Category: Anime Reviews

So…today I learned that this exists thanks to this tweet by Japan Society Film that randomly appeared in my feed out of nowhere. I was already intrigued by the movie it talked about, Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story, both because its premise sounds like a mashup of both ET and Jurassic Park (Both movies even came out that same year!) and because the movie got pulled from theaters because Haruki Kadokawa, the then president of Kadokawa and the creator of the media mix concept, was arrested due to a drug scandal. If that doesn’t tell you how super strict Japan is about drugs, I don’t know what will. But I became even more morbidly fascinated when I found out apparently the movie was a VERY loose adaptation of a manga that CLAMP did the art for! CLAMP didn’t write the story, as that was written by some zoologist named Masanori Hata. Now, I’m not entirely sure if the manga is considered the original source or the movie is, or if the manga is just supposed to be a promotional tie-in for the movie. I couldn’t find anything concrete on that. But I was able to find that someone fan translated the manga for Rex: A Dinosaur’s Story into English. I found it, read it, and here I am! My verdict: It’s a cute little manga about a girl being friends with a baby dinosaur, but don’t expect anything more out of it than that, as it’s silly, cliche, and cheesy as all hell.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Baubles with Firechick: A Dinosaur’s Story (66/100)” →

Okay…I have some explaining to do. Years ago, I told myself I was never going to watch Mobile Suit Gundam Wing in any capacity, mainly because I’m not into mecha series, as I often find them too hard to follow a lot of the time. I have a really hard time keeping up with hard sci-fi and technobabble, as it all just flies over my head and does not compute in my dumb autistic brain, and Gundam Wing really leans HARD into all of that, which is why I gravitated towards stuff like fantasy and slice-of-life in anything I watch, read, or play. Though funny enough, one of the first anime songs I discovered, by accident at that, was Two-Mix’s Just Communication, aka Gundam Wing’s first opening theme, by way of a random Neopets webpage I found in the early 2000s that had it as background music in the form of a midi file. Remember those? I still have that midi file on my flash drive! The only other thing I knew about Wing was the fact that one of the characters self-detonated their Gundam, and that’s because one of my college friends spoiled the events of that episode to explain something to me. But one day, I was bored. I wasn’t in the mood for the other shows I was watching, Anne Shirley got delayed by several weeks, I couldn’t watch the rest of one of my Full Moon discs because episode 19 had a glitch that made it unwatchable, and I found out GW was celebrating its 30th anniversary. I decided to break the oath I swore to myself and I watched the first episode…and now here I am, having completed the entire series. Seriously, what is wrong with me? I’m a masochist, apparently. So as of now, I’ve seen seven Gundam series in their entirety: Both seasons of 00, Witch From Mercury, After War Gundam X, the War In The Pocket OVA, and now Gundam Wing. So what’s my verdict? Eh, it’s…nothing special. I know it’s the series that exposed Americans to Gundam and popularized the Toonami block on Cartoon Network, but honestly, I don’t feel the series is as good as people make it out to be.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Baubles with Firechick: Mobile Suit Gundam Wing(55/100)” →

Man, the 2020s have been a great time to be a Rune Factory fan. Rune Factory 4 got a Switch port, Rune Factory 5 finally came out after years of being in limbo, Rune Factory 3 also got a Switch port that just came out, and a new RF game is reported to be in development, Rune Factory 6. We RF fans are eating like kings and queens! As I just mentioned, Rune Factory 3 got a Switch port that came out in 2023 called Rune Factory 3 Special, a slight remaster of the Nintendo DS game from 2009, with the only changes being more polished graphics, some DLC outfits, the Newlywed Mode segments and extra episodes exploring the main cast. From what I’ve heard, Rune Factory 3 was the game where the RF series really began to find its footing and hit its stride, and it’s considered the best out of the three DS games. If you’re coming into this game after RFs 4 and 5, you’ll notice that this game doesn’t have a lot of the quality of life improvements that later games would have, such as choosing a female MC, interacting with your shipping box, and so on, but there are reasons Rune Factory 3 is still fairly beloved to this day.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Treasures with Firechick: Rune Factory 3 (77/100)” →

ToHeart is an interesting beast. It’s considered the second non-Hentai anime adaptation of a visual novel, only beaten out by the very first one, Nightwalker: Midnight Detective, which came out in the summer of 1998. The original game was an 18+ eroge and didn’t have as much of a marketing push as previous VN adaptations, but the 1999 anime would go on to be pretty popular, selling 10,000 copies in terms of home video sales, which was considered successful back then. It even managed to get an English dub and DVD release in the US a few years later, and even got a sequel series, ToHeart: Remember My Memories, though I’ve heard said sequel isn’t very good. I did watch the first episode of ToHeart on a whim years ago, but child me thought it was dreadfully boring and dropped it. My tastes have evolved quite a bit since then, and in light of the original game getting a remake that came out this year, albeit based on the all-ages version, I decided to go back and revisit it with fresh eyes. Man, child me was an idiot, because even if it’s not the most faithful adaptation of the game, ToHeart the anime is surprisingly good, and has aged a lot better than one would think.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Treasures with Firechick: ToHeart (1999) (78/100)” →

Hakumei and Mikochi is a series I initially skipped out on when it first aired. Not for any reason, as the premise did appeal to my tastes and I put it on my list of anime I planned to watch, but at the time it came out, I was burnt out on anime. From 2010 to the end of 2015, I watched a ton of anime…but after I graduated college, I felt myself unable to watch even a single episode per month unless it was a new episode of Pokemon. A number of things contributed to this for me: Too much time on my hands, too many titles that had elements that turned me off, job hunting with no success, cyberbullying in one particular fandom, having seen too many shows, and so on. Anime always brought me joy, and I honestly tried to get back into it, but I couldn’t muster up the motivation to go back to what I did before. I just couldn’t get myself in the frame of mind to watch anything anymore, even the shows I really loved. Then the crapshow that was 2020 happened and one day, I watched an episode of an anime. And another. And another. Slowly but surely, I found myself going back to the old routine that sustained me throughout my school years. I had finally managed to claw myself out of it. Not completely, but I’m feeling a lot better and more motivated than I was before. To think it actually took a pandemic for me to get back into the medium that brought me so much joy throughout my life. In that regard, I finally managed to watch and finish shows I was interested in watching, with Hakumei and Mikochi being one of them. God, this series is so cute and sweet and deserves way more love than it gets!

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Treasures with Firechick: Hakumei and Mikochi (85/100)” →

Good lord. I can’t believe I wasted my time on this crapfest of a show. What we have here is an anime that’s part of yet another multimedia project to promote a cell phone game involving cute idol girls. Lapis Re:LiGHTs main selling point is that it takes place in a made up fantasy world with made up countries that are much more European-style in nature as opposed to something like Love Live or 22/7. Now, the only reason I watched this was because nothing else really interested me, and since the plague was still going around and putting a bunch of anime on hold, I thought it’d be a nice time killer. It was…but now I wish I had every minute I spent watching this crappy show back! Basically, a young girl goes to a fancy magic idol school where she can become a witch, which in this case is basically a magical idol. But she winds up getting stuck with the flunkies who are about to get expelled because they suck at everything. They decide to try and become an idol group and raise enough points so that they don’t get expelled.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Garbage with Firechick: Lapis Re:Lights (46/100)” →

Back in June of 2010, when I was in my junior year of high school, Anime News Network announced that they would be streaming an old series from 1977 called Ie Naki Ko, or Nobody’s Boy Remi, alongside many other shows. ANN would put up five subbed episodes every week, and it was their first license directly from Japan. Back then, I was still forging my tastes in anime, but thought this seemed interesting, as its premise reminded me a bit of Les Miserables Shoujo Cosette. Let me tell you, I was hooked from the first episode, and absolutely DEVOURED this series every time episodes were dropped each week. It really struck a chord with 16/17-year-old me. Sadly, ANN is no longer streaming Remi, or anything else. I didn’t learn of the existing home video release it had until much later, and by then it was long out of print. Luckily, fansubs were easy to come by, and in 2025, AnimEigo (The new iteration of it, that is) released it on blu-ray. I bought that blu-ray set as soon as the MediaOCD store got early copies in. Seriously, rewatching this show has been a really sobering experience in the best way possible, and I still love it now as a 32-year-old adult woman as I did back when I was in high school. I previously reviewed it on MAL back in 2010, but honestly, that review was one of my first attempts at seriously reviewing/critiquing something, and re-reading it…yeah, it’s rather slipshod and overly gushy and fangirly, so I’m rewriting my review from scratch so it’ll be up to par with my current stuff.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Treasures with Firechick: Nobody’s Boy Remi (94/100)” →

In the year 2000, a man named Kaz Ayabe and his team at the company Millennium Kitchen released an…interesting game for the PlayStation that was unlike anything that had come out before, called Boku no Natsuyasumi. The game was all about a little boy spending his summer in Japan’s quiet countryside in the year 1975, and you could do things like explore, catch bugs, go fishing, hang out with family and friends, and so on. It wound up becoming quite popular, and Ayabe-san decided to try his hand at the concept again with Boku no Natsuyasumi 2, for the PlayStation 2. It would go on to outsell the first game and become quite popular in its own right, with two more sequels to follow. Having only just discovered the Boku no Natsuyasumi series thanks to Natsu-Mon: 20th Century Summer Kid, I actually do want to check out more of Kaz Ayabe’s portfolio, as I really enjoyed Natsu-Mon. But the BokuNatsu games have never been released in English, probably for a number of reasons I don’t have the time to go into here. Luckily, a group of fans made their own fan translation of BokuNatsu 2, which they released last year, and I got to play it now that I’ve learned how to set up emulators on my computer. Yeah, I can see why people want the BokuNatsu games to be brought to America, because BokuNatsu 2 is a really cute, wholesome, charming game, even if I feel Natsu-Mon is better.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Treasures with Firechick: Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 (81/100)” →

It’s funny how things we now see as cliche, generic, or overdone were once novel and completely new. Such was the case for a little game called Lunar: Silver Star Story. Previously released on the Sega CD as Lunar: The Silver Star, the game was famous for its litany of 2D anime cutscenes, amazingly adapted songs, generally bright and colorful anime artstyle, which back then was unheard of for games that came out in America at that time, and for its script having a lot of 90s pop cultural references and slang thrown in. It got a Playstation 1 remake a few years later, which is the version many fans grew up on. I’ve mentioned before that I never grew up with home consoles such as the Playstation or Nintendo 64, so I never even heard of Lunar back then. I did dabble in it a bit via watching some videos of HCBailly’s Let’s Play of it and playing a bit of the PSP remake, Lunar: Silver Star Harmony, but I didn’t get very far with either. I should really get back to playing Harmony on my PS Vita. But in September of 2024, GungHo Online Entertainment announced that a remaster of both this game and its sequel were due to come out in April 2025 on modern consoles. I managed to snatch the Switch version as soon as it was available. As someone who didn’t grow up with Lunar but did grow up on a lot of anime during the 2000s, I certainly do enjoy it, even if nowadays it’s nothing really special. I can definitely see its charms and why people like it so much.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Baubles with Firechick: Lunar Silver Star Story (75/100)” →

(This review covers both the first season and the second one, Bananya and the Curious Bunch)

Now here’s an anime that I’m sure not a whole lot of people know about. Bananya is a short TV series that’s literally about the adventures of cute pocket-sized kittens that live in banana peels. That’s it. It’s a very simple premise, and the first season mainly shows them going through mundane situations, like going inside the refrigerator, or trying to greet a stray cat outside the kitchen window. Every episode is 2-3 minutes long and there’s no real dialogue except for a narrator who tells us what’s going on. Now, if you’re looking to watch this, I should warn you, the story is pretty episodic, and the characters don’t really develop beyond their one singular personality trait. In this case, it can be forgiven, as they’re cats that can’t talk, and the first season has a rather small set of characters that are easy to follow, even if four of them look exactly the same.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Unearthed Baubles with Firechick: Bananya (69/100)” →