Guest Post: Unearthed Baubles with Firechick – Pokemon Puzzle Challenge (72/100)

by Lenlo, posted in Anime Reviews

Hey Pokemaniacs, remember this game? Because I do! In fact, I bought this along with other mainline games when I had my first GameBoy Color, and I loved it! But back then, I was still very new to video games and never managed to complete all of its content, such as the secret hard modes and the extra Pokemon you can get. But Pokemon Puzzle Challenge is an old game that’s still spoken of fondly. It was readily available on the 3DS Virtual Console for cheap, and I often find myself playing it whenever I need to let off steam. Seriously, this game is such a good outlet for when I’m angry. Basically, Pokemon Puzzle Challenge is a Pokemon game but with the gameplay of the famous Panel de Pon concept, where the main gameplay focuses on blocks falling into a well. You earn points by connecting three or more of the same blocks together, or getting rid of them with creative combos, like swapping them around. In this case, stacking four or more blocks causes damage to your opponent, and if the block piles manage to reach the very top, you lose. You basically go through the various towns and the Pokemon League in the Johto region, but instead of battling trainers traditionally, you fight them with blocks. Yeah.

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Kimetsu no Yaiba S4 – 2 [Water Hashira Giyu Tomioka’s Pain]

by Lenlo, posted in Currently Watching:, Kimetsu no Yaiba

Welcome all, to episode 2 of the new season of Kimetsu no Yaiba! I got some pushback last week to my disappointment with the series premier, and that’s understandable. Maybe I was expecting a bit much from a double-length premier. So it brings me great joy to report that this week, this episode? Yaiba gave me almost everything I wanted. I’m happy. Let’s dive into why.

So what is it that I like so much about this Yaiba episode? Well simply put, the entire thing is laser focused on a single character and his relationship with Tanjiro, Giyu Tomioka. We haven’t gotten a lot from Giyu until now, despite him being the first Demon Slayer we ever meet way back in episode 1. He’s not very emotional, doesn’t talk about himself, doesn’t really engage with anyone. So spending an entire episode letting us into his head, exploring his feelings of survivors guilt and relating them to Tanjiro’s own in regards to Rengoku, was great. The only misstep I would say would be the comedy. Yaiba likes to end most of it’s big emotional moments with silly faces and one liners, which I feel usually ruins the tension and emotion of a scene. This weeks weren’t terrible, the soba eating contest worked, but it definitely wasn’t needed.

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Spring 2024 What-I’m-Watching Summary – Week 6

by Lenlo, posted in Currently Watching:, Weekly Summary

Wind Breaker – 7 [Fight to Win]

It’s absolutely ridiculous how close Wind Breaker is to figuring itself out and being great. It already has the shounen stuff down, seriously, Wind Breaker’s fight choreography is fantastic, having some of what are easily the best fights in the season. The way Togame and Sakura’s bodies move, the different fighting styles like Togame’s grapples and stomps to Sakura’s pinwheel kicks and strikes, it’s impossible not to get pulled into the fight. The camera can be a bit ambitious at times, making some transitions look awkward, but Wind Breaker tries so hard to make sure we always see their full bodies as they fight that it generally comes together anyways. The only thing Wind Breaker really needs to work on is the narrative, the core themes of building and maintaining a community and what those communities mean to the individuals within it. Part of why this episode is good is because we get a lot of that with Togame. We see how he gets pulled into the Shishitoren before it got corrupted, how Choji made it feel like home and helped him feel comfortable interacting with others. We get to watch as Choji is consumed by his desire for strength, for freedom, resulting him in kicking out anyone who he doesn’t see as strong, creating this culture of fear. This forces Togame to take on this role of the “villain” within the Shishitoren, performing all of the “skinning” himself, becoming the man every other member fears because, even if they fear him, so long as they love Choji the Shishitoren, the community he came to love so much, will endure. It’s all right there, Wind Breaker has the pieces! Now just imagine if this was episode 10 instead of 7, if we knew more of about Bofurin was like to contrast it against, if we got more time with Togame as an antagonist to understand where this is coming from prior to the fight. It would have been utterly fantastic, a beautiful way to end a season and begin Sakura’s journey in earnest. Instead it’s just one good episode in an otherwise eh team-battle arc. A damn shame if you ask me, but I’ll take what I can get.

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Nana – 5/6 [Ren’s Dream, Nana O.’s Feelings/Snowing in Tokyo! Nana and NANA] – Throwback Thursday

by Lenlo, posted in Currently Watching:, Nana, Throwback Thursday

Welcome all, to another week of Nana! This week we finish up our flashbacks, finally seeing why Ozaki came to Tokyo, as well as get a small reminder of where everyone is before the story kicks off in earnest. Or at least, I hope that’s what episode 6 was, because if not I’m going to have words for next week. Anyways, on with the episodes!

First up we have episode 5, “Ren’s Dream, Nana O.’s Feelings”. This one continues Ozaki’s flashback, ensuring she gets just as much time and attention as Nana, which I appreciate. We get to her struggle with whether or not to follow Ren to Tokyo, whether to settle for being a housewife and supporting him since she would just be following his career or to stay behind and make her own way, eventually meeting up again as equals. We also get to see how they get together in the first place, that this wasn’t just a fling for them but something more. And you know what? It was all really good! I think Nana absolutely nailed it, from Yasu and Nobu’s conversation around music, their careers and Ozaki’s decision to Ozaki and Ren’s relationship. It’s so similar, yet distinctly different, from Nana’s own story with Shouji and I love it.

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Kimetsu no Yaiba S4 – 1 [To Defeat Muzan Kibutsuji]

by Lenlo, posted in Currently Watching:, Kimetsu no Yaiba

Welcome back everyone, to the 4th season of Kimetsu no Yaiba! It’s been a while. Gotta say, with a title like “Hashira Training Arc” I’m not that excited for this one. I’ve covered every other season of the show though, so I’ll be damned if I miss this one just because it’s lining up to be the worst entry yet. Anyways without further ado lets dive into a 45 minute double feature of an episode!

Diving into things, initial signs for this arc are… not good. As per the title, the whole thing is framed as one big training arc. We have no idea how many episodes this will be, 6? A full cour (12)? Two cour? No idea. The sad thing is that there is no right answer here either. It doesn’t matter how long the arc is if it’s nothing but Hashira training, that’s going to get old fast. The only good outcome for Kimetsu no Yaiba is if the title of the season is a lie and it covers far more than the training arc. Maybe it could cover some of the side stories or novels to fill out the season? I don’t know, the only thing I’m sure of is that if this entire season is just training arc, it’s going to suck.

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Ranger Reject – 5 [Fighter D, as a Part of ‘Ranger Force’]

by Lenlo, posted in Currently Watching:, Ranger Reject

Ranger Reject is back everyone! Sports may have stolen our episode from us last episode, but I think that breather did the series good because this episode was much better than the previous one. Not perfect, and we’ll talk about why, but it’s nice to see Ranger Reject back on the upswing. So without further ado, lets dive into the episode!

So starting off, Ranger Reject slowed down a lot this week it felt like. Last episode we covered 5 or 6 chapters I believe, and you could feel it in the episode. We sprinted through content that, if we’re being honest, needed much more time to explore. And it looks like that’s what we’re getting this week as Ranger Reject circles back around on Hibiki’s past, how he got here and what his plans were. In fact, the only major issue I see with the episode is the sheer size of the cast it’s introducing. We got like… 9 new characters this week, none of which I’m going to bother remembering until they actually do something. Not because of any stubbornness on my part, I just have no idea which ones will end up being interesting so it’s up to Ranger Reject to make them worth remembering.

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Spring 2024 What-I’m-Watching Summary – Week 5

by Lenlo, posted in Currently Watching:, Weekly Summary

Jellyfish Can’t Swim at Night – 5 [Viewer Comments]

Ah Jellyfish, the only other show this season that has a shot at consistently beating out Dungeon Meshi. I absolutely adored this episode, top to bottom. From Yoru’s struggles with artistic motivation and feelings of inadequacy to Kano’s attempts to lift her up. Once again, Jellyfish managed to hit me right in the kokoro. Her reactions to comments? The fear of reading them, the knowledge that someone saw and might not have liked your work? I get that exact same thing, yet all I’m doing is writing a few thousand words about anime on the internet. She’s drawing official art for their group and then having bigger, more successful, more talented artists draw fanart of it and then having people say they should be drawing for Jelee instead of her. That must be soul crushing. Watching her work through that, doom scrolling until she commits herself to art fully so she can feel good about what she draws, adding her name back to the mural she previously erased, taking classes seriously and such again, all good shit. I wish this had maybe been a multi-episode plot, but considering the end I’ll accept what we got. Speaking of the end, Jellyfish is entering dangerous territory here. If this is legit, if Kano and Yoru are going to be a real couple with real romance, it could be fantastic. But if we’re just getting yuri-baited because they know that’s what anime fans watch, then it’s going to suck. We can’t know until the next episode, which I’ll be watching right after I finish writing this since it’s Saturday, but I’m hopeful that Jellyfish will pull it off.

Oh and P.S. RIP Mei, her Bad Luck fortune came true the same day she drew it when she lost the love race with Kano. F in chat for our girl.

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Nana – 3/4 [Nana K. and Shoji, Love’s Whereabouts/Nana K.’s Love, Nana O.’s Dream] – Throwback Thursday

by Lenlo, posted in Currently Watching:, Nana, Throwback Thursday

Welcome all, to another (late) week of Throwback Thursday! In this weeks episodes we continue to dive into Nana’s past, seeing how she overcomes her trauma with Asano and eventually gets together with Shoji. We also get a peek into Ozaki’s past as well, a welcome change in my book. There’s a fair amount to talk about so lets jump right into it!

Lets kick things off right away with episode 3, “Nana K. and Shoji, Love’s Whereabouts”. We’re still in the flashback here, which was a tad unexpected to be honest. I’d have thought we would spread this out across the show but it looks like we’re frontloading the exposition. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, it frees up a lot of time in future episodes for other stuff. Nana just needs to avoid having even more flashbacks down the line. Getting back to the episode, this one is all about how Shoji and Nana get together, and overall it was… fine? Shoji and Nana finally get to talk candidly and Nana gets to confront her time with Asano directly by happening upon him in Tokyo, there’s plenty to do. But I have one big gripe with the episode: It’s treatment of men.

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Guest Post: Unearthed Treasure with Firechick – Ashita no Nadja (88/100)

by Lenlo, posted in Anime Reviews

(According to MAL, this is my 570th completed anime!)

I say in a lot of my reviews that it often times doesn’t matter if a piece of media’s tropes and premises are cliche or overused, as these days, nothing is truly original anymore. There’s really nothing inherently wrong with cliches in and of themselves. It’s the execution that counts, and if you actually care about what you’re making and manage to create interesting characters and a solid, engaging premise, people will like it regardless of how cliche its premise is. After the end of the fourth Ojamajo Doremi season, Toei needed something to fill the timeslot up for the next year, and they decided, rather than another magical girl series, that they’d do a historical shoujo adventure instead, in line with stuff like Hello Sandybelle and Lady Georgie. That anime was Ashita no Nadja, which was an oddity in the year 2003, as by that time, according to Justin Sevakis’ article about the World Masterpiece Theater here, Japanese-produced shows that were set in Europe were going out of style. Which is honestly a shame, as even with the context Justin mentioned, a lot of these shows were quite amazing and made the most of what they were given. Nadja as a show is an original anime, not based on an existing property, making it even more of an oddity in 2003, and it did get admittedly low ratings from what I’ve heard, but the people who did stick around to watch it really liked it and have fond memories of it. I myself didn’t even know this show existed until I came across this review of it here on the site, and I did watch the first episode and liked it, but couldn’t finish it due to other obligations and because at the time of the blog post, the final quarter of the series didn’t get completed fansubs. This is no longer the case, thankfully, and I finally found time to watch this. And yeah, I agree, Ashita no Nadja has no business being this good and this well-written. More series should aspire to be like Nadja.

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Spring 2024 What-I’m-Watching Summary – Week 4

by Lenlo, posted in Currently Watching:, Weekly Summary

Dungeon Meshi – 18 [Shapeshifter]

To absolutely no ones surprise, Dungeon Meshi continues to be great. This week it brought us the classic Doppelganger encounter, but with the usual Dungeon Meshi twist. Not content with just one Doppelganger, we had nine, three for each of our cast members. And as if that wasn’t enough, each Doppelganger’s appearance was based on the mental image another party member had of that person, which Dungeon Meshi so helpfully drew in slightly different styles and details so a perceptive viewer could pick out the real one on their own. So for Laios? Each of Marcille, Chilchuck and Senshi view him as some brand of moron or weirdo, leading them to easily pick out his fakes. Meanwhile for the others we have poor attention to detail resulting in inaccurate clothing and tools, as well as a complete misunderstanding of magic resulting in a silly spell book. There’s a lot of good stuff in here, all of it leading to a fun finale where Laios figures out who the real ones are by their awareness of the dungeon around them, as well as how they talk. Of course Chilchuck wouldn’t sit on a box that might be a mimic, he hates them, and of course Senshi would never disrupt an ecosystem so carelessly by stealing and egg, and of course Marcille would be so stubborn as to not eat a humanoid egg even if it might save Falin. All of that culminating in Laios barking like a dog to face down a monster, only for Marcille to blow it up since she was completely dun with the situation, made for a fun episode. I’m not sure about this Ninja girl or why she’s following them, was she ordered to kill Marcille or something? I don’t know, but I’m looking forward to finding out. Dungeon Meshi hasn’t lead me astray yet, somehow staying fresh and fun for two whole cores, I’m not going to start doubting it now. Oh and one more thing, Laios barking was hilarious and exactly the kind of comedy I’ve come to expect from this utterly ridiculous show.

Continue reading “Spring 2024 What-I’m-Watching Summary – Week 4” →