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%
Just watched Mysterious etc., and I feel about the same. It’s hard to imagine the manga-ka isn’t just thrilled drawing massive breasts, honestly. Hopefully it won’t be such a big deal moving forward, since the writing is otherwise pretty interesting.
Or maybe it’ll naturally go full ecchi, who’s to say?
Cool concept though. Got me hooked for another one or two.