Kono Yuusha ga Ore Tueee Kuse ni Shinchou Sugiru
Short Synopsis: A jaded Goddess summons a highly cautious kid as a hero to save her world.
Amun’s review:
Watching this first episode, I can’t shake the feeling that this show is comprised of all the side characters from Kill La Kill. Just the unexpected devolution of character designs for laughs really reminds me of that. In this isekai, we have a goddess closest to Aqua (KonoSuba), a hero closest to Death The Kid (Soul Eater), and a world closest to…really any fantasy show ever. I didn’t really see enough from this episode to get a sense of how this anime will go, but the art was passable and the gimmicks okay. The “shout till it’s funny” humor fell a bit flat in the second half, but I guess I see what they were going for. I’ll give it a few more episodes to flesh out the season’s direction – who knows, might be a diamond in the rough…or just the rough.
Potential: 33%
Lenlo’s review:
You know, for a knockoff Konosuba, I was moderately surprised by Cautious Hero. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still not my kind of show, as I didn’t even like Konosuba. But it seems to have enough of a handle on the shtick to play with it a bit. Playing on the prevalence of “Isekai” stories and such and using that for some of its comedy. The lead goddess is even an amusingly terrible person. The issues though start to arise with our lead who is just… incredibly dull. Like, take your regular isekai protagonist, and remove any defining feature from them dull. Maybe if it plays up the “cautious” bit to actually negatively impact things it could be interesting. But considering I already don’t like this genre, and other shows have done it better… I am pretty meh on the whole thing. Still, it’s not offensively bad. So that’s a pretty good for this season all things considered.
Potential: 20%
Choujin Koukousei-tachi wa Isekai demo Yoyuu de Ikinuku you desu!
Short Synopsis: Seven super genius high-schoolers somehow get on the same plane and get transported to another world.
Amun’s review:
Seven super high school geniuses aren’t smart enough to fly on separate planes and end up being whisked away to a primitive fantasy world…with the main protag getting some mouth to mouth meat in the first five minutes. Choujin has started off beyond pretentious, and, given that all the characters are tired archetypes, I see no reasonable chance of it living up to its delusions of grandeur.
Potential: 1%
Lenlo’s review:
Look people, I don’t need to tell you things are bad, everyone knows things are bad. This is a season of Isekai trash, I am writing my second paragraph yet I am 6 Isekais in and there’s no end to it. We know the anime is unfit to watch and the waifus are unfit to lewd, yet here we sit while some pretentious blogger goes on and on about it as if that’s the way things are supposed to be. We know things are bad. It’s downright garbage. Slowly the medium we love is dying, and all we say is “Please at least leave us alone in our Shounens, let me have my Sakuga and leave me alone,” well I won’t leave you alone! I want you to get mad! I won’t tell you to write to KyoAni or Bones or Miyazaki, because I don’t know what to tell you to write. All I want is for you to get mad. You have to say “I am a human being god damnit, my time has value!” You know what doesn’t have value?! This trash! Don’t watch it. Watch the Network instead.
Potential: -100%
Azur Lane
Short Synopsis: Girls from 4 different factions fight against aliens and among themselves because it’s human nature.
Mario’s review:
Azur Lane is designed to be a “cute-girls-in-combats” show by way of KanColle rip-off, and so far it does a terrible job of keeping us engaging. It’s never a sound idea to throw a dozen or more characters on-screen from many fractions and hope we can get invested to any of them. It also isn’t a good idea to throw a book-length of world-building context in the beginning of the show, and it’s certainly a bad choice to feature a battle where we don’t know most of the players. In between those fights we have moe girls looking for a lost pet, talking unnaturally and… did I mention that these girls are embodiment of warfare? It’s a mess of some cool ideas but poor presentation and I don’t think the show delve any deeper than providing a reason for these groups to fight against each other. Maybe after this episode, the show would slow down a bit to tell us more about the main cast but by this point I don’t care about any of them to go on.
Potential: 0%
Lenlo’s review:
You know, I have a lot of friends who play this, and for an adaptation of what I think is a mobile game, it apparently does a decent job. As someone who the only thing they know about it is “Waifu Ships”, it was exactly what I expected. Every possible waifu ship thrown into the first episode so the weebs wouldn’t be annoyed if their boat was left out. And you know what, at least the waifu’s are cute. The designs are on point, and I don’t just say this because one of my favorite artists Dishwasher does a good bit of Azur Lane fanart. Sadly, tits and ass is pretty much all the show has. I have no time to get connected to any of them, the combat makes no sense, and its literally a tie in to a mobile game I don’t play. So I suppose the question of whether or not you should watch this boils down to this: Do you play Azur Lane? If yes, it’s perfect for you. If no, wait for it to be over and and the waifu fanart to start getting produced. It’s what I will be doing.
Potential: 0.01%
The truly sad thing about these mobile adaptations like Azur Lane is that regardless of quality, it’ll still sell BDs in Japan because these are strictly shows for fans only who keep spending money on gacha drops for their desired waifu/husbando, and because they keep including codes for special gacha drops. All the while other shows that season struggle to even sell a third of the amount these adaptations sell.
And this season in particular, we have three of these that’s going to battle it out gladiator style for the top-selling BDs of the year while other shows suffer as a result. =(
Is AzurLane a product of someone’s dissatisfaction with KanColle’s ‘politics’ or just a cash grab that needed to avoid potential homeland issues? Why else is Japan, I mean Sakura Empire, the bad guys in this KanColle’s copy-paste all of a sudden? It’s not even hilarious, smells like censorship/political propaganda, intentional by or forced upon the creators. I’m so tired of this.
Anyway, okey animation/designs, but soulless characters, pervasive loli-metastasis and 0-sense. Much worse than KanColle (which I enjoyed a lot).
Azur has a lot more vertical musu action than KC, which is interesting. All of a sudden, KC looks more traditional, stereotypical and straight-forward, where the musu keep sailing on and on and use their armaments to do the job. Despite the lack of perceived dynamism, I think I prefer KC’s way as it actually stays true to the whole ship thing – you get a sense of fleet and strategy in the fights. This is basically Naruto in a new skin.
Speaking of Naruto, there was one suspicious Naruto-like-looking fight animation. And the opening line “through pain we understand each other” or whatever was pure cringe. Pain is rolling in his grave. I don’t know what’s happening, but its bad.
End result: probably not even worth for the waifus due to loli infestation taking all the screen time.
* I have not played KanColle nor Azurlane
Well, Azur Lane actually started as a Chinese mobile game that just so happened to become really popular in Japan once the KanColle cow finally ran dry. Likely that explains the inexplicable nature of the Japanese ships being one of the bad guys. And yet the Japanese are still lapping it up despite that.
What do you mean by KanColle row running dry? Popularity of the game? anime? whole? game company out of budget?
I need the 2nd season. One movie is not enough. KanColle should have like 5 seasons by now.
Referring to the game, since it seems to have lost much of its popularity following the film and the release of Azur Lane over there.
It’s sad really. Kancolle clearly wouldn’t slide in China content-wise, so we get this Chinese knock-off getting all of the attention instead. Japanese gacha games are unsurprisingly popular in China, which is why we’re getting this glut of adaptations based on mobile games.
I see. Thx for the info.