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To give proper justice to Solo Leveling anime, the animation must be top notch. The action scenes are the main attraction here and one would it’s the only one.

So the first episode set quite a rough start. Somehow, A-1 Pictures managed to turn everything more… bland. And I’m not just talking about how they Kiritoized Jinwoo. The whole setting just screams generic, the lightning is all wrong and dull. And it’s not just the first episode, the fights aren’t engaging for a good half of the series. Now to give credits where due, the fight against Kang had a few good moments and the ... final fight against Igris was all good. But here lies the problem the level of quality the studio finally managed to achieve in the last to the final episode should have been the bare minimum for all fights to even have a chance to be a decent adaptation.

Okay, I get it, I’ll stop with only comparing it to the original. So, how fares just the story? Very obviously it’s a power fantasy, and not very inspired one. The absolute most weakling gets chosen by the system, steroided up and suddenly he’s getting more and more overpowered, desired by the women while sticking to the sigma grindset (can’t show him actually pursuing the girls as that would break the literally me immersion). Not great, but not exactly terrible. It clearly aims for the younger teenager audience and if you belong in that demographic and enjoy Solo Leveling, you’re not wrong doing so. However, the audience that already had their fill of this kind of storytelling is unlikely to get satisfied with just that. It certainly doesn’t help that some parts of the already unsatisfying worldbuilding got cut off to simplify the anime.

I’ll be honest, I’m not anything like a diehard fan of the original – but the potencial for a great action packed series was certainly there, especially if they go off by the novel rather than the webtoon. What it needed was some change to the ambience and framing to make the tone more sinister and dangerous, and slap some really good storyboarding on the action encounters. There are plenty of moments that could be great if they got some classic ufotable treatement. Or really at least more sakuga moments in general.

Talking about changes, the Japanese localization is silly. It’s usually Japan that gets localized, but they are the perpetrators this time. Changing the character names to random Japanese names makes no sense. Like, not even on surface level of “there is no reason to do this”, there is actually a large story significance to the main cast being Korean while some other characters being Japanese. At first I thought this meant the studio would for sure have no plan to adapt that part of the story and we’ll only get one season. But 2nd part was already announcent, so this might be… interesting.

Basically they took a work that already desn’t have the best of stories and gave it the generic isekai seasonal treatement. It's mediocre, but there is an audience for it. Though personally I think the overall ratings would be much lower if this didn't have an already pre-eexisting fanbase.

An existential crisis and questioning of what it even means to be a human within the first pages, now this is what Ghost in the Shell is truly about.

In this collection of stories you get the good old mixture of action and philosophy, the cyberpunk techtopia mystery the franchise is known for. Despite each part being by a different author, the stories feel quite consistent in its word and writing, and while they range in quality, the quality range keeps within good to great.

While we see some familiar characters from Section Nine, most of the protagonists are new, which is welcomed as it explores new ... concepts regarding the cyberbodies and such.

The writing style for all parts lends itself well to describe the action flow and the scenes well enough that this is some of those books when you can just see the imagination movie of it playing in your head while reading it.

If you’re looking to cleanse your palette after the disappointment that SAC 2045 was, this is certainly the title to go to see that modern GiTS still has potential.

Hyouge Mono is the kind of work that’s just so unique for it to be no real equal. It’s a combination of a niche topic and a quality writing you just won’t see elsewhere. It is pieces like this that make me glad I started reading manga, as otherwise I’d completely miss out on this.

The protagonist s delightfully relatable. He’s simultaneously self-centered and human-like greedy, and looking for a bigger purpose in his life. He lives, learns and adjusts accordingly.

Furuta molds the story and the story is molded by him, the complete opposite of a one-dimensional character. The stormy youth, the midlife crisis, the ... elderly wisdom, Furuta keeps changing while remaining a consistent character. At some point you are guaranteed to relate to him.

While being set in Sengoku Era, unlike most such works Hyouge Mono uses war as more of a backdrop to the characters lives rather than the central focus, in a way that feels quite more realistic. Rather than war, the central theme is one that is sure to be relatable to many anime watchers – the question “What is a masterpiece?”

Beyond philosophies that are still applicable to this day, this manga also offers intriguing look into the art of the time period, in a way that shows the reader just why exactly the potteries not unlike one that you can get in best buy nowadays used to be treasured so much, and just how the techniques of craft have developed thanks to technological advances. And the art featured in this manga is either inspired by real historical pieces or literally is real historical pieces.

If I had to pick up one flaw, it’s that if you make big pauses between reading the volumes, are might get lost in the smaller subplots and who are all the minor characters and their significance. Especially since as mentioned, the characters do change gradually.

The arstyle is captivating with its mixture of rough and detailed. While most of the time the art depicts simply characters talking, once in a while there is a dynamic page that tears through the page to reach the reader, one that would make an action manga jealous. And it’s not just battle scenes where this technique is used, sometimes a character walking or such are depicted this way and it’s the perfect fit with the charismatic eccentrics. Talking about eccentrics, the character design is also really good here, with many varying designs that completely dodge the same face issue while still staying within the realm or normal non-supernatural humans. And not only do the facial features and expressions serve greatly the personalities, there is additional thing that is quite rare to see. It’s the realization that you can see character’s lineages. Not to the silly extent of a child being 1:1 of a parent or exactly half of each of the parents, but that you can see similar (yet still distinct as a standalone character) features within the blood related families. As Hyouge Mono story dips into lineage-related politics, this helps greatly with keeping the world feel reals.

So yeah, if you’re even slightly interested in either history or just manga for mature audience in general, absolutely do pick up this one. Now that it’s finally completely translated.

Note that this review is mainly for the first 5 novels. While that might sound like a tiny portion out of the over hundred ones, this is because only those are properly translated. The rest is currently only available through machine translation.

When I picked up the first volume, I was a bit disappointed at first. It felt just like a very generic fantasy novel with nothing much interesting. However, after the first third or so of the volume, the more intriguing part of the story and worldbuilding started coming. So at the very least I would suggest finishing the first volume if you ... want to get into the series. Of course, Guin Saga might have some big expectations to fill – it might not be that famous in west, but in Japan it’s a legendary work and not only because of its length.

Okay, okay, that’s enough of the preface, what is actually good about it? Well, it mixes the classic macho conan-like fantasy elements that are simply cool with high fantasy and intriguing political and warfare plots. The specific point when I realized I actually quite like it would be the realization that almost 3 volumes were spent on description of basically a single battle encounter – and it was done with amazing description and explanation of strategy that was not overcooked enough to feel like overcooked badly written military genius but rather felt like reading the Art of War again. A delightfully written conflict with the proper context given to the motivations and the decisions behind both the tactics and the character motives. A battle that furthered both the plot and the character development. I fell in love.

The characters too are strength of Guin Saga, each with their own goals and personalities, helping the world feel alive rather just being a background to protagonist’s antics. Hell, sometimes you can’t even be sure who is truly the protagonist. The clash of the personalities, goals and methods of approach make for a great conflict and more than just black and white good vs. bad story.

That is also why I yearn for proper translation, as some of the changes the characters go through are so very interesting (well, it is a long series after all), but a text where “Doal” is changed to “doll”, “chapters” become “episodes” and the text can’t decide on genders of the characters it feels more struggling having to read every sentence with extra care to discern the original meaning. It’s better than no translation at all, but I feel like it’s more of a starting point for a quality check by human and in it’s current form it’s only for the most desperate. It’s truly a shame that the English release got axed as I feel that with proper marketing this would be sure to find audience among fans of classic western fantasy novels. But that is info simply for people looking to read this, the quality of translation is not something I take into consideration when giving score to a series.

„We have Holo no Graffiti at Home“
The Hologra at home:

Look, I get that it’s poor manners to center a review around comparing the work to some other work, but in this case it’s just a straight up blatant rip-off. The execs saw the success of the Hololive shorts and set out to imitate it. And it’s a mild, low-hanging imitation that utterly fails at what made the original great. It’s tame, the jokes don’t land and it *really* hinges on you already liking the characters instead of featuring comedy that can stand on its own. This feels like one of those bootleg movies from $1 ... bins that hope you get them on an accident instead of the actual movie you wanted to get.

I don’t think I’ve laughed even once during all of the episodes, so as a comedy this utterly failed for me. That said, comedy is hardly an universal experience, so maybe there will be someone who did actually like this?

The usual unexpected girlfriend trope, this time with an „android substitute princess inseki fantasy“ twist. Well, I say twist, but the content is really mild. Don’t expect some deeper themes or engaging dialogue from this one.

Fake Fake princes is simply some daydream content with light comedy to it. It doesn’t do much, but it also doesn’t attempt to do much. I’m not really hating on it as it doesn’t pretend to be better than i ti. It’s simply the sidedish of the medium, a non-heavy non-pretentious piece of fiction to lend few glances to. It’s not bad, it’s not good, it just is. Were ... it longer, it would most likely be too obnoxious to read through, but as a short read it still manages to fit within the real of „okay“.

Still, there isn’t much of specific things to comment on for this title, neither praises nor critiques.

Under the guise of night, a poorly drawn handjob is being given in a car. A few sentences that try to have a deeper meaning, but only serve as a background to bishounens kissing so the readers wouldn’t feel embarrassing that they are reading simple pure porn. A hint of possible story, but nothing specific enough to actually make the character stand out. Guns on the cover and badass poses which are both just a clickbait and wholly irrelevant to the few pages of content this doujinshi actually has.

Well, basically just another bl one-shot in long line of meaningless fanservice bl one-shots.

Lord El-Melloi II Case Files is not a traditional detective novel, and it is open about it. Self-admittedly, you can't really properly solve whodunit and howdunnit in the context of magecraft that throws casual logic out of a window. Instead, the refined focus is whydunnit, resulting in an interesting modification of the usual crime novel structure.

This structure is also mixed with magical lectures that are basically an in-universe lore dumps (non-derogatory). You could say that El-Melloi is something of a supplementary material which happened to have a story through it and you wouldn’t be exactly wrong. This I’m not pointing out as a bad ... thing of courses. Though it might be not for everyone, the writing very nicely replicates the academic environments, both character-wise - with tired mentors contrasted to hyped gifted students, and lore-wise, with the above mentioned lectures that convincingly create the world-building and make the contemporary fantasy setting sound like a real target of serious study, filling an unfortunately small niche of phantastical academia politics mystery.

I wouldn’t want you to think that the story is meaningless though. Even if you as a reader with limited knowledge of the in-world magic will be unable to guess the solution along the protagonist, the twists and reveals are still written in a believable way due to building up on previously provided information. And this crosses the bounds of the presented separate cases, as knowledge about the inner workings of magic learned in one arc could and will be useful for later cases.

What really carries the story, other than the intriguing lore concepts for deep in rabbithole fans of type-moon, are the characters. The titular protagonist quickly became one of my favourite characters from Nasuverse, if not the most favourite. He is unlike the more traditional mcs. He doesn’t have a great power, he doesn’t have predetermined powerful connections, he’s not a gifted genius. He is, well, just a guy. Someone who keeps surviving through a combination of dedication, a connections of goodwill he created with other people, and a knack for getting to the core of things. You could think of Waver, the lord El-Melloi, as the sort of opposite to Shirou. Rather than a show of might, idealism and badassery we have someone who has to come in terms with realization that he can’t do much by himself and embracing it – cultivating strengths of others rather than an own one. But still, even in environment when everyone is more powerful than him, he manages to sneak in a change in the order thanks to still believing in some principles, even if he has to bow to others. Pushing for your best despite being outclassed and despite having to question your own worth can be a very relatable inner conflict.

I won’t get much into analysis of other characters, but know that they are all actual characters. Not plot devices to get the plot moving, they all have their own goals and ambitions, and they influence the story due to acting according to their want, not simply because the plot wouldn’t happen otherwise. This is best showcases on the overarching conflict against the primal antagonist in the later volumes, which isn’t about good vs evil, but rather a conflict between different doctrines which each has a point in context.

I’d like to finish this review with some information readers might find useful. First, don’t worry about this being just some “spin-off that doesn’t matter”, this has been consulted with and approved by Nasu himself as a canonical part of the /stay night universe, so read away. Secondly, if you are here after watching and liking the anime, then I have good news for you – only the prologue and the train arc were adapted from the novel, rest of the anime episodes tie in to the novel story rather than adapting it, so you will encounter new content right from the first volume. And lastly, this shouldn’t be your introduction to the fate universe. You should at very least be familiar with /stay night, /zero and Kara no Kyoukai. And even then, this has much more lore density than the usual spin-off, with the processes that usually serve as a background taking the front seat, so unless you have both knowledge and memory, once in a while you might find yourself googling a character or concept wondering if you are supposed to recognize them from a previous work. But such is the kaleidoscopic nature of Nasu’s multiverse.

The new arc barely started and we already get a recap episode, huh.

Well, at least this time it’s not a simply a story recap but rather a character recap, so it’s not *completely* useless. Also, despite being “Egghead Recap”, it barely touches upon Egghead. Though that’s not a bad thing, we don’t need to be reminded of episodes that literally just aired.

The most enjoyable part was the opening, but obviously that sequence is not original to this recap. I mean, barely anything is original to the recap, just the short chibi sequence and some of the narration. So for example despite the Puncture attack ... animation sequence being awesome, I can’t credit it to this recap as that’s just reused footage from the series. Well, recap is as recap does.

I would equate the experience of watching this recap to reading Law’s wiki page. I don’t think a whole another special was really needed for this.

It’s hard to rate Doraemon. Not because it’s complex, no. Just the opposite – it’s strictly for kids. The simple illustrations, the one-dimensional characters, the simple repetitive storyline, this is literally baby’s first comic. No, really, this was published in a magazine for 1st graders.

Does that mean the manga is bad? Eh, not really, it does what it sets out to do. If you’re looking for something for your kid to read then sure, why not. If you’re looking for something for yourself to read, I’d suggest it only if you already have some nostalgic ties to Doraemon and just want to reminiscent about your ... youth. By itself alone, the Doraemon manga does not really have some hidden enjoyment toggle for adults, and that’s okay.

As a note regarding the story, one would expect for Long Stories to be also better stories, but when they are published right next to each other you really notice how the plotlines that later became Doraemon movies are really similar. Pretty much all of them are about ancient/future/alien civilization randomly finding Nobita/Nobita randomly finding them, the gang helps the civilization solve its problem, says farewell to the new friend they’ve made and that’s the end. The main difference over the regular Doraemon stories is that the problem mostly starts because of external reasons rather than Nobita causing it himself.

If you’re mainly interested in the story, just watch the movies instead – at the very least they are nicer to the eye.