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- BirthdayApr 11, 1986
- LocationHixson, Tennessee
- JoinedMay 10, 2019
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May 8, 2025
Getting around to this fairly late all things considered. I wouldn't say I was disinterested in it, but when this series came out in 2022, I hadn't developed my taste for romance anime yet. I also was (and remain) disinterested in ecchi shows, but I'll come back to that.
First, I have to sing this show's praises.
I'll address the elephant in the room first: Marin is an excellent character and I knew from her first few scenes that she was likely to join my favorites. I don't always get the hype around a character this popular, but she was very easy to appreciate from those early
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scenes and her characterization only gets better as the series goes on. Sure, she has substantial *ahem* assets, but I'm a simp for strong personalities (ask my wife) and Marin has that in spades. From her very first scene, she's depicted as someone who doesn't judge a book by its cover, pushing back on the kinds of biases and cliques that ostracize people like Gojo. And it's not hard to see why: she fits in with the popular crowd and is extremely outgoing while also fostering a love of anime culture and cosplay in particular. She stretches across multiple camps... often suggestively, but still.
If that's all she had going for her, I might have written her and the series off as good time, but little else. What makes Marin particularly interesting for me is not just how dedicated she is to cosplay (though her attention to detail and care for portraying these characters is palpable and easy to engage with), but how she acknowledges and engages with her own feelings for Gojo. For a girl who is so outgoing and willing to show a great deal of skin, it's so much more powerful to watch her turn beet red and be at a loss for words around someone whose fervor and passion for their craft she admires so deeply, not to mention someone who cares so much about what she does. There's a real connection between these two and it's a delight to watch play out.
And yeah, that relationship really is the centerpiece of this show. The cosplay is great and it drives the story forward through each mini-arc of becoming a given character or set of characters, but the relationship between Marin and Gojo is the throughline that connects them and they are a perfect complement to one another. It's not hard to see why each of them gets so flustered around one another, but it's particularly interesting that they are rarely flustered together, with each finding different moments to feel hot and bothered over (save a later scene where they both are definitely in that camp). Their shared passion for cosplay, borne both of Marin's infectious obsession with these anime and Gojo's creative impulses and desire to act on them, is the catalyst for a bond to grow between them and it culminates beautifully in that finale.
So yes, I enjoyed this series a great deal. Why didn't I rate it higher? I put that down to a minor issue and a sticking point.
The minor issue is that the romance in this show does get off to a strong start, but doesn't advance much past that point. Both characters acknowledge feelings and I'm not expecting in a first season that they talk about those feelings necessarily, but a lot of the development between them comes from the cosplay and the degree of comfort they have together. That's nice and it's still some movement, and as a fan of slow burn romances like Kimi ni Todoke, I'm not exactly looking for speed. Hence this is a minor issue. It's 12 episodes so far and this is pretty decent development over a single cour season, albeit less than I was hoping to see.
As for the sticking point... yeah, it's the ecchi. It's just not my cup of tea and man do they ever lean into it over the course of the show. There are so many lingering shots and slow pans. This plays into the above since I think a lot of this undermines the more interesting aspects of the developing relationship between Marin and Gojo, turning it more into a feast for the eyes of the audience. I get that, to some degree, this is following the male gaze of Gojo. He's a teenager, there's a hot girl in his class who is paying a lot of attention to him, and she is clearly comfortable enough around him to show a great deal of skin. Of course that's where his attention would be. I don't think that we as an audience need a reminder of that quite so often or in such detail. Everything's animated beautifully, they certainly don't skimp on the details, and some scenes use the tension between them to do something more interesting. Still, it does hold this series just a smidge back from greatness for me. I suspect that will change in S2 as we get more romantic development, even if the ecchi isn't toned down at all (I don't suspect it will be), so despite my misgivings, it's not holding me back from enjoying the series at its best.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Apr 28, 2025
As someone who has never really gotten into dancing or ballet specifically, I found this series pretty engaging throughout.
Of course, a large part of what works is the stellar animation. MAPPA put their all into a project that did not have to go this hard to succeed, but it pulls off nearly every shot flawlessly with excellent sakuga and, perhaps most importantly, just some amazing cinematography. The series really knows how to draw in an audience, often by giving us the perspective of someone or multiple people in the show.
Easy as well to point out that Junpei is just a joy as an MC. The
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mark of a good MC in any sports show is that they bring you into their world and get you invested in what they're doing, and on that front, Junpei absolutely delivers. But the mark of a great MC is one who takes it a step further, finding ways to invest us in the choices they make and root for them throughout. Junpei succeeds on this front as well, taking us on a roller coaster through his time with ballet. Even some of the elements of the show I didn't much care for initially - that Junpei's drive away from ballet is driven by a desire to live up to the man his father was and that he continues to steer clear of ballet due to peer pressure - don't stay problematic for long as the series finds interesting ways for Junpei to overcome them. The series doesn't so much subvert tropes as it does lean into them to surpass them. Honestly, his journey through the series was reason enough to experience this in full.
That's not to say the series is without its flaws. As a foil to Junpei, I don't mind Ruou, but I never really got invested in his journey through this story. Maybe that's because a lot of it is backloaded in the season, maybe it's because it's just hard to get invested with someone who starts the series off so stand-offish, but aside from a few moments like his dance in front of the school and his breath-taking performance in Swan Lake, I can't say he drew me in. Part of the problem there is that he's the subject of some absurd bullying that I found difficult to stomach. He's not a bad character by any means, but he's just not as magnetic as Junpei.
Where I feel the series stumbles most, though, is with its female lead, Miyako. Great introduction, easy to get invested in, love how the romance develops, everything's great until the series gets into its final few episodes. I won't spoil it here, but for a romance I was surprised and delighted to see play out, the way it ended was particularly frustrating. It's one of the main reasons this series doesn't soar nearly as high as I'd hoped.
Nonetheless, this is a strong 11 episode run and I appreciate where it left us with Junpei in particular. I kind of anticipated it, but that's also the nice thing: it made a lot of sense for his character after all he'd been through up to that point. I don't think I would have been happy with him ending up anywhere else. So yeah, great show, absolutely worth the watch.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Apr 27, 2025
I'm of two very distinct minds on this one.
On the one hand, I love the concept of this series. There are some really cool concepts at play and it makes for an interesting and mostly engaging world. The more we learn about the cyberworld as portrayed here, including how it's accessed through the glasses, the various errors that pop up and resulting obsolete spaces, and in particular the variety of illegals on display, the more interesting this gets. This series is at its absolute best in its first few episodes and roughly in the middle of the series when it just delves into these concepts
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without relating them to some wider ranging story, and if the whole series had been nothing but that, this would have been a great ride that I'm sure I couldn't help but recommend, particularly with this nice visual presentation and some great animation of its cyber world.
On the other hand... well, that isn't what happened. There's a lot more at play as we learn about kids dying and becoming comatose as well as the separation of cyberbodies from physical bodies. I'm a fan of a good mystery told well, but I can't say this one quite worked for me. The series does a great job setting up the mystery through a variety of characters and as a part of building out its world, and even though I wasn't invested in that mystery in the first half of the season (largely due to this series' obsession with keeping many of its most central and knowledgeable players as mystery boxes), I appreciated the slow build-up of information. And as the first few episodes of the second half started, I was getting more invested, particularly as Isako's character got filled out.
Cut to the last roughly 5-6 episodes and that slow drip of information turned into a deluge. Suddenly, we were getting incredibly detailed and specific information along with a lot of technical jargon specific to this world, and as someone who likes his jargon and was taking copious notes to keep up, this just confounded me. I couldn't keep up with much of the information dropped in episodes 22 and 23 in particular, and given that the series only had a few episodes to tie it back together and provide a meaningful conclusion to its many mysteries, this put the series as a whole in a precarious position.
I'll give the series credit: it kind of sticks the landing with a pretty satisfying conclusion between its main characters... assuming you're fully bought into their journeys. That being said, I don't think it works overall. The bonds between its most central characters in particular don't feel that well established despite their spending so much of the series together because far too much of it is spent with them at odds. I'm not sure I can fully explain why many of the characters just didn't click with me, though I think a lot of that has to do with just how little we knew about them for so long. You can have characters be a mystery for much of the series and have them work, but they still need to have something to grab onto and, aside from a couple of side characters I really enjoyed, I can't say that happened here. It doesn't help that the series can't help throwing more characters and lore into the mix even as it goes into its penultimate episode, which distracts from its efforts to wrap things up succinctly.
Still, I didn't dislike this experience, I just wish it had either been more consistent with its delivery of information if it wanted to focus on this mystery. If we had known more about Isako, Nekome and Takeru in particular before those later episodes, it would have been easier to connect to their motivations and generate interest in the mysteries surrounding them. There was plenty to dig into, but by the end, my head was spinning with way too much information.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Apr 22, 2025
I watched this in preparation for its upcoming S2 in Summer 2025 and I feel like I'm missing something.
I get it, comedy is subjective, people's mileage will vary. And as a lover of comedy series and movies, I recognize that this is not exactly in my wheelhouse. For context, I turned 39 just this month and, though I certainly had a college experience, I wasn't exactly a frat boy. I attended parties every now and then, but I didn't join a frat and I didn't drink much. So, to an extent at least, that might explain why some of this humor didn't land for me.
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It's just not the kind of experience I had, so it feels foreign to me.
On the other hand, it's not like that has stopped me from enjoying series before. I've loved a lot of series that bear no resemblance to the life I've lived, and not all of them are just fantastical romps like Saiki K and KonoSuba. I don't think it's a lack of connection to what's depicted that is harming my enjoyment.
No, that has more to do with where this series derives its humor. There are a bunch of running jokes and, unfortunately, the series runs them into the ground to the point that they just aren't funny after a few times seeing them. The proclivity of its male leads to disrobe got old really fast, but never seemed to go away. I'm sure many people find the binge drinking funny, but it never worked for me - that might be due to my seeing way too many real life stories about alcohol poisoning, or it may just be that the joke is played out quickly when so much of the plot of this show relies on its characters getting black out drunk. I also tired quickly of Iori and Kouhei's rivalry as well as their and their friends' efforts to put the kibosh on any relationships they might have with women. Jealousy and frustration I get, but this just felt straight up mean in certain scenes. Nor did I enjoy seeing them trying to derive humor out of misunderstandings of who is romantically interested in whom and what perversions certain characters engage in. It was played out early and yet it kept on going. That's not to say none of the humor lands, but what does work are usually more novel jokes and absurd scenes, which did get some laughs out of me.
The series isn't helped by seeming to push all of its best material to the background and only bringing it out occasionally. It seems to recall that it's a series about diving about 6 episodes in before setting that aside for a while and returning to it towards the end. I get that it's a comedy series first and foremost, but part of what sets this apart from other comedies is its focus on the setting and the drive of its characters, which would draw more interest from me if the series spent some more time on it. The characters themselves also offer opportunities, particularly with Aina's story. I found her pretty compelling at points, just a shame we don't get much insight into other characters beyond base urges and frustrations.
I like the art style well enough and there are aspects of these characters and the comedy that I enjoy, but they seem like exceptions rather than common elements to the series. Maybe with a fresh coat of paint from S2 and some renewed focus, this could hit better. For now though, I don't have great expectations.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Apr 16, 2025
Well, that was certainly 18 episodes of an anime... Honestly, it's not bad, but it left me wanting. For a series that got this kind of incredible visuals, it doesn't have a lot going on narratively and it leaves a lot of its central mysteries unanswered.
On the narrative side, there's clearly a split between those on Earth who follow where the central AI Sapientia leads, mainly (presumably) because Sapientia brings such perfect peace to Earth. We're not told much about that process, but fine. What's difficult to get is why they follow it so blindly, particularly a couple of the main characters in this
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squad sent up to the moon to murder a dude. Where does their unshaken confidence in Sapientia come from? For that matter, why aren't the squad on the Moon making a very clear case for why they had nothing to do with one of the biggest atrocities on Earth? Why aren't they talking to Jack and his squad the first time they meet and clearing the air? The narrative all feels like one giant idiot plot for much of its run and I can't for the life of me understand the justification for leaving it that way for so long beyond just stretching out the narrative to cover 18 episodes.
And then you have the mystery. What the fuck was L-Zone? Did that ever get explained? How was it going to turn the Moon green? What is Mary and why does she have this bond with L-Zone? Is she a SEED? Apparently not because she picked up Phil from the wreckage of his ship. What was Sapientia's aim in all of this? To just wipe out the entire population of the Moon, is that really all Sapientia was after? It caused huge atrocities several times over the course of the series, including the inciting incident and driving much of the plot, but we know next to nothing about what it was actually trying to do.
I thought the characters were decent, the ending wrapped things up pretty well (though with a note that some piece of Phil survived somehow and also that Earth went through years of turmoil that are never shown - would have been nice to see some of the fallout of their decision to burn down the AI at the center of this story), and the concepts in the series had some legs, it's just a shame that this series clearly had little idea of how to pull them all together well. Much of the series felt like it was paced oddly (particularly for an 18 episode series) and the answers to mysteries were sporadic and piecemeal. There's good here, but it's buried under a lot of puzzling choices. If you want to just experience some good animation with a lot of cool sci-fi visuals, you could do far worse, but I can't recommend this one.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Apr 8, 2025
On a general level, I'd say this does it's job pretty effectively. You're throwing a bunch of young Japanese girls (and one boy hiding out among them) into the figurative meat grinder, starting by putting them to work and slowly wearing away at them before unleashing them on the horrifying world beyond as American soldiers invade the island. That can't help but evoke a sense of despair to some degree.
One of the more controversial choices that others likely take issue with is presenting the blood and viscera as flowers. This is one aspect that works for me. There's a surreal nature to it that is
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still pretty horrifying, particularly as the petals pile up around them or stream out of wounds. It's also a good way to transform San's perspective on flowers into something distinctly darker as the series goes on. And the generally Ghibli-esque animation in general evokes a connection to a set of movies that include the likes of Grave of the Fireflies, so it does lend itself well to this kind of darkness. From what I hear of the manga, this does denude the anime of some of its more palpably brutal scenes, but it gives the special an identity all its own.
The cocoon and silkworms as metaphors are... OK. I think they work fine enough, but they don't really assist the story meaningfully. I would have rather taken more time to get to know more of these characters because, in the end, we really only get a little insight into most of the characters in this special. Mayu and San get more attention than most and you worry most for them, so Mayu's death does hit particularly hard (as do a couple of others, in particular that first death among them just outside the cave), especially as it comes so close to the end. And that can work well enough...
...but I think it falls short of working consistently.
The series does a good job emphasizing the sort of inhumanity of both sides in this conflict, but it goes to extremes that seem particularly unlikely given the circumstances. When the girls are thrown out of the cave, there's little rhyme or reason to it, especially given how essential they've been to tending to the wounded and supplying the commanding officers with water and food. When they're being chased into a cornfield, the decision to start burning down the corn to get at a group of three young girls seems like an excessive response, particularly if the soldiers are aware that one of the girls is wounded. And finally, and perhaps most egregiously, the decision of the remaining group of girls to end themselves with a hand grenade is... a lot. I can see how they might have built up to this with propaganda about the Americans imparting a strong belief that their soldiers would just do the worst things possible to these young girls, or if we'd heard more about their value system and their views of sacrifice, but absent that, their relative lack of hesitation on the basis that they are likely to die anyway just seems to come from nowhere.
Finally, I do think San's development into someone who can speak up for herself is good, but it's weakly delivered upon. She has good instincts and intuition, which work well when harnessed by someone willing to take charge. The decision not to go into the forest and instead going into town had major consequences, but it was the decision of those around her not to take her view into account. Later, she stands up to her fellow girls when they plan to just kill all of them together, saying that she and Mayu didn't make that choice, but it changes no minds to do so. Does that mean the value of her standing up is that she gets to decide her own course? I suppose that follows at the end when she decides to stare down the barrel of an enemy soldier who had just killed Mayu, even if that decision did not feel in character for her.
Overall, I think there are some good ideas in here, I think they're just muddled in their delivery. I can see what they were going for, but the themes could use some work, as could the sense of realism and build-up through better establishing these characters and how they think.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Apr 7, 2025
This series has been slowly smoldering in my ptw list for a long time, and not just because it’s 110 episodes long. There are many series of that length and far longer that are roller coaster rides full of rises and falls in pacing, and while this certainly does have those kinds of pacing differentials, it’s more of an exercise in patience than most. Frankly, in a series full of incredibly choreographed and carefully articulated space battles animated with far more care and attention than many of its contemporaries, LotGH is not about those space battles.
Well… it necessarily is to some degree. The series’ battles
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often feel sterile and removed. We watch a variety of ship models undergo explosive decompression in space, see the same laser beam patterns criss-cross a battlefield, observe little triangles and patterns move across a screen as though they’re playing Asteroids or Galaga on ultra hard mode. After each battle, the narrator gives you a rundown of all the battle wounded and dead, ships and people, using sterile numbers. At the same time, the series never really lets you forget that these are lives being lost, not just numbers. It’s reflected in the pained expressions of the admirals who send their soldiers in to die, the loss of named characters, many of whom have gotten substantial screentime and characterization. It’s delivered through visuals of the people onboard these soon-to-be destroyed ships, in some cases through people actively trying to put their organs back inside of themselves. Perhaps the series most effective delivery on these deaths, though, comes from the aftermath as governments and militaries grapple with a dramatic loss of life, often encountering major consequences in the form of a populace that is absolutely devastated by the sudden loss of so many lives for no obvious purpose.
And that’s why I say it’s not about the battles.
This series is about consequences.
It’s about schemes on top of other schemes as various forces play outside of the battlefield to assert dominance over the universe, whether to enforce a long dead ideal regarding Earth’s control over outlying colonies or simply to maintain a place of dominance in universal trade.
It’s about competing philosophies and societal ideals playing out on a grand scale chessboard with human beings used as so many pawns. Over the course of the series, this shifts from the battle between democracy and autocracy to internal battles over who should have the reins of power to struggles between the central personalities as each vies for a means of control.
It’s about big personalities who desperately want to demonstrate their military acumen on the battlefield against the most brilliant opponents, and also about trying to win the hearts and minds of the populace.
It’s about what happens in the void those big personalities leave behind when they pass on, figuratively passing the torch in more ways than one onto friends and loved ones.
Honestly, there’s so much that I could unpack in this series, particularly about the various relationships involved.
I didn’t even know I wanted romance in this series, but the slow build of the relationships between the leads and their eventual wives feels so genuine and subtle in a way that most series don’t have the patience to handle.
The brotherly bond between Reinhard and Kircheis is one of the closest relationships of the show and one of the most inherently tragic as the series marches on, rivaled perhaps only by Reuenthal and Mittermeyer’s friendship.
Julian and Wenli have a great mentee/mentor relationship, but also a family bond that grows stronger as the series goes on and as the former finds the footing to stand on his own, often in ways Wenli would prefer he didn’t.
There are so many small relationships I could draw attention to that I love throughout: Sitolet and Julian, Merkatz and Bucock as wise mentors to so many, Mueller and Wenli,
And yes, at the core of this series and buttressing everything else that happens, the relationship between Reinhard and Wenli comes full circle throughout this series, giving us some of the absolute best dialogue I’ve heard in any series. They’re rivals; they’re adversaries; they hold a deep mutual respect and aversion for one another. In many ways, they represent two sides of the same coin, and regularly mention how, if they had been born into different circumstances, they may well be standing where the other is. Without this relationship, the series wouldn’t work.
It’s not just about close relationships, though. Oberstein constantly feels enigmatic (for once, an enigmatic character done right as each action makes you question his motives and could lead to different answers), yet his part in the plot is one of creating distance and making himself a target in place of others. Schönkopf plays the bombastic rogue so often in the series that it can be easy to miss the subtle influences he places on those around him, particularly his estranged daughter. Truniht is a bastard of a character throughout, yet the motives of his final days in the series remain a mystery. And he’s not even the biggest plotter with Rubinsky, Heinrich von Kunmel and De Villiers all playing arguably bigger and more consequential roles.
And even all this doesn’t take into account how many little plots were in play throughout. Susana von Benemunde, De Villiers, everything surrounding Jessica Edwards and Andrew Fork, Dominique Saint-Pierré’s plots… there’s just so much to cover that it’s not surprising at all this series is 110 episodes. The fact that all these characters are memorable even after so many episodes is a testament to how well written they all are. And unless they're dead (in some cases, even if they are), no one ever disappears from the plot, even if they manage to escape playing any significant role for dozens of episodes.
I loved the experience. I wasn’t riveted for every moment (there were a couple of episodes in there that are basically just extended exposition dumps to give background, which are certainly helpful, but a slog to get through), but when this series grabbed me, it wouldn’t let go and I can’t stop thinking about it. A classic for a reason and well worth the time.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Apr 2, 2025
Hey, it’s House M.D. with a loli in the lead role. Sure it was kind of derivative, but a medical mystery anime isn’t terribly common. Of course, one of the few examples just so happened to be airing this season in The Apothecary Diaries, a series that already had a lot of steam going with substantial worldbuilding and a palace intrigue plot to boot. However, I’m not here to compare. What makes this series special?
It features a lot of modern medicine and remains relatively realistic throughout. I say “relatively” because the first case involves a man with blue blood having his leg bitten off by
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a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton and a later one involves spontaneous combustion, but most of the mysteries in here are more grounded. There’s even one I was able to puzzle out before the titular Ameku could do it. Nice to see that Microbiology PhD is paying off. Even the more outlandish cases have a certain allure to them, basically dragging you by the nose to the end just to see how it all comes together.
And it’s not just grounded in its mysteries, but occasionally in its drama. Ameku spends a substantial arc dealing with the realities of a child dying of cancer, someone she formed a relationship with but abandoned to isolate herself emotionally from the reality that she can’t save everyone. It’s not exactly a deep emotional journey and I’ve seen it explored better in a single episode of Scrubs (“My Super Ego,” well worth the watch).
The animation is pretty good throughout. They do a surprisingly haunting job with the flames in this series and many of the visuals really pop, particularly in the OP.
Unfortunately, that’s about all I’ve got for the positives.
While this series does get some of the basics of House M.D. right (a genius doctor who does his own thing to save the lives of his patients, often flouting rules), it spends a lot more time dealing with forensic science than actual medicine, more often dealing with cases where someone has died and trying to find the killer. It’s not a surprising turn, but it is disappointing, as the show becomes more a series of murder mysteries than anything else, and we’ve got plenty of those in anime.
What makes that more frustrating is that its mysteries aren’t things you can figure out by looking at a crime scene. You have to have the necessary medical knowledge to be able to put together information at the scene with diagnostics, which means that unless you have a very technical set of expertise, you’re not resolving any of these mysteries (much less the more convoluted ones mentioned above) before or at the same time as Ameku. Mystery shows can still work OK if you can’t predict what’s going to happen, but part of what makes a great mystery is being able to put the pieces together. If this was just a medical mystery, it might be interesting to just watch them puzzle these things out based on a variety of test results and analysis, but we’re solving crimes here as well and it feels like a large part of that is just a giant shrug and “leave it to Ameku to figure this out.”
None of this is helped by having a lead character who just isn’t Gregory House. To be clear, I wasn’t looking for a carbon copy of House in loli form, but I was looking for a character who had more personality than this. House is interesting in part because he’s got a lot of problems and is generally abrasive to everyone, including his patients and staff, all of which barely conceals a lot of damage in his past and present. By contrast, Ameku just isn’t much more than a very self-confident young doctor with a complex about being called small who struggles with the deaths of her patients and doesn’t understand the word “no.” It’s not exactly a distinctive character archetype in anime, and it wouldn’t stand out among a sea of medical mystery dramas in live action. Really, the only thing that seems to distinguish her is the almost “mind palace”-like deductions she does while sketching out connections with her fingers, both of which heavily evoke Sherlock Holmes… and as someone who has gotten very frustrated with how much mystery series lean on the legendary detective, this did not help my perception of Ameku as a distinctive character.
It’s not like this series doesn’t have interesting ideas, either. That’s part of the problem: it knows how to do a good medical mystery drama, it just doesn’t spend a lot of its time doing it. There’s a short mystery involving a child and their mother that was particularly interesting to follow and did, in many ways, feel like an actual episode of House M.D. An episode involving the excavation of a tomb and the belief in a resultant curse (before the fires start) wasn’t too far off, either, even if it did feel a bit extra. It’s just a shame that these feel more like the exceptions rather than the rules, with each of them spanning single episodes while other mysteries cover multiple episodes. And the split between these and the more over-the-top-crazy mysteries didn't help. It ended up doing the worst of both worlds: never feeling so absurd that you could just turn your brain off and roll with the crazy, nor so grounded that you could really get into the mysteries and how the characters explore them.
Even the final little arc, which brings some personal stakes back to Ameku and Takanashi’s doorstep, feels like it puts an arbitrary and weird time limit on an investigation for something that doesn’t feel all that heavily consequential after watching the series tackle so many cases of death and near-death, though they certainly try to sell it as more. Adding a ticking clock to a mystery can sometimes work, but it didn’t work here.
There are good ideas in here that I can see absolutely working out for the better over a broader span of episodes with more diverse mysteries. It’s just a shame that so much of this feels so humdrum with a cast of characters that are fine and mysteries that average out to fine without ever really pushing the strengths this series should have in spades.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Apr 1, 2025
Where do I even start?
I feel like any review I give of this is going to be a losing battle because I’ve got two very different opinions on this one at war within my head.
Why the split?
My view of the series changes a lot depending on what factors I evaluate. Probably my hottest take on this series is that it kind of fails as a mystery. My view on mysteries is that they’re at their best when you can puzzle them out. At the very least, I feel you should be able to get satisfying answers to the central mysteries of a show in the
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end, yet many of the mysteries of this show remain hopelessly out of reach in the end. Why did all these “this worlds” exist? What was The Principal’s (effectively God’s) aim? What was Ms. Aki’s aim? Why was she just “gone” in the end? I understand what War was, but why was he so pivotal that he had to be eliminated? Why did they fuck with Asakaze so much? Why could some characters die (like Nozomi) while others were immortal? Is that because some were copies and others weren’t? This is just a small sampling of questions I’m left with in the end and there are no clear answers.
Before anyone mentions it, yes, I’m aware there are extensive discussions over the mysteries of the show that have taken place since it came out and some of these questions might have answers carefully hidden in the narrative. I’ve discussed some of them, but I’ll say that getting those answers just hasn’t felt satisfying. One example that seems kind of emblematic of my issue with the mysteries of this show: the show uses visuals to establish a connection between the second compass (the one Asakaze handed over to Nagara near the end) and another student who we don't know much of anything about. There may be some connection between that student and Ms. Aki or Nozomi, but that’s speculation. So... why does this matter? It hints at broader schemes still in play by the end of the series, but not what any of them are or why they are important. They’re just details you might notice that spawn more theories.
So as a mystery show, Sonny Boy fails for me. For so much of its run, it doesn’t let you sit with any of its mysteries and puzzle them out. It just moves onto another mystery, layers another mystery on top of that, goes down a warp pipe to a new mystery, then circles back to a mystery from the start of the series, then takes a space elevator to nowhere. I might notice more and puzzle more of these mysteries out on a second or third watch, but I’d almost certainly just have more questions based on those answers. None of its mysteries lead to any kind of satisfying conclusion. They’re all rabbit holes with no bottom.
…But I still like this show. Why?
Because narratively, it isn’t all about these mysteries. It wasn’t until those last two episodes that I found myself setting aside issues with understanding everything that was going on and just focused on the character journeys and themes, and I chalk that up to the series changing tacks a bit as it enters its back half (roughly episodes 6-12, though some of the episodes, particularly episode 9, double down on the mysteries). Even then, I can’t really say I was fully onboard for what it was doing until the last two episodes, which is part of what makes this review so difficult. The series itself emphasizes the mystery over so much of its runtime that teasing apart the elements that work is that much more difficult. I can’t really talk about what worked in the narrative without getting into those elements, so onto characters and themes.
The best character development in the series comes from Nagara and Mizuho, both of whom experience dramatic turnarounds from self-isolating, often difficult students to more three-dimensional characters willing to put it all on the line just to get back home. Nagara is the stand-out between the two, though. It was easy to criticize Nagara as relatively passive and frustrating early on, but he literally and figuratively stepped up to the plate and took a swing. His journey through the story is perhaps at its best in Episode 7, where, after a while sticking to the reload most traveled, he refused to go along with the crowd and bucked expectations to return to the island. And I particularly liked how the examples of birds - at first, those that were dead or dying that he ignored, before spending the final episode focused on the same nest as Nozomi and showing an interest in something he would have otherwise turned his eyes away from - demonstrated Nagara’s development and initiated something small but meaningful in the end with Nozomi to boot. I had my issues with both of these characters, but their journeys were a major part of why the experience worked for me.
Meanwhile, there are several main characters and side characters who are just great throughout. Nozomi is so good and so central to the plot that you’d almost believe she’s the main character at times. Kossetsu does a lot with only one episode of development, showing mainly the downsides of having a peek into the minds of others. Her friendship with Nozomi, despite the other girl being object of her crush’s affections, feels genuine and I really bought into her journey through episode 10 even while I didn’t really understand the search for War. Hoshi is also a fascinating character who remains a little enigmatic, but the decision to part ways with The Principal and chart his own course showcases some interesting growth.
Yamabiko was such a fascinating character to splash in about halfway through the series that provides some important context and external insight into everything that’s happening. Even with over 5000 years of experience, though, it’s his story with Kodama from his distant past that hits the hardest. It’s not a surprise at all (at least not to me) that an episode directed by Keiichirou Saitou with key animations from Keisuke Mori pops off this hard (the tracking shot from within Yamabiko’s eye is just incredible) with a one-off character for the ages, but the tragedy of Yamabiko and Kodama’s relationship hits hard and yields important lessons for Nagara, even if I didn’t get all the intricacies of how the plague worked on first blush.
But let’s be real: no character in this series really compares to Rajdhani. Not often I know I have a new favorite character on my hands from the start, but his curiosity and scientific exploration of this world is part of the reason that the mysteries didn’t fully get away from me as he solves several of them (particularly the cats). He also grows with the series, making peace with the many “this worlds” and his exploration of them and even turning into a forest in the end. Love that for him, giving his new macaw a home. However, the best part of Rajdhani is how he shows such a deep wisdom borne of experience. I’ll get into this on the themes, but Rajdhani’s contributions are a big part of the reason I recommend this series despite being baffled by so much of it.
Unfortunately, these also contrast with other characters who range from enigmatic for the sake of it (falling into the mystery camp) or are just frustrating.
The ones that matter most in the former camp are The Principal and Ms. Aki, both of whom play huge roles in the plot but remain black boxes when it comes to their motivations. I’d even include Asakaze in this camp despite understanding him because he’s the subject of so much of their manipulation that he mostly functions as a means of meting out their enigmatic plans, and he’s not the only one. So many other characters are tied into the central mysteries and plots of those two enigmatic characters, which means even really interesting inclusions like War just kind of peter out after they’ve had an episode to shine.
The latter camp includes Ace (I know he’s supposed to be a representation of the blue monkey, but dude is so vain it’s absurd), Cap (interesting for about an episode where he’s trying to assert control over his classmates before just learning his lesson and never being all that relevant), and Pony (interesting mainly as a vehicle for exploring Mizuho’s early characterization and just kind of the worst). They’re less characters and more parables.
As for themes, the basic one for the whole series slots well into their character journeys: it’s transition. These are high schoolers moving onto the next stage in their lives and struggling with that. You could argue that this is somehow The Principal’s efforts to assist with that, to help them understand themselves and decide on a path forward, even if that means spending thousands of years wandering or turning into a jungle. It’s a bit abstract, but I can see what they were going for generally.
However, if we’re talking some incredible theming, this is where Rajdhani and his part in episode 11 in particular really shine.
We get two stories from him about other “this worlds”:
The first is practically an encapsulation of both the central theme (moving on in life and being ready to do so) the positions students take in the end: they either accept reality and want to move on or live out their lives in a fantasy, trying to recreate a utopic vision of what they had.
The second gives us some surprising closure on Hoshi’s story as the inventor of death in a deathless realm. It seems time warped his mind. He created a utopia, a world of fasting. Hoshi may have been the one who helped realize it, but he wanted to break up the static nature of this place with death, rejecting the rules of this place. He committed experiments on his fellow classmates, and was eventually successful in creating a sort of death that shifted his worldview. He rejected everything he was by accepting everything, transcending earthly desires and achieving a form of death as a result.
As Rajdhani says:
“Life’s a constant cycle of vain endeavors. But at the same time, since it is meaningless, then this moment of becoming, is a precious and beautiful thing indeed.”
I definitely don’t claim to fully understand this story or its themes. Accepting reality, recognizing the pointlessness of so much of what we do, and embracing it all anyway, finding something to care about in the mix, is a strong sentiment. Even parsing out what I have here required writing out some pretty detailed summaries and thoughts on each episode and getting some insights from various sources outside of my watch experience. But I can say that my take-aways from the series were far better than I expected while I was trying to parse each episode. It’s a series that comes together well, because even as the number of dangling threads only got larger, there was something cohesive to take from them nonetheless.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Mar 30, 2025
S1 of this show was a vision, a great example of how to do video games in anime with low stakes that still invest audiences. So, why does S2 feel like a step or two down?
Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed this season. The characters haven’t changed and, if anything, they get more excellent character moments this season. There’s still some great animation, albeit not the peak moments that the previous season boasted. The fights are still pretty good and creative, wielding a lot of game logic, and there’s plenty to enjoy in the worldbuilding and going through a wider variety of games than
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we did back in S1. But it does feel… different.
It’s taken some time for me to think on the difference and I think it mainly comes down to one word: momentum.
There was a sense of momentum throughout S1. Sunraku joins Shangri-La Frontier and has a blast taking the road less traveled, power-leveling past obstacles that no one else could manage wielding his experience with trash games. He stumbles into an endgame boss and has to run around half-naked, stumbles upon a rabbit village and has to grind hard against a variety of challenges brought by the Rabbit Boss Vysache. He runs around trying desperately to avoid attention with his new rabbit familiar Emul only to draw a lot of attention and have to escape max-leveled PKers. Then he gets involved in the first scheme of its kind to take down another endgame boss, yielding what remains the best fight in the series with some real emotional heft.
Are there side-tracks? Sure. Sunraku visits other games and participates in other fights that give him ideas for the main game. He lives a life outside of the game. We get insights into other players he allies himself with and antagonizes. They draw some attention, but they feel like minor side-tracks to a central quest line.
As for S2, well... Sunraku reaches max level and there’s little sense that he’s still on some central quest line. It feels more like a set of side-quests all aimed at getting things he wants: empowering the Ether Reactor, going into Nephilim Hollow to face down an old rival in a mech suit, facing off against Lycagon again because they ran into her on the way to their destination and finding their way to the Abyss City. That last one has the makings of a central quest line, the fight against Lycagon is obviously consequential, and a lot of this is connected to his larger goals in the game, but so much of this season just feels like disconnected pieces. They’re fun enough, particularly as Sunraku has to use different tools to overcome seemingly impossible odds, but they are mostly side-quests or the early stages of a larger quest. And even the Abyss City arc is interrupted by the Global Games Competition. They all interrupt the momentum of the series in a way that events in S1 never felt like they were. Maybe that’s not fair to say, since there were a lot of small asides in S1, but they never dragged attention away for too long. It really doesn’t help that the GGC is where this season ends, leaving us on a cliffhanger that, honestly, I’m not super invested in seeing play out. It also doesn’t help that they arbitrarily made things more difficult at the last minute and their opponent is still mostly an unknown entity beyond their leader's quirky personality.
The more I thought about this, the more I related it to my experience with World of Warcraft. Getting to the endgame and experiencing the content for max level players was a large part of why you played the game, but whereas the leveling portion could often feel like a chore, there was always a sense of momentum to it. You were following a quest chain that led you down a path to that max level along an interesting journey. Endgame content meant bouncing around to various locations engaging in raids or PvP or what have you. I’d dump hours of my time into an individual event and just switch over to something else. It works great in a game where you aren’t necessarily driven by following a linear narrative and you choose how and where to invest your time, but not so well for a show like this where it makes the choices for you.
So yes, I still enjoyed this. There’s a lot to like about the wild ride that Sunraku took me on week after week, and if anything, his experiences were more diverse this season than last, so we got to see him really stretch his skills to cover a variety of games. And much of what he did played into the larger narrative of what he wanted to do in Shangri-La, so it’s not wasted. The pacing goes through some rises and falls, bottoming out with a prolonged meeting between guilds near the beginning of the season and occasionally dragging through its arcs that take place off SLF, but every arc still manages to keep me invested on some level. Still, after a stellar first season and despite all the new elements, this S2 just doesn't work as well.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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