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May 4, 2020
This is a checklist anime, a perfect 5/10 series, a show crammed with cliches and cardboard characters/situations. For example, here is a leaked conversation between executives:
"So listen, Bob. The first couple episodes aren't getting great ratings."
"That's terrible, Jim!"
"We need to get more viewers or this will just be 'Jiggly Jiggly Heaven' all over again."
"Okay, so I'm just going to add boobs. Lots of boobs."
"Great! Make sure to take the amount of boobs you're thinking of adding and double it!"
"Boobs!"
"Booobs!!"
There was definitely potential to tell an interesting story, but about a fourth of the way in I noticed that all of the character progression was taking
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place off-screen. I'm a big fan of the live-work scenarios because it provides two big stages for arcs, and I also enjoy country-to-city backgrounds too--it's a handy way to show things off to audiences without seeming like a shitty tour guide. I have no problems with the checklist characters either, and all the VA was done splendidly; likewise, animation is of a high standard.
But Hinako's entire arc from frightened scarecrow to actress is skipped. Instead, most scenes are about boob closeups, yuri panic, cute chibi set pieces (which I really found charming), and things otherwise unrelated to the "central plot." There's the swimsuit shopping/beach episode, the sleepover/training camp episode, the school open house episode, the visiting mom episode, etc etc etc.
I 100% have zero issue with generic anime or generic anything if the execution is good and there's even a grain of soul/originality/passion/creativity involved. Hinako Note does not have any of those things. Is it bad? No. I did finish all twelve episodes after all, but for the last four I found myself only half-watching while I browsed hent--educational websites.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Mar 9, 2020
Identity crisis.
tl;dr for "is Sakura Quest worth the investment of 25 episodes?" = yes with an if and no with a but.
Yes, if you're looking for a series with tip-top-tier production values in every single aspect from art, animation, music, sound, and voice acting. Yes, if you are starving for more series with comfy, low-stakes and low-key country atmospheres that do their utmost to prop up rural life. Yes, if you're a huge fan of excellent characters who fill out the runtime with large personalities, well-imbued quirks, and established attitudes, and story arcs that aren't padded out. Also yes if you like old people and
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just want to enjoy all of the above with a long series that doesn't have evil villains or end-of-the-world scenarios.
No in my opinion, but Sakura Quest does excel in everything I just mentioned and if those are the things that draw you to anime then you'll be in good company here.
For me, this series never, ever wrote its own ground rules for existing and stuck to them. Is this a comedy slice-of-life with dramatic arcs? Is it a drama with comedic relief? Is it a show specifically about fighting rural decline and geriatric problems? Is it something for young adults to watch and think "hey, I want to be like that when I'm old!" or in general an anime for finding a path in life? There's no telling. Sakura Quest fails to plant its flag on solid earth and claim its own standing. Some arcs are interesting, some aren't so much, but the one thing that all of them have in common is a total imbalance between comedy and drama.
It's difficult for me to quantify exactly my feeling after finishing the series. To put it best, I think, is to say that the series just isn't cheerful enough, but not in the typical misdirected manner I see so many anime fall into. SoL shows like this really rely on a general feeling to carry interest, and that's even more important with 25 episodes, but absolutely every arc dumps far too much on the "drama" side of the scales. Any time something happy occurs in the world or to the characters, a far more depressing counterweight is tossed in that ruins everything--and usually it's within minutes or seconds. There's never enough time for the relief (which had often been building for multiple episodes) to kick in before yet another bad thing happens. It just doesn't make sense at all, because ALL of the bricks for a happy, breezy anime are set up perfectly, but the director/writer/producer somehow bungled the execution and instead of making a solid wall ended up with a jenga tower.
By the way, the tendency for drama to immediately and permanently overrule cheeriness persists literally until the last scene of the last episode, so if that's the kind of thing that really bothers you (like it does me), just skip this one entirely. It's not worth the investment, even if the characters and the world are done so well.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Mar 6, 2020
The MC is not a typical anime pussy. 9/10 material just for that alone, but in case that's not enough I also have other reasons...
Arifureta's beginning is terrible, there's no way to sugarcoat it; the first episode is so utterly cringe-worthy I really don't have any explanation other than maybe it was a discarded pilot that was accidentally cast instead of the real version. The next 3-5 episodes are also pretty bad, although they become progressively less so as the world fills out, mechanics and rules are introduced, and the world begins to take shape.
At episode six, the MC and his ever-growing harem emerge
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from the labyrinth and the story really explodes in terms of scope--so much so that it's like a different series entirely. I absolutely loathe flashbacks and feel they are a mechanic that lazy, uninspired, and just *bad* writers fall back on when they can't be bothered to detail their creations...but the first half of the Arifureta is so awful they probably should have begun on episode six and just flashbacked the first five. Yeah...they're that terrible.
I won't blab on about the story, because in all reality it's the same, regular isekai harem OP MC anime plot progression that's been done a dozen times already in the last four or five years. But I will never lose the conviction that being generic is fine as long as it's done very well, and it's done very well indeed here.
What really makes this such a great investment, in my opinion, is that the MC is absolutely not a little bitch. He doesn't have a high-pitched, effeminate voice. He doesn't avoid kissing or touching women. He's not obsessed revenge. Best of all: he kills his enemies. There's no ambiguity about it, he absolutely annihilates the people in his way, usually by shooting them in the face with his it's-totally-six-shots-guys revolver. I can't even estimate how many series I've seen where the MC forgives and forgets through the power of friendship magic how terrible people are. Nope, not here. This guy will blow their heads clean off. Nice.
I'm an adult. I like adult reasoning. Adults don't act like children, particularly in live-or-die situations. Sadly that's almost never shown in anime, because the vast majority is for children. But this one isn't. This protagonist emulates actual, adult logic in extreme problem solving. Again, nice.
Besides the first half of the show being just...yeah, the music throughout the whole show is wrong. Battle scenes are accompanied by some kind of smooth jazz/soft rock that sounds some guys at a 3am jam session in a sax bar when everyone is totally hammered and can't hear. It makes no sense. I can't explain why no one thought "hey, this music sucks really bad and I should tell them to stop." Oh well. Also, as a word of warning, the story is not complete, but in this case the second season is already in production so that's fine. There isn't really a "big bad" antagonist in a real sense so even if the second season gets canned the story itself isn't bogged down with a bad cliffhanger.
Most people gave up before the halfway point. If you can make it there and still have the willpower to go forward, I promise you'll enjoy Arifureta.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Jan 30, 2020
This is a beautiful anime. I also hate it.
The most striking aspect is the art, which is just gorgeous. The colors are rich, the palette is broad, and even sad scenes are packed with nuance. The music is great and above all is perfectly suited to the content (ie, no weird guitars or synths for no reason). The Japanese cast is wonderful and acted to perfection. Not even bit-part characters have repeated or annoying voices, which was super surprising.
The characters are full and exciting. The MC follows the typical anime/fantasy arc of powerless naive princess growing into herself, but I always value execution over
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originality and Akatsuki pulls right through to the end. My only genuine dislike for her came at the overabundance of tears, mainly because a good deal of the crying scenes would have been just as emotional without the waterworks. The MC's companions are--with the obvious exception of the Yellow Dragon--fully incorporated with multi-episode arcs including flashbacks and extensive building of their stories.
Akatsuki's created world is also crammed with life. The cities and villages are stereotypically Asian, but they all have slightly different aesthetics and none of them are rushed or tossed off as pointless backdrops. The landscape is varied and interesting, the fighting scenes are choreographed exquisitely, and with just a few tiny exceptions there's no filler at all.
But...
It was around episode 16 that it hit me square in the brain: this series will be incomplete. I double checked that there was no sequel. I frantically looked at its release year, scanned the wiki, Googled....and then I knew. This was going to be another Densetsu no Yuusha no Densetsu. It will go great all the way up until it ends before anything substantial happens. I struggled to pull through. By episode 20 I knew that the "final battle" was going to be an utter waste of my life with an 11th hour antagonist. By the time the Yellow Dragon literally waltzed into the picture in Episode 24 I knew I'd been bamboozled.
There's not going to be any more Akatsuki no Yona. The series ended five years ago. I spent twenty-four episodes of my time watching the glorious growth of a great main character only to be shit on in the end. This is clearly just the first in a multi-arc epic tale, but for some godforsaken reason the producers chose to waste time and money on the prologue. I don't even have the mental fortitude to check the state of its source material. All I know is it was just another waste of time.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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Jan 6, 2020
Ten episodes of absolute hilarity, two episodes of overwhelming melodrama. Why--seriously, why?!--is it so hard to avoid the inevitable dramatic turn of just about every comedy I've ever seen? Can't funny things be funny and dramatic things be dramatic? There is no objective reason to mix the two, because people who enjoy comedy and people who enjoy drama will both be getting screwed.
I was actually lmaoing for the first three or four episodes, and all the rest up until 11 I had a smile on my face at the very least. Humor is undoubtedly subjective, but anime humor I feel is far less contingent on
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societal differences; from what I've experienced, a vast amount of the humor is derived from silly faces and voices rather than what is actually said. Shinchou Yuusha combines both and mixes the dry, deadpan brand of comedy displayed by the protagonist with the overt, slapstick, goofy-face-a-scene of his goddess sidekick. There were several times I legitimately had tears in my eyes from laughing so hard.
Episode 11 and 12 have zero humor. Everything is tears. Everything is depression. Everything is melodrama with an infinite emphases on the "melo" part. There aren't any jokes, silly faces, quips, gags, goofs, lols, or even keks. Instead you get an exposition dump from out of nowhere along with endless crying and sadness, and a total lack of relief. Honestly, what the fuck? I don't know or care about the source material, I care about what I watched, and what I watched the last forty minutes was absolute garbage. If these two episodes had been placed somewhere in the middle of the series I would have at least understood (although I still would have loathed them) because there would be palate cleansers later. But no. The producers decided instead to take a steaming pile of shit as a capstone.
Whatever. If you stop after ten episodes and just read spoilers this will easily--EASILY--be a 9/10 or even 10/10. But don't say I didn't warn you about the last two episodes.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Nov 1, 2019
[SOME SPOILERS]
Back in high school, my English teacher was big into literary treasure hunts. We would read the classics and spend days or weeks dissecting words written hundreds of years ago for hidden secrets or obfuscated intentions supposedly stashed away by authors who obviously knew that pimply kids half a millennium later would be sweating over term papers. "Yes but what did he MEAN by that?" she would lecture. I didn't know--who really does?--I just wanted to test out of English in university so I would write parodies and fake it.
Berserk is like an old classic written by a roguish magician. I was very
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much into the series in no small part due to my recent re-addiction to Mountain Blade (Perisno in particular), and I wanted to enjoy an anime that followed a mercenary company. Jormungand was great in this regard but clearly the setting didn't particularly line up with the game. Berserk it was.
I hated the animation style at first. Twenty-five episodes later and I still don't like it. I'm not dense enough to ignore that the manga came first, but I didn't read the manga and so the art and animation I have to work with is what was contained in the anime. In general I'm a sucker for huge production values and Berserk felt cheap: overloaded with scrolling still images and frequent static shots. Often there were no sounds effects or music for long periods and I didn't appreciate it.
Then the narrative took off, the Band of the Hawk came together, and Guts began to go, well...berserk. The art and sound made more sense and actually became charming, even if it was still ugly to me. Personalities were born and molded; Casca specifically had her backstory greatly expanded. Awesome! The Band was riding high and the story was objectively accelerating.
And then the roguish magician danced to a Kansas City Shuffle and it all came apart. "Oh, you thought you were watching an anime about the rise and fall of a mercenary band?" the sorcerer said. "You were not. This is, in fact, a tale about alternative hellish dimensions with a huge tiddie demon and mass sacrifice. Everyone you grew attached to over the last twenty-two episodes is now dead or irreversibly ruined and the entire anime was a big ruse to get you to feel feelings."
I don't like being baited. The anime was so long that I'd forgotten about the first episode, and afterwards there hadn't been so much as a hint of the way things would turn out. I had no inkling that the ultraviolent battle scenes and sweet '80s synth tunes would give way to a Clive Barker orgasm so detached from the in-series reality that it essentially overrode all that came before.
So I thought about my old English teacher. What did they MEAN by this? Betrayal, greed, loss, sacrifice, goals, love. I get it. I liked Guts. I liked Casca. I liked Judeau and Pippin, and although Corkus was a caricature he still fit inside the collective. Just like that they were all gone and Casca was destroyed as a character and all I could think was "what was the point of building all that up?" The only conclusion I've been able to reach is so viewers could feel an even bigger sense of treachery and sadness over the finale.
And I don't like that. I also don't like Shakespeare or Voltaire or Dickens. I like Howard, Larsson, I like Lee Child. Perhaps that makes me stupid, or perhaps I'm simply the sort of person who appreciates a progressive narrative that goes from A to Z but is told with masterful skill. I know I'm in the overwhelming minority by not enjoying Berserk, but in my opinion it would have been so much better without the total transition towards the end.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Sep 25, 2019
This is a spectacular piece of shit and I can't recommend it to anyone, no matter how vampire anime deprived they might be.
My #1 criticism is the colossal shitshow that is the art style. It's difficult describe with words, but it's that kind of "art" where someone throws a whole lot of motifs around that *should* be artistic but the way it's all put together just produces a cringy mess. Art in general is highly subjective, but in this anime it's comparable to showing up at a high-class show in Paris and instead of seeing masterful works through the centuries you actually see what happens
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when a methhead eats twenty tacos then goes potty on some canvas. (I'll leave further art comparisons alone since getting into the whole "inflated art prices are actually thinly-veiled attempts at money laundering" isn't anime related.) The nail in the coffin (HA) for me was the poorly Photoshopped photographs that are spliced in generously; in the final episode, there's an obvious picture of New York City with the Empire State Building right in the middle...despite the series taking place in Tokyo. Lmao.
My second major complaint is the loli crap. Fetishes are one thing, and DanceBund certainly does the whole "my body may LOOK like a nine year old, but I'm ACTUALLY a seventy-four thousand year old vampire queen" meme to justify showing prepubescent T&A, but it's the literal child molesting during a later arc that really pissed me off. There's a boy and he's shown making out (complete with pornographic spit exchanges and sound effects) with a grown woman before they fondle and so on. I get that Shaft were trying to be edgy--and again, I don't care at all about personal fetishes--but this was just fucking gross.
My third primary complaint is the shitty storytelling. As the series progresses it becomes constructed more like a crappy Youtuber shouting at a camera about whatever hot topic is in the news: jump cuts, jump cuts, jump cuts, random pictures, random Photoshopped images, random colors, jump cuts, cump juts, tuj mumps............it all just melts together with the terrible art direction to cement my opinion that this was directed by an idiot. And it didn't HAVE to be! The actual narrative is pretty good even in spite of the dumb central plot (vampire-werewolf forbidden love). There are ever-so-brief glimpses of what could have been, like political scheming, vampires revealing themselves to the world, artificial blood, power struggles, and more, but it's all lost in jump cuts and shitty Photoshopped images.
I don't recommend anyone watch this. There are zero redeeming qualities at the end of the series, and I honestly regret wasting any amount of time on this steaming turd.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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Sep 12, 2019
This is one of those journeys that's worth experiencing even though the path is rocky, filled with puddles, there are bandits waiting to steal your wallet, and even when you reach the end it's not entirely satisfying.
Production values are impeccable in every area. The sound effects in particular are outstanding, the music is of the highest quality, and there are scenes where the art actually made my jaw gape. I watched with subtitles and all of the Japanese voices are done to a high standard and the casting is perfect for every character. Some of the animation is a bit choppy during battle scenes
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(and there are numerous repeated sequences), but it's in no way immersion breaking.
The unfortunate anchor weighing down this space opera leviathan is the pacing and enormous quantities of melodrama. If this were ten episodes less with all of the repetitive weeping scenes lopped into oblivion it would easily be my favorite science fiction series of all time. One particular example is a three episode arc (it could have been four, my eyes were drooping quite a bit) where the Princess must make a decision. It's a decision everyone knows she's going to make one way (including all the characters besides her), and there's absolutely no tension whatsoever...but five or ten minutes of each episode of the arc is dedicated to her agonizing over it with all the subsequent weeping and melancholic music. Why? What purpose does this serve? It's utterly boring.
There are also Nodos battles (Nodos being demigod mechas) that drag on for multiple episodes filled with recycled animations (even complete sequences repeated in entirety thanks to messing with space-time). It's not exciting at all. Good editors/directors deal with time travel scenes by flashing through the parts we've already seen, bad ones show it all just to pad out the melodrama.
Despite the overreliance on unneeded filler, there are many genuine scenes of drama that had me choking up internally. I won't spoil anything, but the majority are shown with incredible art and masterful music that demonstrated the level of talent in the production studio. I can't stress enough that the story here is extremely good and if your tolerance level for pointless scenes is higher than mine this is a no brainer to watch. I think this could have been more, but what is here I still enjoyed tremendously.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Apr 19, 2019
I don't care about incest, harems, fan service, lolis, or any other crap: what I want is a funny show that entertains me to the point I forget how shit IRL is. Anything else is a pleasant bonus surprise. Oniichan makes two critical mistakes that prevent it from being interesting:
1) It's not lewd enough
2) The entire point of the series gets boring about halfway through
As for the first point, even watching the uncensored version there weren't enough lewd moments to keep my interest, and because of the second point I actually began to nod off during the last couple episodes. I really don't know why
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I kept on with it, except maybe avoiding work or the fact I was generally starving for harems.
Series like DxD or Monmusu maintain their lewdity from start to finish and also have good stories to tell while there aren't cartoon tiddies flopping back and forth. It's fun to stay involved in both senses. Oniichan doesn't have consistent fan service and the "slice of life" feel it tries hard to maintain doesn't present any interesting scenarios. There's a bikini judging contest towards the end of the series that was so utterly boring I don't think it could have been done any worse even if there was a free-entry contest called "design the worst bikini judging contest and win five billion dollarioos." The last couple episodes are also quite heavy on flashbacks, and those aren't interesting either because I couldn't have given less of a fuck how these people met as kids since I just watched ten episodes of them being friends already.
The spicy incest angle is also boring to watch because the brother never once slips up in refusing advances and the sister is obnoxious in all ways. She isn't sexy or alluring or possessing of a funny, witty personality: she's a bratty bitch who never stops whining about everything. Supporting characters in the "harem" (it's weak and nothing at all like DxD, etc) have various angles to them but no depth to speak of. I also think the legitimate loli was gross, although maybe that's just my puritanical upbringing clawing its way through my adult facade.
Why not a 1? Because I still finished it. The premise was decent, and what little lewd scenes there were at least made me pay attention. I don't particularly regret watching either, but I definitely wouldn't recommend to anyone else unless you're like me and just about out of new harem shows that actually have some "plot" to them.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Apr 14, 2019
This is a really great anime that's plagued by serious pacing issues. Twelve episodes is not a time commitment worth lamenting on the grand scale of things considering my body isn't that old, but unfortunately my soul resides in a jade skeleton that's collecting dust in a tomb decorated extensively with signs that read "pick one fucking plot thread and stick with it you nervous bungusbreachers."
I expected a pure comedy. I know, it was my mistake. The prolific "comedy" tag on MAL has led me astray so many times in my short months as a purveyor of digitized Laotian hand weaving techniques and I absolutely
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should have learned my lesson by now. But as they say in the biz, "once a total idiot, always a total moran." Or something like that. Who knows, it's not like enjoying Mongolian cartoons is actually a job for anyone.
Anyway, this series is about a little sister-obsessed light novel writer and his half dozen or so accomplices. "OMG accomplices in what?" -u. Glad you asked: in the heinous cardinal sin of pissing me off by lacking confidence to maintain focus as E I T H E R a comedy O R a drama. One episode is about omni-erectional mobility devices (yes, that's spelled correctly, and yes, I get the reference) and a guy with a meter-long sworddick (yes, that's how it's referred to), the next couple episodes are about unrequited love, dead mothers, broken hearts, and an unresolved conclusion. Earlier there were two young guys going to a sauna for ass research (yes) only to find shriveled grannies, but then the next episode was some melodramatic whatever or other. There is Z E R O consistency.
Most hand-drawn Uzbek tuna fishing motion pictures start as comedies and then turn into something else, which is enough for me to drop about half the animes I start. Here there isn't enough episode-to-episode coherence to *have* an arc like that. It's one up, one down, one up, one down all the way through. And it didn't have to be like that. It really absolutely totally could have been a riotous and raunchy comedy show. I'm serious when I say there are legitimately roflworthy moments. ...but then it decides to be a drama and I found my eyelids drooping out of tedium.
So, worth your time? Even though I came away from it with a bad taste I'd say it probably is. I don't think there are enough productions in any medium that deal with self-genesis, which is a real shame. The characters are all interesting and when it's funny, it's *really* funny--but when it gets serious, it gets *really* serious for no good reason whatsoever. I'll rewatch this in a few months and I plan to skip all the drama episodes...and I know I'll love it. Take that as you will.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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