Star Crossed Anime

Wooper: We’re back with another weekly roundup – the last of the year, and perhaps for the foreseeable future. I restarted this column because I found the fall season to be particularly diverse, with lots of worthy shows that weren’t receiving regular coverage. Not all of them remained in our good graces, of course, but this format gave us a fun and easy way to heap both praise and criticism on whatever series we felt like discussing each week. Will winter 2020 be similarly inspiring? We’ll need a few weeks before making that judgment.

First Impressions for the new season are slated to begin a week from now, and our yearly awards post will go live around January 20th. Those are our priorities at the moment – if these weekly summaries do return, it won’t be before that second date. They could reappear in spring, or summer, or not at all. We’ll see what the future holds! Until then, for the final time in 2019, here are some thoughts on what we’ve been watching this week.

No Guns Life 12

Amun: No Guns Life 1-10 were a solid string of excellent episodes. 11 and 12 just took a wildly different turn; I’m not saying they were bad by any means, just that they could have been episodes 3 and 4, and I think it would have made more sense in the overall flow (Apparently there are 24 episodes, but I’m judging this as the first half) That being said, 11 and 12 represented a stand-alone story that served to introduce some characters seen in the OP – I got some real GiTS vibes here. Also, this was quite a well-done car chase scene and some unexpected fanservice. Despite the rather odd midseason redirection, NGL has been superb this whole season. Engaging characters, crisp storylines (11 and 12 notwithstanding), and a beautiful Unreal engine rendered world give NGL a winning combination. To me, this is the future of below-blockbuster tier shows: put the effort into character designs and fight animations and let the computers handle the annoying backgrounds.

Hi Score Girl II – 09

Mario: After spending time with these kids from primary school up to their high school, it’s kinda sad to see it all end. The airport scene wraps up Oono and Haruo’s romance nicely, albeit a tad bit repetitively. We’ve seen this airport scene before, we have seen this situation where Oono gets further away from Haruo before, and we all have seen how Haruo, staying behind, improves himself to become worthy of Oono before. Yet it couldn’t have ended in any other way. The same goes for Hidaka’s role. She’s a supporting character at heart and here she knocks some sense into Haruo even at the cost of losing him forever. Yet she remains such a fantastic character. And that is the core strength of Hi Score Girl – even with all its love for arcade games, it’s all the characters that I find myself thinking about long after the credits roll.

Continue reading “Fall 2019 Summary – Week 13” →

Wooper: I’m all on my lonesome, it seems. We’ve got just two blurbs for this week’s post, both written by yours truly. The holidays are a busy time, after all, and – wait, does this mean my life is the emptiest of all the Star Crossed writers? On that uplifting note, here are a few thoughts on some anime I watched over the past week.

Mugen no Juunin: Immortal 12

This episode felt like a greatest hits compilation to me. How much time was supposed to have passed between the beginning, when Rin encountered Kagehisa, and the end, when they parted ways? It’s very difficult to tell, because each phase of the story was represented by a single scene. Their conversation in the cave near the beginning passed too quickly to quell her vengeful intentions, so the mere fact that they traveled together afterwards felt wrong. If the show had given their partnership another two or three scenes to establish itself, I’d have been okay with it.

Midway through the episode, Rin helped him fend off a band of assassins, and later pleaded with Manji to kill another group of Kagehisa’s pursuers. The overall direction that this takes her character is consistent with what we’ve seen in the past; despite Rin’s anger at the death of her family and her hatred of the man who orchestrated it, the vein of compassion running through her is similarly deep. The issue isn’t the road taken by this episode, then, but the speed at which it traveled. Kagehisa’s illness came on far too quickly, and the appearance of Manji, Magatsu and Makie during the lakeside battle was so sudden that it felt nearly surreal. Of all Immortal’s jam-packed installments thus far, this was the hardest for me to swallow.

Mairimashita! Iruma-kun 12

Looks like we’re on to the next phase of the story: choosing an after-school club. They’re called “Battlers” in the netherworld, and many of them have their eyes on Iruma after his recent dodgeball exploits. Since he’s courted by a handful of club presidents, and countless others are handing out flyers and doing recruitment drives, we get a good look at what sort of extracurricular activities there are to choose from in this version of hell. That’s a fine way to elaborate on your setting, but I feel as though the series missed an opportunity here. At this point, we know that choosing your club has a big impact on your ability to rank up, but we don’t get a sense of what Battler life looks like on a day-to-day basis. The latter is probably more important to Iruma than the former, given the value he places on friendship (as well as his cautious nature). I wish the episode had spent half of its time popping its head into various clubs, then settled on one to really explore during the second portion. It’s a minor quibble, but it did gnaw at me during and after the show this week.