or social media.

Story-wise there are interesting things going on and the drama is tense but never feels grating, so that's great, that's quality entertainment. As for the romance... Ever watch Quintessential Quintuplets? Does he go with the blue haired chick, the brown haired chick, the white haired chick, the other brown haired chick... It's all formularized to make you feel like anything could be possible. So that part is not terribly interesting.

The one negative that sticks out to me is that while Tomozaki has grown, he's still stupidly awkward and not always in a believable way. There are multiple bad scenes of him being weird in trying to accomplish set goals and it goes too far. Essentially he loses all his gained confidence and acts out of character, reverting to an annoying brainless stuttering idiot as soon as he's in an awkward situation and it doesn't play well.

Mild non-story spoiler:
The worst one by far is when he invites one of the girls out because he's supposed to take a picture of her eating ramen for his "pinstagram". He starts obsessing over the fact that she's ordered a different meal and it becomes this ridiculous mess of him trying to swap their meals and then making up this story about him taking a picture of her as proof so she doesn't eat his egg, all the while acting horrendously suspicious and having an annoying tropy stutter.
Even the most socially awkward outcast would just ask for a picture and not care about the specific food she's eating, mostly to get it over with and not have to make up insane lies along the way.

This stuttering "oh gee, oh no, oh golly no, what do I do, what do I do" trope repeats a few times and it never feels right. I get that some love this sort of cringe humor, but to me it's just not well executed.
Besides that we have some exposition hidden in an analogy that spans multiple episodes which is not my cup of tea and it overstays its welcome in my opinion. It's not exactly exposition, but it may as well have been.

Other than that, it's fun. Go watch it.

Score: 5 - I rate shows mostly based on how I enjoyed the experience. If I were to give it a more objective and comparative score, it'd be higher, but I want to tell you what to expect.

Why would you watch the fantasy show Frieren?
You'd do it for the relaxed pace and storytelling, the high quality and care put into the stories within the 28 episodes.
The animation quality ranges between simple and exceptional, but never bad and the music is quite good. It's quite wholesome when it's good. There are some great action scenes.
There is an undercurrent of deliberate emotion put into ... things without being dramatic.

Why wouldn't you watch Frieren?
In the latter part of the show, it goes from being an adventure to a dragged out tournament arc that overemphasizes the value of a single magical trick, it rushes to introduce characters and adds a ton of exposition and mouth-flapping (panning stills with no animation except for mouth movement). For me, this is the mark of a bad show and trying to fill animation time. I cannot express how much I can't stand it when a show wastes the viewer's time.
The delivery of nearly every character is monotone and while they'll have childish reactions to insignificant things, their reactions to getting stabbed through the body is to look regretful and then immediately move on. It feels janky and it gets repetitive.
There are a lot... and I mean a *LOT* of unlikable characters and there's a bad habit of the show wanting you to be engaged in who they are by telling you things about them but rarely showing it.

The worst part for me, besides the exposition, is that there's a hollow feeling to it all, like nothing and no one matters. You can tie this into some of what the story is about, the main character's long life span, but it permeates everything, as if no one cares when they should.

There are slop shows I'd recommend over this, because at least when I watch those, I have fun and don't get frustrated. Do not get it twisted, it's not a terrible show, but Frieren is not a masterpiece and its extremely high rating on this site is not deserved.

6 - Inoffensive isekai slop, with some nice pacing and story beats - It has some heart - Not bad, not great. The score of '6' is what I give it relative to other things, my enjoyment of it was a '7' and I never felt like I shouldn't bother with it whenever I saw a new episode pop up.

Story: High school student turned protagonist in a fantasy world to become the 'Ring King' who needs to convince five princesses to give him their paired ring, in order to fulfill the legend and beat the baddie. He's into the main girl, who's into him.
There are ... some nice locations with interesting dilemmas and the circumstances he has to go through, at the end of the day it does feel like an adventure, which is fun.

Ecchi: While this is an ecchi show with partial nudity (breasts), it doesn't do much with it and it actually tones it down quite a lot as the show goes, despite it adding girl after girl.
It is extremely frustrating the MC is either constantly interrupted or wimps out. This is a boy turning into a man who has no social expectations of him since he's not in Japan anymore, but for an entire season he just can't get to grips with how to get with a girl, let alone multiple, because he insists that he's only into the main girl. Whatever happened to having casual fun?
The girls look good but have no appeal.

Isekai: I don't know why it's an isekai.
The story hook of the main character following a childhood friend (girl he likes) through a portal isn't particularly engaging and it adds absolutely nothing to the story since our protagonist doesn't do anything clever with his modern knowledge in a fantasy setting, he's mostly just 'guy who tries hard'.
At one point they return and you'd think there'd be some fun to be had with the fantasy girls with cat ears, horns, elf ears in modern Japan right? Nope.

Ultimately the show takes itself too seriously too often and completely forgets to have fun with things. I recommend it because the story in itself is not bad, there's a really good foundation for something that could've been great.

Feel-good isekai slop that starts out cute and fun and turns more serious as it goes along and not for the better.

The tl;dr on the plot is that a young career woman dies from stress, wishing that she could've at least had the pleasure of touching the fur of her parents' cat, so she is reincarnated as a noble girl by a god, with the ability of being uniquely attractive towards all animals and monsters alike, an ability she wanted so she could 'touch all the fur', but is also tasked with judging the world on the side of humans or monsters, as they can't ... get along.

It starts out fine, it's a cute premise and it's fun to see everyone stare bewildered and wonder why this child is able to tame and get along with the wildest and most noble of creatures. It quickly turns into a monster housing project show, where some serious topics are touched on, but it's done so selectively. There's a pretense of there being consequences to her actions, rather than actual consequences in the story.

Nothing special.

I give it a 5 - it features two straight episodes of exposition which kills the show for me - I rate on how much I've enjoyed a show, not as an objective or comparative score.

It's an Isekai with variations, such as 'what if the main character wasn't the intended summon' and 'what if healing isn't just healing', neither of which are unique, but it's engaging enough all the same.
There are some interesting ideas, such as there being a trio of summoned heroes, one an accident, one hesitant and one enthusiastic about the situation.
The way healing is just as a personal boost ... to keep fighting, basically using your mana bar as an extended stamina bar as well as being able to constantly strengthen yourself through training without restitution - A neat concept to give the character weight as to how he becomes strong and also adding narrative weight to him.

The story and storytelling is for the most part fine, it looks good, the characters are mostly fun/interesting, but it starts dragging and then you get those two aforementioned episodes of flashback exposition towards the end, to explain the motivation of one character, that they've already explained through context and responses well enough and it doesn't just feel like it's wasting your time, IT IS wasting your time. That was entirely unnecessary.

Not slop, but not better than slop. It's only a 'mixed' recommendation because others might not mind the exposition and that's why I front loaded the review. I personally cannot stand it for a list of reasons and it distracts so much from what I'm watching, that it makes it a worse experience. Once I start skipping scenes, entire parts of an episode or even entire episodes (plural!), there's a problem.

Why 8? Because I rate on how much I've enjoyed something, not as an objective or comparative score.

The premise is straight forward and smells like slop, meaning a cynically pumped out show with little to no variation.
I can't claim that it meaningfully deviates from formulaic isekai-like generic fantasies, because it relies on too many tropes and never feels like a full throated production that people put their passion into, it looks fine, the acting is fine, the music is fine and while none of it is special, it also never disappoints.

It's a very decent story that has an appreciably slow pace without dragging things ... out or getting stuck in exposition. The people behind it may not have given it their all, but they did care about making this.

The premise is simple, you take your average fantasy world with a guild system and adventurers in it and resurrect the main character from being a middle-of-the-road adventurer who never got anywhere as age starts to creep up on him, to getting eaten by an impressive looking monster, inside of a labyrinth, and dying.
Whether he's spit out or comes out the other end, the end result is the same, all that's left of him are bones. And he's still alive, as a 'monster'.

The dilemma is that he can't just go outside the labyrinth or he'll be slain by adventurers or guards. The hook, however, is that he is now stronger than he used to be and experiences a natural talent for combat and physical activities that he didn't possess before.
What's more is that when he slays monsters he rapidly becomes stronger and even evolves (basically getting XP and leveling up).
This is important because his dream is to become a 'Mithril ranked adventurer' and finally sees a shot at progressing towards it.

Our main character is mild mannered, pragmatic, kind and principled, he's well liked and people think of and care about him.
It's also refreshing that he thinks about things like an adult and isn't a screaming and hot headed shounen protagonist.
While the story quickly solves his issue of appearance, it just as quickly deviates from that as the active plot, however it does keep it in mind to some degree as he's forced to interact with others in order to be an adventurer, even if he's solo.

The reason I enjoy it so much is that most of the time it feels like an actual adventure and that his relations to others feel largely natural. He has a close friend whom he can discuss his situation with and talk and think about how to deal with his situation and what he actually wants to do.

Not a show I actively look forward to, but I'm happy every time I see it has an episode added to it.

My reviews usually focus less on the show itself and more about the practical viewing experience, with exceptions of course.

'Classroom of the Elite' is a psychological drama mixed with a 'who's about do it' (rather than a who done it) puzzle of where seemingly impossible situations play out and are explained at the end, so you get to guess how the characters do it and why.

If you can handle the smug over-intelligent teenagers being ludicrously predictive (as in they predict the future, not that they're predictable) and the pseudo-Machiavellian scheming, then this is highly entertaining.
Regardless of how good or bad these seasons are as adaptations ... of the light novels, the premise has massive issues.

The idea, as it continues to be, is that high schoolers are put in an ultra competitive situation where their behaviour and performance is rated and classes are pit against each other, earning on-site currency as rewards. They are occasionally thrust into situations where they have to compete directly in events and must devise strategies and figure out how to win or make the others lose... and that's where the story sort of breaks apart, because this season introduces a literal extreme torture situation that is marked as brutal and being reprehensible, not to mention several situations of severe violence.

This has earlier been hand-waved with "oh but you don't have proof" (and even when there is video proof, it's hardly believed), but that excuse has become not just implausible but is breaking suspension of disbelief, where students are basically left to their own devices, if only they're clever enough to do it out of sight of witnesses and cameras.
The writing is very clever, it does try to explain everything at length, but the premise is breaking apart as it's just not believable. Even the 2000's "Battle Royale" is more plausible and more narratively coherent than this.

You mean to tell me that a school that encourages scheming, paranoia, bribing, backstabbing and aggressive means is producing the kind of members that society wants? I don't think so. You can argue for ruthless and strong leaders, but a hundred of them a year, if not ore of them, is only a detriment and not a benefit to society.

Still, it is entertaining and if you can turn off your suspension of disbelief, then go for it.