Yozakura-san Chi no Daisakusen
Short Synopsis: A traumatized orphan marries into a family of spies in order to stop his new bride’s brother from killing him.
Wooper: I don’t have an encyclopedic memory for Shonen Jump adaptations, but Yozakura-san might be the least promising one I’ve ever seen. A lot of that is down to Taiyou Asano, the protagonist – at least, based on the minimal amount of thought I’m willing to spend on this show. He seems to have been designed by someone desperate for him to stand out, but not willing to put in any effort to ensure it, with a thin scar over one eye and one huge, impossibly curly strand of hair sticking out from his classic spiky mop. Even when you get past his appearance, there’s nothing remarkable about him, and he spends most of this episode either explaining his tragic past or saying, “Huh?” so other people can feed information to him (by which I mean the audience). To be fair, he has a lot to catch up on, since his teacher wants to kill him for getting too close to his childhood friend, who is also the teacher’s sister, and both of them are part of a secret spy organization along with the rest of their siblings, and ALSO Taiyou has to marry her in order to keep from being murdered. Did you get all that? The show doesn’t overcomplicate things, but it does present both its background info and its action scenes in pretty dry fashion. A couple of flashy cuts make their way across the screen as the siblings display their borderline supernatural combat techniques (I thought this was supposed to be a spy series?), but on the whole the storyboarding displays very little ambition. There just doesn’t seem to be a hook here, at least from my perspective – Yozakura-san isn’t terrible, but neither is it worth picking up.
Potential: 15%
Lenlo: Wooper basically has the right of it, Yozakura is almost comically tropey. Orphan? Check. Tragic backstory involving his entire dead family? Check. Unique hair color no one else has and a scar as his defining features? Check. A female lead blatantly in love with him for absolutely no reason? About the only novel thing about it is the spy setting, but even that gets ruined as the “spies” basically end up with otherworldly super powers anyways. It’s clearly trying to set itself apart with a unique setting, but it isn’t able to do that without falling back on the common Shounen bullshit. What I’m getting at is this: Unless you really, really need a battle shounen and neither Wind Breaker nor the upcoming seasons of My Hero Academia and Demon Slayer do it for you, don’t bother with this.
Potential: 5%
Rinkai!
Short Synopsis: Cute Girls Do Biking
Lenlo: Within seconds Rinkai has already introduced its entire cast of color-coded waifu’s for viewers to pick from. And you know what? They don’t look too bad. Then, mere moments later, we are treated to some of the worst CGI models I’ve seen in a while. They just look so… flat, both in their colors and how they all move the same way, like robots. The closeups are nice enough, we get 2D animation for those and the bikes/movements look decent there. As for what’s actually going on, it’s a classic Cute Girls Doing Cute Things show as the cast jointly figures out what bike racing is and collectively decide to take part for reasons about as simplistic as you’d expect. Still, despite the CGI, basic premise, and samey characters… It was alright? Maybe it’s because CGDCT about sports is just inherently more interesting to me, like Moi Ippon was a few seasons ago, but I find myself enjoying this more than most of the seasonal fare. Not enough to sit through an entire season of it, but I think someone could find some value here.
Potential: 15%
Tadaima, Okaeri
Short Synopsis: A salaryman and a househusband move into a house in the suburbs to raise their biological son together.
Wooper: I thought about pretending to write this impression as though I had no clue what the Omegaverse was, but I actually learned about it a couple days ago, after seeing people mock this episode upon its release. Personally, I find anime’s obsessions with reincarnation and RPG mechanics to be worthier targets for mockery, but I’ll admit to finding the idea of male pregnancy to be pretty fucking weird. It does seem to be a widespread fantasy, though (so much so that it has its own “-verse”), so who am I to kinkshame? Anyway, this premiere wasn’t terrible. Sure, it was cloying (the main couple’s toddler is unreasonably sweet and well-behaved) and uneventful (the biggest source of conflict here is an ornament falling from a Christmas tree), but it wasn’t unwatchable or anything. Ironically, the clear-cut alpha and omega hierarchy here allows for tenderness between the central male couple, as opposed to the implied alpha/beta dynamic of many other BL shows, which are typically dominance-based. Maybe that gentleness isn’t what the majority of Omegaverse enthusiasts are seeking, but for an unadventurous cishet guy like myself, this episode was a good-enough introduction to this strange fictional world.
Potential: Ω%
Lenlo: Dear Lord in heaven help me they did it, they made an actual Omegaverse anime. Why? Why would you do this to me God? Wooper may have been able to look past that and find something underneath, but personally? I’ve always found it disgusting. Not the gay stuff, that’s fine, hell I’m down for more shows being upfront about it. No, I’m talking about the Alpha/Beta/Omega power dynamic bullshit. From the looks of things Japan hasn’t gone full “Sexual Assault/Rape story” like most western Omegaverse media, which is good. But the whole male pregnancy thing is still weird and I generally detest the alpha/beta/omega crap from the debunked wolf study because of the kind of attitudes it promotes. To make a long story short, I wish this anime didn’t exist, but at least its not the weirdest Omegaverse story I’ve ever seen.
Potential: Better than Western Omegaverse shit, but still Omegaverse shit in a lot of ways.
