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This anime is cute, yea. I mean it’s impossible for it not to be. There isn’t any way for an adorable white-haired girl in a white dress who speaks like a child and apologizes for everything not to be. But I cannot fathom HOW the Japanese constantly succeed at making such neat concepts as discovering an angel in your apartment… turn out SO DULL.
This is exactly like every live-in-maid anime you’ve ever seen before, if you’ve seen one. The last one I recall was Helpful Fox Senko-san… all the ingredients are exactly the same: magical female spirit shows up, starts cooking and doing laundry ... for MC-kun. Is naturally a great cook (wasn’t kidding about those ingredients!) and great at laundry and wants to make MC-kun feel better. He is exactly as bland as is required- grape flavored this time (purple hair and wears a matching tie)
At least in Senko-san the guy was a grown man who worked at a stressful job. Here, the kid looks to be about 15, so naturally he’s in high school (GROAN). And he acts like a terrified helpless baby around girls. The 2nd episode is about how Angel-chan bursts into the bathroom on him constantly, and he screams and panics and turns beat red and slams the door… In the third he walks in on a pretty co-worker changing and “Arghhh!! A GIRL! And she’s changing!” and he spends the next several minutes freaking the fuck OUT. Sighhhhhhhhhhhh

Look I’m not an expert on girls but… if you are one, do you find it attractive for a guy to panic and freak out at the sight of women? Would you throw yourself at him like the chicks do in this anime? (Don’t say yes)

The biggest letdown is the angel doesn’t even look or act like an angel apart from having white hair. She only has wings in a few scenes. She doesn’t have any religious wisdom or pray or tell the MC to worship God or anything- and I’m not asking for a religious anime here but if you have a creature strongly associated with certain religious beliefs it would be a lot more relatable and interesting if she acted like an angel from heaven- even if just for cute effect.
This leads me to probably the biggest issue, which is how many ideas you can come up with for “Angel shows up in apartment”. Some of the situations could be funny, embarrassing, shocking, there’s a whole treasure trove of things you could do with such a concept. And this anime does exactly what you don’t want and nobody needs: it plays it so safe that it’s just dull. A white-haired girl moves in with MC-kun and cooks his dinner for him. Then he meets other pretty girls who are magical (or not) and they like him.

It just doesn’t pay the bills, I’m sorry.
(but it would be funny if SHE did!)

This looks okay the visuals are nicely colored and the characters are decently animated but that’s not much of an accomplishment, in an era where everything is just done on a computer using character-templates. There is no individual style in this at all, no mistakes, no experiments, nothing unique.
Will I actually watch it every week I dunno… if the new episodes keep showing up for me on Sunday morning, probably. Sunday morning is quiet and I’m usually not doing anything in particular.
Sunday morning reminds me of church…
Church reminds me of, angels…? Well the angels in heaven, if there is one and they exist, must be far more interesting than this house-servant girl who cooks food for grape-flavored-protag-kun. That’s a shame really.

Well hello Cyberpunk my old friend. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it.

This is a hard one to review. Modern cyberpunk anime are hard to come by. Especially in this isekai hell we seem to be stuck in these days… Think one of the last ones I watched was DimensionW somewhere in the mid-2010s, Metallic Rouge introduces itself with a bedroom wall poster that immediately captivates. The style of the whole anime is a welcome departure from generic-fantasy world or spaceship/sky 2d background. It has a misty, industrial and concrete aesthetic with lots of warm hues, and at least in the first half was ... not so over-articulated as to assault the eyes, but has a pleasing and soft sheen, like the first thing that came to mind was Tinsel City in Bubblegum Crisis- which itself was strongly inspired by Blade Runner… there are lots of callbacks to classic cyberpunk and in the first episode the lead character transforms into what looks for all the world like a Hardsuit. YES- This is the real deal! I was so excited…

The music fits the world perfectly, it has a really good soundtrack. The opener to this is very early-90s in style, but my personal favorite is the entire ending. The 4 fps animation and the song together just make a great music video. This is one of those anime where I actually look forward to the ending more than the show itself. About that…. well; bear with me.
The characters got on my nerves at first, especially Naomi- and her American voice-over really added to that impression- but the two leads grew on my over time and even though their roles in the story were often confusing, all the characters in this were likeable- even that Vash-looking villain, I actually loved that guy and wished he had more of a role. Every single English VA did a superb job- this is one of the best simuldubs I’ve ever heard, literally ever- it has some of the best voices in the biz and sounds just as pro and polished as the soundtrack sounds and the visuals look.

So you’d think I would have given this all a pretty high recommendation; it’s cyberpunk, it hits all the nostalgia points dead on, it looks good, sounds great, has attractive characters and great music, so what’s not to love huh…. well what about the story?

And that dear viewer, is where this thing falls flat on its face.
In that same first episode a big fight leads to a death that- being in the very first episode and among all the polish and flash should have been very impactful, but even though it looked terrific there just wasn’t anything that made the fight feel moving. And this was a constant problem throughout. They spend the first several episodes setting up a world where people (humans) are using (and abusing) these androids called Naeans (which are recharged by a cerum injection or they die) and throw a bunch of concepts at us- but most of it is delivered through verbal exposition. And a LOT of it. I got sick of the terms they kept tossing around… “Immortal nine”, “Nectar”. “Asimov Code”… using the dreaded Tell Not Show method of world building. Even if you always knew what the Asimov Code was, and its implications for androids, it should still be a major plot-point of the story. And it sort of is in one episode, before the show just wanders away from it and never makes it an issue again. After the halfway point we don’t even see the ordinary Naeans again. It seemed like someone died in every episode, but they would usually be someone we met at the beginning of the episode or who never had a major role. So their departure leaves no feeling at all. Or they ended up doing something so mind-blowingly stupid you can’t feel bad for them. There’s bullets whizzing around all over the place you idiot! Get down! Oh, see, that’s what happens! THAT kind of stupid.

Eventually it tried to weave an origin story for the Naeans that resembles prettymuch every single Mad-Scientist-Dad-Doing-Experiments+Creepyweird-wife-also-scientist-he-murdered plot you’ve ever seen before and every bit as cheesy. It ruined the anime. But even when it wasn’t pulling inexplicable rabbits out of hats or making some convoluted reveal, most of the time it just felt totally lost and nonsensical. By about episode 9 I gave up trying to understand anything that was happening, and probably enjoyed the show more as a result.

Forget trying to like or understand the story, just watch the shiny hardsuit fights (it never explained what those transformations are or why they can do them) and enjoy the pretty pictures and music. Don’t ask any questions you’ll just get more confused. That was my experience of the whole anime. I don’t even know what to make of it.
Was it bad? No. Was it good? Not really. Was it interesting? Well it depends on how you look at it. Should you watch it?
….I’ll leave that up to you.

This is one of the most baffling anime experiences I've ever had. Here is an anime almost nobody knew about, both in Japan and over in America, and this project appears to be this studio's very first anime.
Well they are definitely learning how to make anime in the School of HARD KNOCKS
It's supposed to be a Boy's Choir, though in the very first episode they show dancing, and a routine that more resembles idol performance. There are some bits and pieces that hint at someone in this studio knowing about singing... but it's not much, and the show has a distinct feeling that it ... doesn't really know much about its subject. And then there's the music.... Oh God. For reasons known only to the show's creators they had an ambitious choice of songs but which include a lot of English lyrics. But they apparently didn't have the budget for fluent English vocalists... the singing is by a bunch of amateurs and sounds awful most of the time. And I don't mean mild accents here and there, but such bad mispronunciation that it literally made me CRINGE!!
Speaking of cringe, the opener for this thing is an acid trip. It's one of the most terrible looking openers I've ever seen, made all the more baffling by how much passion was clearly put into it. This entire anime feels like a Case Study for the Dunning-Kreuger Effect.
The plot is pretty basic- smug rich boy failed conductor (Haruo Hibiki, who I called "Maestro") is recruited by his grandmother (better known as Old Hag) who decides that he must coach a boy's choir at the Kawagoe Boy's School that she is headmaster of, and win a National Competition or else his conducting career is over. He first scouts Tenshi, known as "Cardbocci" in the anime, which means Cardboard Box...heh, a very apt description of the impression this anime makes on you. Tenshi is cute, talented, but has stage fright. But it quickly forgets the plot and becomes an after-school music club anime, with all these other oddball boys joining. One who has facepaint like you'd see in Kiss maybe, a couple of twins and a rich kid (who all have the same face), and a big marshmallow guy (Bartleby).
It teases shonen-ai romance but never gets farther than the characters just being nice to each other. The animation is stilted, a lot of scenes make heavy use of stills. The characters all have these prominent eyelids drawn over their eyes that just make them look tired. The direction is all over the place, and the episodes range from pithy, slightly boring inexplicable school antics mixed with character drama- to downright awful. One episode in the middle of the season features the boys moving to another auditorium and somehow getting taken hostage by the worst terrorist in history, while an old guy shows up with a camera and ends up with his pants down... I can't explain, it's just terrible. Other times the direction takes a dark, artsy turn.
Characters are introduced and then forgotten about. Most of the episodes began with Maestro sitting on the sofa in Old Hag's office while she prods him for progress on his choir recruitment while they eat desserts (like PEPPER FLAVORED pudding! BLEGHH!!) Another episode has her ride up to challenge a competing choir group while riding a Segway. I could tell you to just go ahead and watch this just to see for yourself, but you're more likely to be bored to death and that is why I can't recommend it.

Even so, there are moments of true brilliance- sometimes the music is emotional and fitting and very good. Sometimes the arthouse direction actually pulls off a great scene. Sometimes the character IT-kun is actually kind of fun and entertaining. The backgrounds don't look like anything you see in other anime, it's different scenery and shot from different angles than you usually see and gives it an interesting vibe. This isn't a truly bad show, it tries very hard and has a positive message, but its execution is so clumsy and its writing so sloppy, and it's a musical anime that doesn't understand its own subject and doesn't have enough MUSIC!!! And in the world of music anime that's a deal breaker.

First, you should take my recommendation of this anime with a grain of salt… preferably one the size of A BUILDING.

Some people like ecchi and some people hate it. But those who like it REALLY like it.
And so if this genre is your thing, you can’t NOT watch this show… unless there is something physically preventing you from doing so (you have no internet and live too far from anyone who does, your tv exploded, computer exploded, or your prison warden won’t let you, or your phone exploded)
So since that eliminates very few unfortunate people, you are watching this and now it’s only down ... to if the gags (pun intended) are or aren’t your thing. I can’t say, that depends on you. It’s not for everyone. But it’s very lighthearted, and that’s the biggest reason I enjoy the show. SM is not really an interest of mine, but here it’s very lighthearted and not cruel or violent at all. The main girl has an obvious obsession with the magical girls and a strange love for them that shows itself through her desire to put them in awkward situations for her own (and their) enjoyment. Not once does she actually harm them, and gradually the apparent enemies get closer together. If that’s an accurate or inaccurate portrayal of SM I don’t care.

This anime actually loves its whole cast. It’s not just hyperfocused on one character or one side. The Magical Girls, called ‘Tres Magia’ are upright and confident, well mannered and admired- and they’re really great characters too I totally love them. The Bad Girls are delightful, they are this adorable take on What If I Could be a Really Cool and Cute Villain. It seems like a unique and original idea. I’ve never seen an anime exactly like this. I’ve seen ironic takes on Magical Girls before, but none this degenerate. I’ve seen ecchi, and… ...yes this degenerate- Interspecies Reviewers was far worse than this- but
I’ve forgotten where I was going with that thought.

This is completely uncensored (and of course there are still complainers that they aren’t showing enough) So if you’re one of those college age or younger guys who is always complaining about steam and whatnot- then here’s your jam, man. At least hurry up and watch it before the execs who bought the license find out, and clumsy censorship finds its way in.

I never heard of this manga before, and I’m sure it’s completely inappropriate for anyone under 18 to have. If you have this manga, then shame on you. Also, if you’re watching this anime and should not be- then shame on you, I’ll tell your mom.
Just for the love of god don’t let her see it. Because that would be bad!

Honestly this anime started off kind of cliche, and that should have been enough of a warning to avoid it: demon lord/dragon thing that threatens mankind is defeated by “the heroes” yawwwwnnn… but wait! They didn’t quite defeat it- BOOM!!
MC is reincarnated… that canard again. The MC, who is oddly named Desir, has to go back in time with his reincarnation and do it all over again- but this time actually defeat the monster in the end. Okay, that’s not a terrible idea. It puts me in mind of an old movie where a man is tragically murdered, and he’s committed too many sins ... to get into heaven, so he’s told by an angel he has to go back and figure out his own murder…. in both cases this is a storytelling concept that isn’t original but it CAN be interesting if done right.

So the real challenge for the main character- he needs to build the perfect team. And he already knows who the members are that he wants- but going back in time even the slightest change in what you do also changes the outcome- and things don’t go exactly like he thinks they will. All pretty interesting- but only as I summarize it.

In reality this got dragged down by too much fluff and cliches. One of the only things that kept me watching it early on was curiosities like the character Pram- a ridiculously cute blue haired boy who shows up with a school uniform that includes short shorts, and he has a crush on Desir too! His uniform is a unique look that he sticks with, and even adds stockings later. I love characters who wear shorts with stylish uniforms… So with Pram earning a place into my favorites right away, and with the overall story dynamics being interesting- I slogged through this thing through boring training arcs and cgi battle scenes; and endured its stupid “plebs vs nobles” shtick (which clashes pretty hard with the whole ‘humanity’s survival’ plot) all to arrive at: an ending arc that includes more ugly cgi battle scenes.

This anime feels like it doesn’t know what it wants to be. It has bits of magic school, mage battle-royale, training arc, fanservice fluff.. it was really inconsistent. It couldn’t make its mind up about what the plot should be- the time-travel aspect is forgotten right away, and the implications of changing future with every action totally ignored. Instead it goes for this conflict between stuck-up nobles sneering down at ‘commoners’ with often violent hatred; even the whole magic school is organized to give the nobility students all these preferences, and not bother with the commoners… that’s really stupid! If th nobility hated the common folk that much THEY WOULDNT GET TO GO TO MAGIC SKOOL!!!
They don’t actually bother to show what the differences are- this show barely bothers to depict any decent backgrounds and mostly takes place inside generic white or grey rooms so they didn’t have to do any scenery. This gives the whole show a sort of empty feeling… like I know who the characters are, but nothing else. There’s no sense of time or place. There isn’t ANY concept of why saving the world is even important, since we never see people outside the college or the world he’s trying to save.
Mostly what you get here is low-level game-mechanics magic battle with a small amount of characterization. The main character is a little too kind and too flat- he mostly just stands there and smiles at his enemies while defeating them in fights where he mostly stands still. Pram and Romantica are more interesting- at least they have clear motivations. But they mostly just fight too. The standout is Pram, who is the most animated character in the whole show- he darts all over the screen and has the best moves of the entire cast.
But that’s all you get with this show- is some magic battles where the stakes are not very high, the tension is lacking, the characters hardly ever get injured and never really feel like they’re in any kind of danger. The major fight of the season was between Desir and a guy transformed into a ridiculous green lizard monster thing… and the entire time, the entire battle- the harder it tried the more I just laughed at its ridiculousness. And the entire plot is built around having to rebuild the same team of mages that he had at the beginning- all to defeat a horrible looking CGI dragon at the end of another cgi game battle. So unless you're heavily invested in one of the characters or source material, I can't strongly recommend watching this. It's either a 5 or 6 really, but because of Pram I'm totally unfairly rating it 7. Sue me.

If you look up the source material for this drek, you’ll see something that has become increasingly familiar in this Post Modern trash heap of a world we live in. A manga, or “Light novel” that looks suspiciously like every other light novel coming out these days. It’s a bunch of random-character-generator waifus created in a program like Manga Studio, with generic faces made by the program, dressed up in outfits that were picked from the program, colored by swatches in the program, arranged into manga panels with the program, by an author who probably couldn’t draw a stick figure if you asked him to. ... I’ve noticed nearly all the Current Day anime and manga media tends to look the same. It’s totally generic, looks like everything else, because it was made the same way as everything else. There’s no art here, no individual style, no creativity, because there doesn’t need to be. But something had to be put together- a story had to be told to justify smearing this crap across however many screens- and the story we have here sums up the author’s creative abilities perfectly: Confusing, directionless, random, juvenile, nonsensical, and stupid.

Oh boy here we go another “demon lord reincarnated” thing, and oh look- he threw the word Excalibur in there so people would actually look at it. It worked, and that’s right- Excalibur as you know it has absolutely zero to do with this entire story.
It started out as demon lord reincarnated into this shota boy, some buxom harem girls pop up around him, maybe one or two episodes took place at some generic magic school with some competition where MC can show off how overpowered he is… then it ditched the whole magic school thing and the story devolved into a monster taking over a ship, then a conspiracy involving a loli princess and these half-animal half human dudes, before it lost any concept of time or place or any story structure at all. One minute they’re fighting a monster thing that looks like tree roots with eyes, the next they’re RIDING IN A LIMOUSINE DRIVEN BY GHOST CHAUFFEURS. No joke. In another random scene the demon boy (Leonis) is at a table eating dinner with some orphan children and we have no idea who they are, and never find out. And I don't even know if they were orphans..

If you ask a twelve year old boy to write a story, the plot of this light novel is probably pretty close to what he’d come up with. A hero who looks like and is the same age as the author, surrounded by a bunch of pretty girls, and he’s OP, and fights monsters. Yup. The monsters range from big purple flying octopus looking things to leopard dudes and A GUY WITH A WOLF HEAD. By the end of episode 12, it didn’t even resemble what it had started out as.

What about the visuals- well, there isn’t much to say about it apart from don’t waste your time watching it. They’ve taken the different templates for “Futuristic looking city” (which has a white and blue hue) and “High Fantasy Country House” (with its orange and green hue) and mashed them together making completely off-kilter looking scenery. But it’s fun to pick out the parts where they didn’t have any template… because some things- like the monsters- look absolute cack against the rest of the CGI backdrop- precisely because of the fact that the guy who made this can’t draw and the staff couldn’t either.

If you take my advice and skip this anime you will have missed out on absolutely nothing. There are much better things to watch out there. Like literally anything.

Totally INACCURATE attempt at 90s Nostalgia

This show baits the viewer with its title, and with the very crisp and weirdly accurate PC-9800 computer as a prop- but don’t be fooled, its knowledge of the 1990s begins and ends with that computer. There are some major issues with this show’s lame attempt at going back in time.
So it’s about Konoha, a bubbly, cute, skinny, short-skirt wearing teenage girl who works in a software company developing eroge games. Cough cough. Yes that’s right- a 19 year old developing pornographic games. (take a deep breath- and I’ll show you how deep the rabbit hole goes)

She loves vintage (90s) ... eroge games (of course) and finds a charming shop run by an elderly woman who has a lot of suspicious knowledge of what games she’ll like, and sells her some from her shop- which mysteriously disappears the next day. It’s a really neat setup- despite how wrong it is for a girl that age to even be into such a thing, or how off it is for an old woman to be running a game shop- when Konoha opens one of the games at a cafe, she’s transported to another dimension!
Upon waking up in a street- AT NIGHT- finds herself outside a dull looking building, and starts whining for help (her voice is very squeaky and loud and it will drive you nuts even if you get used to it) So they take her in and she finds a little office with a young kid and two other girls about her age, making eroge games. It’s the year 1992, and she’s gone back in time 30 years! And she's not interested in finding any people she might know, or her family home or anything, she wants to color ergo games! (How convenient!) It's interesting how she shows the people her Apple tablet to convince them she’s from the future, and the battery is dead; and how she tries to learn coloring with a mouse, pixel by pixel. Having done that very thing myself with 16bit graphics, it was interesting to see that portrayed. But for a time travel show- this feels really claustrophobic.

All we ever get to see is what this one street in Akihabara is like- and tbh it’s very dull, and grey, and kind of boring. Maybe it was in 1992, but it STILL IS even when Konoha goes back to 1996, then 1999- there seems to be no real understanding of the outside world beyond the PC stuff.
Everything around that computer is fully accurate- although I doubt the reach of 16-bit graphics was that widespread; and MS-DOS was the dominant operating system on most machines (even the slang “PC” was not really in use in 1992- when the first time-travel goes back to) but windows 3.0 had already come out by then. My own experiences with pc’s of that era were crappy 8bit graphics and yes MSDOS, but already by 1994 we had a Windows 3.1 machine… If Japan was that far ahead with graphics with their machines- they’d have already adopted windows by 1996- but in this show, they’re still using Dos? Okay, but the computer stuff is the MOST accurate stuff from that era they have- there’s a lot more problems here.
Clothing: none of the characters dress in a way I would say is accurate to that era. Young men mostly wore white dress shirts and black pants. Girls wore long skirts and did not wear tight sexy cloths. And the ones who did- were KOGALS and kogal culture was taking off in the 90s, but none of the chicks in this resemble a kogal in any way. I find that odd in a show that’s all about pornographic games. And the male characters all look like cardboard cutouts in baggy current day clothes. Apart from the guy with that libre mask, which is just lazy and makes no sense.
At one point, Konoha is handed a grey cellular phone- which the character refers to as “here’s my other cell phone”… so he has more than one phone in 1999, not only is the phone’s reception perfect when talking, they literally proceed to send TEXT MESSAGES back and forth, and the phone vibrates and makes that sound like a 2020s smartphone.
WHAT. THA. FUCK.
You mean to tell me, you know all about a 1980s era computer to the most granular detail, but don’t even know what early cellular phones were like??? There was NO TEXTING!!!! There was no ‘vibrate’, there were no large screens. NOT. IN. 1999!!!
There are a couple references to events of the time- like a recession, and “dot com” companies- but they don’t relate that Alcoholsoft became a dot com, which would have made some sense when the scandal comes down:
Some guy who runs a couple boring night clubs talked the game company owner into investing in his business, promising to sell him a game console. Okay, but when the news breaks- he says he lost a billion yen in the scandal.
WAIT. WHAT??? A BILLION? WITH. A. B? In 1999?
A billion yen… and the characters are all standing around in the office late at night, moping about how great the company used to be and how fun the games were that they made. Keeping in mind these were porn games- and the majority of the staff are FEMALE (???)- that’s already way off- but NO WAY would they even still have an office to work in. That place would have been shut the hell down immediately, padlocked, all its equipment hauled off and the owner would be IN JAIL.
How long could it take for the writers to have looked up how much money a billion yen was in 1999? How can they not know this?

So what this anime amounts to is- some zoomer who is really into a 1990s computer decided to make an anime, with the only knowledge of the era being about… pornographic video games… And this is why ‘otaku’ is an insult in Japan.
The graphics of this anime are really good, it was clearly made on computers- it’s obvious a lot of money was spent on its production, which is kind of a waste for something like this. Being a nerd about one specific thing and not understanding anything else is really going to show when you try to tell a story about time travel.

I somehow missed putting this in my list until today, even though I’ve probably watched the first season through several times over. Maid Dragon has been my current play-in-the-background anime for a few months now. It’s a mix of comedy, slice-of-life, iyakishei, even technically magical-girl in some respects- it’s the kind of fantasy anime some of us love the most: fantasy where a person from the fantasy world comes into the present-day world, and how they adapt. Tohru, a typical fire-breathing green dragon- is able to pass through a portal to come to our world and go back to her own at will. And in ... the human world- for some not entirely clear reasons- decides to work for the title character Kobayashi- as a maid. She takes the form of a blond haired dragon girl with horns, her big tail, and occasionally wings she can sprout up. What made this one so immediately likable (besides how funny and pleasant it is) is how unique and everyday its characters are. How many anime are there- where the lead is a completely plain looking, not especially feminine, somewhat bland young woman who works as a developer in an office and lives in an apartment alone? Her friend at work Takiya- is just a friend at work. He’s a dorky otaku gamer- but not in some exaggerated way but in exactly the way many of you and me probably are: a basically decent guy with normal hobbies, a small apartment, a good job, a handful of friends- and who is a supportive coworker and friend? There was nothing especially tragic brewing- nor anything wrong with the lives of the people in this show- they are ordinary, and therefore perfectly relatable.
Enter Tohru, then Kanna- and suddenly a bland but likeable young woman has a family. It’s rewarding to watch. My favorite episode (apart from the Christmas special) was the third- where Kobayashi does something as exciting as: decide to look for a larger apartment.
But a seemingly everyday event is made funny and interesting thanks to the presence of two adorable and silly dragon girls- who are delighted by the rooftop space on the building Kobayashi chooses. The vignette that follows has them figuring out how to get along with their new and somewhat noisy neighbors. I mean, I live in a building not all that different and on the same exact floor height as these characters do, and have literally had conversations with my neighbors about odd noises in the building and such things. So seeing this all play out with dragon girls is really fun.

Then there are the episodes about Kanna deciding she wants to go to school- seeing her fall asleep on the bed with the new backpack that she’s obsessed with made me laugh so hard- say what you will about lolis but despite being a dragon girl, Kanna has to be the most believable child character I’ve ever seen in an anime. Everything she says and everything she does is precisely how a six year old is- without any anime tropes or anything- they nailed it.
And I would have nothing but endless praise for this show- but there are a few things that I do think kind of miss the mark- and that could have to do with Japanese humor not perfectly lining up with my western mind….
The character Lucoa and her gigantic boobs would sort of be funny if she weren’t literally harassing a six year old boy with them every day. There are quite a few jokes about Tohru having sexual desires toward Kobayashi, which I kind of felt ruined the dynamic between them and seemed a little too perverted at times- Kanna is the perfect picture of a 6 year old girl EXCEPT FOR the first day she knocks on Kobayashi’s door and accuses her of being a slut. There are some other things that don’t make a lot of sense- like Tohru explaining that dragons don’t need to sleep and hardly ever do…. like huh?? Isn’t sleeping exactly what dragons are famous for? Isn’t that why there’s the saying Don’t Wake the Sleeping Dragon? Isn’t Fafnir famous for sleeping among his gathered treasure in a cave? Then there’s the mystery of Kobayashi’s parents, which I can’t figure out why it’s a mystery.
So it is not perfect, but Dragon Maid is a really unique kind of anime, made by a studio that was burned to the ground in a horrible and tragic event that played out on television to the shock and disbelief of millions of anime fans around the world. It was too long ago for me to remember how much I donated to the fund that helped revive Kyoto Animation, but to the creators of this wonderful series who lost their lives in that fire- may they rest in peace, the work they did on this show shall always be appreciated.
Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid is a great anime and you should definitely watch it ( ^_~ )

This is one of those I had on the ‘must watch’ list for years, and finally got around to it. The iyakishei genre is one of my favorite, and the opening scenes are breathtaking, the music is pleasant and everything about the town and the fields; the peaceful serenity of the everyday in the countryside of Japan is exactly a place you want to be. Non Non Biyori is one of the best known in this genre and is widely loved… So why after such a promising start do I think this show is so dull and overrated?
I’m basically going to complain about everything ... I didn’t like about the anime, and make it sound a lot worse than it actually is… but I feel like I need to justify such a mid rating and explain something that’s been bugging me.

It has a great opening song, which is very inspiring, but everything that follows fails to live up to what the song promises. The problems begin with the characters: Komari and Natsumi are sisters, Renge is in 1st grade, and Hotaru just moved to town. That’s the main cast- these four girls. So right away there’s this imuoto thing going on with Komari and Hotaru develops an extremely odd and not-at-all funny obsession with her that didn’t make sense for the kind of story this seemed to want to tell; a girl moving to this new life in the country.
And Komari isn’t the kind of girl that makes a very good crush- she’s barely grown out of being a loli and acts very immature. Every scene with her and Hotaru is about her complex with her immaturity, and Hotaru makes lovey-dovey eyes at her, and I don’t find it cute or entertaining. But the worst offender in this foursome is that thing with purple hair and lintels for eyelids- RENGE. Oh dear god she is annoying as fuck. It took a few episodes, but pretty soon every second she was talking- in that annoying baby talk sounding desperate yet psychotic- it was like fingernails on a chalkboard!!! And she never shuts up. She points at things and goes “waaaa”- like a baby- and they seem to be playing it up as if it’s funny. And she’s unbelievably stupid. I get that she’s a first grader surrounded by older girls and would not be as smart as them, but when you have a young child around older ones- that usually rubs off on the younger one who will act more mature. If you don’t believe me, watch how your nieces and nephews, or your own children- act around older kids. But in Renge’s case, she is single-mindedly thick as a brick and dumb as a plank of wood to the wide-eyed confusion of all those around her. Possibly one of the best episodes she meets another girl her age- and approaches the new girl the same way she is around the older girls- she acts like a clueless idiot. But then something incredible happens: the new girl is mature, interesting, and kind- which (incredibly) inspires Renge to act like a normal human. Her time spent with the girl are some of the best moments; and the look on her face that doesn’t fully register the shock of realizing she’s moved away abruptly just about made me cry before she did. That moment gets played out a little too long… but… then the anime just moves on from all this as if nothing happened. Renge doesn’t even seem to care anymore. Why? No reasons given, the show could easily have been about how that photographer girl brought Renge out of her shell and taught her a vocabulary higher than an ape- but nope. Half an episode she’s gone, and Renge goes back to being a baby.

The rest of the characters in the show aren’t much better. The teacher seems just as clueless and boneheaded as Renge. I think the strongest character is actually Natsumi, Komari’s older sister. She’s the most unique of all the girls, is somewhat a tomboy, gets into trouble, and runs away from the house when she does. But she’s dragged down by a cast of utter morons.
…And then there’s the brother. UGH. The writers obviously decided they wanted this to be about girls, in most anime that usually means no boys allowed. This show’s answer though is not to banish him completely- but to have him basically be mute, so he’s just a cardboard prop that shows up in the background now and then. It was one of those things that- the attempt at making him an unimportant background prop actually made him more noticeable… his silence is deafening. Literally- the absolute worst moment is in the last episode of season 1 when Renge finds him eating leaves (I can’t explain) and he just stares at her munching the leaves while Renge looks at him with a typically dumb stare… two boneheaded idiots looking at each other with blank faces, unable to say anything. It’s utterly painful to watch, but it sums up this anime perfectly. Who thinks this is a masterpiece??

I dunno.. I don’t hate Non Non Biyori, but I just don’t think it lives up to the praise it gets, and most of all- it did not live up to the expectations I had for it, which may have been unfairly high. That might really be the show’s greatest weakness, that it’s remembered for being better than it actually is. You can tell me the later seasons are better, and I will be glad to take you at your word. I have no plans to watch any more of this show.
If you wanted a calming slice of life anime, there are so many that are better than this. You would have to really like the characters to choose this one- and you’re choosing between an 8 year old who talks like a baby, a teenager who acts like a baby, a new girl with no personality, a teacher who is dumber than all of them; a couple other characters that are cardboard props; a nonexistent story that goes absolutely nowhere, and some nice backgrounds and music. It doesn’t add up to a great anime in my book. 6/10

Chaos Dragon, a.k.a ‘Red Dragon War’ was a project put together by all-star creators Gen Urobochi, Kinoku Nasu, Izuki Kougyoku, Ryogo Narita- the connections with Fate/Zero (Urobochi, Nasu) are so strong that even the first episode is called “Kill One to Save Many” (if you’ve seen F/Z you’ll get the reference)
Also if you know each of their styles, you can recognize which characters in the show were designed by whom (and who wrote them); but I think Kougyoku probably designed the main characters as her style is beautiful and Ibuki, Eyhka (the Bounded One), are so incredibly cute it will make you want to watch ... the anime even if you don’t like the story. But unfortunately adorable character designs are contrasted against some of the dumbest, worst CGI dragons I have ever seen. I mean they are comically bad; and the plot of Chaos Dragon is decent but gets incredibly dark and violent really fast. It takes place “a thousand years” in the future, i.e. the year 3015- although by all accounts is the same medieval fantasy world you’ve seen in any other fantasy RPG, so not sure what the whole ‘year 3015’ thing was for. Maybe that was Urobochi’s idea…
It takes place on an island called Nil Kamui (which sounds more like the name of the bastard child of an American and a Kyoto Princess) which has been caught in a war between two other countries who need to keep fighting to keep certain schemers happy (sounds like Lodoss War tbh) but a big tin can robot thing convinces a group of adventurers from the different factions to go on a quest to find and take down the Red Dragon which is somehow responsible for the war. I seem to recall there was a red and a black dragon in Lodoss War, too...
The level of sadism was shocking- and the way characters interact with each other makes it really hard to tell friend from foe- like you think Lou is a villain right away but she is no threat at all (at least never tries to be) toward some of the main characters, but geezus she’s evil and violent AF. The weird mismatch between the cute and almost childlike characters and the violence is really jarring- one moment the shotas and lolis are fluttering eyelashes at each other, the next they’re STABBING PEOPLE THROUGH THE NECK. I went from going “awww” and the next spitting my coffee out! Some of the moments are unintentionally funny- like when the half-naked chick shoots the big robot guy through the (metal globe) of his head and he’s smoking- I couldn’t stop laughing.
I didn’t try very hard to understand what was going on, but after a few episodes it got interesting enough that I kept watching the each next- and by the time I got to the 8th, ended up watching it through to the end all at once. It’s pretty obvious the talent behind this show, it looks nice and is decently written- but those awful cgi dragons are unforgivable.
And people die in this anime. As with Fate/Zero, characters you like will be sent to the grave really fast and without warning; and characters you think should be spotted as obvious problems end up getting away with shit, while the MC is reluctant and indecisive most of the time. It’s both frustrating and interesting enough to keep you watching til the end, but isn't really strong storytelling.
Being only 12 episodes (1 cour) it had a decent ending that wrapped things up in an interesting way while leaving enough loose threads that it would allow another season. But I doubt a second season will ever come out. I don’t know how much material is in the Light Novels, but the shows’ creators are busy enough with other projects and this was kind of a one-off, it isn’t popular enough to be made into any more anime. Which is fine- this is just a 12-episode story that is fine on its own and entertaining enough, but it won’t light your pants on fire. That was a joke…