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tl;dr: A really original and interesting manga that was axed before it amounted to anything.

Welcome to the Weakest Contestant of Space and Time Championship, where the god of each space time enters their weakest sentient being. First off, they compete in a tournament where they fight to the death. Each match the competitor that dies wins and gets revived to go on to the next round. In the end, once only the five weakest remain, they get thrown out into an enormous wilderness and serve as prey, while all the other contestants serve as hunters. If the hunters kill the prey, then the hunters get ... to return home. However, there are no more revivals for the prey. If they die, they’re dead for good.

The premise for this manga is super original, and though there were definitely some rough spots, overall the execution was pretty great too. The main cast, the five weakest, are pretty interesting. The protagonist, Hitomu, is your average everyday salaryman. Except he overthinks things way too much. And as for his personality, well they say people’s true colors are revealed in times of crisis, and in the case of Hitomu his last actions before imminent death are trying to get in one last smoke or staring at a girl’s boobs. Kind of a girl. She’s actually a slime, but for some reason after sucking Hitomu’s blood she started looking like his ex and behaving like a human. Also, Hitomu has some sort of trauma stemming from his relationship with his ex that seems to be one of the main reasons he’s so useless, and interacting with her replica slime girl seems to be serving as some sort of bizarre therapy that’s helping him get over it. There’s also an overly aggressive war robot that isn’t actually a war robot, a yokai no one has ever heard of and that seems to have no powers, and caterpie. They’re all pretty incompetent as you would expect. And they’re also pretty annoying personality wise. However, the writing feels like it’s using the bad parts of their characters pretty well, and together they’re actually becoming somewhat likable.

On top of the interesting cast, there’s also some pretty interesting world building. Mainly stemming around how the gods are all bastards exploiting the weak purely for their own amusement and not caring about life in the slightest. But then there’s some hinting that the tournament organizers, or at least some of them, are seemingly working on a plan to overthrow the gods completely. That plan however, will forever remain a mystery because the manga ends prematurely. Just as it feels like the manga has pulled you in and is really getting going, it just ends. There isn’t even an attempt at giving it an ending. It’s just suddenly over. It clearly got axed, and now all the various plot threads will remain unfinished. This is immensely disappointing to the point I question whether this manga is worth reading at all. Overall, I did enjoy what I read and I don’t regret reading it, but at the same time I really can’t bring myself to recommend it.

The art is decent with a pretty generic art style. The designs are also pretty generic, but it pulls generic designs from a lot of different settings and genre’s so in combination it looks pretty interesting visually.

tl;dr: A student/teacher multi-couple anime that focuses pretty much entirely on hilarious ecchi accidents.

This anime is about the formation of four male-student/female-teacher couples. This anime is composed of twelve half length episodes, so it has about the content of six standard episodes. Most episodes are split into two halves as well, so this anime could be seen as a series of 5 minute shorts. The first four episodes are about the first couple, the next five have the second and third couple intermixed, and the last three episodes are about the fourth couple. Once a couple is formed it isn’t really focused on, but you ... still do still see them in the background as it focuses on other couples which is kind of nice. Due to the short length, obviously it doesn’t really have much romance or drama or anything like that. The general flow of things is pretty much just that the couple end up getting involved in a series of ecchi situations and then end up going out. The teacher aspect is mostly just window dressing and isn’t taken all that seriously. If you’re looking for something that actually deals with taboo romance you will not find it here.

The writing in terms of characters for the most part wasn’t all that great. The first couple involved what’s supposed to be a really strict teacher but that part wasn’t really emphasized much and the boy had pretty much no personality. The second couple involves a boy who everyone is afraid of due to looking like a thug but that is actually a very dutiful young man, and a woman who I don’t really remember much about other than that she’s kind. The third involves a shota trying to act like a man and his tomboyish PE teacher childhood friend. All in all, I didn’t really feel much of anything at all towards any of these characters or their romance. Like obviously if things went badly I would be pretty pissed due to the type of anime it is, but overall I wasn’t all that emotionally invested. The last couple was different in that they were pretty great, especially the kuudere ditzy school nurse. The boy was overly emotional which made him basically the opposite of her, but that actually gave them great chemistry in an ‘opposites attract’ sort of way that worked well.

But what really is the core of the anime is the ecchi aspects. The majority of the anime is simply the couples getting thrown into bizarre ecchi situations. They actually start out quite simple, the type that you’d probably be able to find in other ecchi media. However, they progressively get crazier and crazier to some of the most absurd situations I’ve seen in ecchi anime. And they’re completely hilarious. Especially how they can escalate so quickly. The ecchi itself is pretty good too. It’s not really borderline H, but it still does go farther than most ecchi anime. The art and animation overall aren’t all that great, but they do a pretty good job with the ecchi portions. The character designs also have a good amount of variety for the setting and premise. The OP has some pretty solid ecchi too and a pretty good song, and the ED is decent in both regards. I also liked how both changed based on the couple being focused on. As for those that don’t like ecchi: This is a review of a fan service anime. No doubt about it this is a review of a fanservice anime. So why are you here?

tl;dr: A thriller manga with a good plot full of suspense, but awful and nonsensical characters.

The plot of this manga revolved around a real-world incident where a thief or group of thieves managed to steal 300-million-yen. To this day, no one knows who was responsible or where the money went, which makes it a great premise to center a manga around. The incident happened in 1968, but the manga takes place in 2010 with flashbacks throughout the period in between. As such, the focus isn’t so much directly on the incident itself, but on the aftermath and wide-reaching effects. More specifically, the focus is on ... Yamato and his adoptive sister Miku who end up getting pulled into things when their parents go missing and their investigation leads them to investigate the 300-million-yen incident. However, this catches the eye of some very dangerous and powerful individuals who wish to stop them through any means possible.

The actual mystery regarding how the 300-million-yen robbery played out and the conspiracy involved there was pretty well written. Since it’s based on a real-life incident that has a lot of conspiracy theories there was probably a lot to pull from, and the mangaka did a good job in terms of execution. How the main cast slowly pieced together what happened was handled pretty well and was pretty interesting. The cat and mouse games at a smaller level were also pretty interesting. Overall, the plans characters carry out are a lot simpler than most manga which makes at least this aspect really easy to follow. As such the focus is much more on being a thriller than a battle of wits, and the manga is good at keeping a fast-paced sense of suspense so it handles that pretty well.

The area the manga fails completely is its characters. It seems to try to give everyone a complicated background, and a lot of them end up completely stupid. A lot of these characters start off as mysterious, and their further characterization is inconsistent with how they were portrayed early on. If you trying reading the first few volumes after finishing the manga, you’ll spot loads of instances of characters behaving in ways that that are bizarre based on what you learn about them in the future. The complicated entangled web of connections between the main cast is also overtly convoluted. And as that’s the core for character’s motivations, this results in a lot of the manga just seeming like random nonsense where it isn’t clear at all why characters are doing what they’re doing. This applies to pretty much everything that happens during the the final stretch of the manga, which made the ending pretty unsatisfying. Pretty much all the romance in this manga is terrible too, especially the main couple. By the end of the manga, it was kind of hard to stay invested in anyone to be honest, which made most of the emotional beats fall completely flat.

The art can be great at times but for the most part it was only okay which was disappointing. The character designs are pretty typical modern designs without anyone really standing out. The first fan translator was pretty solid but the second, who did the latter two thirds of the manga, was pretty bad.

tl;dr: An action anime about giant bugs that’s carried pretty much entirely by two great characters.

This anime is set in an alternate Edo that has come under the attack of giant insects. To combat them an organization known as the Mushibugyo, meaning Insect Magistrate, was founded. This story particularly follows Jinbee, a samurai from far out in the country that comes to Edo in order to join the Mushibugyo. The first third or so of the anime is centered around Jinbee and the rest of the Mushibugyo simply dealing with the various insects that attack Edo. Each episode focuses on a single character, with Jinbee ... and by extension the viewer learning more about them. The rest of the anime involves two extended arcs with more intricate plots focusing on fighting specific groups, though with a training arc episode and recap episode in between.

Overall in this anime, there were only two character’s that felt well written and utilized. The rest of the main cast have solid introductions, but they don’t really develop much beyond that. There are moments here and there where they get their moments in the spotlight, but due to the long gaps between these moments, overall they weren’t fleshed out enough to really get invested in them. Some of them had interesting enough personalities to make them likable even without much depth to them, but in that case it felt somewhat disappointing they didn’t matter more. For example, Haru pops up quite often, especially early on, but she has no plot significance whatsoever.

The first character that stood out as an exception is Jinbee, which I suppose shouldn’t be surprising considering he’s the protagonist. His personality is really fun in that he’s a complete moron that’s dense as a brick, but also really hard working and incredibly kind. The end result is that he’s just an incredibly good natured guy that sees the best in everyone to an absurd degree, and in doing so he manages to draw out other people’s best selves. He does have special powers that pop up from time to time under special conditions, but the majority of the fights he gets into, he wins simply due to the fact that he’s been training really hard and refuses to go down no matter what. It’s simple to the point of being stupid but it’s still really satisfying. Also, he’s hilarious.

The other character that stood out as well written and utilized is the magistrate of the Mushibugyo. For the vast majority of the anime she’s referred to by her titles, and you don’t really learn her real name until the end and even afterwards no one calls her that. But she is by far the best written character in this anime and definitely the one with the most depth. She can pretty much single handedly carry the entire anime in this regard. She doesn’t even show up until episode seven, but after that she quickly becomes the main heroine as the plot seems to revolve almost entirely around her. It’s incredibly easy to sympathize with her and get invested in her character arc and her relationship with Jinbee, which makes it easy to get invested in the plot and anime overall. And ultimately, she and Jinbee are enough to make the anime overall pretty enjoyable. The anime ends with a lot left unresolved, but it stops at a pretty good point that I was satisfied with, though I’ll definitely check out the manga eventually.

The art was a mixed bag. I like the art style, but I don’t think I like the general design sense for the most part. I didn’t really love any of the character designs, but I really didn’t like a few, such as Mugai’s. I also hated the enemy designs for the most part, though with the focus on giant insects I suppose that was inevitable. Also, I know chonmage are historically accurate for samurai, but I’m still not much of a fan. The animation was pretty solid. Action wise, power ups and abilities in general weren’t fleshed out all that well, so the action felt pretty random and didn’t really have any depth, but it looked pretty cool. The first OP had a pretty cool art style so visually I found it pretty impressive, though the song was only okay. The second OP is more conventional visually but still pretty good and has a great song. The first ED was okay in terms of the visuals and song. I really liked the visuals and song on the second ED though. The soundtrack was also pretty solid and worked really well at times.

tl;dr: A somewhat amusing rom-com about a girl trying to tease her crush but failing.

This is one of those manga where a super outgoing girl, in this case Himekawa, teases a more reserved boy, in this case Doujima, who she clearly likes. What makes this manga somewhat different is that the teasing always backfires. Not due to the actions of the male lead, but rather due to how he doesn’t really take any actions at all. Doujima completely brushes off the teasing which generally causes Himekawa to get frustrated and screw up in some way or another, causing her to be the one that ends ... up feeling embarrassed. It’s a bit of a nice twist on a very common comedic premise. Doujima’s kind of boring, but Himekawa’s screw ups are able to carry the humor pretty well, though they probably wouldn’t be able to if the manga was longer. There are a few reoccurring side characters but no one has enough of a presence to mention in particular.

The romance in this moves much faster than in most manga that seem to have this type of premise, though the manga reaches completion within three volumes so I suppose that was a necessity. How it progresses is incredibly generic, with her originally not knowing her feelings and just teasing, eventually realizing that she’s teasing because she likes him, and then eventually confessing. I didn’t feel it was written all that well though as it really doesn’t flesh out Doujima at all and thus it’s hard to get invested in the relationship. To be honest I felt like the earlier parts when she hadn’t realized her feelings and the manga was solely focused on her failing to tease properly were more interesting compared to the later parts that took her romance more seriously. Still, all in all I was happy with the way things worked out and was satisfied with the ending.

The art in this is decent. There are a few times where it looks especially nice but more the most part it’s just okay. I think the style works well enough for the story, but this isn’t a manga I would read for the art.

tl;dr: A hilarious manga about a misunderstood high school student that’s surprisingly heartwarming.

Angel Densetsu is a manga about a high school student named Kitano that others judge as evil solely because of how he looks. He’s actually a very kind and honest boy, but because his face is terrifying everyone thinks he must be incredibly terrifying as well. Kitano is sad about not being able to make any friends and tries to improve his image, but it doesn’t help that he’s incredibly innocent and thus fails to actually understand how people are really seeing him and how they’re interpreting his actions. This combined with fate ... itself seemingly conspiring against him results in all sorts of bizarre misunderstandings that just snowball.

This manga is primarily a comedy and the majority of the comedy is humor centered around all these misunderstandings and how the rest of the cast react to them. It may sound like this’ll get repetitive it never really does. The manga is constantly throwing in new characters to misunderstand and act in new ways, so there’s a lot of variety to how things play out. And just in general the writing in this regard is just really well written. This also isn’t all the manga has so there’s enough of other stories mixed in to keep things feeling fresh. Though some of these stories definitely feel like they’ve overlived their welcome at times, such as pretty much everything regarding Kuroda in the second half of the manga.

While this manga doesn’t really have much of an overarching plot, there are overarching plot threads stemming around the friends that Kitano makes. And a lot of them are pretty touching. The main reason for that is that Kitano is really likable. He doesn’t really have any character arc or development, but he’s really easy to get invested in just because of how good of a person he is. Thus, when people do acknowledge his true self and all the goodness it entails, it’s pretty satisfying. His friend Takehisa is also somewhat likable as well for being a pretty loyal and good friend, though he doesn’t really have any character development either.

The two characters that stood out in terms of development were Ryouko and Ikuno. Ryouko is the heroine of the manga and has pretty solid relationship development with Kitano over the course of the manga. She’s also a pretty fun character due to how she’s strong and pretty high-spirited, and because of her character arc where she starts off as somewhat of a hard ass but slowly gets softer over time. On the other hand, while Ikuno also does have some relationship development with Kitano, the focus with her is much more on her character arc. This was centered around her changing from someone that lived solely to fight to someone that could make friends and enjoy just hanging out with them. What makes her a lot of fun is that a lot of the extreme parts of her personality persist through that. In hindsight I find it kind of strange that in a manga in which the vast majority of characters are guys that two girls end up as the only ones that get developed properly, but in context it worked pretty well. The ending isn’t some epic finale or anything like that, but I felt it did well by the cast of the manga and thus overall, I was pretty satisfied with it.

The art, to put it frankly, starts out pretty awful. Like straight up bad. However, it improves tremendously over the course of the manga. Around halfway through the manga, it’s pretty good and by the end pretty great. This is probably one of the biggest improvements I’ve seen within the span of a single manga, though it starting so low is probably one of the main reasons. The fan translation was also really solid and I thought they did an especially great job with making sure characters voices came through well, such as thugs speaking roughly and crudely and in contrast Kitano always speaking and thinking in a super strait-laced manner. I have some nitpicks regarding translating terms that probably shouldn’t have been, such as it probably would have been better to just leave banchou instead of translating it as guardian, but as mentioned these are just nitpicks.

tl;dr: A pretty generic action anime that’s still pretty enjoyable due to pretty good execution in the second half.

Towanoquon is an original anime, by which I mean it is not an adaptation of anything, composed of six movies. Each movie is 48 minutes long, so the total contents of the entire series are about equal to that of a single cour. The plot is centered Attractors, people that suddenly gain supernatural powers and have a tendency to go berserk. The protagonist, Quon, is an Attractor and the leader of a secret group who’s goal is to find and protect them. But there’s also an organization ... known as Custos that sends out a group of cyborgs known as WTOC to eliminate them. This inevitably results in violent clashes.

Overall, this anime is pretty generic with nothing really popping out as all that unique. Quon is a really good guy with the type of backstory you would expect from someone in that position. The main cyborg focused on, Shun, also has the type of backstory you’d expect from someone in that position, and the twist to his story is also pretty predictable. The main antagonist is also a straight up cartoon villain with no real explanation given at all for why he’s evil and no redeeming factors whatsoever. The world building felt lacking, but what little there was was incredibly standard without anything in the way of surprises. There are also light hints of romance here and there, but overall nothing really happens in that regard.

Despite that, the anime works really well when it embraces it’s simplicity. The first episode is just setting things up and though it felt a bit slow did a solid enough job at doing so. The second episode is centered around trying to find and deal with a single Attractor without really any contribution to the overarching narrative. It tried to add depth, but it didn’t really work all that well, and thus overall the episode was really weak. The third episode contributes quite a bit more to the overarching narrative and has a more interesting plot, though it’s still somewhat slow. The fourth episode is where things really get moving though, and continue moving pretty fast through the fifth and sixth episodes as well.

Honestly, you could say that things are moving too fast since it doesn’t really explain all that much. However, the plot line is simple enough that even if the details are all glossed over it’s easy enough to follow. Furthermore, it seems to be very direct about the character arcs it’s trying to portray and emotional beats it’s trying to hit. They’re incredibly generic, but how earnest it is in hitting them results in them working incredibly well. The action doesn’t really have any complexity and abilities seem to basically do whatever they need to do at the time, but they can still be really cool. There’s really nothing all that special here, but things flows well and the execution is pretty good, and thus it’s pretty enjoyable to watch. The ending felt really abrupt though.

The art and animation are solid enough for an anime, though not at the level you’d expect from films. The design work was a mixed bag. Human designs are decent enough, but nothing too extreme. Attractor’s special designs felt pretty weak, other than the main one in the final episode which was pretty great. WTOC designs were pretty generic. The soundtrack is decent enough with a couple tracks that stood out. There’s no OP, and the ED felt pretty weak in that it’s the same song used in each film and the visuals are just scenes from that film. It also didn’t help that it played the full song so it felt like the credits dragged on too long.

tl;dr: A Negima sequel that leans too heavily on it’s connections to Negima while not really playing into Negima’s strength’s.

UQ Holder is centered around Touta, a fourteen year old boy with a complicated past whom Evangeline A.K. McDowell, now known as Yukihime, essentially adopts. While originally living in the Japanese countryside, various circumstances occur that result in Yukihime having to make Touta immortal. Furthermore, it turns out that Yukihime is actually the leader of what is essentially a union for immortals known as UQ Holder, who own and operate out of a hot spring known as Senkyoukan. Thus, Touta too begins working there while getting ... used to his new abilities and making friends with the other immortals. However, the past quickly catches up to Touta and it turns out there are a lot of important and powerful people interested in him.

UQ Holder is the sequel to Negima, Ken Akumetsu’s previous manga series which had somewhat of a difficult history, especially in terms of it’s anime adaptations. The anime for UQ Holder makes that it is a Negima sequel quite clear in that it literally includes “Mahou Sensei Negima! 2” in the title. The manga however does not. I haven’t yet read the UQ Holder manga, so I originally thought that this was just a marketing stunt and that the anime production committee wanted to leverage the Negima brand for marketing. I was incorrect however.

This isn’t just a loose sequel set in the same, but a sequel that very heavily draws on the plot and characters of it’s predecessor. This isn’t really apparent in the first half where you’re not missing too much if you haven’t read Negima. However, I’m willing to go as far as saying the second half will make essentially no sense if you haven’t read Negima all the way through, and thus reading Negima is absolutely a prerequisite before watching UQ Holder. I would also like to emphasize the ‘reading’ aspect in the previous sentence, because watching the anime adaptations for Negima definitely isn’t enough.

UQ Holder is pretty similar to Negima, but overall it’s much closer to the final arcs after they’ve gone to the Magic World than it is to the earlier arcs in Japan. Overall, it’s much more serious and plot oriented, and ultimately I don’t think that’s for the best right off the bat. I think Negima was amazing for how it was both a good light hearted character focused ecchi/harem series and a good serious plot focused battle manga. UQ Holder feels like it’s also trying to do both, but it’s not really able to do either quite well.

The light hearted character focused ecchi/harem aspect is especially weak. It doesn’t really flesh out any of the main characters other than Touta, and there really isn’t the level of ecchi you would expect with there being nothing like Negi’s sneeze gimmick. The OVAs, which are a sequel to the main anime actually handle the ecchi/harem aspect really well so I’m very much looking forward to how things progress in in this regard in the manga. But that doesn’t diminish my disappointment in the main anime.

I also found Touta’s relationship with Yukihime strange. I don’t have a problem with it in and of itself, but the way the writing seems to be emphasizing her also loving Negi and Nagi just makes things awkward. Rather than taking it seriously and further convoluting things with what seems to be some sort of time travel, I feel it would have been better to just gloss over things.

As for the plot focused and battle focused aspect, it does well to an extent, but I kind of feel like it started falling apart completely towards the end of the season. The biggest reason is that it seems to be drawing way too much from Negima. Touta’s abilities are very heavily rooted in his connections to elements from Negima. Though he gets an original weapon and it seems like that’ll be the core of his ability set, it completely takes a back seat and isn’t developed at all. The plot is fine when it’s focused on UQ Holder and it’s members, but once it starts focusing on Touta and his past it starts getting really convoluted. The final battle was just absurd. It felt like it was just trying to hit as many Negima related beats as it could. I admit the nostalgia did get me emotional, especially the part with Happy Material playing, but I will admit I have very little idea what was actually going on half the time. Overall, I found it completely nonsensical but I did enjoy it.

The art and animation are solid enough. The only thing that stood out was that the CG monsters were terrible, though they had very low presence. The OP has pretty good visuals, and uses a new version of Happy Material, an iconic Negima OP song. The EDs of the OVAs also use new versions of Negima EDs, though the visuals were essentially recaps of the episode which I thought was kind of weak. The visuals on the main anime ED is also pretty solid and the song I think is pretty solid too. As far as I know it doesn’t use an old Negima ED though, so I kind of think they should have just for consistency’s sake.

tl;dr: A fantasy rom-com with a generic plot and with characters and comedy that are more annoying than amusing.

This manga is about the romance between a male hero (Yuusha) and female demon lord (Maou). Yuusha falls in love with Maou and asks her out, and although she refuses at first, after realizing he’s overpowered and could completely destroy the demon army she reluctantly agrees. She starts off just using dates to try to find Yuusha’s weakness in order to defeat him and restart the demon invasion of the human world, but she pretty quickly actually falls in love with him, though she’s a tsundere so ... she refuses to admit it. After that various others try to break them apart both from the demon and human side, but their love prevails.

The plot here is a pretty generic Romeo and Juliet type story, though overall the themes in the manga lean more towards taboo romance than enemies become lovers. This is in part because of the way the romance between the main couple is framed, but more so because there are a lot of other relationships it also focuses on, the majority of which fall into romances that are taboo within the context of the world the story takes place in, such as yaoi, yuri, and incest. Still, all in all it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and when it does it’s pretty much always terrible, so don’t expect any depth in any of these. I will say however that I did like the ending, because even though it’s the most generic ‘powering up through the power of love to defeat the final boss’ type story possible, it still felt like it fit the story pretty well and was much better than all the other serious moments where it tried and failed to be deep.

Rather than the plot, what is meant to hold up the manga is the characters and comedy. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really do all that good of a job with either. Character wise there are a few interesting and likable side characters, but most of the cast is boring and pretty unlikable. For example, Yuusha has some personality towards the beginning but as things progress it seems to disappear and he becomes even flatter. Maou starts off as a complete bitch, and she does have a character arc where she becomes less of one. But she never becomes likable, only bearable, and it takes her about two thirds of the manga to get there so for the vast majority of the manga she’s downright unbearable. Not being able to get invested in the cast, especially the main couple, results in most all the emotional beats completely falling flat.

The comedy is entirely one note, and that one note is that everyone is an idiot. I can certainly enjoy that kind of humor, but it was so utterly repetitive here. And a lot of the stupidity is so utterly dumb that it’s not even funny anymore. I feel like this is part of why a lot of the cast was so unlikable as well. And simultaneously, not liking the cast made it harder to find their antics as amusing. So the two aspects are basically compounding on each other to make the manga worse.

The art was a mixed bag. The art regarding and backgrounds and such is nothing special and not really worth talking about. The art in regards to characters can be pretty great, but the character designs don’t really seem to allow for that that much. There are certainly some great designs, but they’re also a lot of boring designs, and the characters focused on generally lean more towards being boring. Though I’m also kind of thinking that my dislike of certain characters is preventing me from appreciating their art. Also, the mangaka is good at doing extremely exaggerated expressions, but they’re used way too often to the point they’re not really impressive at all by the end.

tl;dr: A film with a few interesting aspects and great art in some respects but overall really weak writing.

Iroduku is an anime that has a very busy beginning. It’s starts out in the future so it has a bit of sci-fi going on. However, the protagonist Hitomi and her grandma are mages who can use magic, which her grandma suddenly uses to send Hitomi 60 years into the past. Hitomi suddenly appears in the middle of someone’s room and has to sneak out, leading to a strange misunderstanding in the process. And to top it all off, Hitomi is fully colorblind, meaning she sees in ... monochrome, as a result of some sort of emotional trauma. I really liked how it just threw so much at you all at once and thus I found the start of the anime to have quite a lot of promise.

However, as it progresses it shifts away from the extraordinary into something a lot more grounded. And unfortunately I can’t say I really enjoyed that much. It’s pretty much just an incredibly generic teen drama. It has all the standard tropes: a shy and gloomy protagonist slowly opening up and becoming more cheerful, a love polygon that causes conflict between two friends, a dense male character who is the only one that doesn’t realize a girl has a crush on him, a teenager contemplating their future planning on taking the safer path but being inspired to instead pursue their dreams, etc. I don’t think being generic or full of tropes is a bad thing. And I’m fine with a story being completely generic if the execution is good. However, I don’t think this was handled all that well.

I feel the biggest problem is that it’s trying to do too much while also trying to spend enough time doing nothing at all. It has a lot going on in terms of characters. The character’s may be tropey, but in the end they all do have stories and motivations and relationships. And the writing tries to flesh out all of this for everyone. This may have been possible in thirteen episodes if it was focused enough, but this is also an anime that’s trying to build a strong sense of tone and atmosphere. It spends a lot of time just showing Hitomi and the group of friends she makes just hanging out and doing random club activities. These portions do slowly demonstrate the growth and change in characters, but subtly and often not as the focus. As a visual novel reader, I’m certainly not opposed to that either as it can be a great way to build investment in characters, but the key thing is that it takes time to do so which this anime simply doesn’t have enough of. I also felt that the writing wasn’t all that great at comedy or amusing fluff, which made these portions less enjoyable than they should have been, leading to them feeling especially wasteful.

In the end the writing manages to check all the boxes it needs to, but it doesn’t feel like it does anything well. It’s very clear what each character’s arc is, it’s foundation, and why it progressed the way it did. But at an emotional level nothing really had all that much impact. There are scenes that I can easily recognize are very well written in a vacuum, but in context the build up to them just doesn’t feel like it’s built up enough investment for them to hit as hard as they should. This is especially true for the ending. Things take a much more serious turn and magic takes a much more important role in the plot. The writing also becomes more focused on Hitomi and her character arc so it manages to do pretty well by her. However, the lead up to all this wasn’t strong enough to really support it, and thus it falls pretty flat. Ultimately, I wasn’t particularly satisfied or unsatisfied with it, it just felt kind of dull.

The art is a mixed bag. The art is fantastic when it comes to backgrounds, both the standard backgrounds and the more unique ones involving worlds inside paintings. However, the art and animation when it came to characters felt pretty weak, especially for such a character focused work. And that’s coming from someone who likes Fly’s art style. Furthermore, even when the art was great I felt that it spent far too much time focusing on just the art which contributed to the feeling of things moving too slowly and not progressing enough. The OP and ED were both pretty solid in terms of songs and visuals. The soundtrack was also pretty good and worked well with the tone and atmosphere.