This post was written by Dark_Sage. He is Dark_Sage.
Oh ye of little faith.
The Series
Mayoiga (The Lost Village)
tl;dr: A bunch of randos go on a bus trip to a spooky town. Is this just a metaphor for passing on cuz -le twist- they’re already dead? Holy shit, that would literally be the worst thing ever.
Manga: N/A
Light Novel: N/A
Animation Production: diomedea
I was so prepared to give this show a failing grade cuz it looked like P.A. Works spent a bit too much on a hookers & blow and had to make the difference up somewhere. But then I skimmed the first episode and found a chick who habitually vomits on people, so now I’m in love.
Besides girls leaking fluids, though? Look, the thing with Mayoiga is that it’s setting up this grimdark environment, ripe for people murdering the shit out of each other. Yet with the first episode’s hesitancy to actually show anything darker than kids talking to one another in a bus at night, this is shaping up to be the 4Kids version of Another. And Another wasn’t even that good.
My hype is pretty low here. If someone doesn’t die in the next episode, I think we can just call this one a bigger failure than my sister.
Phoenix Wright: Squid Attorney
tl;dr: Phoenix Wright is a struggling squiddtorney at law and blahblahblah who fucking cares
Manga: http://www.mymangatown.com/gyakuten_saiban/1/
Light Novel: N/A
Animation Production: A-1 Pictures
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tACXREkraIg
Sorry fellow oldfags, but it’s time to move on. You remember how Rozen Maiden failed, right? My innocent heart couldn’t take that again. ;_;
All in all, it’s not the early 2000s anymore, and that’s probably a good thing. Give me something new.
Endride
tl;dr: Jimmy and Brad are your average American teens, until one day a comet hits their small town, transferring them to the secret world of Aslandia. There they must battle the evil King Margoon who is oppressing the populace because he is evil. It is a touching tale of growing up and doing the right thing even in the face of overwhelming odds. Lik dis if u cry evertim.
Manga: N/A
Light Novel: N/A
Animation Production: Brain’s Base
This looks like it was originally made to be a mecha, but then the studio decided Fantasy was more hip these days, forcing the production team to replace the setting and weapons, but nothing else. Cheap and disjointed like all Brain’s Base series, there is no reason to watch this unless you’re on a suicide-by-anime run.
Pan de Peace! (A Peace of Bread)
tl;dr: Girls who aren’t fat pretend they know shit about being gourmands.
Manga: http://bato.to/reader#fa11dfd32c541a8c
Light Novel: N/A
Animation Production: Asahi Production
The basic concept is so stupid that the fact it even got an anime adaptation gets a rise out of me. With the source material being a fucking 4-koma, Asahi would knead to be baked to give it a full-length series.
Lucky Star and and Azumanga Daioh only managed to surpass their source material because they had things for the characters to do beyond the food fetish pandering. Here, all we get is a baker’s dozen of fifth-grade special needs kids with an unhealthy fixation on bread.
You’ve got nothing to grain by adding this to your watch queue. Even if you’re about that gokkun life, your time would be better spent rewatching Koufuku Graffiti. At yeast that show had a budget.
Kuma Miko: Girl Meets Bear
Concept pitch: Remember Yuri Kuma? Well how about if Yuri Kuma was bad? And then what if it wasn’t? Turned my generic comparison tagline into a plot twist on ya. Everything in my literary career’s been leading up to this moment!
Manga: http://bato.to/reader#9a7805e294c51f7f
Light Novel: N/A
Animation Production: EMT Squared | Kinema Citrus
Kuma Miko’s a lighthearted slice-of-life set in the Japanese countryside, based around cheap gags and obscure Japanese cultural references. Normally, I’d be out on this — haven’t liked a slice-of-life since… shit, I can’t even remember. Hell, I didn’t even like Bakuman. But Kuma Miko? Fuck, I am all in.
This is a series about legitimately enjoyable and relatable characters. And really, that just boils down to a country bumpkin and her bear friend. But if it’s enough to warm even a heart as cold as mine, most people can expect heartburn in the best possible way.
Keep your expectations in check (cuz this is a slice-of-life no matter how you cut it), but you can count on this to reach as high as the genre will allow. Get ready for some zutto happy days.
Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu (Re: Life in a different world from zero)
tl;dr: This is shounen done right.
Manga: http://bato.to/reader#76bc6f4897c6faee_3
Light Novel: I’ve got a link, but…
Animation Production: WHITE FOX
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvhgOe9BY5A
So, hm… what the fuck do I say about this show to get you to watch it without spoiling why? Cuz this is sure as fuck a series you wanna go into with only the vaguest of ideas at first.
Let’s do a choose your own adventure:
- Trust that I’m right and that this is show is worth watching (watch the first episode and report back about how great I am)
- Scoff rudely and demand evidence (click the spoiler cuz I am about to ruin something and hype you the fuck up)
12-Sai. Chiccha na Mune no Tokimeki
tl;dr: Elementary schooler slice-of-life, POV’d on some basic bitch.
Manga: http://bato.to/reader#b20a5ae832873c4a_2 (Spanish)
Light Novel: N/A
Animation Production: Oriental Light and Magic
At first I got really excited by 12-sai. I mean, Kyou no Go no Ni was fantastic in all the wrong ways. But then I realized that 12-sai had nothing in common with Kyou, other than that both their titles were Japanese. ._.
If elementary school girls are your thing, 12-sai will be the right show for you. And I suppose some of y’all may have more pure, legitimate interests in a coming-of-age story focused around a 12-year-old girl. However, I am definitely not the target audience here, so I’ll be skipping out like I imagine this show will reveal MC-chan’s dad did.
tl;dr
If you love yourself me:
- Kuma Miko
- Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu
If your only alternative is being a normalfag:
- Pan de Peace!
- Phoenix Wright
- Mayoiga
- 12-sai
If you’re looking for reasons to die:
- Endride
Okay, time for sleep. Hanging out with some IRL pals for most of tomorrow, but I’ll try to get Part 3 finished before I pass out (only if my arms aren’t too sore by that point).
I will take your word with Re:Zero because I love you~ <3
I totally forgot Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu was coming out and started reading the manga.
:( major fail
is the manga good?
Good taste for once? Miracle.
Damn son. Your articles always bring tears to my eyes.
Kind of tired of these other worlds dogeshit.
“Azumanga Daioh … managed to surpass [its] source material”
Nice try. The anime was a solid 8/10, but the manga was easily a 9. Every single page was laugh-out-loud funny, and the pacing was absolutely perfect.
The anime was excellent, but the manga was a true masterpiece of comedy, slice of life and the 4koma format.
You got me excited for Rozen Maiden. I’ll never let myself be fooled again.
Apparently doll joints have an expiration date. ;_;
I’m going to trust you on Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu. (another 1-2h till it’s up)
Wanted Phoenix Wright to be good (I loved the games), but I spent the entire episode saying to myself “this is so terrible”. I expected it to be fun and hammy, but I just cringed all the way though.
So it’s up. How’d I do? (Great, right?)
http://24.media.tumblr.com/c7c10a3e9dfc9dcffab2a03d9ebc9312/tumblr_mqc7euG3AA1rucc9wo1_500.gif
You were quite right DS. Re:Zero was much more interesting without any info ahead of time. Wish MC-kun wasn’t another tracksuit wearing hiki, but the story, setting makes up for it. I was hoping the show would be him muddling around without the destined encounter. The ep ending was a real DUN! that makes me look forward to the next one.
“This is shounen done right.” Sums up the show quite nicely.
OH GOD I CAN READ PORTUGUESE I CAN READ RE:ZERO
I KNEW BEING BORN ON BRAZIL WOULD BE WORTH IT SOME DAY!!!!
Jokes aside, will you be doing some per-week review like you did with Fall 2015?
Potentially… I know you guys need content, but I don’t know if episodic posts are really what will scratch the itch. And I don’t have much bandwidth to experiment… ._.
BRAZIRU
Random Macross Delta Episode 1 review (I know no one cares, but this is basically keyboard masturbation)
Thoughts and things that irritated me while watching the episode:
Decent introduction to setup the show
Teen working as a longshoreman operating heavy machinery, do they not have child labor laws?
Main guy’s design has him looking mid teens rather then late teens/twenty’s as they have done in previous iterations.
Really, firing (and paying) someone at the START of the workday?
Heavy equipment is designed to be operated in a certain manner, there’s no way it would be able to dance around like that. It would be torn up by all the stresses put on it.
Want to show the guy has the ability and talent to operate a Valkyrie when he hops into it, fine.
She ditches her pack when she runs after eating. He brings it along leaving work, but then ditches the pack himself when rescuing her. Does she not care about her stuff?
Idol group with the members having distinct stereotypical types, yawn.
Buildings built in a 14th century manner on an alien planet in the 21st century.
Military vehicle DO NOT sit around fully armed.
Idol henshin, .
Battling going on, building being destroyed, people being killed, but lets stand around and watch the idols give an impromptu concert.
The Idols flying around doing battle just felt out of place.
And what I expected at the 3 min mark, amid battle girl goes off singing and guy jumps in a Valkyrie.
Zentraedi shoots at the feet and not center mass.
He enters flight mode and knows how to keep the arm out, despite never being in a Valkyrie before.
She’s not going to be still singing when he enters flight mode and is going over 140 mph.
Overall Thoughts:
The pacing for the episode on the whole was crap. It was fine in the first half with the intro and the guy/girl, but the second half just through in a battle with tons of characters with no set up. The episode had 15 odd (presumable “named”) characters shown, but with no prior development the action become meaningless. The ep would have been better with a tighter focus on the guy/girl pair (ie only showing the battle from their point of view). Then slowly introducing the other characters over the course of the show. Not just vomiting them all out there.
The mecha CG fells a bit cheaper then Macross Frontier, which is a damn shame.
Interesting that they went with a terrorist angle rather then a foreign force.
The Idols fighting outside Valkyries with various techno abilities really bugged me. All the previous series were mecha on mecha. So this is a major departure and is going to but the heck out of me going forward. This is Macross, not Senki Zesshou Symphogear.
Well here’s hoping they fix the pacing. Macross 7 had crap pacing issues too, but it was bloat rather then cramming. They could have removed 50% of content of each episode, from about episodes 5-25, without losing any plot or character development. (15 years latter and it still bugs me)
why even bother with macross? only the first one was great, the others were more about singing their dumb songs and feelings than amazing spacemech combat, fuck dat noise
Holy crap, you weren’t kidding about Re: Zero. Potential AotS right there; very well executed so far.
Yay, there’s more of previews. This one is particularly reasonable.