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Star Driver is a show about adolescence, and of course adolescents. They wander, get lost, make mistakes, try to find meaning in life, and try to do the right thing. Some of them fall in love, and others yearn to. There’s a pitiable few who get trapped there, and never learn to grow up. That’s Star Driver. There’s also a story, of course, and it does some cool things sometimes, but it’s not what’s ultimately important: the feelings, the friendships, and the adventures.

If you just let go and let Star Driver carry you, it’s an incredible ride. Its biggest strengths are that it looks fabulous ... and has a strong, weird vibe. Its biggest weaknesses are its plot and repetitiveness.

Highly recommended.

Kiraboshi!

I adore Kumo desu ga, Nani ka? (KumoDesu), though it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why I enjoy it so much. At the start, it was the inhuman protagonist struggling to survive that kept me going. Then you learn that there’s more to the world than meets the eye, and that the weird things that are happening are there for good reasons. Then the story shifts, and it’s the diverse cast of characters with interesting interpersonal relationships and conflicts that drove my engagement. In this way and others, there are multiple disparate arcs in KumoDesu that naturally lead into each other, and that might be the ... thing I enjoy most about this story. I also enjoy the characters and the worldbuilding, and most of the story. Read more about those below!

KumoDesu has a large, diverse cast of interesting, multi-faceted characters. And if you’ve read the synopsis, that may come as a surprise. But it’s true! One of the coolest things about the story is how many chapters are told from alternate perspectives, which all give different insights into the world and the people in it. On top of that, there’s a wide variety of character interactions throughout the story, from funny to serious to slice-of-life. These people feel realistic and grounded despite the fantasy setting, although it would be misleading to imply that the setting isn’t also realistic and grounded.

Because it is both of those things. Not that magic is at all realistic or anything; just that everything about the setting makes sense, given the initial assumption that magic exists. You probably won’t believe me when you start reading. The initial arc has “LitRPG” written all over it, after all. But some of the best parts of the story for me were when things clicked together, and I was like, “holy crap that makes sense!” This happened a lot, and I loved it. I'd be happy to provide concrete examples here, but almost anything I could provide would spoil a lot; you'll just have to trust me. KumoDesu’s world is thought-through and carefully put together, and that’s great.

The story, as it happens, is similarly well-constructed, despite a few pitfalls. The plot is driven largely by the world and the characters, and as such, events feel natural when they unfold. Because part of the plot is a world mystery, some of this is not evident until later, and this is compounded by the fact that some side stories are set at different points in time. I enjoy the story greatly despite and often because of this. However, some story beats won’t tickle everyone’s fancy—they differ wildly in the long run. If you’re only in it for the action-packed first arc, some of the later bits won’t satisfy; and if you don’t care for that first bit, you aren’t even going to know about the very different later arcs. An even bigger pain point might be the abrupt ending. The web novel's ending was revised a bit in the light novel to make it more palatable, but this also increased the pace of the already brisk finale. I like a good denouement, so this was disappointing, but at least there is an epilogue.

Everything so far has been mostly praise, so let’s take a minute to talk about the prose. While grammar throughout KumoDesu is nearly impeccable, the style doesn’t always come across very flatteringly. From reading the WN, I understood that the main character has a habit of repeating things in a more incredulous tone. Something like, “Oh, I’m screwed. [two line-breaks] I’m screwed!” In the LN, it doesn’t always come across this way, and will sometimes manifest as a second paragraph simply rephrasing the previous paragraph. This does make some sense, because the main character is also a very careful thinker, and doesn’t make important decisions lightly. But it can give some portions of writing a slower feel than they perhaps should have. There are a few other quirks, which I’m certain are artifacts of translation from Japanese to English, and it’s hard to fault them for this. A lot of the translation is very good, and it’s not very noticeable at all except for the character names, some bits of culture, and pop-culture references being obviously Japanese. I only found a few translation errors, and only for minor skill names getting mixed up or translated differently in different spots.

The cast and world are great, the story is good, and the writing is ok. What else even is there in a book? The illustrations? They’re lovely! I highly recommend checking out some version of Kumo desu ga, Nani ka? if it sounds at all interesting. The LN is good, the WN is free, the manga has more pictures, and the anime has color and sound.
(Maybe don’t watch the anime unless you are allergic to paper or something, though. If you need music, my soundtrack for KumoDesu is Neighborhoods by Blink-182.)

Vampire in the Garden is good and bad. I think that’s my conclusion. Allow me to explain.

There’s definitely a lot to like on display. The music and sound design are great, no problems there. The art is very strong despite simple, slightly uncanny character design. The character dynamic between the two leads grew on me as the story progressed, and I found that their emotional beats really resonated. I love me a good road trip, even though this one was kept pretty snappy. In fact, the show’s rather economical storytelling allows quite a lot to happen in a mere 130 minutes. The fast pace rarely ... lets up, including some rip-roaring action scenes that I thoroughly enjoyed.

It is this economical storytelling that also leaves much to be desired, though. Many scenes lack proper flow, with a couple actually leaving me questioning what happened. The world lacks cohesiveness as well, with many specific details about humans and vampires either not making an impact where they should, or not making particularly much sense to begin with. Heck, character decisions and motivations don’t make a lot of sense and are largely driven by the plot. And oh lordy, the plot. Let’s just say the writers didn’t let a silly thing like physics get in the way of what they wanted to happen.

Just like the whole show, the animation is good in parts (the dancing!) and bad in parts. So I feel like I’m stuck giving it a 5 outta 10. I would give it a 6, but what kind of vampire story doesn’t have anyone actually turn into a vampire? Seriously!

So I started watching 18if because I heard it was artsy and had a different director for each episode. And while there are 11 episode directors for this 13-episode show—and there are even some episodes that could be considered . . . good?—this show is ultimately very, very bad.

Note: review contains very minor spoilers.

TL;DR: Anime sourced from sh*tty mobile game is also sh*tty, but episodes 3, 7, and 10 are worth watching alone if the show’s premise tickles your fancy.

18if could have been good. There’s some real heart tucked deep down inside, and it tries to address big, relatable issues that real people face: bullying, ... disability, death, eating disorders—you get the idea. The problems with 18if arise when you consider how poor quality much of it is. It feels like every aspect of the show suffers in some respect, so much so that it’s irredeemably bad in my eyes.

The most obvious place to start is the animation. It starts out passable, with some interesting perspective shots and camera movements in episode 1. Some episodes are fine; I didn’t have much to complain about through episode 3, for example. At that point, it would be a solid 6 out of 10, maybe higher (episode 3 is pretty good-looking). On the other hand, many later episodes reuse things often and have very little animation overall. Off-model characters and weird movements are common in the latter half of the show. The long and short of it is there are simply no real outstanding pieces of animation to be found.

Art goes hand-in-hand with animation, and similarly, the art style suffers in many episodes of 18if. 10 of 13 episodes look pretty similar to each other, with some differing color palettes thrown in here and there. It doesn’t look awful, but it’s simple and bland. It gets the job done. I was probably just expecting more. However, episodes 3, 7, and 10 provide different experiences that contrast the comparatively boring rest of the show. 3 just looks good: it provides a more traditionally good-looking, modern anime style, and it does it well. 7 is probably the wackiest for anime: the main cast are in entirely different bodies, and it sort of looks like 3D crayon models, but it's good and colorful and bright. 10 is more dreamlike in style, and is in fact the most dreamlike episode by far, which is good for a show purporting to be about dreams. It has some interesting animation going on, and is easily my favorite episode. So overall, 3 episodes of 18if make the other 10 look pretty bad.

Now seems as good a place as any to start talking about the plot. In short, it’s bollocks. It doesn’t make sense; it’s contrived. Episodes 1 through 10 are episodic stories focusing on a different girl’s dream world she’s stuck in, and how our main character Haruto gets them out. Each girl has a problem in the real world, and that manifests somehow in the dream, and Haruto helps them get over it. If that were all, that’d be fine and dandy; you could leave the nitty-gritty details to your imagination, it’d be a weird dream anime, I would rate it a 5 or 6, and I wouldn’t be here writing this review. That’s not all, though. 18if also tries to tie all of these stories together and put together its world with rules that support it. The problem is that it’s shoddily done. Details about Haruto’s power to enter dreams are forgotten about; some girls manifest different unexplained powers that affect the real world; the dream professor can do a lot of unexplained things because he’s “been researching the dream world;” an evil antagonist group is introduced but then doesn’t do anything; a ghost shows up in real life and is ultimately unexplained; and there’s a giant world-ending plot twist that is solved by friendship. I could go into more detail, but MAL technically doesn’t want spoilers in reviews and this is probably too long already. From what I can tell, the overarching plot was made up on the spot to try to fit everything together and force a conclusion in the final 3 episodes. To play devil’s advocate is to justify these issues with something akin to dream logic, and I guess I can’t argue with that, except to say that “dream logic” is the laziest excuse I can think of to explain away your entire show.

What I imagine people enjoyed the most about 18if are its episodic themes/morals, like the episode on “doing what you’re good at,” or the episode about revenge, or the two episodes about bullying. I’m here to say that while the subject matter is serious and does affect real-life people in real ways, the way each episode covers each subject is rather simple and straightforward, with no room for nuance. It doesn’t help that Haruto usually has some hand in solving the problem, as if it can’t be solved alone. I just can’t help but feel like the creators wanted some mature issues in their narrative, so they just added each issue and resolved it in one episode no matter what. Examples of note include bulimia, trauma, disability, two instances of bullying, and three instances of self-harm. To me, it cheapens these issues somewhat, especially because they are solved in the dream world, not in reality.

Looking at the characters, nobody really stands out above the rest. Lily is secretive, the professor is more annoying than he is funny, and each girl has her simple motivation(s) and issue(s). I can easily point out which two are below par, however. First, the antagonists are stupidly simple and poorly written, with almost no motivation. This is the group I mentioned earlier, who are introduced in episode 11 and end up being completely irrelevant. Second, our main boy Haruto is simply inconsistent. Often, in order to help the girl of the episode, he is altruistic; he’ll hang out with her, try to work out her problems, and generally be friendly. Other times, he’s apathetic and is just there because he has to be. The most jarring example for me was between episodes 2 and 3, when Haruto goes from assisting one girl with a violent crime to sitting on a bench nervously with another girl. Additionally, it feels like most of the girls have some level of attraction to him, and in at least 2 cases there are romantic undertones between them. He just doesn’t feel like his own character, but instead like a stand-in for the character traits required for each episode.

The sound design in 18if is passable most of the time. I’m not a huge fan of the OP (I expected more music after the drop, but nope, turns out that was just the end of the song), but each of the 13 EDs is fine. All the voice acting is acceptable, I’m not going to be picky about sound effects in dreams, and any incidental music went unnoticed. That is, until episode 12, when there’s supposed to be a prominent vocal track from one of the characters which is drowned out by gunfire, other characters, AND the instrumental part of the song. Also her lips didn’t sync properly. Aside from that, sound was pretty average overall.

I think everything else I want to say doesn’t really fit together, so here’s some miscellaneous topics I still wanted to cover. I somehow got through all of that review without mentioning the clusterf*ck that is episode 9, so I guess I’ll just say that episode 9 is comically bad, and might be worth a watch because of that? I also tracked down and played the mobile game that this show is based on, and let me tell you, it is the most garbage Puzzles and Dragons (PAD) clone I’ve ever played. Not only does it not innovate much beyond the basics of PAD, it also has poor translations, is buggy, gives very little free stuff to the player, and doesn’t even have any cool looking units (in my opinion, I guess).

To sum up: 18if is, for the most part, poorly made. I would call it Very Bad, so according to MAL adjectives, that means 3/10. However, if you’re intrigued by the show’s potential, I highly recommend watching episodes 3, 7, and 10 as stand-alone stories. They are pretty and interesting by themselves, and would easily score between 6 and 8 individually. Just don’t think episode 9 is the same beast. Because it isn’t. It has the dick-genie.