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This is my first Clamp series. Yes, I'm a neophyte when it comes to this particular corner of the anime world, and regardless of what else I say, I am interested in seeing more series from Clamp, though not because of the various cameos in this series. Those were honestly a little distracting.

And I'm not entering into this one with a negative attitude towards it. Sure, it's a little saccharine, but that's kind of the point. A young woman appears suddenly in a town with a talking, fire-breathing stuffed animal with the chief goal of mending peoples' broken hearts. If that's not a premise for ... a saccharine show, I don't know what is. So when people start inviting this random stranger into their homes and preschools, you just kind of roll with it. That's the kind of show you're watching. It's not meant to be strongly realistic.

That's the vibe I rode through much of the series and I genuinely had a good time with it. The set-up of Kobato meets and helps a new person in the town felt like a great way to build out the world, including some very touching stories about lost love and letting things go, in particular. I only wish we'd gotten to see more instances of this, or at least gotten to see how her many interactions changed the town around her - honestly, just a few SoL moments of her walking down the street and running into people who know her by name after walking in a stranger would have helped establish the depth and breadth of connections she was making beyond the small scope we actually see during the series.

But therein lies the problem: I think this is the best stuff in the series. The throughline stories involving a moneylender trying to tear down the school, Sayaka's relationship with her estranged husband, Fujimoto's background and, most especially, Kobato's entire reason for being here along with Ioryogi just don't work nearly as well.

To start, the series strings along watchers with a lot of its central mysteries. It's not necessarily a problem to have big reveals towards the end of a series, but it does mean that we can't really interact with a characters' past or their aspirations. We're told from the start that Kobato wants to go... somewhere. It's not clear where for a very long time, so it's hard to get behind her desire, which is the central drive of the series. It's just too vague to get invested, and when things are finally revealed, I'm usually left with more questions than answers. What seemed clear often was revealed to be far less so, and character motivations make less sense when considering the answers we are given.

But it's not just the mysteries that bother me. Even when revelations come sooner and characters linger in the story, they shift from apparent threat to background noise back to threat and finally to... pillar of support? There are opportunities to both establish and build on relationships that are missed, turning much of what happens into an arc that takes such sudden turns that it gave me whiplash. It's not like there were no breadcrumbs leading up to these moments, but they made me question a lot of how characters behaved and why for much of the series.

And then there's the relationships. Leaving aside issues of how these narratives resolved, I didn't find that the story did much to invest me in any of the romances. If anything, it made it actively more difficult to root for the pairings it aimed to establish. I'm not going to spoil any given relationship, but the show actively rejects some of the more obvious chemistries it establishes in favor of something that feels forced and contrived to happen by the plot itself. Another relationship is both built on an untold amount of time together and marred by strife, but since one of the characters hardly shows up after they apparently reconcile, we hardly get to appreciate seeing it mended. For a show about mending broken hearts, it was disappointing to see it falter with its longer-running examples.

Finally, there's the ending. I know I've vaguely alluded to some of what's there, but as a whole, it just left me wanting. There were elements that felt like they were just there to leave us on a certain note, and the show didn't seem to care how we got there. Sure, it was once again that saccharine sweetness, but it felt like we were duty-bound to end up there rather than seeing it build more organically.

The show is still a good time when it just sits with these characters and offers moments for Kobato to be a real force for good. It's just a shame they're baked into a story that left me scratching my head or frustrated so often.

I had a really good time with this one.

I was more continuously invested than with Tatami Galaxy, though this series doesn't wrap up as expertly as that did. The time machine itself is quite the vehicle for telling the story, leaving me grasping for hints from previous episodes - I think this might work even better upon repeat watch. It's more the ride than the destination on this one, though it's also nice to see some closure on some of the central plots of the series as a whole. Much to its credit, this also improved on the amount of attention various side characters ... got, something I felt was distinctly lacking in Tatami Galaxy. The animation is also on point, providing some of what that series gave in a sharper package.

Really, my only issues with this one are that the episodes were too short to give me everything I wanted out of a 6-episode run (it crams in a lot, but we often get side-tracked - not that I'm complaining, since I love the side-tracks), the humor of the series still doesn't quite hit for me, and, even after they dedicate a whole episode to him, I'm still kind of baffled by Ozu. He's a great plot vehicle, but such a strange character.

I was looking forward to this with some trepidation. Anthology series are usually pretty hit or miss for me, often with more of the latter and less of the former. I like fairy tale-based stories, but I wasn't sure how these would be translated into anime. Given how distinct these stories were from the originals, it also meant that these stories couldn't lean on nostalgia for these stories as much. They have to stand largely by themselves.

So, how well do they stand? In general... not so well. These stories are self-contained, so if the plots are complex, then these stories had the unenviable task of ... making things clear for the audience while wrapping up their narratives. I don't think many of these accomplished that, particularly as so many of these were either full of plot holes or just refused to provide necessary information. The series has visual flair, and the interludes between stories are serviceable, but here are my individual thoughts for the episodes:

Episode 1: Cinderella. This has an interesting idea to tackle by inverting the original story. I love it as a premise for how this could play out, and it had all the makings of a story that could work, particularly as there's a good deal of psychological torture that plays out over its length. It's great to see the toll this takes on her family. For me, what I find wholly unbelievable is that the person perpetrating them lives in a house with so many live-in servants that never discover what she's doing, even though she often goes into her room and speaks to her living doll. And that's the strangest thing for me: the story sports a fantasy element in the form of this doll that could have been used to address why everyone in the household seems blasé about so much of what happens, but never uses it in that way. If it did, it was never clear, so the doll just functions as someone for Cinderella to bounce off of honestly throughout this episode. There's another purpose for it that I won't spoil, but it's largely just personal for Cinderella, so it has no effect on the broader plot. It's an exposition device rather than anything plot relevant.

Episode 2: Little Red Riding Hood. This story should have been an instant win for me. It's basically Dexter in a sci-fi world, and once again, the setup is strong. There's a lot to love about how the Wolf functions in this story, even if all he is in the end is just a sadistic killer who wants the tactile experience. No one in this story is particularly deep or interesting, and the world is only surface level (though that is literally by design). Still, the story feels strangely lifeless. Maybe it's the fact that it's leaning into the nudity, blood and gore, but somehow keeps all these elements just off screen, only showing us the end results. This is the kind of story that would have worked better for me if they had gone all in.

Episode 3: Hansel and Gretel. This took a lot of cues from The Promised Neverland. It definitely deviates at a couple of points over its run, as the Witch plays a more nuanced role here than in the fairy tale, the role of the parents is distinctly altered, and the titular children are given a lot of agency. Then we get to a pair of twists. I won't spoil them here, but both feel strange and leave me with more questions than answers about the overall plot. It's kind of crazy that even the characters themselves point out substantial plot holes and oddities in how this play out. I can't say this worked for me.

Episode 4: The Elves and the Shoemaker. Unsuccessful writer finds his muse in a young redhead. I like the idea here of a writer dealing with the fact that his only lauded work is stuff he doesn’t remember writing, but it ends up far more convoluted and I’m honestly not sure what it wants me to take away from the story. There are good ideas here, but they're buried in something stranger that never fully comes together.

Episode 5: The Town Musicians of Bremen: It's similar to Trigun with an all-female main cast dealing with a gang that has taken over a town, and it keeps things simple while making the character designs pop. I enjoyed this one for its simplicity - unlike so many of these episodes, it doesn't feel like it's trying to cram too much narrative into too little space. It's not without its issues - one of the central three feels largely superfluous at best and annoying at worst, the newest addition gets scant little exploration beyond one moment in her background, and the ending leaves me wanting a bit - but it's effective and fun, even if it's more style than substance.

Episode 6: The Pied Piper of Hamelin: While this was the most visually interesting (evoking some Ghibli), it's another example of the story ending up largely confusing due to just... so many lapses. There are stretches of time and choices made that are just glossed over to a confusingly vague degree. There's some interesting worldbuilding in the village, but that contrasts sharply with the Piper themselves who just left me baffled, acting both as a character and as a force in the story and not really working in either respect. Couple that with a pair of leads who are just off-putting for so many reasons and I found myself just weirded out by the experience.

Overall, it's a bunch of interesting ideas that mostly didn't get the space to breathe. Even some of the better stories like episodes 1 and 2 missed opportunities to really make their stories come together or pop, while many of the others floundered in their attempts to tell a cohesive narrative or make sense of some of their more outlandish concepts. The ride's interesting enough that it was worth sitting through, but it's hard to recommend outright for the strange turns it took.

These specials are a strange, strange ride on a submarine that turns solid surroundings into liquid.

I was genuinely pretty flummoxed watching these specials. They're only 6 minutes apiece, so it's not like I was expecting anything amazing, though I can't say I was expecting three largely disconnected stories that function based on a kind of nonsense logic that I can't really get onboard with. They're interesting in that they give us some chances to see the odd character interaction that didn't appear in the main series, but honestly, the only scenes I really connected with narratively were the ones at the end where whoever was ... telling the story was chided for shoddy storytelling in some way, shape or form. That's kind of what these were: just an opportunity to try something zany and string it together with the throughline of involving a submarine that defies physics, a harpoon, and our cast of... heroes? Hard to say at times.

Really, what you come here to watch these for is the animation. It's definitely rougher than the series is known for, but that's kind of got its own appeal to it. The color palette is pared down, often to very basic extremes, and they definitely don't always go for fluid movement. I still dig it, even if I can't say this was reason enough to go through these episodes by itself. Might appeal to others more, hence the "Mixed Feelings."

I had a really good time with this movie. It's certainly got a lot of visual flair, often displaying moments and scenes in unique styles to do a lot of the storytelling visually. It can be a little blunt at times in the dialogue, sometimes to the point of hitting you over the head with its themes, but that honestly fits in well for me, especially as this is a movie where its two central leads need to be hit over the head. The Black-Haired Girl spends much of the movie charting a path forward and excelling at pretty much everything she does, but can't ... perceive anything beyond that path, including her own feelings or those of the people who stumble into it. By contrast, Senpai has trouble moving along his path, stumbling the entire way as he endlessly pursues his goal of having the Black-Haired Girl see him. Even then, he stumbles, not knowing what he wants out of being seen and arguing endlessly with an army of inner selves about whether he should even put himself out there. At least for me, it's a relatable inner struggle made manifest in some of the most absurdly over-the-top scenes in the movie.

It's nice to get to spend more time with side-characters in this one. It's not necessarily that they get a lot of depth, but they're interesting insofar as how they facilitate the plot and the MCs. Higuchi and Hanuki are back and it's nice to see that they've fallen into a very chaotic lifestyle together as they impart various pieces of wisdom while engaging in just about every zany thing they can manage within a short time. There's a whole subplot involving a traveling group of performers working in defiance of the powers that be led by the Underpants Leader, a man defined by his love of someone else who got hit in the head with the same item as him at the same time. It's with characters like this that the movie occasionally managed to get a laugh out of me, so a little better than the series did. Ri Haku and the Used Book Market God also managed to direct some fantastical portions of the plot, making for some of the more absurd scenes. Still, not as captivated by the comedy as I was by just seeing the crazy ways its plot unwound and trying to guess how it would come together.

It's not episodic like the series, it's one complete narrative with a linear (albeit winding) plot. That makes it easier to follow and keep up with, but I'll admit, I kind of missed the way Tatami Galaxy told its story. Still, there are a lot of interesting visual flourishes in this one and things come back around quite readily from early in its run, and even though it was quite as visually innovative (it didn't jump back and forth between live action and animation), it certainly went hard in the animation department. I had a great time with this one, even if it wasn't quite as mind-blowing.

I wasn't sure what to expect going into this one. It had been touted as a strong comedy, so at the least, I expected to get some laughs out of it and see it in a package that merits the attention this series has received over the years.

While I can't say the comedy worked for me or that I consistently enjoyed each episode... I kind of loved it anyway. I put that down to two reasons.

First, the overall package is far greater than the sum of its parts. It's a time loop story, and like so many of its kind, it builds iteratively. What is ... particularly interesting is how it builds and pays off that iteration. Our lead, Watashi, isn't aware he's going through this... well, not fully anyway. He experiences déjà vu and, at random moments, seems to recognize that certain things have either played out before or played out differently. There's a fortune teller who keeps raising her prices every time she meets him in a new loop. The vast majority of the other characters don't give us any reason to believe they know what's going on, though there is the occasional comedic moment that suggests more. And if that's where this stopped, I'd say it's passable, but nothing special.

Where it becomes great is in how it builds on the story. Elements in each of the loops, especially early in the story, often go unexplained for a while. Who's that random beautiful girl sitting behind a curtain in Watashi's apartment and why does she look familiar? Why does he have a little stuffed doll from his friend hanging from a light switch? What's with this pen pal he keeps mentioning? What is the deal with all the castella? And who was that random guy that appeared out of the wall in his apartment that one episode? This show is absolutely willing to let you stew in perplexed silence over its various mysteries for a while only to reveal everything in an off-handed manner later like it's not even important. I got a sort of giddy excitement out of spotting them all.

Second, the visuals were just captivating. This is a series that didn't go all-in on the animation budget, but instead engages in the surreal by transitioning back and forth from animation to live action and somewhere in between. Particularly as it gets later in the season and in one episode in particular, it gives this feeling that you're somehow a part of that space in which the characters reside. For all the ridiculous stuff that goes on in this series, it really grounded the experience and made it feel personal.

So, yeah, I really dug this series. Not everything worked for me - the rapid-fire speaking made it difficult to keep up with at times and didn't really add to the experience, some of the loops were way more interesting than others and did more to flesh out the world and characters, some of the characters were a bit one-note, and its method of storytelling did make it more difficult to get on-board in those first few episodes - but it certainly did more than enough to reel me in and keep me invested.

I really wanted to treat this entirely as what it mostly is: a cute capstone to the series. It's nice to see Miyo slot into her role now that she's an important person in Kiyoka's life. There's a nice little subplot that affirms Hazuki's bond with her. There's a very sweet bit of romance between Miyo and Kiyoka that shows that this relationship is blossoming. All that experience would make this an easy recommendation.

...but then they had to insert the explanation behind the unexplored background plot points of the series proper. Don't get me wrong, it's fully gratifying to know the details of what led ... her mother to marry into the Saimoris in more detail, to understand how and why the emperor manipulated their lives in a last ditch effort to maintain his power. That's all good.

Here's my problem: Miyo responds by essentially saying that it's water under the bridge because she has Kiyoka now. Time to move past it.

Except... no it's not.

Look, I get that they weren't going to punish the emperor of all people. I get that there was probably nothing they could do with this information, not without creating big problems for themselves. And I get that Miyo spent the entire series moving past her history so that she could live a happy life with Kiyoka. That's great. I love that she has managed to move past her trauma.

That being said, the fact that neither Miyo nor Kiyoka respond to this in a way that offered any kind of catharsis is incredibly frustrating. The prince essentially told them that his father was responsible for so much of the pain and loss in her life, as well as the misunderstandings that led to so many of the problems she encountered with her family in the original series. That's a big deal. That should matter. Even if they don't say anything directly to the prince, the fact that this was all revealed to be the grand scheme of a power-depleted emperor desperate to hang onto what little he had at the expense of Miyo, her mother, and her extended family should not be so easily dismissed just because she ended up with a good man in the end, especially since that last bit was most definitely not the emperor's aim. And none of that is to mention all of his efforts to end her and Kiyoka at the end of the series.

This scene may not take up much of the runtime of this OVA, but it's probably the most important part for the broader series. It was an opportunity to reckon with the single biggest cause of everything that Miyo has had to struggle through and the person who had thrown the most impediments possible in the way of their relationship. And they just... didn't. She's beyond it now, emotional payoff be damned. The fact that this is basically episode 13 makes it all the more galling given that this takes place not long after some of the worst things the emperor did to them. It may be a short OVA, and I like a lot of it, but this really stuck in my craw. Major missed opportunity that left what could have been one of the more important moments of the series feeling empty.

There's a good deal I like about this series. It presents an intriguing set of characters that get more interesting as the series progresses. It's got a visual style that really pops with a great deal of magical flair, and you can feel the weight of its fights. I also like the world-building and place-setting this series has done for its next season.

And that's the biggest knock I have against it: it does just seem like place-setting for the next season. It's not so much that this is a slow start - we start and finish several short arcs back-to-back over the course of this ... season, all of which have their own little intrigues as various mysteries are solved - but rather that the series seems just fine getting side-tracked as often as possible.

The first two episodes set up a central plotline for the series for us to follow: Guideau travels with Ashaf under the auspices of a larger magical organization to hunt down witches with the aim of finding a specific one that cursed her and ending her. She doesn't really know what the witch looks like (I initially thought this was a Dorohedoro situation where the lead just didn't know who his target was, but it's a little more complicated in this case), but she should be able to narrow the field, get the curse removed, and return to a powerful body that Ashaf carries around with him in a coffin similar to Wolfwood from Trigun. So, what I expected was to see them run into a series of witches, gathering clues and getting closer to their goal before having some big finale engagement. And... well, we kind of get that... if you ignore a couple of other short arcs in the middle.

To be fair, all the side-tracks the series takes are interesting in their own rights and do establish more of the rules and basic concepts of this world, particularly in who can use magic and how. In one particularly interesting aside, we follow a necromancer and get to see what a completely distinct type of magic can do. It's honestly some of my favorite stuff in the series.

But that's the problem: I don't think the central plot has gotten interesting. They've run into a few witches, dealt with a variety of magic, and bent the rules a bit with the curse so that we can see what Guideu's original form looks like. And yeah, it leads to some cool stuff. The problem is that I don't have much reason to get behind Guideau. I know next to nothing about her motivations beyond wanting her body back. Ashaf remains a bit of an enigma. Honestly, we get to know more of the side characters better than we do these two. And that's not necessarily a big deal, but there's also very little in the way of character growth for either of them, and even when we arrive at key climactic moments, they just don't have the emotional heft to make them feel terribly meaningful.

Finally, while I wanted to give this a higher score, it ended up being brought down a little by its final couple of episodes. The backstory helped establish a bit about their background together, which is nice, but it felt like an odd arc to leave us on. Combine that with an exposition dump from Ashaf that sets up some very interesting bits of worldbuilding that I'm legitimately excited to see in S2 and, honestly, it made the ending feel like more of a tease for S2 than anything meaningful to this season.

Still, I enjoyed the ride. I want to see more of these characters and learn more about them. I just wish they'd focused their efforts better in this season.

Where to start on this one?

This was the kind of series that had a lot going for it from the outset, at least from my perspective. The fact that this was an anniversary passion project from Studio Bones (one of my favorite studios), the excellent artwork, the sci-fi elements (those black holes really pop), a pretty strong OST, not to mention the whole premise feeling like some crazy mash-up between Blade Runner and Accel World. The models for the various members of the Immortal Nine and the designs of Neans are striking. Unlike many who watched this in the early stages, I found being thrown ... into the narrative blind refreshing. We were learning about both the world and the circumstances of its leads right along with them. That was intriguing and set up for some solid payoffs to its various mysteries as it went on.

…then the series hit episode 5. It’s not like the series just turns bad at this point or anything – I think it still does well enough in much of the following episode – but the writing is on the wall in episode 5 as we’re greeted with a lot of partial answers to a wide variety of questions. Then we get more answers between episodes 7 and 9, which are where the series really begins to drag since the answers we get range from underwhelming to confusing. This series has a lot of good concepts, but part of the problem with comparing it to Blade Runner is that it’s all too easy to see how it falls short of that classic work. To put it bluntly, much of the series feels like it comes down to a simple idiot plot, where just having certain characters talk to each other would solve for so much of what’s going on. And the further you get into this series, the more these issues continue to add up. Most opportunities to characterize the elements of its world in complex ways end up making them seem absurdly simple, to the point that even supposedly complex character motivations just become absurd.

This is where I’d usually focus on the good aspects of the series (I liked the fight choreography in several of the fights, much of the character design, the animation was pretty solid, and for a while at least, the interactions between our two leads), but then we got that ending. What was at least a somewhat reasonable disagreement between characters, none of whom were obvious villains, turns into a villain plot in the first of three table flips contained within the finale. I often find table flips lazy, but especially when they’re done in short sequence one after another, it’s the kind of “4D chess” maneuver that accomplishes nothing aside from frustration. In the end, it becomes a series that confuses more than anything else, adding more moving parts in the pursuit of complexity that ends up making things overly simple and introducing more characters with their own motivations to dry up the deeper themes it was initially aiming for.

This series is a mess, and a sad one at that. I was expecting a lot better from this series. From the outset, I got glimmers of another series that left me frustrated: takt op.destiny, but the worst thing I can say about that series is that it looked good without delivering anything interesting. Metallic Rouge had something interesting, but managed to fumble it badly and ruined its best opportunities.

Not a bad start by any means, though it took a little while to solidly get going for me. Speaking as someone who has read Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer, it certainly hasn't hit as hard as that series did, but it's planted opportunities to do a great deal more.

It's not so much that the series is slow, but rather that it lacked an identity beyond its worldbuilding and basic establishment of its core cast. From there, it just became a series of fights that slowly built on those identities before a couple of big moments started to shift the momentum. The series has been ... slow to become more dynamic as it builds things out from a basic "let's fight a new powerful opponent" as a template for most episodes and has started to introduce the larger issues in the world surrounding them and how each character relates to them. I can't say any of the characters have been terribly investing so far, but they've given them enough building blocks to make them worth following.

This is a long series, slated for 37 episodes in total with these 13 episodes comprising the first arc and the remaining 24 comprising the second. Moving slowly to create an investing narrative in order to build out the world and establish the characters is fine by me if there is certainty that there's going to be more, and based on that ending, there's a lot to expect. I'm cautiously optimistic, especially as we've seen some admittedly abbreviated character arcs play out over the course of the series so far. I can't say any of the characters have really grabbed me yet, and though there's some interesting worldbuilding, it seems minimal so far, largely kept as background noise while the series focuses on the central characters. That's not bad, but it does mean that the second season needs to go pretty hard to make this series more than just a good time.