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Wouldn’t it be great to have a Manga that taught us lowly otaku the scientific principles of love (attraction theory, etc.), so that one day some of us might transcend the sad state of eternal singleness and join the ranks of the happy normalfags?

Better keep looking guys, unfortunately this is not the Manga for us. This is just a below average romcom about a bunch of science students in grad school “researching” love. Although, considering the science they use, this might as well be just another high school club. I mean, who would have guessed that your heart rate goes up if you are close ... to someone of the opposite sex.

So, both our main girl and our main guy are supposed to be very smart. But how do you convey this fact to the reader? By letting the characters constantly spout a bunch of science talk, of course. Unfortunately, the things our MCs say are most of the time neither smart nor funny, so what’s left is just boring back and forth banter. Another problem is that our main couple has no chemistry, mainly because they have no personality traits aside from being in love and having an interest in science. I know a romcom doesn’t need super deep characters, but after 16 chapters the main cast should develop a little more personality and/or get some kind of character motivation.

The one thing that this Manga does have going for it is its character art. All the girls are pretty hot, and I suppose the guys will appeal to the female audience as well. I never thought I would say this, but what this Manga needs is a lot more fanservice. If you only have one asset you might as well go all out with it.

TLDR: A romcom Manga you should skip. I honestly learned more about romance playing eroge.

The day has come my friends. Finally, a Manga about the greatest medical specialty of all: RADIOLOGY!

It has always been puzzling me how few Anime/ Manga cover the medical profession, especially when compared to their non-animated book/TV-drama counterparts. And now we even get one about Radiology. What a day to be alive. So, is it good? Well, it’s pretty average honestly.

Dissecting the Manga, it basically consists of three main parts. First there is the romcom with all the tropes we know and love: childhood promise, tragic past… you get the idea. Most of the comedy revolves around our genius MC being really awkward around the ... main girl causing misunderstandings.

Next, we have medical drama which is pretty standard and could very well air on morning TV. It usually follows this pattern: patient comes in with symptom, doctors can’t find anything wrong with the patient, someone form the cast meets the patient and bonds with them, some backstory on the patient with emotional moments, MC sweeps in and solves the case. Yeah, nothing special here.

Last but not least we are occasionally treated to a bunch of Radiology infodump. It’s mostly beginner level knowledge, but if you don’t have a job in the medical field you will probably learn something new. Even though the authors don’t seem to have experience in the medical field themselves, they have done research and most of the information is accurate. Of course, I could nitpick a few mistakes, but the Manga is a romcom at heart so who cares.

I enjoyed the character art in this Manga. Each face is drawn fairly detailed and the characters expressions conveys their emotions well. The background art does take a back seat though, so don’t expect too much there.

Even though this Manga is pretty average, the medical cases kept me interested enough to continue reading and see how they were solved. If you have no interest in medicine/Radiology however, this Manga is probably not for you.

TLDR: Romcom/medical drama hybrid with occasional Radiology infodump.

Dr. Stone is a good shounen Anime that is aware of what it is and does what it does well.

I honestly can’t understand all the criticism Dr. Stone gets from the other reviewers. After watching episode one, you exactly know what kind of show this is. I mean come on, one of our main characters stays alive being petrified for thousands through sheer willpower because he couldn’t confess to his crush yet, while the other one knows exactly what date it is when he breaks out of petrification after millennia by simply counting continuously the whole time. Yeah, sorry guys, you are not goanna get ... a super serious plot here. You know you are in for a silly Shonen Anime with a lot of whacky humor. If you expected something else just stop watching now.

After watching a couple of episodes, it becomes apparent that the main point of Dr. Stone is intended to be a fun way to get young teens interested in science. After setting up the premise we follow our heroes’ journey to rebuild society using science while explaining and reinventing basic scientific breakthroughs in human history along the way. Being a scientist myself I find it fun to them move along and trying to solve the problems they encounter using scientific methods. And if not successful on the first try, they continue to try until they do. This basically describes the life of every scientist, although things are obviously significantly way more specialized today and it takes a lot more failed attempts to get something that works. Considering what the show is, the story is actually pretty well thought out with multiple factions that follow different ideologies. There is also the overarching mystery of why the petrification catastrophe happened, which kept me interested.

Titular, and also most interesting, character in Dr. Stone is Senkuu. He usually behaves like a too cool for his age teen featuring an unweaving believe in science and the progress humans are capable of. Contrasting this is our main antagonist, the physically very strong Tsukasa, who wants to keep human development to a minimum and create a world ruled by the young and strong. Fortunately, he is neither insane nor dumb so this winds up to be an interesting conflict. The other character are less interesting and more like we are used to from other shounen like the slightly dumb, work hard and scream louder character that is Taiju.

A lot of love went into the production of this Anime. The color scheme is vibrant, the character faces are expressive, and music fits the Stone World the characters live in very well. I didn’t find the OP and ED to be particularly outstanding, but you can always skip those anyway.

TL;DR: Fun to watch and well produced shounen Anime that should not be taken too seriously. Features a lot of science propaganda that I strongly approve of.

Do you know these kinds of shows, which have relatable protagonists, interesting villains and a strong plotline, but are no fun to watch? Well, Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka is the opposite.

As anybody can probably guess by the title, this show is another edgy magical girl show trying to jump on the edgy magical girl Anime bandwagon. Premise of the show is that after the successful repulsion of an invasion of killer-plush animals from another dimension our now retired magical girl protagonist Asuka and must deal with PTSD and her new peaceful life. Wait, doesn’t this sound like this could be a potentially interesting story?

Unfortunately, with ... the introduction of the antagonists by the end of the first episode I realized I will not be able to take this show seriously. Some things that happen over the next episodes include: Antagonists announcing that they are indeed “very bad” magical girls, mascot character explaining obvious things, like what a magical truth serum is, swimsuit episode, terrible pronunciation of foreign names that makes you laugh during supposedly dramatic moments, 2nd swimsuit episode, a reference to Goblin Slayer's rape scene cause I guess that is a thing now, and torture, because what could be more edgy than torture. At one point, even our protagonists torture an enemy character, although with questionable methods. Seriously, how does spanking somebody on the butt in a BDSM manner make them tell you anything... well, I guess it’s ok since they call it “magical spanking”. What the hell were they thinking???. I mean, I get that you are trying to sell the show by displaying some fetish stuff, but there must be a better way than this. Once I threw logic out of the window though, the show became surprisingly enjoyable to watch. It definitely contained enough absurd moments to keep me entertained.

Best girl is the mascot character Sacchuu. Not only does she have an awesome voice, but she gets bloodlust when fights start, beats enemies up with her spiked brass knuckles, wears bulletproof vests and uses dual handguns because it’s badass. During one of the end credits she also excitedly suggests “asking [a captured enemy girl’s] body if it knows anything” (aka torture).

The animation is decent, not good, but nothing like the abysmal animation we had to witness in some shows during the last seasons. There is a dip in animation quality as the show progresses though, so be aware of that. Character models seem to have been designed while getting wasted at Hooters Japan (yes, they have it too) with chest sizes usually only seen in Hentai.

The soundtrack is surprisingly catchy. It got some cool electronic/dance tracks that play during battle scenes and both OP and ED belong to the kind you don’t skip. You might even find yourself looking them up on Youtube.

TL;DR: Edgy magical girl show that can be fun to watch if you enjoy trashy Anime.