Spring 2018 Anime First Impressions

I don’t watch quite as much anime nowadays as I used to. Just a natural part of getting older and not having as much free time. I can barely keep up with what’s currently airing, forget going back to older anime. Which is why this season is going to destroy me because my watchlist is at least 10 shows long already with so few candidates for the drop pile. At least this makes up for last season being kinda crap in comparison. You’re off the hook for now Japan, although you have a lot of explaining to do with those CG bears.

Megalo Box

This show reminds me a lot of Redline, which I suppose shouldn’t be surprising since they’re riffing on the same style. That late-90’s space-western cyberpunk, with extra effort put into getting that highly specific style across. The story is fairly similar too. A future star of the sport in the making is paired with a no-life lowlife as they make money by throwing underground sporting events, before deciding to make the jump to the big leagues.

The story isn’t necessarily anything amazing. Street punk gets his ass handed to him by an elite in the sport he plays in the underground and it inspires him to break through the class barrier and fight his way to the top. But in its execution it becomes the best anime of the season. It has a wonderful sense of dramatic pacing, lingering on key shots to set the mood for that one moment. From the grime of the underworld, depressing failure of the gambling halls, gaudy lights of the city, it nails everything about the cyberpunk future its trying to depict.

Lupin III Part 5

I have seen a fair bit of Lupin III in my time, but it was mostly just movies and the special hour-long pieces they air every now and then. Castle of Cagliostro is the only one I truly think is great and the rest range from ‘fun’ to ‘bleh’. It’s not like you need to know anything of Lupin III to get anything out of the series though. You might be like “hey why is this thief hanging out with a samurai, do I need to watch loads of Lupin III to understand what’s gonig on”, but honestly I’ve never really understood why there’s a samurai myself either so hey just roll with it.

And you should, because this show is great! I love how they’ve taken Lupin into the modern era where he opens with robbing a cryptocurrency online trader to becoming a meme. It does this while feeling relevant rather than coming off as Lupin with a backwards baseball cap, skateboard over his shoulder while saying “hello fellow kids”. The story moves along at a brisk pace to remain entertaining, knowing when to ramp up some action and when to have some downtime. Plus it still has Lupin’s hairy palms, which is something I’ve always been appreciative of.

Hinamatsuri

This show has already made me properly laugh out loud a few times. Like, actual belly laugh, almost snorting because I’m that kind of loser for whom god decided to bestow upon the unfortunate habit of snorting if I laugh too hard. My favourite bit so far was in episode 2 when they walked into the bar and the schoolgirl was doing a perfect cocktail shake routine while staring blankly ahead of her contemplating her life choices. Episode 2 in general was a step-up from 1, and the first episode was hilarious as well so that’s promising signs for the future.

The story itself is a yazuka bloke with a fancy flat and collection of expensive vases ends up having to take care of a psychic girl who drops into his life one day. It’s a rare case of anime comedy that doesn’t need to have the straight man there to point out all the jokes to you by yelling “that’s not right” very loudly. Many of its best jokes are said with a soft tone of voice, or done with a tone-setting shot that is inherently funny. I always feel a bit leery of stories that make out people from organised crime like they’re all actually very honourable people, but the show is so surreal that it kinda gets away with it, while somehow still having a heart underneath it all.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These

As someone who is a big fan of the original series, I was super wary coming into this. But turns out the show is still pretty great even when modernised, BL game-looking character designs aside (and it’s not like the original character designs were any good either). I really like the way they portrayed the two sides over the course of the first two episodes by showing the same events from either side. In a fairly quick way they have shown us how each military operates, how incompetency can spread through the system, and how these two military geniuses can fight against the incompetency and rise up themselves.

None of their strategies are necessarily brilliant, but they don’t have to be. So long as they work in context and are better than their predecessors, it works, even if we have to assume every other military strategist in the show went to the school for the honourably stupid. I have no idea how the fuck they plan to fit any length of Galactic Heroes story into 12 episodes, but as an opening pair of episodes they’ve done incredibly well to establish everything and keep it interesting. Plus the space battles are not just the same shots of two lines of ships going pew pew. Now it’s dramatic sweeping camera angles of CG ships going pew pew.

Steins;Gate 0

I have forgotten a lot about the original Steins;Gate. I forgot Daru was apparently a future dad for one of the other characters, for example. I am struggling to remember enough about the original series to explain how Kurisu ends up dead at the start of this series. I also forgot…well, why I really liked Steins;Gate that much in the first place. Especially when we walked into a cafe while a catgirl and a not-exactly-thoughtful representation of a trans person started going all gooey over our male lead. Then the male lead started talking about how he’s trying to act normal, coming out of hypnotherapy, trying to take up tennis, and I remembered why I liked this show in the first place: Okarin.

He is possibly the single best anime character in the last decade in anime. His paranoid persona hiding an actual paranoid, socially awkward loser beneath that ended up actually becoming reality, breaking his own world down and wondering how much of his paranoid persona was real and losing his own grasp of himself. Now we have Okabe the PTSD sufferer, which is such a fascinating direction for his character and one that justifies returning to this world again and continuing to follow his story. The stuffy, grey directing continues to suit this view of Okarin and emphasises his current worldview. The shitty parts of Steins;Gate are still here, but so is the reason why I liked this series so much in the first place.

Mahou Shoujo Ore

I talked about this briefly when doing my season preview since they had pre-aired the first two episodes already. But hey for what it’s worth, this is a very silly show with a very silly premise that made me laugh for how silly it is. Main character is a failing idol who has a yakuza bloke telling her she’s gonna be a magical girl, then she transforms into a buff bloke to save her love interest, who then falls in love with the male version of her, and that’s barely scratching the surface of some of the glorious nonsense in this show. Its humour isn’t as clever as Hinamatsuri, nor as well produced, but it’s not necessarily going for the same thing. It revels in how unrefined it is and makes it work.

Full Metal Panic: Invisible Victory

I just want to take a step back for a second and express how I should be far more amazed than I am that this actually came out. I used to make fake season charts and would always include a new season of Full Metal Panic because it was obviously never going to happen. But as time went on and I saw more and more anime being made out of things I put in my chart, I learned that if something is critically acclaimed or successful, it will more-often-than not get an anime at some point. Unless there’s a really good reason for it not to, that one popular manga will get an anime. A Bride’s Story, Oyasumi Punpun, these will most likely get anime at some point. We got a Parasyte anime and next season we’re getting a Banana Fish anime. I’m no longer surprised by these things.

All that aside, I’m a little worried about the new Full Metal Panic. I’m one of those weirdos who likes the first season of FMP the best and got really irritated by the shift to a much darker tone in The Second Raid. It killed so much of the fun in the series that was the reason why I liked it so much. It’s a cold-war-style fun action thriller with goofy mecha school anime stuff thrown in. It’s an inherently silly premise. Have more fun with it and stop taking yourself so damn seriously. Unfortunately I feel the boat may have been missed on that one.

Dorei-ku The Animation

I’m not sure if I think this is actually good, or just the kind of trash I’m personally into. It’s an exploitative sex-horror kind of thriller series in which people gamble against each other to become their slaves. Which naturally means sex slave because that’s obviously how these things go. The story is there are these sexy gumshields that you wear that mean if you lose a bet against another person wearing one, you become their subservient slave who must obey their every wish. I think the reason why I like this more than other survival game type shows (is this even a survival game?) is because the characters are adults and treat the subject with a far less juvenile tone. What matters a lot though is where they go with the story now that the setup is out of the way. What are you trying to say with this story, because if it’s just exploitative sex games then I’m out. Horny, but out.

Golden Kamuy

Oh dear. I’m usually one to defend CG when used well. That is a rather rare occurrence, but I’m still there when needs be. But I am hard-pressed to find an instance of CG so catastrophically damaging to the entire show. The CG bear looked like a joke. Like they had dropped a cat into the set of a puppet show and pretended it was a cougar. There has been worse CG, but a bad CG car is still just a car for the most part. It’s when it formed such an integral part of the episode that it broke down. When you’re trying to get across the visceral impact of a crazed creature fighting to death with our main character, bodies colliding as blood drenches the battlefield, yet it looks so jarring next to our human characters.

The story itself is really good though! Excellent setup, establish who our main character is, justifies why he would kill as he does, makes him sympathetic while not admonishing him of his actions. Interesting setting as well that feels genuinely unique. But the adaptation is so bland with rather little done to justify its existence as anime (and the one part they tried in was the CG bear so…yeah that happened). It’s a show I would probably really like, but I feel like I need to learn my lesson from Welcome to the Ballroom. If the adaptation looks like its fucking up right from the start but has a super strong story, you’ll only find the gradual irritation with the adaptation overwhelming the more you watch.

Gegege no Kitarou 2018

Between this and Lupin III, it’s been amusing to see these old anime return with their take on the modern world. This time it’s watching Logan Paul get turned into a tree while filming. That alone means its probably worth checking out, but it is actually pretty well made anyway. The storytelling is solid and watching these old spirits get fascinated with modern technology is genuinely funny. I’m not sure I’ll keep up with it though since I believe it will likely end up airing for like 100 episodes or something, given its taken over the Dragonball timeslot on TV. But hey, I’ll do my best until I get bored of the formula.

My Hero Academia Season 3

The first episode was a recap with a little bit of lol Mineta is a lecherous twatnabble. The second episode was hey let’s start a training arc, plus a little bit of lol Mineta is a perverted cuntwumble. Suffice to say this has been an awful start to the season so far and I’ve kind of hated the first two episodes and am on the edge of starting a national campaign to feed Mineta to a pack of wild walruses. I know everyone already hates Mineta, but for real can we talk about him for a second? He is the perfect encapsulation of the pervy shounen character that everyone grew out of years ago if they weren’t a girl and already didn’t like the archetype and yet somehow persists to this day. Mineta has no purpose in the show beyond to remind everyone that you can’t be a woman without someone judging you for your looks and making you uncomfortable. If they gave him more backstory, I wouldn’t like him more. I would just be irritated they spent time of such an inherently terrible character. Just write him out of the show. Please.