Summer 2014 Anime

Alfisti wrote:I think any move between different media requires a certain amount of change in order to work in one or the other. There is, however, a big difference between adaptation to fit into a different format (manga to anime, book to movie, etc), and missing the intent of the original material.

On the flip side, making it a harem comedy might have been the only way to get Rail Wars adapted as an anime considering the tastes of current anime otaku collectors.  

I may be saying this prematurely...but I think Space Dandy 2 just won the "Whoa!" award of the season with Episode 8.

So, Alfisti's Saturday in a nutshell: go to pub-lunch with mates, spend rest of afternoon at "lunch", go to dinner... then home at the disturbingly adult hour of 7:30pm. Sit around, drink tea, binge what has been released so far of Sailor Moon Crystal whilst sobering up.
#rockstarlifestyle

Two things: a) that was way more entertaining than it has right to be and b) Sailor Mars is awesome.

I dunno. It could well have been the last of the beer talking, but I found Crystal a lot more enjoyable than some of the other stuff I've been watching recently. Yes, parts of it are pretty cringe-worthy, but for some reason that doesn't bother me. Maybe it's because it never seems to be trying so hard to get my attention, and instead seems content to be what it is, take it or leave it.

For me, this season is just a total, utter loss.

Adlnoah.Zero started out so strong, but recently, it's suffering from the same problem as so many tabletop RPG groups: party members can do stuff that would logically get them killed (or in a kill or be killed situation), but everyone kum-by-yahs back together because they're all PCs.  Basically, the plotting went into the disbelief zone (for me.  I know it's long been there for others.)

Magical High School started the summer as a train wreck, but it's not even an entertaining one at this point.  Where it started out as a Sky High-style underdog story, it's now obvious that the MC is a god walking the Earth.  At this point, I'm watching primarily to see how far afield they can take the story from the original premise.

Tokyo E.S.P. stated as a "let's try to do the X-Men" style super-hero-ish story.  It's not that bad, but there is just so much melodrama.  Yes, I like heart-punches, but one of the key things to consider in a successful heart-punch is that it has to focused, not drawn out.  There's manipulation in both, but the melodrama is so obvious, so hamhanded.

Terror in Resonance - I'm only halfway through, but I can't see why they are keeping the girl around / alive.  They're trying to be "the good guys", the terrorists who don't kill people, but it's starting to wear thin.  I don't see why they're doing it, but I see the trope of "it's a black-ops school for orphans."  I can deal with it, but they're spending too much time in the present and not enough tying back to the history.

Sword Art Online II is my favourite anime of the season, and that's not saying a lot.  I started the season expecting to hate it because Sword Art Online (I) S2 was such a misogynistic mess.  It's effectively turned into a harem anime (no, not as much rom-com, but all the supporting characters save one are attractive females.)  At this point, it's the shows that I mind the least.  That's damned by faint praise.

Honestly, the one thing I did intend to watch weekly - Rail Wars! -  I only made it to episode two of and no further. While I've not specifically decided to give it up, I've also not felt much urge to keep watching so... you tell me.

Maybe I'll just go binge watch Nadesico... again. That usually cheers me up.

Alfisti wrote:Honestly, the one thing I did intend to watch weekly - Rail Wars! -  I only made it to episode two of and no further. While I've not specifically decided to give it up, I've also not felt much urge to keep watching so... you tell me.

The anime review site I am using to follow the shows I am currently stacking up does not cover Rail Wars! so I can only go off what I hear each week on ANN's podcast and the consensus they have been giving is the show remains focused on titties and trains, which means I probably won't get very far when I pick it back up. 

Alfisti wrote:So, Alfisti's Saturday in a nutshell: go to pub-lunch with mates, spend rest of afternoon at "lunch", go to dinner... then home at the disturbingly adult hour of 7:30pm. Sit around, drink tea, binge what has been released so far of Sailor Moon Crystal whilst sobering up.
#rockstarlifestyle

Two things: a) that was way more entertaining than it has right to be and b) Sailor Mars is awesome.

I dunno. It could well have been the last of the beer talking, but I found Crystal a lot more enjoyable than some of the other stuff I've been watching recently. Yes, parts of it are pretty cringe-worthy, but for some reason that doesn't bother me. Maybe it's because it never seems to be trying so hard to get my attention, and instead seems content to be what it is, take it or leave it.

I admit to having a bit of a hard time getting into Crystal. I am very much a child of the original show and the new character designs don’t resonate all that well with me. Evidently this show was originally meant to be an Original Net Animation and they secured a broadcast deal late in development so the reason it’s being broadcast every other week is to try and clean-up the animation so it looks better. And I must admit what made the original so fun to watch was the over-the-top dub.

taerkitty wrote:For me, this season is just a total, utter loss.

Yes, I’m reading and hearing mixed reviews on a number of shows. I haven’t really been watching anything of late, but I have been starting to catch up on shows…

Yama no Sasume 2 and HaNaYaMaTa have both remained steadily awesome, and Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun is consistently hilarious - Chiyo Sakura is going to be giving Nike Lemercier a run for Favorite Anime Character of 2014.

SPACE☆DANDY 2 has also been consistently solid, thanks to Kimiko Ueno and Keiko Nobumoto putting in excellent scripts.

Blue Spring Ride is holding it’s own, though it’s not to the level of Kimi ni Todoke or Say I Love You as one of the great love stories of recent anime.

Glasslip seems to have lost the plot, as I am generally just confused now as to what is going on.

Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories 2 is weaker than the first series, though it can still generate some chills.

Space Dandy 2 is on a roll and with Episode 10 has officially gained a commanding lead in my "Pick of the Season" race as the crew continue to up the ante. I shudder in fear to think of how much further they can go with three episodes left.

Also in other news, I'm prepping my marathons and also am 10 episodes into my Marvel Disk Wars marathon and so I say again...

SOOOOOOOOOOOOO SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!!!

Notes to self from Week 11...

1) Learn yosakoi

2) Climb Mount Fuji

3) Blue Spring Ride is, in fact, one of the great love stories of recent anime.

Aldnoah Zero, What an ending ! looking forward to January !

Fully agree. It's a definitely a love it or hate it season ending. Me, I loved it.

The season ending taught me a valuable lesson: never get attached to characters in any work written by Gen Urobuchi.

/will likely make the same mistake for season 2 because he is a masochist

Ghost in the Shell: Arise border 4: “Ghost Stands Alone”

Motoko and Public Security Section 9 must track down a terrorist known as “Fire Starter”, who unleashes an infection that affects cyberbrains.

Best of the four - classic GitS entertainment.

HaNaMaYaTa - A



So genki, it would make a Vulcan smile. Definitely a moe show, but also definitely not your standard “moe moe kyun - cute girls just being cute” fare, which is what made it stand out.


Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun - A

A perfect romantic comedy.


Blue Spring Ride - A-

The final two episodes pushed it over the hump from "good" to "great".


Rail Wars! - No Grade

I “speed watched” this show, meaning I downloaded the Cruncyroll rips from Horriblesubs and set it for 10x so I could watch the rest of the series in about the time it would take to watch one episode. From what I saw, this graphic sums it up pretty well:



Though I will say that if the girls uniforms looked like what Noa Kashima wore at her concert in Episode 04, I would have watched the whole thing in real time.




LOCODOL - No Grade

Another show I speed-watched. It generally looked like your average “cute girls being cute” show crossed with your average idol show to deliver something that was probably average.

Rail Wars!
-Final Assessment

Well...there certainly wasn't much 'war' in Rail Wars! ; that's for certain. There was even an exclamation point at the end too! XC<

For the first five episodes, this show showed a good amount of intrigue as I enjoyed watching four kids and one youthful adult try and make the best of their unique traits in an otherwise stressful environment. I mean seriously, one kid is so stressed out, he feels the need to wear a god-damned bulletproof vest as a part of his uniform...seriously.

After episode 6 however, Rail Wars! falls down the moe-ecchi(yes, there are many types of ecchi) rabbit hole and stays stuck like Alice. A love triangle emerges and then all hell breaks loose as the Goldfish Paradigm(it's a real psychological axiom, look it up) comes to fruition for one Naoto Takayama and soon this poor unfortunate train otaku goes swimming in headlights and cabooses.

All LOLZ aside, I can honestly say that Rail Wars! was at the very least an enjoyable show. Although I subscribed for the action, and there was a fair amount of that, it transformed quickly into a nice slice-of-life show. Even though that life was about four kids, and two adults who are working for the Japanese Nationalized Train Industry.

In the end, I might re-watch this show as a part of a sick day LOL-fest, but I won't be paying full price.

Final Grade = C+

I only see a programming context entry for Goldfish Paradigm.  Could I bother you for a link or elaboration?

Elaboration sent via PM.

I just watched the 12th episode of Space Dandy 2...I think I just got mindfucked...

Not quite "The Trial of Captain Stern", was it?

Well...yes in the fact that somebody just had to go crazy. No in the fact that nobody got paid off, and there's a good chance Dandy didn't even know he was on trial.

Also while Dandy may not have stood trial for twelve counts of first–degree murder, fourteen counts of armed theft, twenty two counts of piracy, eighteen counts of fraud, thirty seven counts of rape, and one moving violation; it shocks me that he still hasn't been billed for collateral damage. Okay, maybe the moving violation might stick as well.

GLASSLIP - B-

The finale was as opaque, narrative-wise, as the previous 12 episodes. If this story had a plot, I was never able to glean it. 

The story was a joint work between Rika Sato, whose only other project was doing half of the screenplays for Tari Tari, and veteran Junji Nishimura, who has been writing and directing anime for some four decades, including some shows I deeply enjoyed from a story sense.

So I’m left with the visuals, which were up to PA Works usual excellence and second only to the high-budget Madhouse projects in quality.

I consider this show to be overall a disappointment and it will be the first P.A. Works show I do not actively want to own.

Tokyo ESP
-Final Assessment


Well, if there was one thing I could compare this series to, I would possibly call it Japanese Avengers.   The series actually is quite well done story wise, if compressed a lot. However, the story doesn't get convoluted in any grander scheme and thankfully it doesn't take any emotional cheap shots like Black Bullet did last season.

Surprisingly, the characters were quite relatable even though they lacked any real depth. Unfortunately, this is where the story loses steam. Character progression is constant, but it is light in the fact that the story is a bit too concerned with 'getting on with it'. There are a few tense moments and they are in fact followed up upon, but they didn't have that "WAMM-POW!" effect you would normally expect from such moments.

On it's own, I call this series above average at best. However, as an introduction to a possible ongoing series, this was pretty well played.

Enough action to please the Michael bay disciple and enough story to keep you interested; Tokyo ESP for those bored weekends.


Final Grade = B

I wouldn't even say Tokyo ESP compares to The Avengers recent film.  It has shades of X-Men with the, "I don't care if the rest of humanity hate and fear us, we're going to protect them" motif.  

For a show that opens so grimly, they seem incredibly reluctant to kill off any main character on either side.  That turned me off, and prolonged a lot of the show beyond what I felt was necessary.

I watched it to finish it, but not because I really cared all that much about it.

Recommend you avoid.

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I could say the same about Night Raid 1931, a series I added to make up for a dearth of interesting shows this year.  It showed some promise early on, but quickly turned into a serial story.  Nothing wrong with that, but the story was hard to follow and hard to believe.

As I said previously, recommend you save your time.

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Terror in Resonance is well done, but I can't figure out why the girl is part of it.  (There are some other issues in the final episodes I can't figure out, either.  Namely, most of it.)  In short, the plot reaches far beyond its grasp and is ultimately disappointing.

The art is wonderful, and the ... well, the art is wonderful.

I'm glad I watched it, but I won't re-watch it.  I neither recommend it, nor recommend you stay away from it.

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Irregular at Magic High School ended.  That's the best thing I can say for it.  I'm glad to be done with it. It sold me on a lie, but I wanted to see what it had, what the creators felt was worth lying to the viewers.  It had a lot of one-sided battles, and that was it.

Recommend you run screaming.

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Aldnoah.Zero is on hiatus for the winter season.  Evidently, it will restart come January 2015.

Spoiler:

I'm mixed about it.  I like how the main character uses his tactical prowess to defeat his enemies even when they greatly overpower him, but that seemed to taper off in the final assault.  I love how he is cool under fire, a welcome relief from the "Raging hard doesn't win this fight?  Well, I'll just have to rage HARDER!" idiots like the protagonists from Attack on Titan and Argvellon.

What I don't like is how the protagonists have 'realistic' (well, in the way that Gundam is more realistic than Grendizer) mass-produced mecha with projectile weapons and large-scale metal knives while the attackers had one-off mecha that had 70s is powers: shooting forearms/fists, beam swords, and invulnerability fields.  For a schism that separated the Martian and Earth-bound humans for all of a few decades, the disparity is hard to accept.

No recommendation either way.

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As I've said in past posts, I started watching Sword Art Online II primarily to see if it sucked as badly as Sword Art Online I S2 (the flying elves world).  It doesn't. Or rather, it doesn't suck as hard as SAO I S2, that is.


Episode 13 evidently is only the halfway point; Wikipedia reports this is scheduled for 24 episodes.  If this is the case, then the next episode will be interesting - we've figured out how the bad guy does the seeming impossible, we've revealed the bad guy's real world identity, and we've concluded the elimination tournament.

No recommendation either way.

===

All in all, a hugely disappointing season. As seen with Night Raid 1931, I've started exhuming past shows to watch.

Space☆Dandy - A

A show this ridiculous and awesome needed a ridiculously awesome send-off and series director Shinichirō Watanabe delivered on a grand scale. I’m confident the ratings will be good enough to get another season.
  
 
Based on various reviews, I have decided not to go back to Tokyo ESP or Tokyo Ghoul. I am also not going to go back to Argevollen nor Akame ga Kill as both are evidently continuing on to Fall and I don't think they'll hold my interest for 24-26 episodes.

I’m also not going to finish up with the first season of Aldnoah.ZERO. Through episode 06 I have not really been impressed nor interested. Anime News Network's and Angry Anime Bitches' weekly episode reviews have been generally opposite (ANN likes it, AAB does not), so I'll go with my gut on this one, which is that I expect I'll see it more through AAB's eyes than ANN's. Inaho Kaizuka is a direct analog of Tatsuya Shiba from The Irregular at Magic High School - someone who's mental skills are so amazing, they make them a walking deus ex machina. Unfortunately, unlike the rest of the cast of The Irregular at Magic High School, who at least look semi-capable of helping the hero out, the rest of the cast of Aldnoah.ZERO seem as dumb as posts and are going to be totally dependent on his ass-pullery to keep them alive.
 
 
I am going to give Terror in Resonance a shot as AAB’s final (spoiler free) summation was very positive.

Actually, with Irregular, they're all nearly to the point of deus ex machina.  Of course, when they don't, then Tatsuya comes to save the day.  The fights were largely predestined, and thus, boring.

In my eyes, the difference between a d.e.m. and Aldnoah.Zero is how Aldnoah makes some use of physics and conjecture.  It's not a total d.e.m. where Zeus comes down from on high and sprinkles happy-dust on everyone.  

As for the rest of them being dumb as posts, that's fine in my eyes, mostly.  If we're talking about the characters in RPG terms, Inaho is the one-and-only PC in the bunch, and the rest of the cast are NPCs and bosses.  It's a throwback to the 80s and 90s story-telling wise, but it's a valid power distribution.


The last part of Terror In Resonance's last episode had me going 'WTF' so many times I came up with a kuh-wuh phonem to loop the last WTF and the next one.  But ... it has lovely artwork.

I just realised that they stole the reason for Tatsuya not being much use at magic from Terry Pratchett's Colour of magic, Rincewind was hopeless at magic as well due to one of the eight spells of creation! hiding in his head and scaring all the other spells out of his mind !

Except he could, and did cast a lot of other spells very effectively. If they kept him limited like they initially said, it would be a much better show.

taerkitty wrote:As for the rest of them being dumb as posts, that's fine in my eyes, mostly.  If we're talking about the characters in RPG terms, Inaho is the one-and-only PC in the bunch, and the rest of the cast are NPCs and bosses.  It's a throwback to the 80s and 90s story-telling wise, but it's a valid power distribution.

Except they are a mix of professional and cadet soldiers so they should at least be competent at soldiering...but they're not.

In Episode 06, when Lt. Marito said he "just needed a heavy gun" and then the incoming "fists of fury" started being knocked off course by bullets, I thought it was him and I was like "yes! finally someone other than Inahto is going to make an impact". But no, Marito was busy pissing himself in the cockpit because of another PTSD attack and it was Inaho who was the perfect one-shot CIWS and once again saving everyone's bacon thanks to his tactical genius and mad skillz.

Add that the show's story has more twists than an M. Night Shyamalan movie and I just know at best it will be a mid-to-low "B" show for me and I don't bother spending my time on those anymore.

Yes, I can understand that. However, I've found my tastes to become more and more limited over time. While exceptions always exist, I don't like

- Shows where the protag has only to rage harder than before to win.

- Shows that take forever to show significant plot development.

- Too much fanservice.

- Parodies, or shows that don't take themselves seriously enough.

- Pointless, over-the-top violence.

- Shows that break my suspension of disbelief too soon.

Note that these are all subjective. It's hard to quantify why I don't like a show. These are the best I've got.

taerkitty wrote:Except he could, and did cast a lot of other spells very effectively.  If they kept him limited like they initially said, it would be a much better show.

he didn't cast them directly, they were preprogramed into his CAD, he supplied the power, that's why he was able to work out how to make the flight spell work without the magician constantly recasting it ,the Machine did it for them instead

All casting is done via CAD. It's one thing when he can calculate charging sequences and figure out how to interrupts it. It's another when he can cast something that basically makes a tank and crew vanish. They rest of his squad can do that, but not the rest of the students.

Girls und Panzer: Kore ga Hontou no Anzio-sen Desu!’

An OVA from July, this one tells the battle between Ōarai Girls High School and Anzio High School.

Still a silly concept, but also still a very entertaining concept.

Finally finished Terror in Resonance and have to say that in the end, I was not impressed. As a parable warning against the rise of ultra-conservatism in current-day Japan I guess it works, but "terror-free terror" does not an interesting story make and the cast's motivations were mostly opaque.

Himegoto
-Final Assessment

Let me say first that I am sorry for my absence and I hope to make up for it. Now on to the show...

This is definitely one of those shows that isn't for everyone. Whether it be the context of the funny or the outright ridiculousness of the character exposition; this is definitely a series with no grey area to speak of. The series starts out with ridiculousness and ends with that same feeling. Unfortunately, the series somehow has a need to want to get serious at the worst possible time. 

Although the series started out strong, it finished fairly weak for my tastes. For a show that had so much funny going for it, I am surprised at this turn of events in the last two episodes. Despite that, it is in fact a very funny show and the 4-6 minute run time of each episode works to enhance the funny by not saturating the joke exposure. You can literally watch this entire season in an hour and some change, I shit you not.

An ecchi show that isn't quite ecchi, I enjoyed the premise and wit that the show approached its funny. However I don't think I'll sign up for any spinoffs.

Final Grade = B-