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Ignore the number for a sec; Sketchbook: Full Color's is just barely entertaining enough to get a shaky, half-hearted recommendation. A fusion of iyashikei and slice of life comedy, the two parts never fully blend and the latter will be carrying the slack for the former. When it's just the colorful cast getting up to their antics, it's pretty alright. The characters are endearing and there's just enough variety between them to be refreshing and prevent anyone from getting annoying. It's not gonna have you busting a gut but it's enough to have you grinning every so often. However, the ... other half of the show is where it might start losing you. When it switches to Sora's shallow contemplation, it dips a little too far into the iyashikei and becomes tedious. It is just far too insubstantial, without the ambiance that other more tolerable iyashikei have to at least make the time pass. I also found the cat segments to be quite annoying, too, partly because of the obnoxious voices they have, partly because of the fatuous scenarios themselves, and partly because of just how long these segments take. Unlike the human characters, where the brevity of any given segment typically breaks up the monotony, the cat bits drag far too long. Less fuzzy fun, more hairball in your throat.

Overall, even though I think there are plenty of times where you'll be looking at the timecode, itching to fast forward, or start staring at the wall or trimming your nails, or otherwise falling out of it, the art class and their shenanigans are just engaging enough to make this worth checking out, but you are forgiven if it's just not enough for you. If you don't find yourself caring enough to stick it out for the humans, you won't be missing anything if you decide to drop it.

This review comes fresh off of a second watch-through, mostly because I saw that I had already rated it here but didn't remember a thing about it. But now that I've seen it again, I remember my feelings from then and they hold true still, and just so this doesn't happen again, I'm leaving this as a note to self, and may as well share it here.

First off, I have to praise the artstyle. It's an inspired spooky style with lots of little touches to the environments, the buildings, the people or more appropriately, creatures, that give the show identity and atmosphere. It's ... probably the greatest strength of this anime. The animation itself, as well as overall production values, however... they're definitely on the cheap side, to put it kindly.

As for the narrative, the basic set-up for each episode is that Momonosuke, the protagonist traveling in search of scary stories for a book he's writing, will come across some horrific seemingly supernatural situation, where he either serves as a passive witness to the events that unfold, or well-meaning participant trying to help people, with most of the situations as well as Momosuke's role ending up having been set in place by a trio of ghoulish tricksters he becomes increasingly involved with, who serve as karmic retribution for the ne'erdowell of the week.

The execution, however, is flawed in several general ways. The way the stories are set up, rather than all the elements being introduced in the beginning and coming together as the curtain peels back, instead we get staggered, trickled out exposition that comes out of nowhere in scattered chunks. This exposition is often very blunt too, and makes the mysterious openings seem stupidly simple after all is said and done, and if the elements in these dumps were introduced from the start, the mysteries would be child's play to at least get in the ballpark of what's going on. It's understandable why they then decide to just omit these elements from the stories until they become relevant but that leaves us with unsatisfying ass-pulls or nonsense that feels cobbled together at the last minute. Some character will just come in at the eleventh hour to say "It's so sad that that captain of the guard whose been hunting the ghost, his wife died 10 years ago in the exact same way as the current murders... such a shame" and then it's like oh gee I wonder what's going on.... But then in another vein, there's a lot of stuff that's also convoluted but not vital to the story. Deep-cut historical and occult references (at least to a weeb like me, but I think even a standard Japanese audience might not know all the things that are referenced) that might build some ambiance, but don't serve much purpose except to make it seem like a deeper mystery going on. It's not so much that these things are being set up, but when the more critical components AREN'T getting this treatment, it's feels like a waste. It's like all the things in that should be simple and easy to grasp are needlessly complex and involved, while all the things that should be intricate turn out to be overtly basic.

There's an over-arching plot going on beyond the episodic stories as well, but it's sadly underdeveloped. It focuses on Momonosuke's relationship with and the nature of the three fiendish characters, as well as Momonosuke changing from interacting with them, but developments come in sudden and overstated bursts while skipping over the crucial interstitial stuff. The whole thing (including the epic finale) is all just kind of done half-way.

The pitfalls in both the episodic and background story writing are surely just a matter of not having enough time to build up all the things they need to and satisfactorily pay them off, having to fit an entire ghost story plus overarching plot into 20 minutes an episode and only 13 episodes to do it. It's just too little time. If it was perhaps done like Mononoke where instead of 1 story per episode it uses its time to strongly build up 3 stories over several episodes each, or if it got 24 episodes and got to do two parters and main story and episodic story specific episodes, or if it was 40 minute episodes, or just some other way to divvy up the time and give more time and effort to each individual component, it could've smoothed over most of the issues I'm sure. But coulda woulda shoulda, and all that. What's here is just a watchable but not quite at the next level experience.

As an anthology, I'd have to say Amazing Nuts isn't worth your time. It's basically four concept music videos without any underlying or unifying theme. There's not really a reason these are compiled together, and none of them are strong enough to justify watching any of the others or seeking out the entire set. Of course, with anthologies, you have many attempts to connect with an audience, but I think most would agree that the first story is the only one that you could recommend universally. I'll detail my thoughts on the individual stories below, but the TL;DR is watch the ... first one, only check out the other three at your own discretion.

1. Global Astroliner Gou
This is basically a Gorillaz music video. The animation and art style are extremely appealing. It's cute, humorous, cool, and a treat to behold. It's a shame how much of it goes by in the blink of an eye, because every shot is its own little story. The story is complete, but very hastily concluded and you will definitely be lost in the succession of flashing events. You will loosely be able to understand the story just by watching it, but if you really want to get the full thing, you're going to have to spam the play/pause button and freeze frame a lot. Even then, the story is simple and sweet. I would definitely watch a feature length or even 30 minute OVA of this, but I don't think that's ever happening. The music matches the visuals well and stands alone as a good song. Really the most I can say is that I wanted more, I wish this was the full OVA, and that everything else in this collection was at least on this level.

2. Glass Eye
This was easily my least favorite because it was virtually unintelligible. There were a couple moments I understood what the emotion it is trying to evoke was, but for the most part it was complete Greek. The more offensive thing though is the visuals. It's basically just live-action with a filter over it, and it's butt-ugly. I didn't want to look at it. Even if it told a compelling story, the visuals would be hard to get past. But the nail in the coffin is the song, it's just an Engrish jpop song, bland, forgettable, much like the story it's matched with.

3. Kung-Fu Love
This one is probably the height of visuals for the anthology, but the absolute pit for story. I don't even remember the music, I was mostly trying to keep up with the story. It throws out a premise that loosely sets up the first third of the music video, but the second third is like, "what", and the third feels like an entirely new story just rehashing the designs of characters used in the first part. It's like three trailers for three different movies in a series all crammed into the same trailer. I loved how it looked but I was so detached from what was going on that I gave up trying to follow it after a point. That said, the emotion and animation is obviously the point so people who care more about visceral entertainment will get more out of this than people who want a story or meaning to ground themselves in.

4. Joe and Marilyn
This one would be my personal (distant) second, but it has some major flaws holding it back. First of all, the song sucks. Slightly better than the 2nd one's, and far more fitting and related to the story, but not a very good song still IMO. The visuals are a mixed bag. On one hand, it is almost a direct ripoff of Tim Burton's A Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride. But at the same time, the two central characters have hideous shoujo-face, where the eyes down are smushed into where a normal person's lips to chin would be, and they have big bulbous heads. The rest of the characters though aren't even remotely supposed to resemble humans, they are monstrous and this hideous artstyle fits. The CG looks both surprisingly detailed and yet terribly dated. The story itself flows and makes sense, but it's incomplete and there's not much to sink your teeth into to start with. I might've enjoyed a more fleshed out full-length OVA of it, but who can say? What is here though, is just meh overall. I wouldn't really recommend it, but of the three non-1st stories, it was the most tolerable to me so make of that what you will.

So yeah, overall, your best bet is to just check out the first story on youtube or something and only watch the other three if you just want to see what sticks for yourself.

Such a shame this turned out the way it did. It had the ingredients on-paper to be a fun little OVA series, but it's just wasted on lame jokes, completely random and inconsequential plot, and empty characters.

The story starts off by introducing and uniting the three main characters... and then the rest of the story is driven by random events out of nowhere to propel it along. There's no telling how you got where you are and where you'll end up in the next five seconds. It's entirely disjointed and eventually just drops the very tenuous direction that it even had, which ... was vaguely "get back to Earth." But that goal doesn't matter, the events you're seeing one second don't matter to the next, and so on. The story is a wash, but the characters don't fare any better. They're as one-note from the moment they are introduced to the end of the series. Over 120 minutes of run-time, you don't know any more and they don't change at all from minute 15 to minute 60 to minute 120. They're a couple of traits that events happen to that can loosely be called "characters" and nothing more.

The action in the series is similarly pointless. It just happens. Lots of boom and bang segments but they don't matter, it's all just time being wasted to thrust the characters into the next location for a few moments in a never-ending chain of nonsense. It's like if Family Guy was entirely composed of cutaways, without the premise of an overarching story. And speaking of Family Guy, no matter what you think of it, I guarantee you've laughed at at least ONE joke. You won't be able to say the same for this. The humor is severely lacking. The bulk of it is extremely Japanese, but even if you were the most Japanese person alive, I couldn't imagine someone actually finding it funny. The jokes are mostly wordplay and the most superficial references to Japanese culture. Outside of that, all the jokes have little to no setup and little to no payoff. It's non-sequitur references and puns. After the first episode, the teacher character entirely devolves into making puns and poems. If you think a random haiku out of nowhere very, very loosely related to a thing happening on screen at the time would make you laugh, then hey, maybe I'm wrong and you'll like this show. And to be clear, it's just that the humor could only appeal to a Japanese audience: I've enjoyed many emphatically Japanese comedy series. The point is that even to a Japanese audience, the humor is the most shallow cultural references and wordplay that would make even the cultural ambassador groan.

The only positive thing I can say about this show is that it looks good. If it looked as bland as it is written, then I wouldn't have bothered past the first ten minutes. It clearly has resources and effort put into it, visually, which is probably WHY this show got cancelled instead of given two more episodes like it was apparently planned to be. It was probably hemorrhaging money from the animation costs so given its bad ratings, they axed it as soon as possible. I wish that art and animation and the character designs could've been used for a better series, because they were the only thing that got me through the four episodes in the first place. I should've just dropped it.

And that's the point of this review. This isn't the most terrible thing ever but there is so, so little here to make it worth watching. To make it even worth killing time with. It was a struggle to watch and the sum of my thoughts for the first two episodes was "I really hope it gets better" and the last two "I want it to just be over." Trust me, save yourself the time, and forget about this.

This show is a tricky one to review. Pinning down all the heads of this hydra is quite tricky, because I'm not quite sure where to even begin. For a tl;dr just skip to the end, but if you're actually thinking about watching this, I'll lay out the foremost of my thoughts.

I guess the best place to start is with the first episode, because this is absolutely going to be the biggest barrier. This first episode is where I'd say 95% of the people who drop it will drop it. The first episode starts by sucking the skin off Super Smash ... Bros' dick (Ultimate, specifically) but as cringe as all that is, it's peanuts compared to what comes next. Tomozaki's worldview at this point is that of an insular, jaded loner. He's got nothing going for him but being a smash gremlin and shunning the rest of the world. Quite frankly, he's a boo-hoo beta bitch boy. Through convenient light-novel happenstance, he is face to face with the most popular girl in his school who's also actually his gaming rival and they argue about SOCIETY. The problem here, the thing that is going to turn off and probably already lost many people who watched it, is that the show makes absolutely no attempt to separate its viewpoint from that of Tomozaki's. There is no assurance that the show doesn't necessarily endorse Tomozaki's outlook, there's nothing to let you as the audience know that what the character is arguing ISN'T the position the show will take and try to justify over the next 11 episodes. Because for the bulk of this first episode, the only perspective of weight you're shown is that of the MC, through inner monologue and uninterrupted tirades against antagonistic characters. There is little done to humble the protagonist, to balance his perspective with self-reflection or other voices of equal weight, to make it less serious and absolute than it comes across as, and without any assurance of what you are watching being self-aware, this can easily lead you to take this as the show's and protagonist's viewpoints being synonymous. It's not until the very end of the episode where his perspective is meaningfully challenged, and literally from this point out, it's not really like it was before. There's more self-awareness, more dialogue, and more exploration from episode 2 onward (more or less, it's not exactly the deepest) and the protagonist is never again that much of a complete sniveling loser. So this first episode does a terrible job of ushering you in and laying out what the show is gonna be like, but if you can make it past this first stumbling block, it's honestly a far cry from what you see here.

Well, okay first let's get something else out of the way: the cosmic background cringe. The video game analogies and constant smash fellating will be omnipresent, they never go away, but they're also very easy to let roll off your back. They're cringe, they're lame, the whole LIFE IS LIKE A VIDEO GAME shit is here to stay, but it's not enough to repel a champ like you if you made it through the first episode. Good job champ. Now I won't bring it up again, but it's there the whole time, so just get used to it.

There isn't really anything especially noteworthy until episode 4 when there's another giga-cringe moment. Without getting too much into it, he basically wins new friends by REEEEEing a popular girl who called smash gay.

After this point though, the MC overnight chills out and stops being a sperg. From this point in the show onward, the show is basically standard romcomdram fare. There's one more particular moment I need to address, but for the most part, from episode 2 onward, it is coloring inside the genre lines. If you like this kind of stuff, if you want your light novel high school vicarious do-over, here it is. The show is extremely derivative of Oregairu, and whether you've seen it or not, it's still going to feel familiar to you. It's just very safe, formulaic, by the numbers, but adequate enough. If you read the synopsis, read this review, and made it through episode 1, I think it's safe to say you'll find it serviceable. Maybe even you'll find the later developments slightly more compelling than the bare minimum. I honestly started coming around to it in the last 3 or 4.

But speaking of that, I have to mention that particular moment. I couldn't NOT. This show, this genre really, is pretty indulgent wish fulfillment, but even then, what I'm about to mention is on a whole 'nother level. THE GANG is out on a camping trip and the boys bond by... comparing pen0rs. And of course, for your wish fulfillment fantasy, your self-insert can't be anything less than hung right? That's right, they felt it necessary to make the MC packing and everyone in the story know, and there are callbacks to this later (in passing but still.) Maybe you don't think it's that big of a deal, maybe this says something about me, but I'd wager most people will at the very least raise an eyebrow when they get to this part, if not do what I did and clutch my shoulders and writhe in cringe at the audacity to include this.

There's more I could say critical of the story or the themes or the characters or the drama or this and that and the other but the long and short of it is that this is your highschool romcomdram slop with extra heapings of cringe on top. Maybe you're like me and get a kick out of the agony and ecstasy of high-quality cringe, left gobsmacked by the bizarre unfiltered discomfort and savoring the eons it feels like for it to pass. Maybe you don't give a shit and can stomach it just fine. Maybe you think it's not cringe at all (hate to tell you what that means about you then tho.) Whatever the case, I think if you just trust me that it only gets as bad as the first episode and that the MC's bitch boy attitude is intentional, then afterward you'll find a tolerable experience. But if you don't want any cringe, why are you still on the fence over whether to watch this or not, and moreover, why are you watching anime in the first place?

As a huge fan of Eve no Jikan, as I was watching Mizu no Kotoba, I was having quite a bit of deja vu, and sure enough, this is the springboard for what later became one of my favorite movies. It was certainly interesting to see the roots, the nascent ideas starting to kick in the womb, and particularly visually and atmospherically, it still has some merits of its own. Sadly, the themes and narrative elements are quite a bit weaker here. Muddled and benign, breaking away from coherence (if it ever was in the first place,) and simply pretty words with ... not much underneath. As it's only 9 minutes, it might still be worth checking out purely as a shoegazing diversion, but I highly recommend you watch Eve no Jikan first or simply instead.

I was honestly so surprised that I enjoyed this as much as I did and I feel compelled to write a little recommendation for those who might give it a chance and find the same level of enjoyment, and also to make it clear who this WON'T appeal to so people don't waste their time. Right off the bat, I should say that this is an extremely amateurish affair on almost every level. The writing is linear, straightforward, surface-level, simplistic, and unambitious. It doesn't have any deep themes (honestly to say it even has any themes is debatable), the writer can't really ... juggle multiple concurrent plot threads, there will only ever be one thing going on at a time, stopping arbitrarily to pick back up a different thread every so often, but never in any intertwined, multi-layered story. The pacing is stop and go, wildly accelerating or skipping through swaths of time only to slam the brakes and progress in real time before skipping forward again. The characters are entirely one-dimensional, the relationships are shallow, honestly there's barely any difference to the recurring side characters and a nameless rando that gets one line in terms of depth. As far as the world-building, you are told a little, shown even less, and don't really get any feel for the setting beside what you explicitly are shown. The systems, the places, the people, the dynamics of the whole world are loose, undefined, and only fleshed out as relevant to the protagonist's journey. The animation is minimal and basic, backgrounds are simple and undetailed, the most that can be said about the music, even the OP and ED, is that there is music. The voice acting sounds like they scraped up all the aspiring new hires from some agency and put them to work on their first professional gig.
So in what universe can I say all this and still want to recommend it? Well, in spite of everything, this show has a charm to it that with the right attitude makes all the ways in which it's quite simply not good more digestible. It's earnest, it's lighthearted but not entirely without serious moments, and its mostly the ways in which it will surprise you with hints of aspiration that may endear it to you. It comes off like the writing of a guy who just wants to entertain people with his simple rpgmaker game story, and against all odds managed to get it picked up by a studio to make his dream a reality, and even though that production is underwhelming, there's still hints of someone caring more than they had to. There are random humor moments that actual catch you off guard, both in the writing and how much effort the show put into delivering them (not that these are by any means high effort, but the bar is so low that they could have gotten away with ANYTHING and chose to do even anything more is commendable.) The story despite being so amateurish flows, it makes sense, and eventually becomes slightly compelling as you come to know the characters. Despite the world being so loosely cobbled together, the fact that I actually wanted to see more of it speaks to *something.*

This show is something that has "good" shyly hanging onto my tongue, anxious to leave my lips. But I can say that it is a comfy, relaxing piece of idle entertainment. I think this is the perfect kind of show to serve as the parsley to a more substantial piece of media. Use it to clean your teeth in between heavier dramas or nut-quaking action movies. It truly does feel like an escapist diversion. If you only want to experience masterpieces or things that even aspire to be them, this show is not where you'll find it and I'll say simply move on. But for those who just want something to watch lying in bed cuddling with a pet or to pick your heart up after watching tearjerkers or simply be stimulation for an idle brain, I think The Great Cleric is an underdog you can get behind.

Your average battle shounen, with a tacked on forced romance component
The only interesting thing about it is the tsukumogami designs. They're basically just gijinkas for traditional japanese tools, but the way they incorporate the properties of the tool into their physical appearance, their personalities, and their combat abilities is honestly pretty creative and refreshing, definitely the highlight of the show. However, the show is extremely stale otherwise. The protagonist is a gary stu and his love interest/macguffin is the perfect mary sue to match. There's not a moment where you feel anything is in danger, the stakes are wholly nominal, ... the fights are a mere formality, everything narratively is bog standard. The show would work better as a Natsumi Yuujinchou clone, without the forced save the girl save the world crap that comprises the vast majority of the runtime. Despite the archetypal characters, in contexts removed from specifically the romance subplot, the muted slice of life comedy is actually amusing but it's not enough to justify this as is.

The Mars Daybreak is the picture of average. It has a beginning, middle, and end. There's really not much more to say about it. The protagonist is a Gary Stu, everyone else is a static stereotype, and only a couple characters demonstrate any growth, albeit along predictable trajectories. You might like a couple of the side characters (there are a ton of em so it would be rare that not one strikes a chord with you) but they all get so little time or effort in fleshing them out that there's nothing to any of them but a handful of traits. ... If you like any character, it better be Gram, because he's the one who you're gonna be seeing most of. The setting, the characters, the plot, everything here lays the minimum groundwork for a story and nothing more. It wasn't so awful that I couldn't bear to watch but there's genuinely not any reason to watch this. Perhaps a worse fate than being steaming garbage :/

Blue Gender started strong... for 15 minutes. It's all down-hill from there. Despite having a ton of tags & genres, it doesn't do any of them well. Quite the opposite, it manages to do every single thing it attempts worse than if it had just neglected to tackle it in the first place. I honestly don't even know where to start with this, but I guess since he was the first thing you're introduced to, let's start with the main character, Yuji. Awoken to a hectic battle, with the power to simply run away in horror, you can immediately empathize ... with him. He's alone, in the dark, being chased by ominous soldiers and hellish bug monsters, with no clue when or where he is or what's going on. You can understand the angst, the despair, the frustration, the confusion, you can see why he's frightened and jumpy, or to put it simply, this isn't Yuji at his best. However... as the situation relaxes and he gets his bearings, you unfortunately get to see what Yuji is like even when he's feeling better, and it's just as bad. He's sanctimonious, selfish, rash, and his only "good" traits are that he has a basic moral code, and that's it. Unfortunately his more consistent traits, his self-centered impulsiveness means he's always going about doing the right thing in the worst way possible and only the power of hack writing can save his sorry ass. If it weren't for the foot-thick steel plot armor (sometimes literally) around him, he would do more to damage his cause than any mindless bug alien mook or cartoonish evil government asshole. At his best moments, he's tolerable. He's never likable, you will never say "man I can't wait to see Yuji" or "How will Yuji deal with this situation?" An insufferable lead character, and that brings us to his better half (only marginally), Marlene. Marlene is the cool, stony soldier, tough as nails and committed to the mission: except when the author gets horny. Yeah, Marlene is either the stand-in for Yuji, the object of cringeworthy lust or romance-pandering, and basically eye and heart candy, never rising above her stereotype.

That brings me to one of the biggest issues with this show: this "romance" is basically the driving force of everything in the show after the first couple episodes, and it SUCKS. Yuji sucks, Marlene sucks, the two pining for each other sucks, and the amount of ways the plot has to warp and bend to get them apart then bring them back together then take them away from each other then bring them back together over and over again is excruciating. I would suggest you grab a spoon if you wanna watch this with which you may gag yourself. The major conflict of the first quarter of the show is Yuji being torn between Marlene or some nomad fling he meets on the way to the next story beat. It is so ridiculously contrived, and the writing is so sloppy that only that aforementioned double-duty plot armor can keep them from meeting the same fate as the rest of the meat puppets the show throws into harm's way to give the illusion that life in Blue Gender is fleeting. Going by the quick departures for the rest of the cast, with particularly gruesome and unceremonious deaths early on to this end, you would think that life is extremely fragile and death could come at any moment. Yet after the first episode, you can't ever fathom that Yuji or Marlene could ever die. They will always be the last ones standing in the face of wave after wave of endless (and purposeless) bug attacks. The grimdark tone the series wants is entirely undermined by how hasty the writer is to throw Yuji and Marlene into peril and how half-assedly it bails them back out. There's no tension for either of these fuckheads but everyone else in the show is so throwaway and doomed from their entrance that there's nowhere in this to place your concern. The major conflict of this show isn't pragmatism vs idealism in wartime, it's not man vs nature, it's not even man vs man, it's "when will Yuji and Marlene get together?" Gory deaths for the side characters, dismal outcomes for everybody not in the starring roles, frightening stakes for those not graced with plot armor all give the illusion of a serious, mature world and story, but this is a juvenile romance novel for tweens at heart. And to make it clear, I'm not mad that it's a romance. I'm mad that the romance is ass and all other aspects of the show are undermined by it, not that any of them fare much better in terms of quality of the writing.

The show is split into basically two halves, the first half being Yuji and Marlene's meet-cute on Earth and ensuing romantic escapades, and the second half being Yuji and Marlene being kept apart by a comically incompetent evil government in space and tying up (poorly) all of the underdeveloped story threads that aren't the romance. What's going on with the blues? What does the goofy ahh government want Yuji's ass for? Well, you'll get your hand-wave answers but you'd probably be more satisfied if you got your answers from chatgpt. The story is loose and only there to facilitate the cheesy action-adventure-romance, the action is exceedingly dull, similarly perfunctory. Waves of mooks, stormtrooper accuracy and cartoonish bad-guys, the bugs are flip-flopping between unstoppable terminator-ass forces of nature and squishy mindless walking corpses, the action is under-animated and veiled in darkness and often occuring entirely offscreen or on radar screens and there's a lot of standing around gesturing while nothing is happening. Even when it's just combat, no bawdy kissy kissy garbage involved, it's rather dull. Throw in the unwelcome, misplaced, and overemphasized horniness/loneliness and it's just a puke-inducing drag. There's no moral conflicts to chew on, there are no characters or plights to get behind, the only thing keeping you watching will be to find out if it gets on the rails and ever delivers on what the first episode made it seem like it would be, but rest-assured, it doesn't. Nothing but moaning, groaning blah awaits.