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Turn A Gundam is a series of good episodes (When it isn't being Turn A Gundam) in a sea of mediocre to bad episodes (When it is being Turn A Gundam). By MAL standards, this anime is not very popular, which creates the effect that most reviews of it are popular because they come from a sampled bias of Gundam fans.

While it starts with a very good first episode, showcasing the late XIXth century to early XXth century setting, the reality is that most of the anime is comprised not of this, but of pointless mecha fights in green prairies without any personal stakes involved. ... Indeed, it was the time of "sponsor-mandated one mecha fight per episode", though while anime like Macross manage to structure themselves in a way that it is never a problem or even imperceptible, here it sticks out like a sore thumb.
There's a concept I coined named "The Emma Effect" (Based on the comparisons between the manga and anime of Emma) where not doing something when you should will prevent you from simply continuing at any time, giving you the overhead of having to recreate the circumstances for that thing to occur. Turn A suffers from that in the form of it being always promised that "the plot will proceed in the next peace meeting", the problem being that every peace meeting is always interrupted by a mecha fight and doesn't continue after it has ended, there will only be a second try a few episodes later when the cycle will repeat.

Indeed this structure makes it so Turn A has no real plot until it's final quarter (Now you understand why the first movie in it's recap duology covers 75% of the series), but rather a myriad of different ways of wasting your time. This is true to a point that the main conflict that jump-starts the entire story is resolved off-screen once it ends.
I came to this anime upon seeing clips of episodes such as "The Cow Episode" or "The Washing Machine Episode", but the rest of it has a completely different vibe. At first I couldn't understand why, but I did so upon watching episodes 32 and 33 (The Manupichi Arc): At first, I was a bit annoyed, "Bah, we're pausing a story so we can get an unrelated one?" but those ended up being some of my favorite episodes solely by doing something that most of Turn A didn't, which is exploring it's own world and having us meet interesting characters with arcs and motivations.

Turn A could've easily be mistaken for an early 90's or even 80's anime (Which isn't a problem), due to it's choice of a "flatter" artstyle, without much detail. Adding to this "uniqueness" would be it's Victorian-esque setting, unorthodox mecha designs in virtue by being designed by Syd Mead and "different" cast of seiyuu: Many didn't have many other works after that, some would grow to become legendary, such as Romi Park and Fukuyama Jun.

I do consider it a large improvement over Zeta Gundam (Which isn't a very high bar) in the sense that, unlike Zeta, "with heavy surgery" you could turn A (ba dum tss) into something functional.
Turn A is "realistic" in the worst sense of the world, because believe me when I say it: You don't want your art to be realistic, you really want it to be romantic.
Arma 3 is a realistic war game: Most of the time you'll be shooting (And missing) at small brown smudges in the distance, nothing will happen for a couple minutes, then you get shot out of nowhere and die. Realistic? Totally! Fun? No!
This is a common criticism, mainly aimed at so-called "anti-war" movies, since because a movie has to be interesting and have a compelling narrative, it ends up making war appealing regardless (This is scientifically proven with such movies actually increasing the number of people enlisting).
So in a way, we should give our props to Tomino by REALLY being anti-war: Most of Turn A is about pointless small skirmishes every time, everywhere, for plots of land which will be worthless after all that discussion, all the while the higher ups of each side waste time with pleasantries and the common man tries to continue living their life (In here represented mainly by the characters of Keith and his quest to have a wealthy bakery and Fran Doll and her dream to become a journalist).

Overall, I give the same tip here that I give to watching JoJo Part 3 before the Egypt arc: Just watch a selection of the best episodes, you REALLY won't be missing much.

Lily Borjano is cute, though. Also, I really like Kapools, they're very nice.

"Context" is a key word.
Galaxy Fraulein Yuna was made in the context of promoting it's two Adventure Games for the PC-Engine (And later it's third one). A lot of it is fanservice to such games.
If you're on MAL, however, chances are that you actually watched it because of one of two different contexts:
1: The fact that it came to the west on DVD and was even dubbed, meaning you learned from it wither first-hand or via someone which did (e.g. an anime blog)
2: The fact that it had the name "Shinbou Akiyuki" in it (He only made the storyboards for episode one here, though he ... did direct the sequel)
Me? Oh, I'm neither, I'm here because I like mecha-musume.

That being the case, a large part of this OVA, due to being unintelligible due to referencing characters and events we never saw, ends up serving as both a self-aware parody and a celebration of 90's anime tropes, and thus can still be enjoyable this way.
Granted, I don't think people will understand some of it's references such as the fact that "Bishoujo Kamen Polylina" is a reference to "Bishoujo Kamen Poitrine", a 1990's Tokusatsu by Ishinomori Shotaro which directly inspired Sailor Moon.

Ignoring the fact that, due to such circumstances, the first minutes of episode one are not very different from pure noise, the rest of it mostly takes for of a very wholesome comedy celebrating how loved Yuna is. The second OVA has probably the worst kangaroo court I've ever seen, which makes it a bit of a "forced conflict" — it's action scene likely goes very hard if you know those characters, but that was not my case.
My complaint would be that there very few actual mecha-musume scenes, but even though this anime could never grabbed me, I somehow couldn't easily let it go either, something in me telling me "OK, let me give it one more episode a chance".

In 2015, JAM Project made the Opening theme for the anime "One Punch Man", "THE HERO !!". They probably received a list of specifications and made that Opening. In 2019, the same JAM Project made the similar, but worse "Seijaku no Apostle" for it's second season. That second Opening feels less of an original idea and more of trying to re-hash it's first opening.
That's Lazarus from it, Adult Swim trying to re-hash Watanabe Shinichirou's works without knowing why they worked, and ending up with something that borders self-parody made by ChatGPT.

Lazarus works on the structure that, at any point, they can finish the story in ... just two episodes, making the remaining episodes feel somewhat pointless and disconnected from one another, mostly existing to have some action scenes with no personal stakes that aren't even that interesting to begin with. It's structure feels less of an anime and more of a game of the Hitman franchise, with in most of it's episodes you learning almost nothing about it's plot, setting or characters.

It's setting, also, feels a bit weak, as it fails a lot at "show don't tell": Yes, we know that humanity may be doomed in one month because it's explicitly told to us... but if it wasn't, could you conclude that from what the anime shows us? Not a single character seemed to have change their lifestyle one single bit, save for one scene where a live-journal tells us that there are being riots somewhere and that the stock exchange crashed (Not that those things ever end up mattering, anyway). You could've changed the premise that the whole thing about Hapna being lethal was unknown to the general public and the plot would stay the same. One could think that such seeming discrepancy is intentional and is the show trying to tell some message via it but... I don't really think it is.

It feels like an inferior version of the Suicide Squad because, at the end of the day, what our characters are doing has no personal connection to them, it's not something that will make them have to come to terms with their past, the types of person they are nor something like that: They just got to do their job... and so they go there and do their job.

Cyberpunk and similar "dystopic sci-fi future" setting might be set in the future, but they're about talking about the present: Take an exaggerated problem in the future and use it to talk about a similar problem happening in the present, take a problem in the future and talk about it being a logical conclusion or extrapolation of a problem happening now or in the past, talk about the technology could be used to, instead of solving our problems, creating new ones or making the ones we have worse.
Lazarus does none of that, and it's social commentary is so bad that it feels it doesn't want to be there: When we learn about Doug being a victim of racism, it's the most generic type of racism possible, and one that essentially says nothing about the subject. It's like it's there only to fill a checkbox, and not because the person writing it cares about the subject. That same case of racism could've been in a story set in the present or in the 90's and it would need no changes to it. Same goes for the anime talking about homelessness or trans people, it's just saying "Oh yeah, homeless and trans people exist" without exploring nothing more of the subject or how the material conditions of it's society relate to it.

It ends up feeling that their view of Cyberpunk is "Woah, cool technology, and also humanity bad" rather than a study and reflection about society, it's systems and structures.
In the end, Lazarus just ends up being a pretentious "all style, no substance".

I decided what I would watch in the Spring 2025 season by watching the PV of every anime in it. At first, I didn't have much higher expectations, so I decided to lower my bar... then the PV for Kijin Gentoushou came like a blast and made me realize that good anime is good anime, no bar-lowering needed.

Kijin Gentoushou is an ambitious story, and I don't say that solely from it coming from a premise of being a very LONG-running story spanning a LONG time-frame, but from the fact that, similar to other anime nowadays such as Oshi no Ko, Re:Zero Season 3 and Frieren, ... it decided to start with a multiple-episode long "first episode" despite not having the recognizability of those three. That choice made sense: That story NEEDS to be long to establish the bases for the anime, but at the same time it does not represent what the story IS, so having it as two or three separate episodes could give people a wrong idea of what Kijin Gentoushou is trying to be, in a way that the official episodes 2-6, which cover the second book, do much better.

In part I speak of experience: Though I know that much of book one was cut and the source material is likely better, much of the anime's episode one made it feel... Korean? That mostly come from my negative image of Korean works, but once it started with the ultra-violence between demons while they acted in less reasonable ways than a Newtype in the Gundam universe, it REALLY felt that it was going into the "OP protagonist edgefest" realm. Luckily, I couldn't have been more wrong!

From the end of episode one, we already know that our protagonist is still very human and didn't give it to his most base desires. In a way, this fact makes the next episodes, which are there to explore a journey of him "getting back his humanity" to feel a bit different: Though the closest story in that regard would be Berserk, Jinya never "lost as much humanity" as Guts did, so in his "quest to regain his humanity" he's... already starting from a very high baseline.
That might feel "off" to a few people: Book two mainly explores his questioning of what truly means to be human, and that some demons can be more "human" than some humans, though those are the types of stories you would expect if Jinya had some form of hate-boner for each and every demon, which he never did, being very level-headed ever since episode two.
While I would prefer that such character development had happened on-screen rather than between books, it also made it possible for the episodes to be how they were.

Kijin Gentoushou is "efficient" with it's characters: It could have easily been a(n inferior) story where characters only appear in one episode, and never again, but it truly makes a nice re-use of them in various different occasions, which ties back to Jinya's "return of humanity": A human must live in society together with people, don't they?
The story has multiple opportunities to "fall to some vices", but never does, with even a scene of Jinya killing rapists feeling less like a power-fantasy and more like him fulfilling a promise to people he knew deeply, almost as if he had "lived through their memories" ;).

It truly is a story about killing demons, it just happens that the focus is on killing the "inner" ones.

I often joke that "Isekai is when an author is too lazy to write fantasy", coming from the fact isekai stories forego having to write a character's backstory and how they relate to that world — "they just came there, have superpowers and are the chosen one, now let's jump to the actions scenes!".
Of course, good isekai will go out of it's way to write not only backstories for their characters, but also spend a lot of time having them acclimate to and become a part of that world rather than simply being an outside force which is there to change it.

The mere possibility that ... Teogonia could be an isekai made people jump the gun in initially give the anime a score less than 6.5 (Which at the time of writing this review, has gone up by 0.3 points), but in reality it is a fantasy story, though one which picks a setting much closer to the Bronze Ages rather than being fully medieval.
Indeed, "Bronze Age: The Anime" seems like a fitting description: Tales of local gods and their avatars, life-energies, body-painting, gods who reward their loyal servants and are wrathful towards those who offend them, a humanity which lives in villages and garrisons and, most important of all, a deep connection to the land.
Indeed indeed, that might be the aspects were Teogonia distinguishes itself the most and is able to say "I'm a fantasy, not an isekai": Our characters are villagers, not a warrior caste. They protect their villages next to the people they grew up with, and where they will later go back to plow the fields for their own food, marry the lasses who tend to the animals and continue the cycle.
Our protagonist, our "avatars", are not ones like in isekai stories which travel around the world, but are those who tend to and protect their lands and vassals. Those who distinguish themselves are rewarded, yet at the same time become targets of those who want to distinguish themselves even further.

Teogonia might be far from being the anime with the best artstyle or animation (Though the one it has isn't bad either), yet it is the sum of a plethora of small details in it that bring a sense of "uniqueness" to it.

"The Illusion of Choice"
There's a term I coined called "The Valley of Mediocrity", it stems from the fact that a lot of webnovel stories are born from one very interesting idea, but once that idea gets exhausted (Sometimes it's after it's first volume, sometimes after it's third-fourth... sometimes after it's first chapter) it essentially becomes a boring and generic story... until the author has a second idea (Which in normal situations would've been another webnovel), though that's not guaranteed to happen 100% of the time.

Katainaka no Ossan, Kensei ni Naru is like that: Sure, the flashback sequences for each of the characters are interesting, we're ... really sold in the idea that he's a DILF, he met quite a bunch of interesting people in his life... but after that, where do we go? If I had to base myself in the fight against the griffin, I would say we're likely going in a very generic route, since so far it has not sown any seeds for a greater, overarching plot.

So why "Mixed Feelings" and not "Not Recommended"? Well, a couple of reasons: There's some good work being put into some spots — the CGI by YAMATOWORKS is top quality, some character designs are interesting, it isn't an isekai about an OP protagonist (Low bar, but hey, that's where we're at nowadays), rather choosing to go for the route of someone with realistic sword skills, and the poses/forms are quite nice to look at.
It has a mixture of things that make it go just BARELY above the line that I want to give another episode a chance. Since this is Preliminary Review, this "Low 6/10" isn't the rating of the four episodes so far, but rather something that also takes into account the "potential" for this anime to become something bigger, as in "If things go right, this can become a 6/10 anime".
Granted, "potential" wanes after every episode if it isn't used. Since contrary to some other reviews, I have not read the original manga nor Light Novel, this comes from a place of thinking that maybe, just maybe, with one or two good episodes it can go to a nice direction.

Is that optimism? Maybe, but one can dream.

It's quite likely that this will become a "Recommended" when it finishes, but so far I have to go with "Mixed Feelings", but my 7/10 is a recognition of it's potential.
This anime has a pretty nice first episode, some nice energy to it, the music jam scenes really feel like something that would come from an experimental short trying to convey a single emotion. Not the top spot for best CGI of the season since that spot was taken by "Katainaka no Ossan, Kensei ni Naru", but it's likely right after it.

My complaints are from the somewhat unwise use of it's time: At list 2/3's ... of it's second episode could've been cut, it mostly being repetition or reiteration of points already conveyed to us in the first episode (There are also some repetitions in episode three, but to a much lesser degree). For instance, the fact that Lilisa's adoptive sister despises her is already conveyed in a short pouting scene in episode one... but if you didn't get that, there's another scene in episode two conveying the same thing... and if you STILL didn't get that, she explicitly tells the audience this at the end of episode 3.
An anime doesn't HAVE TO advance it's plot every episode, but it has to show us something NEW, something INTERESTING every episode. It's first three episode being reformulated into two episodes would've made the anime feel more tidy, more concise.

This review might seem overly harsh, but the reason for that is that the anime has all the tools to be great, so failures call even more attention than they naturally would. While it's true that the "three-episode rule" is more of a "heuristic" than a proper rule, the reality is that the anime's story only feels it will start from episode 4 onward, it's first three, while setting our long-term objective of playing in a rock festival and looking for more band members, don't really tell us what the structure of the anime will be, something you usually do have by episode three.
As from the rest... well, a review (Words, essentially) is a bad way to convey art (Something created because words weren't enough): The musical part of it is good, it has fine character designs, and it has nice scenes, but those are things that are supposed to be EXPERIENCED rather than explained (So go watch it).

TL;DR: It's a box full of potential. After three episodes it was shown that was a lot more potential than initially imagine, but so far it's still only potential, we'll have to see.

Princess Tutu is a 2002 anime starring (At the time) fairly new seiyuu, some who would eventually become fairly big in the industry. It existed in the context of the post-1997 anime industry which, due to the massive success of Evangelion, began to bet more into shorter (One to two cour) anime with more experimental stories while also embracing the innovations of digital animation - and in that regard, Princess Tutu's artstyle wouldn't feel out of place were it released five or even ten years later.

This anime is WESTERN, but not western in the sense of "Anime largely based on western cinema ans sensibilities" as ... one would call anime made by Watanabe Shinichirou, nor western in the sense of "A cowboy story", but western in the sense that it not only is about the western cannon of theater, ballet, fairy tales and opera, is also structurally shapes itself around those aesthetically: The anime episodes not only represent an opera, THEY ARE, themselves, an opera.
That in itself makes it a bit hard to analyze it, as it is something that is best "felt", rather than "described with words".

It's arc structure is a bit unorthodox: It's first 13 episodes could themselves alone, with little to no changes, be a complete anime, and one that I would likely give a 10/10. It's second half isn't as strong or concise, but it still found interesting ways of expanding the story.
The anime is strongly episodic, with the episodes (Mainly in it's first half) having little to sometimes no epilogues to them (Sometimes the credits rolling right after the end of the climax), but it still manages to have some sense of progression via the relationships between the characters and the "heart shard" system, which brings visible change to our male lead, Mytho/Myuuto. The "abandonment" of such system in it's third quarter makes it a failure on trying to emulate it's first quarter, as some of it's episodes might now feel a bit repetitive and could easily have swapped places without anyone noticing, the stories themselves also feeling weaker, as they're not based on any specific emotion theme anymore, and it takes a while to get accustomed to that slower pacing after the aggressive spectacle of it's second quarter.

It had a fairly smart way of omitting and drip-feeding information, causing the audience to assume different things as different times (Such as the identity of the raven). Likewise, the decision to focus on different characters in different moments also leads to the relationships the anime will end up with to feel "natural" and "fairly earned".
It's somewhat funny that our "secondary protagonists", with time, end up becoming the focus: The character development of the mysterious Fakir, the tragedy of Rue, too weak to deal with sadness, falling to her darkest desires, feeling empowered by them... but alas, still being a human, we go back to seeing the fragility in her.

Being an anime of which one of the messages is using dance to convey that which cannot be conveyed with words, the series itself conveys with artistry in a way that can only be experiences, and not simply read in a review, it's a marriage between song, dance, theater and animation.

Despite the fact that, at the time of this review, Shin Cutie Honey only has positive or mixed reviews here, I've mostly seen negative opinions about it everywhere else. I do not understand them, however.

Shin Cutie Honey is a soft-sequel of the original, 1973 series, though in a way it makes more sense to refer to it as the "Turn A Gundam" of Cutie Honey, as it is set in a distant, dystopic future with different versions of characters from Nagai Go's star system.
It adds a lot to the original by having characters with more fleshed out personalities and episodes with more of a story ... to them.
We now have a Gotham-esque metropolis of "Cosplay City", a "hardened" Honey with attitude, a lovely side-cast (I absolutely ADORE the visuals and relationship dynamic between Akakabu and Daiko, Chokkei's parents) and a late-80's - 90's aesthetic that almost borders self-parody, from large shoulder-pads to glam-rock.

It goes harder in the ecchi direction, to the point that it would be very difficult to post a video about it on you tube without having to censor a lot of it, from Black Maiden's delicious flat chest to a Honey that, despite being made out of metal, really feels like a human made out of meat, bones, fat, muscle and sinew. It knows what aesthetic it wants, from the guitar rendition of the original theme song, from Honey's new forms such as a silver armor.

What might be a a letdown for many, however, is that Shin Cutie Honey is an incomplete story... sort of. It was initially supposed to have 12 episodes, but it only ever had 8. This is less of a problem since, due to it's unorthodox structure, the story technically "ends" at episode 4, with the remaining ones being somewhat self-contained episodes. If you found the (Equally incomplete) ending of the original series satisfactory, then this one shouldn't really be an issue for you.

I don't think that I need to talk about the artstyle or animation, it's the good quality you expect from a 90's OVA.
Give it the three episode try, at the very least, as I personally consider the third one one of the best.

Cutie Honey is an anomaly, and in a good sense.
Preceding Sailor Moon by nearly two decades on the idea of a female henshin-hero anime and preceding Minky Momo by one decade with having the idea of it's protagonist transforming into a new profession every week, Cutie Honey works as a parody of super-hero stories typically associated with Ishinomori Shoutarou: An android/cyborg/mutant fighting an evil organization with villain-of-the-week androids/cyborgs/mutants as well as their goons. This time, however, with a "female" motif and an erotic-comedy spin to it (Though the ecchi is very mild by modern standards).

Episodic shows live or die depending on how good it's episodic ... structure it is, while trying to avoid the sin of being repetitive. Perhaps due to it being only 25 episodes instead of 50, Cutie Honey succeeds on that by having a different transformation in every episode (As opposed to only using the same ones established at the beginning) and finalizing the weekly villain in a slightly different way.
While it would be expected of the male cast to simply be useless perverts trying to land a humor that is no longer funny, this is definitely not the case here, with them working as a pretty endearing and helpful side-cast to Honey's adventures.

The one thing that I would see as a problem are the usual early segments of Honey having to escape her academy while evading her ugly teachers: Sometimes the jokes land, but often I feel that they don't. They feel more reminiscing of Nagai's previous works with school erotic-comedy in Harenchi Gakuen, while in here they usually don't result in any consequence of Honey continuously eloping, don't connect to the rest of the episode (Anything would've sufficed, really, but there really is nothing) and the stories themselves could easily just start elsewhere, skipping those segments completely (Which is what happens later on).

Something that can be either a pro or a con depending on how you look at it is the fact that, other than the standard one-and-a-half-minute opening sequence, Cutie Honey also possesses a three-minute ending sequence, directly followed by a two-minute episode preview, which is mostly just straight excerpts from the next episode. If you choose to skip those, as I did, it makes episodes, an therefore the whole series, 20% shorter.

While Nagai's artstyle (And by consequence his character designs) feel "made to a flat 2D plane", thus not often taking "three-dimensionality" into consideration, only made to be seen in certain angles and certain poses (Which isn't a problem in a manga), the animation doesn't really feel "stiff", and other than the occasional weird-perspective shot or slight character off-modeling, it feels very good for an anime of the era.

While I complimented the anime for being innovative in every episode, sometimes this is done in the way of Honey having a new power or gadget never seen or mentioned before (The first episodes are quite fond of that).
The "transformation gimmick" is still very interesting regardless, as some transformations might have special skills (Such as being able to tame lions or be proficient in any vehicle) and others might be first and foremost be used as disguises, which adds the factor that Honey must first find an opportunity to change to her "combat form" before being able to win a fight.

Part of the dynamic is that Honey cannot transform in public, as she fears that she will be shunned and hated by all if people find that she's an android... but this fact doesn't have a lot of energy to it, as we never see characters expressing negative opinions about androids, so it's more something that you have to think "Yeah, I guess that would make sense" rather than something the anime will try to convince you. Maybe it was common trope of the era and it's supposed to be "obvious" for you if you've read enough similar stories?

The biggest problem would likely be that it eventually gets a bit boring, as a lot of it's "episodic episodes" don't have much in terms of plot, and the personality of a lot of the villains of the week doesn't differ much between one and the other.
While by it's latter half the story goes to an "around the world" route, it mostly seems random, as rarely is stated a reason for Honey & crew to be there or go there, and this is where I feel the anime would've benefited a lot of having a more overarching plot at that point. It also has a bit of an open ending.

It really isn't bad at what it promises, but the main issue is that it never promised much in the first place.