Category: Other:

Karasu wa Aruji wo Erabanai

Short Synopsis: As four women from four different provinces vie for a prince’s hand in marriage, a male representative from the northern province is sent to serve as the prince’s attendant.

Wooper: From its double length premiere to its massive cast list to its elaborate fantasy setting, Karasu wa Aruji wo Erabanai is one of this season’s most ambitious shows. Not every facet of that ambition makes for great TV, but I’ll be following it for the foreseeable future, since I like historical anime. Karasu isn’t grounded in history, of course, but its costume design and court politics are strongly reminiscent of medieval Japan, and the mythos surrounding the yatagarasu (the three-legged crow whose name appears in the show’s localized title) reads like historical fantasy lore. I say “reads” because that’s exactly what this show requires of you – there’s a ton of table setting in these episodes, so you’ll be chugging through not only the plentiful subtitles, but also the on-screen names and ranks of around 20 characters. That’s going to feel too much like homework for a lot of viewers, and at this point I wouldn’t disagree, but Karasu’s wordy beginning works in service of an Apothecary Diaries-esque palace intrigue plot, with four female representatives competing to wed a reclusive prince, and a POV character serving as our window into said prince’s life. The yatagarasu stuff is what’s most interesting to me, as several characters can shapeshift into crows; we don’t get a good look at those transformations, but the production is otherwise solid, with just a single dip during a kendo scene across these first 50 minutes. I wouldn’t recommend this one to a wide audience, but for those who don’t mind dedicating their time and their full attention to a new fantasy series, there may be something here.
Potential: 50%

Whisper Me a Love Song

Short Synopsis (Anilist): After performing a song at her school’s opening ceremony, musician Yori Asanagi receives an apparent love confession from freshman Himari Kino. But just as Yori decides she wants to return Himari’s feelings, Himari reveals that she did not “love” her, but “admires” her! But you can’t unring a bell once struck, and Yori is determined to make Himari fall for her, not just her music. Will their hearts ever beat as one, or will their love fall out of tune?

Lenlo: Look it’s the last post so I’m just going to lay this out there, you have at least 3 better music based shows airing this season. From Hibike to Girls Band Cry to Jellyfish, each and every one of them brings more to the table than this. I’m not saying it’s bad, it isn’t. It’s definitely better than most of the usual seasonal stuff. But that isn’t an achievement and it’s competing in a very contested genre at the moment. The characters aren’t as compelling as Jellyfish, the visuals aren’t as polished as Hibike, and it doesn’t move anywhere near as well as Girls Band Cry. If none of those were up your alley, but you’re still itching for a music show, maybe give this a shot and see if this somehow does it for you. Personally though? I’m music’ed out and this lost the race.
Potential: 25%

THE NEW GATE

Short Synopsis: Kirito from SAO stays in the game a tad too long after beating it and is sucked into an Isekai world exactly like the game, but now with all the standard isekai tropes on top of it.

Lenlo: Imagine if you took Sword Art Online, created a carbon copy in every way, made every aspect worse by about 50%, nuked its production from orbit, and then turned it into a fantasy Isekai by teleporting Not-Kirito into the game world for real after he beat the game and everyone else logged off. That’s how you get New Gate. It is, in every way, an inferior Sword Art Online, Log Horizon and Shangri-La Frontier. Watch literally any of those instead, they have better narratives, better production, better characters, better music, better voice acting, just better… everything.
Potential: Can’t believe I’m saying this, but just go watch SAO.

Seiyuu Radio no Uraomote

Short Synopsis: Two voice actors just so happen to go to the same highschool. When a director catches wind of this, he puts them on a podcast together!

Lenlo: Seiyuu Radio pleasantly surprised me. Early on it felt like an excuse to get Miku Itou and Moe Toyota, the lead VAs, to effectively do an animated podcast. But as the episode went on, I found myself enjoying it more and more. It’s all about public personas vs real personal selves. How someone on screen, or on a podcast, or in a book, or any form of media really, is putting on a character because they know that’s what sells. Some of it is about knowing the real you won’t be accepted, won’t get you work, like with Yumiko. Meanwhile Chika, she just doesn’t understand why people like her public idol self, and sees that more as a criticism of who she really is since she acts nothing like her alter ego. Throw these two in a room, get them talking after a terrible first impression and see them slowly become friends, and you have a pretty wholesome show that peels back the curtains a bit on the VA/Idol industry. Not in an expose “This is how terrible it is” sort of way like a lot of shows, more in a “VAs are people too” way, and I like that. Plus the way the show gets them together isn’t even all that contrived, a Director got his show cancled, knew they went to school together, and said “Fuck it, puttem on a radio show, should be funny”. So yeah, I’m going to watch it for a bit. No idea if it will hold, it’s on the lower end of my list, but I enjoyed it. It felt very personal at times.
Potential: 50%

Viral Hit

Short Synopsis: Local kid decides to become a YouTuber to make money for his sick mother. The idea? Fight people on the internet to go viral! The catch? He’s a wimp.

Lenlo: I… Enjoyed Viral Hit, as weird as that is to say. Youtubers, bullying, pathetic leads, mediocre comedy, Viral Hit has a number of things against it. Yet despite all of that, despite attempts at a more “realistic” artstyle similar to the failing Fable, it worked. Viral Hit doesn’t try to hide how shitty YouTubers are, how all of them are in it for the money, how predatory the system is and the kind of actions/personalities it encourages. Instead it dives head first into the system, focusing on how it’s a way poor people can make money by debasing themselves in front of the world. In that sense, it’s really not all that dissimilar to combat sports like boxing and MMA, which is funny considering Viral Hit is all about a kid fighting on the internet to make money. What I’m getting at is that Viral Hit goes in on a lot of the worst aspects of YouTubers, and it does so in a way I find engaging. I have no idea if this will last in the long term, but for now at least I’m in.
Potential: 50%

Kaiju No.8

Short Synopsis: Kafka Hibino once made a promise to his childhood friend to join the Kaiju Defense Corps and rid the world of Kaiju! Now he works cleaning up the aftermath of their battles.

Lenlo: For the first 20 or so minutes, Kaiju 8 was great, almost everything I could have wanted. An older MC working a dead-end job who has given up on their dream, their passion reignited by a younger employee and a traumatic experience that pushes them to try once more. The detail that went into the Kaiju itself, not just in the design but its biology and just how large a cleanup operation would be post-Kaiju, as well as the knowledge you could gain from being around/cleaning up so many. Even the relationship between our lead, Kafka, and his new kouhai, Ichikawa, was pretty good as Ichikawa becomes both Kafka’s inspiration as well as the first person he’s ever saved. Visually it was a bit rockier, sometimes looking great, other times getting a tad too ambitious with the wild camera movements and such, but overall still solid I feel. My issue with Kaiju 8 comes in the last 2 or so minutes where it takes the novel idea of an older protagonist working an actual job that deals with the aftermath of the big fights trying to find his niche in a young man’s profession, and turns him into a standard shounen protagonist with a unique super power. Kafka didn’t need that to be interesting, to succeed in the Kaiju Corps. He had knowledge few others did due to working with them so often. But now that’s going to get sidelined in favor of him being able to turn into a badass monster. Will it still be fun? Will it still have decent fights and shit? Probably. But it lost what made it unique in my book, and is now only worth watching for the cool fights.
Potential: 40%

Unnamed Memory

Short Synopsis: A king’s line is cursed to never be able to bear children. Their solution? Go find a witch, conquer her trials, and use their one wish to ask her to be the prince’s wife. What could go wrong?

Lenlo: You know, for a fantasy series about a guy tricking/forcing a girl to live with him for a year in his castle so he can try to woo her into being his wife, all because she’s the only woman capable of handling the raw unadulterated magical power of his penis I mean curse, Unnamed Memory wasn’t actually that bad. The premise is still stupid as shit, but if you can ignore it the production isn’t bad, the cast seems decent, and it isn’t nearly as ecchi or perverted as the premise would make you think. I don’t think it has much staying power, the whole thing is about an unflappable hero trying to woo a beautiful witch into being his wife. That sort of premise tends to be a flash in the pan in my experience, very wholesome and cute early on but unable to sustain/change itself up in the long run. Still, I’ll check it out for a few more, just to find out.
Potential: 30%

Boukyaku Battery

Short Synopsis: A talented pitcher-catcher duo join their no-name high school’s baseball club after the catcher loses his memory.

Wooper: I’ve got a soft spot for sports anime, so I was looking forward to this one, especially since it has some promising staff members attached. Action animation director Junpei Tatenaka, for example, is a baseball anime veteran, with credits on both the Major and Diamond no Ace franchises, and art director Yuuki Funagakure previously handled the backgrounds for Wonder Egg Priority. Unfortunately, while this talented group did turn in a good-looking premiere, Boukyaku Battery has a problem outside the realm of visual presentation; it desperately wants to be funny, and it simply isn’t. One of its two lead characters is Kei, a former baseball prodigy who lost his taste for the game upon losing his memory, and he’s got a new, extremely goofy personality to go with his amnesia. We’re talking weird faces and hand gestures, quirky vocal inflections, an array of nipple-themed jokes, and (sadly) much more. His batterymate Haruka provides a strong, silent counter to his endless clowning, and the show demonstrates some self-awareness about its use of sports anime tropes, but Kei is going to be too much to handle for some viewers, especially those with an aversion to shouty shounen stooges. I might go back and try a couple more episodes in the future due to my enthusiasm for the genre (and for the Pillows-esque ending theme by newish band Macaroni Enpitsu), but I can’t recommend Boukyaku Battery based solely on its first outing.
Potential: 30%

Lenlo: The more I look at Battery, the more I weep for what could have been. The first 3 minutes were great, the tension at-bat, the heavy shading, the shot composition, it all looked great. And a lot of that is still there for the rest of the episode as well! Like Wooper says, Battery looks pretty good for the whole episode. But then the rest of the episode starts and it just… It goes from a dramatic baseball drama to a character driven comedy with bad jokes and a worse plot. Why amnesia? Why all of the shitty jokes? Why can’t we just have a good baseball anime? Anyways, suffice to say I was very disappointed by Battery. Maybe it will walk things back as it continues, cutting down on the bad comedy and going back to actual baseball, but I don’t have much hope for that. If you can stand Kei’s shitty (literally) jokes you might get something out of it though. Personally I wanted to turn it off after about 10 minutes.
Potential: 15%

Mysteries, Maidens, and Mysterious Disappearances

Short Synopsis (Anilist): Sumireko Ogawa’s dream of becoming a novelist is reinvigorated with new rumors of mystical incidents. Now a clerk at a bookstore, she enlists her young coworker, Ren Adashino, to investigate urban legends, black magic, and ghost stories across the city. Sumireko has a knack for triggering magical events, and Ren has a dark secret of his own. Will they survive their investigation unscathed?

Lenlo: I’m very conflicted on Mysterious Disappearances. When not hyper fixating on the absurdly large breasts of its female lead, Ogawa, it was actually pretty good. The whole thing about losing her imagination, her ability to write, as she got older, her accidental run in with the supernatural and subsequent desperate bid to hold onto her youth despite the dangers because of the creativity it gave her. It was very “Hand of Midas”, or “Monkey’s Paw Curls”, I liked it a whole lot. And while Adashino wasn’t particularly interesting, I did still enjoy his dry wit, how supportive he was of Ogawa, and the underlying darkness to his knowledge of the supernatural. The only issue is that Mysterious Disappearances has decided to weave a bunch of pointless, degrading, and occasionally concerning sexualization into a story that doesn’t need it. Why are Ogawa’s tits larger than her head? Why do we need PoV cleavage shots into her valley? Why is there so much focus on her body while she’s turned into a child? If those weren’t there, this would probably be the strongest premier of the season for me. As it is, I’m very interested but the ecchi bullshit feels like it’s going to ruin a lot of otherwise really promising episodes. Maybe that falls off as we go, Horikoshi slowly wrote Mineta and his weird sexualized tendencies out of My Hero Academia, early decisions made to sell copies don’t have to stick around. If that’s the case then awesome, this should be good. But I can see it turning a lot of people off and I wouldn’t blame them. Anyways, for now, I’m going to keep up with it.
Potential: 50%