Hey there, friend! What's up?
Anyway, I've seen the original movie three times. (The third one was by accident.)
General anime discussion thread
- Thread starter LOG
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Hey there, friend! What's up?
Anyway, I've seen the original movie three times. (The third one was by accident.)
- Joined
- Dec 7, 2016
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- 174
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- 23
My goodness, what a small world! I've seen the movies more times than I can count, was not a big fan of the Arise reboot though.
So the new anime season's here.
Unsurprisingly, my favourite's Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju, and the second season's as good as the first so far. If you've seen the first season you know what to expect; if not, watch that first.
Blue Exorcist also has a second season, I'm enjoying it about as much as the first, if not a bit more. I was a little confused, though, as it started, because there are continuity issues. Turns out the first season went anime original at some time in its run (8 or 9 episodes are anime original), and season two adapts the manga material, erasing those episodes of season 1 completely. Be aware of that, and you have an easier time to get going. (I barely remembered the details, so I was spending a good amount of episode 1 wondering what was going on.)
The best premier of a new show is Demi chan Wa Kataritai. It's surprisingly sensitive to identity issues, on top of being a really cute show.
Kuzu no Honkai is also very promising: Boy and girl are in a sexual relationship, explicitly using each other as substitutes for their respective teacher crushes. This sounds like a catastrophy in the making, but the show's actually pretty good, I think. From the director of White Album 2 and School Live.
Onihei feels like an old-school Samurai drama. It's a dark show, both metaphorically (including, for example, torture as valid investigation methods) and literally (dark colours). I liked the first episode more than I thought I would, but there's nothing I haven't seen before.
Seiren looks like Amagami SS, but it seems to be going in a different direction, as if deliberately trying to play foil to that kind of show. Episode 2 is based around bog-standard harem misunderstandings, but only the protagonist behaves the way you'd expect from the genre staple. Bonus points for a good male best-friend character.
ACCA seems to be a show about political intrigue, from the perspective of beaurocrats. I started out bored and ended up intrigued. There's little I can say at that point; but it's got potential to rise in my esteem. It's also got a very distinctive and unusual look. It's not a look that particularly appeals to me, but it's one I'll get used to. (Especially the mustaches will need getting used to.)
Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid is good fun. The show's based on a manga by the mangaka who also did I Don't Understand What My Husband Is Saying and Komori San wa Kotowarenai. Both of them have anime adaptions, and if they're anything to go by, I'll enjoy it more and more as I go on.
Masamune Kun's Revenge seems to be a show about petty people being petty. The story is neither a turn off nor a point of interest, but I love, love, love the soundtrack and the direction (there's a scene where the main character is surprised by a spider: the final shot is a close up of the character's eye with the spider reflected in it. The timing of the scene is excellent.)
Most of the other shows have little to offer, or are downright awful. (There's a short called One Room and that's only the second show with a run time under five minutes that I dropped before it's over. There's a first-person camera, and you're made to check out a school girl in uniform, "your" new neighbour. Awefully creepy. I don't know what happens then, because I clicked it away.)
Unsurprisingly, my favourite's Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju, and the second season's as good as the first so far. If you've seen the first season you know what to expect; if not, watch that first.
Blue Exorcist also has a second season, I'm enjoying it about as much as the first, if not a bit more. I was a little confused, though, as it started, because there are continuity issues. Turns out the first season went anime original at some time in its run (8 or 9 episodes are anime original), and season two adapts the manga material, erasing those episodes of season 1 completely. Be aware of that, and you have an easier time to get going. (I barely remembered the details, so I was spending a good amount of episode 1 wondering what was going on.)
The best premier of a new show is Demi chan Wa Kataritai. It's surprisingly sensitive to identity issues, on top of being a really cute show.
Kuzu no Honkai is also very promising: Boy and girl are in a sexual relationship, explicitly using each other as substitutes for their respective teacher crushes. This sounds like a catastrophy in the making, but the show's actually pretty good, I think. From the director of White Album 2 and School Live.
Onihei feels like an old-school Samurai drama. It's a dark show, both metaphorically (including, for example, torture as valid investigation methods) and literally (dark colours). I liked the first episode more than I thought I would, but there's nothing I haven't seen before.
Seiren looks like Amagami SS, but it seems to be going in a different direction, as if deliberately trying to play foil to that kind of show. Episode 2 is based around bog-standard harem misunderstandings, but only the protagonist behaves the way you'd expect from the genre staple. Bonus points for a good male best-friend character.
ACCA seems to be a show about political intrigue, from the perspective of beaurocrats. I started out bored and ended up intrigued. There's little I can say at that point; but it's got potential to rise in my esteem. It's also got a very distinctive and unusual look. It's not a look that particularly appeals to me, but it's one I'll get used to. (Especially the mustaches will need getting used to.)
Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid is good fun. The show's based on a manga by the mangaka who also did I Don't Understand What My Husband Is Saying and Komori San wa Kotowarenai. Both of them have anime adaptions, and if they're anything to go by, I'll enjoy it more and more as I go on.
Masamune Kun's Revenge seems to be a show about petty people being petty. The story is neither a turn off nor a point of interest, but I love, love, love the soundtrack and the direction (there's a scene where the main character is surprised by a spider: the final shot is a close up of the character's eye with the spider reflected in it. The timing of the scene is excellent.)
Most of the other shows have little to offer, or are downright awful. (There's a short called One Room and that's only the second show with a run time under five minutes that I dropped before it's over. There's a first-person camera, and you're made to check out a school girl in uniform, "your" new neighbour. Awefully creepy. I don't know what happens then, because I clicked it away.)
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Akiba's Trip is a fun series so far. It's the type of series where the people making it are obviously having fun with it. It knows exactly what it is, and revels in that. It feels like the type of show Studio Trigger would make. Also, it's pretty cool that it has a simul-dub airing alongside the sub.
I'm not impressed by the new season so far. As usual, I'm following fourteen series (including two holdovers from the previous season), and most of them are mediocre at best.
Chaos;Child may have potential. Chaos;Head was decent, from what I now remember at several years remove, and Stein's;Gate, derived from the same series of visual novels, was pretty good. The fact that this one's tagged as "harem" in at least some places makes me wary, though.
Youjo Senki is a war story centering around a loli witch . . . except that this particular loli is a reincarnated Japanese salaryman with an adult outlook and a heartless efficient streak (episode 1 has her deliberately sending an annoying idiot soldier to a post where she knows he's going to get killed, and not regretting it in the least). Dark and nasty, but still better than 75% of what's airing this season.
Of the remainder, ACCA seems to be the most likely to turn into something worth watching, even if the artwork style reminds me of kiddy cartoons from the eighties, with limited details and bright colours.
Beyond that, I'm watching a lot of mediocre video game adaptations and idiot protagonists. I haven't gotten to the first episodes of Onihei or Hand Shakers yet, although they're on the list (and I don't have especially high expectations for either).
Oh, and Fate: Grand Order was reasonably good, but it was a movie-length one-shot. There's a two-shot, Ryuu no Haisha, airing in February that looks potentially interesting.
Chaos;Child may have potential. Chaos;Head was decent, from what I now remember at several years remove, and Stein's;Gate, derived from the same series of visual novels, was pretty good. The fact that this one's tagged as "harem" in at least some places makes me wary, though.
Youjo Senki is a war story centering around a loli witch . . . except that this particular loli is a reincarnated Japanese salaryman with an adult outlook and a heartless efficient streak (episode 1 has her deliberately sending an annoying idiot soldier to a post where she knows he's going to get killed, and not regretting it in the least). Dark and nasty, but still better than 75% of what's airing this season.
Of the remainder, ACCA seems to be the most likely to turn into something worth watching, even if the artwork style reminds me of kiddy cartoons from the eighties, with limited details and bright colours.
Beyond that, I'm watching a lot of mediocre video game adaptations and idiot protagonists. I haven't gotten to the first episodes of Onihei or Hand Shakers yet, although they're on the list (and I don't have especially high expectations for either).
Oh, and Fate: Grand Order was reasonably good, but it was a movie-length one-shot. There's a two-shot, Ryuu no Haisha, airing in February that looks potentially interesting.
Oh, I forgot about that. To be honest, I was a little disappointed with it. Once I heard that a lot of the team from Robot Girls Z were involved, I thought it would be a lot of fun and going forth with reckless abandon. It's surprisingly tame, though. It's not bad, but it's not what it could have been. A bit more... "energy"?... would have been nice.
The first episode is an hour long and contains a "summary" of Chaos;Head, as it's a sequel. But the summary doesn't really explain anything of what you'd know once you watched the show, so I read up on it to refresh my memory of the show. It's got potential, and at the very least it's going to better than last seasons Occultic;Nine. But it's not a top contender in this season.
I don't often like war anime, and I hated the character designs, so I dropped it almost immediately. Mistake?
I couldn't get very far into Handshakers due to the nausea-inducing CGI (literally; I suffer from motion sickness, and some CGI shows, for example Sidonia no Kishi, can trigger that). But from what I hear it's near the bottom of a rather bad season. I have no idea whether I would agree with that or not, since I can't get past the CGI.
The original one-shot for Dragon Dentist (Ryuu no Haisha) was pretty good. I have high hopes for that one.
I'm going in cold with only the summary ep plus what little I still remember of Chaos;Head. We'll see how little sense this makes as a result.
As for Occultic;Nine, it struck me as a mess, really, although it did pull itself together a bit towards the end.
Hard to say.
I was more impressed by the second episode than the first—less action, but more story. The main character turns out to have been a rules-obsessed psychotic salaryman who was dumb enough to issue a challenge to god/the powers-that-be after someone he fired pushed him in front of a train. Said powers reincarnated him as an orphaned girl in a world with WWI-ish level technology in an attempt to teach him a lesson. He/she is bound and determined not to learn a damned thing, though, and my bet is that this is not going to be any kind of touchy-feely redemption story.
Thankfully my motion sickness only activates when playing 3D video games, not when passively watching something (I can't play more than about 15 minutes of Minecraft, but I got through all of both Sidonia series just fine). If Hand Shakers turns out to be a true train wreck instead of the mediocre shounen action series I'm expecting, well, I have some other mediocre shounen action series from previous seasons that I never finished.
Hmm, I'll put in on my maybe-later pile, then. Thanks for the description.
I'm also slightly photo-sensitive (I've got my screen set to very dark as a precaution), so that may also play into it. Handshakers doesn't appear to be any loss, but I did want to watch Sidonia.
Physical issues aside, I tend not to like CGI. There are occasional exceptions, but they're very rare. Nyanbo is excellent (cat-robots that look like they're made out of card-board boxes put into real-life environments), perhaps because it's based on geometric shapes rather than trying to imitate living things. I stopped watching American animation, because almost all of it is 3D-CGI (the worst kind, for me).
Shin Sekai Yori is one of my favourite shows! (I liked Wolf's Rain, too, though it was a little strange at times.)
Been watching Toonami more now that we have some new series and their current ones have caught up to where I am in them.
- Dragonball Super: No real tension yet, but I've managed to stay suitably entertained nonetheless.
- DBZ Kai, the Final Chapters: Not interested. I know all of this already.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: It's pretty looking and all, but man does the constant exposition pull me out of it.
- Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn: So apparently this is some kind of remake of the original Gundam series? Ep 1 was fine, if a little slow. Ep 2 was a little better, but the dialog of the last half to third of the episode had me rolling my eyes.
- Hunter x Hunter: It's OK, though it also suffers from battles accompanied by way too much exposition.
- Naruto, Shippuden: Read the manga for this one and have no desire to experience it again.
- One Piece: A penultimate example of a terrible anime adaptation. Everything humanly possible that can be done to stretch this series out to waste time has been done, and it makes the flow of it absolutely atrocious to experience after you've read the manga, and just plain bad if you haven't.
- One-Punch Man: Fun to watch the first time through. Doesn't have very good staying power for subsequent viewings in my opinion. The joke wears thin pretty quick.
I don't understand why they have Super first and not Kai. Kai should be first and then Super. HxH is good, but the mangka needs to get off his ass and resume the manga. (It goes on hiatus A LOT!) Gundam basically recycles itself with this: aloof main guy, princess-type girl, hothead, meccha and masked dude.
So I watched the first ep of Hand Shakers today and it turned out I was pretty much right: Stock shlock shounen, with a side of inappropriate ecchi. I'm probably going to dump this one in favour of leftover episodes of Endride or World Trigger, which at least don't have the ecchi crud tacked on, although they're not exactly scintillating examples of the animator's art. The most interesting thing about Hand Shakers is that it isn't full 3D—it seems to be 2D characters over 3D backgrounds, with no sign of the animation weirdnesses that tend to plague 3D anime.
Hand Shakers felt worse than standard shounen schlock. The CGI felt out of the place, like it wasn't actually touching any of the 2D parts (a perfect example of this is the way the chains slid over the girl's legs in the beginning, it never looked like they were actually brushing against her legs). The perspective were probably badly drawn too, and there were so many shiny surfaces, like they were trying to make JJ Addams jealous. Also, the camera kept moving around way too much. And, yeah, it had some weird breast physics. The only thing I thought was decent were the character designs.
The plot fell squarely in that category, though. "Boy is granted weird superpowers by nonsensical plot device and is drawn into a fight that is realistically none of his business as a result." Meh.
What I noticed about the 2D/3D layering was the shadows. They never felt quite right. It was an interesting choice of artwork setup, but that doesn't mean they did a good job with it.
Realistic breast physics aren't exactly featured in much anime regardless of the other content. ;P
As for the characters, I found they looked a bit washed-out, or maybe it was just in comparison to the backgrounds.
I'm still on Rayearth. The first season was good, but the ending made me want to rage quit. The second season is boring, but I think it would be better in the manga.
- Joined
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- Messages
- 174
- Reaction score
- 23
Husband started watching Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. He is in love with it. I think it's OK but then I'm not exactly the target demographic either.
- Joined
- Dec 7, 2016
- Messages
- 174
- Reaction score
- 23
I wouldn't know, husband is a dedicated subtitles man. He's watching Hunter x Hunter and is so excited our son can read well enough now to follow the subs.
I think the One Piece anime is excellent, but that's just me. I only watch the Japanese version. I'm still hundreds of episodes behind though, haven't watched a lot of anime in more than eight years. But I will go back into it because I absolutely adore that show.
Notable mentions are Death Note, Naruto, Bleach, Gungrave...
Notable mentions are Death Note, Naruto, Bleach, Gungrave...