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I can see why the series is so highly rated. The music and relationships were the big high points for the series, and episode 7 in particular absolutely soared. A lot of the subtle communication and effective romance that I love are at least present on some level here, even if it doesn't quite deliver as strongly in the end (I'll hand it to the series for not giving us a clean happily ever after, but I find it hard to believe that Riko and Richie just never communicated after that heartfelt train scene, and I felt that Sen's exit from the plot was a ... bit forced, even if their reunion was on point). It's a series that makes me want to see follow-up OVAs that fill in more of the time skips in the story, or maybe just read the highly rated manga. Generally speaking, my only substantial quibble is that they did jump around quite a bit, which made parts of the story feel rushed even when it acknowledged a lot of time was passing. Still, those end up feeling small compared to the heights this series soared to.

Gundam, especially in the UC timeline, has been very hit or miss for me. Some of its entries are among my favorites, others are baffling misfires, and there's a whole lot of mid.

So, how about this one?

I'll get the obvious out of the way first: the CGI is mostly good to great. Its mobile suit fights look solid and, especially as it gets later in the series, there's a sense of weight to the fights. I don't think it does ground-level views quite as well as previous entries (the gold standard so far is Hathaway), but there's a grit to this and a sense of ... rawness that most of the other series don't really convey. This feels like a real war, even with all the giant robots in the thick of it. Where it falls on its face a bit is... well, in the faces. The humans, aside from a couple of the bigger characters, do not look great and we see an awful lot of them so it's a difficult flaw to ignore. Still, I think this show nails enough of the CGI where it counts, and looms large as a result, particularly for the Gundam which does come off as horrific at times.

Everything else is largely fine to good. There's not a lot to the narrative, which I actually appreciate. So much of Gundam is told as grand epics with massive galaxy-spanning wars and grand plans. This is grounded and very localized. It's not perfect in that regard, since the series can't help but insert two Newtypes, but it also doesn't go too far on their powers (unlike many entries I could mention) and, with one exception, doesn't give them substantial plot armor. That being said, the simpler plot does mean there's not a lot to really elevate it. I've seen this kind of plot in war films and it's pretty common and basic. It's nice to see it under the Gundam banner, but it's not going to elevate it much.

The characters land more in the fine category. Beyond Iria who gets a particularly affecting dream sequence in the final episode (also some of the best animation in the series) and goes through an arc that is relatively well-worn in Gundam without feeling overly tropey, most of the characters just aren't all that interesting. A couple give signs of it, but it's telling that they don't really have arcs in this series. They're other soldiers on the battlefield who are working towards the singular aim of getting home. Yuri Kellerne shows up for a cameo straight out of 08th team where he feels like he stepped out of a different universe with his open shirt and extra haircut (and yes, I realize that show is probably more akin to this than most Gundam UC series, but dude still looks so out of place).

One more substantial gripe: the series doesn't lend some real humanity to both sides of the conflict, something other Gundam series manage much more effectively. In a sense, it does do that with regards to the Gundam pilot, but we barely get to know that person and most of the EFF forces in this are just faces without any personality whatsoever. They're just enemies. I get that that's part of the point, for Iria to try and connect too late, but it also just makes some of the losses feel weak, particularly for a character who has seen so much of the battlefield and lost so many people close to her. The ending is pretty decent, but it fell flat emotionally for me partly for this reason. The show clearly wants to have its cake and eat it too, garnering both the terror of the faceless Gundam and, eventually, the empathy for the person piloting it. The former works, the latter not so much.

Still, it's not a bad show, just one with a mix of workable and throw-away elements that comes together more often than it flails. I enjoyed the watch well enough, though I don't think I'll be coming back to it because it's just not memorable for anything beyond its solid visuals.

So much joy packed into 24 minutes. I was grinning ear to ear throughout.

It shouldn't be hard to believe that One Piece can grace us with a one-off special that hits this hard, but it still blew me away. The fanservice was perfectly timed and didn't overstay its welcome, the perspective shifts were awesome and recontextualized a lot of what happened during two pivotal arcs without changing them, the new characters were a joy to watch, and yes, the animation was incredible (checks the team behind it... oh yeah, no wonder - same director behind Where the Wind Blows and instrumental in OP26).

Other studios ... and directors, take notes: this is how you do it.

Yep, this was certainly... a show that happened.

The first episode was great, which makes this one particularly hard to rate because it's a balance of that with just how far it spiraled down in the next few episodes. Maybe... maybe that was the point? To make the audience feel like they're spiraling as well? If so, kudos to the showrunners: you did it.

I'm sure plenty of reviews will talk about the visual quality, which took a nosedive after episode 1. This was a fraught product in development and it shows, with the budget for this thing nearly drying up after that first episode. It's ... too bad because you can really see the commitment to visual fidelity side-by-side with what it looks like when a studio phones it in, and the jank is absolutely real.

But it's not just the visuals that bring this thing down. The team behind this knows how to emphasize the creepiness, but don't seem capable of showcasing the horror. The storytelling and presentation made some of these scenes outright goofy. I laughed outright several times at scenes that were supposed to evoke dread. None of that is helped by the series' need to keep moving to the next element, which meant that, even if a scene worked for me, it was left behind almost immediately and no one talked about it anymore. I've heard that that gets explained in the manga, but here, it just looks like even the series just doesn't care about most of what it sets up.

It's not all bad, though without episode 1 to bring up the average, this would be significantly worse. I went into it thinking four episodes was not enough. I left thinking it was too many.

It's just what it says on the tin: great.

I watched this show a short time after watching Golden Boy. I'm not going to be comparing to that show, but it had a similar vibe to it, and I think in many ways this is a broader realization of the ideas of Golden Boy.

In many ways, this show probably shouldn't work. When your premise is that Onizuka is becoming a teacher to perv on high school girls... yeah, it's not the best, especially since he doesn't really drop that throughout the story. Hell, a substantial arc in this story involves Onizuka getting one of his students ... work as a model using some very revealing outfits to display her ample... assets.

But that's also kind of the point. Onizuka is a good person at heart, even if it's hard to see at times (like, a lot of times), but he also doesn't give two shits about the methods he uses to achieve his aims. He's willing to do things that would absolutely get other teachers fired in order to deliver a message to individual students (or small groups, depending on the arc). That sometimes involves skirting the law, giving up his and others' worldly possessions (RIP so many Crestas) and even potentially losing his life. He puts his students first and foremost, especially and strangely when he's pursuing something for himself.

And his students respond in kind. Even students who are outright hostile to him to start are slowly won over, and while it almost seems formulaic, the series never falls into a clean rhythm. There's always some new wrinkle to address, and while Onizuka is often abnormally confident, he's also just so human in how he deals with repeated threats of firing and imprisonment. The students themselves require very different forms of intervention, some of which Onizuka does actively, and some of which is just a consequence of a series of actions that include Onizuka, but all of them showcase why he's the man for the job.

Really, though, what makes this show is the humor. Yes, all the memeable moments are impressive, and Onizuka especially knows how to make me crack a smile, but this is one category I have to give to the antagonist that is the Vice Principle. Dude is a laugh riot despite being introduced as a terrible human being. All those poor Crestas...

It's a show that revels in the mess that is its characters, and while I couldn't appreciate everything the show did, it did more than enough to earn its classic status.

This is undoubtedly one of the better entries in My Hero Academia’s long run. They did a much better job this season of translating the visuals to the anime, often in similar detail, they covered pretty much everything from the manga as well, and there’s just a lot going on that was portrayed well on the screen.

Unfortunately, that’s part of the problem. It’s not that this season is bad by any means, but it is incredibly uneven and chock full of plot lines that are all either rushed to an end or slowly dragged out to the point of frustration.

It starts off strong. The Star ... and Stripe Arc is short but powerful and has some lasting consequences for the plot (though I wish they lasted longer, she really should have gotten more screen time). The U.A. Traitor Arc works reasonably well to explain the traitor everyone expected from previous seasons and do it in a pretty emotional way. It doesn’t linger here too long, either, so it’s pretty effective.

Then we start the Final War Arc. We get the separation of heroes and villains into different groups and the various ways they try to maneuver, which makes a lot of the middle of the arc pretty overcomplicated as we jump back and forth between sites. This was not helped by Toga dragging Deku through one of the portals early on, which added yet another factor (his travel to Shigaraki) and led to one of the more desperate fights while he was absent. The fight against Dabi has what looks like two separate endings and drags on a little too long for my liking, even if it does end well. A little frustrating, but not too bad. Hell, I thought the end of Toga’s arc in the anime was even better than in the manga, displaying all the beautiful detail of its panels with a better flow and direction to it (I like it a good deal thematically as well, though I’m still put off by her “heroic sacrifice” since it probably wasn’t necessary to lethally drain herself of all her blood).

The devil, however, is in the details. I really didn’t like how they deus ex machina’d Bakugo to make sure he didn’t die, nor how they powered him up to ridiculous extremes afterward with such a fragile body. While I like the concept of the heteromorphs rising up against oppression, it’s not an issue that has received much attention beyond a couple of isolated scenes prior to this and it doesn’t seem like it will go far beyond this. It’s too much of a side-note to keep in here and it’s not executed particularly well, at least not nearly as well as other racial allegories like X-Men. And though it is awfully cool… I don’t really like that ending fight between AFO and All Might. Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of instances where someone loses their powers but is somehow granted a way to gain even greater power, and even though it’s visually great, I just can’t fully get behind a sudden power-up that even gives All Might this much ability to stand toe-to-toe with AFO.

This is a good season, even a really good season at times, but it becomes bloated and overcomplicated with plot lines that sometimes end up feeling like they’re there just to make for cool moments rather than being emotionally resonant moments as the series wraps up. They were in the manga, they were translated to the screen, and most of the problems are still here. I can’t blame the adaptation, but this is one instance where maybe things could have been streamlined a bit to ensure we could keep better track of the characters and not be constantly distracted by other fights. Still, if you made it this far in the series, this one is definitely worth your time.

This was a fascinating watch.

To get some of the bigger picture stuff out of the way first, this show is pretty uneven. That seems to be purposeful, as the goal is to throw not only the audience off, but the characters as well. There are a lot of meta jokes about episode counts and viewership that work in the show's favor, but even though I can appreciate those elements, it doesn't change the fact that the show is very chaotic and occasionally opaque in its approach. Especially as it gets to the middle of the series, I think most audiences will have a split opinion ... on whether the direction of the series really works, and as someone who is a big fan of absurd escalation a la Gurren Lagann and absurd twists a la Bang Brave Bang Bravern, my mileage varied. At a certain point, the crazy variety the show implemented started to feel less purposeful and more there just to move the plot in a certain direction. That's not necessarily a flaw, but considering where the series really shines, I think a lot of that portion of the plot stands out as considerably weaker as a result, especially since the show could have leaned more into the humor to make it pop (again, a la Bravern).

As for the more granular details, I think this show was at its best in the beginning and towards the very end because these characters are what make it work. Hazama's a bit of a mixed bag because many of his best elements seem to leech from him in the middle of the series, but he's also one of the major elements carrying the finale, so I can't be too harsh on him. Goto might be the best character in the show, but again, largely takes a backseat in the middle before getting a devastating finale that brings the series full circle in the more ways than one. A lot of the same can be applied to MMM, who also get some of the best comedy in the series while hitting some of the best emotional highs and lows. I love Kaname, just everything about the man proves he's essential to the series, start to finish. As for the rest of the cast, while I think there are a few highlights, a lot of the newly introduced characters for the middle section are pretty tropey and uninteresting.

Overall, the ride was definitely worth it, even if it went through a rough patch. The show started and ended strong, and the journey was a good time regardless of the p(l)otholes. An underrated gem.

It’d be easy enough to just say this series is great, and that’s virtually as true now as it was back in S1. It would save me a lot of time because this season is getting virtually the same score as the first season from me, and I have similarly positive thoughts about it. The character moments don’t have quite the same oomph as S1, but they’re still powerful and probably have a stronger emotional base this time around. The animation takes a tick up, particularly as the series gives us some impressive sakuga during the massive play.

I’ve grown to like Aqua more over ... the course of this season as he learned to grieve Ai in a way that felt a little more believable. I liked Akane’s struggle to be noticed on the stage and stand beside both Aqua and Kana in very different ways. Melt really stepped into his own. Kana is looking great acting opposite Akane and I think the two really do bring out the best in one another. I liked Abiko and Yorkiko, felt like a very different dynamic that worked well for me. And other side characters did well enough, even if none of them was really the kind of stand-out you would expect from top tier talent at another agency like Taiki and Sakuya. Maybe we just didn’t get to see them really shine or maybe our focus was too much on the series’ leads.

All this is to say that the series is still strong… but it’s got the same problems. I know a lot of people enjoy it, but I just can’t get behind the revenge plot. It didn’t work in S1, and it’s not working here. It’s good to see Aqua wrestling with it a little, but this season just had to expand that plot to include Ruby, and it did it by… inserting a fantasy loli who likes to fuck with the characters I guess? I really don’t like her turn towards vengeance, which feels particularly off given her personality to date. Couple that with the decision to make this much more about Aqua and Ruby’s reincarnation, which is another plot that never really worked for me (it seemed unnecessary and creates some ick moments, particularly with Aqua cementing his relationship with Akane) and the final third of this season was an unfortunate downgrade after what was a superb first two thirds of the season.

None of this is to say that the series is bad, just that it never quite soars as high as it could if it had focused on the performance. There’s so much to love about the frustrations that keep things tense early on as the creatives clash over how best to represent the vision of the mangaka as well, which makes the performance itself that much stronger. If it had stopped at the performance, this would easily be my AotS, but it’s decision to turn its full attention to the elements I disliked the most about S1 brings it down substantially. It’s a great series, but you can definitely see how those cracks in the foundation are creeping upwards through the plot, and I worry about future seasons.

It’s easy to like a good spy story with a lot of action and comedy built in, and I do like this one well enough, even if the humor can be a bit same-y at times. Generally, mileage may vary as you go through the early part of the series and I was a bit underwhelmed by the experience, mainly because it’s largely an extended training arc/bonding experience between the Yozakuras and Taiyou, who marries into their family in the first episode. It has a colorful cast of characters and, while Taiyou himself can be a little basic, he’s also embodying the “fish out of ... water” trope, and since he’s surrounded by outlandish characters, it comes with the territory. His history offers something a little different with the sudden and tragic deaths of his family, though nearly every protagonist has some tragic backstory, so it seemed to largely function as a way to give him some damage to drive him forward. In general, though it is fun, it’s just a little too tropey early on for me to fully enjoy the experience.

Then the series takes a turn. It starts around episode 9 or 10 as we get our first hints that the deaths of Taiyou’s family were not the result of an accident. It’s part of the reason I’m particularly fond of the Kuroyuri Arc, as is some actual characterization of Kuroyuri himself. He does, however, start a trend that becomes more obvious later.

We don’t get to sit with the information that some spy organization took out Taiyou’s family for as long as I’d like, though; there’s very little sense that the Yozakura’s are ever really implicated, though I would have appreciated spending at least some time with that uncertainty instead of just downshifting into the focus of the latter half of the series. The introduction of Tanpopo as antagonists results in a slew of antagonists entering the plot, so now the series has a clear set of heroes and villains and becomes pretty black and white…

…well, not entirely. It’s not like the antagonists are solid villains, as they have their own individual backstories that lend them a bit of pathos and should (at least in concept) make it easier to connect with their stories. But the issue is two-fold: one, there are so many characters that we don’t get to spend a lot of time getting to know each of the antagonists, and two, when we do get to know them, they’re either set to die or set to be removed from the plot. That ends up making them feel more like plot devices to demonstrate the strength of our main cast, which is fine, but it doesn’t add much grey to that black and white tapestry they’re making. There are counter examples like the aforementioned Kuroyuri, Kawashita who ends up driving a lot of the plot, and Shirai who lends some pretty solid pathos to the plot before it becomes the norm, but it still feels weaker than it should, especially given the kind of work the Yozakuras do on the regular. It really doesn’t help that Kawashita, in particular, is just oozing Magneto from X-Men 2000 energy with his final plot, and it doesn’t work nearly as well for him since he’s largely enigmatic. He just doesn’t have the swagger to pull it off.

All this leaves me wondering whether it would have been best to just keep the investigation going longer rather than push rapidly onward to the flights. I liked the intrigue when Taiyou and his newfound family were struggling to piece together the mystery of his family’s death. I liked the shenanigans they got up to around the house and on missions. It didn’t always work, but there was more good than bad. When this turned into Tanpopo vs. everyone… it had its moments and I liked seeing everyone’s blooming, but it just didn’t deliver narratively. It was just an opportunity for characters to show off their power sets, which once again reduces their opponents to plot devices meant to bring out their best. I like that those powers have thematic relevance to their characters, but it makes the plot of the last arc feel same-y for a while even as they up the ante.

In the end, while I think this series has strong enough fights (the manga goes harder from what I’ve seen) comedy, and characters to carry it through to the end, I don’t think it ever manages to be more than that. Its drama occasionally lands, but never quite as solidly as it should because too much of it relies on last minute backstory. Even characters who seem like they could be really interesting like Momo Yozakura end up just vanishing in the end without further explication, which is a shame. Its narrative is fine, but its larger beats are cribbed from stories that do a better job building up villains and relationships than this does. I’m interested to see what they do with a Season 2, but if the focus remains on Tanpopo vs. everyone, it might not hold my attention for as long as this season did.

This is one of those shows that started off strong, but its score and my enjoyment of it kept waning as the season continued.

To some degree, that was always bound to happen. This show is treading ground that might as well be a trope at this point, with Will, a magically inert person in a world full of mages, trying to become the very best mage, like no one ever was, to join his girlfriend as a Magia Vander. Apart from the girlfriend part, replace Magia Vander with Divine Visionary (Mashle) or Wizard King (Black Clover) and not much changes. It certainly has a new ... coat of paint, as this series looks great, but it's not remarkably different from either of the other series where a guy who uses non-magic abilities is able to clash with and defeat highly powerful magical characters. And if that was all it was, I could see this season being a fun distraction without being particularly interesting.

I do think there's more to Wistoria, however. The backdrop of having this large artificial sky created by the Magia Vander invites a lot of questions about the basis for their existence and what exactly they're trying to keep out. The existence of a large dungeon with most of the floors yet to be explored (the final episode suggests there are at least 50) and extremely dangerous monsters to fight with all kinds of different tactics necessary to defeat them is intriguing. We've only gotten the barest look at what the power scaling looks like, so there's a lot of room to grow and build out the magic system in this world, as well as establish some very dangerous-looking villains with interesting movesets and designs. All that could, and probably should, have elevated this season.

But, alas, I was pretty disappointed with this one, mainly for two reasons.

The first is that it does feel like the show is barely getting started delving into its more interesting elements. The villains have a couple of episodes with limited screentime where they show that they're a force to be reckoned with before voluntarily leaving the show. The top mages in this world get an introduction, but largely become the objects of desire of other characters rather than interesting in their own right. We're shown a person who might be the most powerful mage around and are even introduced to a character who may be pivotal to Will's growth... in the final episode. We get some insight into the dungeon, but only find out how far these characters are delving and for what reason... in the final episode. We only have stories and visuals of the artificial sky. It's all very bare bones worldbuilding up to these points, and so just when the show is getting to its more interesting worldbuilding, it cuts off. Makes me excited for S2, but leaves S1 feeling rather weak.

The second is the characters. With Mashle, the negativity Mash receives throughout is part of the reason the show is so funny - it's just over the top and ridiculous. But with Wistoria, it doesn't have that comic base to justify characters being about as dumb as they possibly can. Maybe that's part of the reason I've never seriously committed to watching Black Clover as well: I really don't like when characters put prejudice and personal frustrations over basic common sense. Sion, in particular, is hard to watch throughout much of this show because he finds out early and often how powerful Will is, but seems so hung up on a prior conversation that he absolutely refuses to see the forest for the trees, putting himself and those around him in danger while ignoring obvious opportunities to succeed. I can accept it more with Julius who's just an all-around prick, but with characters like Sion and Wignall who at least seem to know how to prioritize and focus, their willingness to get caught up in personal spite and feelings of inadequacy in the middle of a fight for their lives is just baffling. With a few exceptions, the priorities of these characters are all over the place and I don't really buy it. It doesn't help that some characters like Rosti just seem to function almost entirely in the background until they want to introduce some romantic tension or get a last minute power-up. They're plot devices rather than characters. Elfaria seems like a fascinating character to spend some time with, but we don't get a lot of insight into her beyond stories from Will, which makes her mostly a plot device as well up to this point.

That's not to say all the characters are this frustrating. Will may have some issues with his priorities, but his genuine nature and willingness to push himself through all this is absolutely heartening. Colette is best girl and spends a lot of the season trying to get characters to put their heads on straight - too bad her affections for Will are probably going to remain unrequited. Edward is at least an interesting idea for a Snape-esque character who commands one of the better scenes in the show, though I wish we spent more time understanding him. Iris, Cauldron and Workner both seem like they could be very interesting if we got to know them better while still functioning well in the plot by introducing different points of view and interests. There's a lot of "this looks good" in the series, even if it all still feels like it's still getting going.

In the end, though the visuals carry this series into "good" territory for me (it goes awfully hard in a couple of its fights), I can't say that its other elements go that far. It's a lot of set up that hasn't really paid off yet, so while I look forward to a S2, I'm a little tepid on this one.