Seto Kaiba

Inexpressive Kashiwada & Expressive Oota An odd-couple romance comedy about a pair of high school students: a hothead named Oota who has no poker face to speak of and the girl he lowkey likes, the phenomenally stoic Kashiwada. He's openly fascinated by her and is absolutely determined to do whatever it takes to crack her deadpan expression and get a visible reaction out of her, no matter how immature. Basically, the central premise of the series is one of those little kid crushes where they annoy the object of their affections as a way of showing interest. It's cute and refreshing, in a very innocent sort of way. Oota's such an open book that Kashiwada seems to have no trouble at all telling what he's up to and foiling his plans.

Wait, it's a PG-13 Predator movie? That definitely feels like a misstep. I might've been tempted to see it in theaters, but now I think I'll wait for the streaming release. Sounds like they're making the same mistake as the first Alien vs Predator movie too. Well, yeah... but that's not an indicator of understanding the content of what's being said. I can record and play back birdcalls and the vocalizations of primates, but that doesn't mean I know what they're actually saying. I'm definitely with you there. The less we know the better, because their inscrutability was the main thing that made them scary. They were the Unknown and the Unknowable. You can't make them scary again as an unknown menace once you've been to their home and met their mum.

Yeah, that's the problem with having a limited breeding population with limited genetic diversity. You end up reinforcing recessive traits, some of which are potentially detrimental. Fortunately there were about a million surviving Humans after the war so the genetic diversity wasn't catastrophically low. The Zentradi ran into their own problems once they started reproducing naturally too. Like Klan Klang's "clumsy" genes that affect her usage of the miclone system. (Given that Master File indicates the New UN Gov't eventually solved the Zentradi "fighting instincts" problem with gene therapy, one has to wonder if they solved the problems from that initial extensive use of cloning Humans the same way. They could potentially wipe out all kinds of diseases and potentially-fatal conditions that way, as we're starting to do now in the real world with potential gene-editing cures for things like HIV and Down syndrome.) They compressed the range of heights for the Zentradi a bit in the movie version, yeah.

Evolution Toy's VF-2SS is 1/60 scale, so it's about 50% larger than the Bandai Hi-Metal. I'm not a toy collector by any means, but my wholly subjective impression is that the Evolution Toy VF-2SS is lower-quality than the Hi-Metal R despite its larger size. It has some joint problems particularly around the hips and struggles to stay in fighter mode due to the tabs that hold the legs up being a poor fit. IMO the main advantage of the ET one is its larger size + the availability of the Fairy Platoon variant with decals to do the other three members of Sylvie's unit. Neither toy is truly screen-accurate though. They both made the same design compromises to have the removable Super Armed Pack so the pack itself is a lot bulkier and sits a lot higher on the airframe. Neither one has the correct number of Squire bits either. The VF-2SS normally has five, but the Hi-Metal R has four and the Evolution Toy only two.

Ouch. Yeah, it is about that bad isn't it, if we've gone from "inscrutable alien spree killer hunting the most elite soldiers in the world" to "alien hunter intern tries to prove himself and land a full-time position". Makes you wonder how they can even understand each other, since the Predators don't exactly speak English and have tried to avoid contact with Humanity except on the hunt.

Mechanical Marie Multiple kidnapping and assassination attempts orchestrated by his own relatives have turned the Zebes corporation's young heir Arthur Louis Zetes into an extreme misanthrope. For his own safety and convenience, he commissioned the Zetes corporation to create a robot maid to tend to his home and personal needs. Faced with his impossible sci-fi ask from the company's next CEO, the Zetes corporation hires the legendarily stoic martial arts champion Marie "the Robot" Evans for her combat skills and unshakeable poker face and asks her to play the role of said robotic maid and bodyguard in exchange for clearing her parents debts and paying for her education. For the sake of her future and family, Marie has to keep her charge safe and convinced that she is the robot the Zetes corporation claims she is. So begins an unlikely romance comedy as Arthur quickly develops a bodyguard crush on what he firmly believes is an inanimate object and Marie struggles to cope with Arthur's very unpleasant and fratricidal family. It's fun in an odd couple-y sort of way. A bit like Spy x Family, if Yor were Loid's bodyguard.

Hmm... I dunno, my hopes are not high for this one. After rewatching the first couple Predator movies, I feel like it's not a great idea to make a Predator the protagonist of the movie. IMO, what makes the Predators work as the sci-fi horror movie monsters they were/are is that they're inscrutable. They couldn't be communicated with or understood. They were just these aliens hunting people for sport because they could. Once you give them dialog and have them explain their culture and the context of their actions to the audience... they're just rubber forehead aliens like in Star Trek and there's no pivoting back to horror after that. Basically the same mistake Alien: Earth made by revealing you can absolutely just talk to Xenomorphs and control them with language.

A Mangaka's Weirdly Wonderful Workplace A slice-of-life comedy about the trials and travails of a novice mangaka's daily life as she produces new chapters of her shogi manga Dear Subaru for a shoujo manga magazine. Given that this kind of thing is well-trodden ground, I'd kind of expected the series to make the hilariously toxic work dynamics of the professional mangaka the focus of the humor in the series. There is a bit of that but most of what passes for humor in this series is the titular mangaka being a womanchild who breaks down in hysterical tears over every little inconvenience and has to be bullied into and/or mercilessly handheld through every aspect of doing her job by her assistant. It's more depressing than funny.

A Gatherer's Adventure in Isekai definitely ain't beating the "boring, lazy, painfully derivative form letter writing" allegations by trying to be self-aware about how its plot developments don't make sense. 😆 If your story's barely gotten started and your only recourse to trying to make the story's events fit together and flow is to have your protagonist acknowledge that random bullsh*t just keeps happening and none of it makes sense, maybe consider a career other than "professional writer"? Seriously.

Not entirely sure what you mean by "clone strains" there. Macross Chronicle's WorldGuide sheet for the Zentradi describes there as being essentially three main types: Ordinary soldier type (e.g. Warera, Roli, Conda, Milia) Records/Staff officer type (e.g. Exsedol, Tranquil) Commander type (e.g. Vrlitwhai, Quamzin, Laplamiz, Boddole Zer) We do see Commanders occasionally take to the field with their troops. Quamzin's the poster boy for that. He's a Commander type and his men are ordinary soldier types. Macross Chronicle's Character Sheet "Zentradi Soldiers" (SDFM TV Zentradi 08A) has a note on the line art of the various Zentradi background characters used in the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series that explains why they all look different. The Zentradi are all clones, but they're cloned from a large number of different genetic patterns so each force has considerable diversity of attributes among its soldiers. (Presumably this is more advantageous than just cloning the same guy a billion times the way the Republic did in Star Wars.)

Let This Grieving Soul Retire! (Second Season) Picks up shortly after the events of last season's finale, though most of the episode is given over to an extended flashback to how Tino's first encounter with the members of Strange Grief and a stolen brooch spiraled into Strange Grief gaining fame as heroes. The animation and writing are both on par with the previous season's. Not great, but "pretty good" would be fair. The main weakness of the writing is just the story's central premise requires the writing to jump through a LOT of hoops and use a lot of contrived coincidences to avoid making a strong argument for Krai either deserving his reputation as the genius strategist hero or being a Flashman-style dirty coward who's been mistaken for a great hero because of his proximity to the other members of Strange Grief. Hands Off: Sawaranaide Kotesashi-kun ... okay, yeah might have to write Crunchyroll about doing a better job with content advisories. This series is flagged under "sports", "comedy", and "romance". No indication on their simulcast page of what this series is really about. Even the series page in their app doesn't give any indication besides a tiny "18+" icon the size of a single grain of rice next to saying it's subtitled and the above-listed genres. The only indication that this is... something else... is buried in "More Details" extended description. It's ecchi bordering on softcore p*rn. Why is this even on Crunchyroll? That's HiDive's bag, not theirs. They've put it in the same content category as Berserk, which is an odd choice. Ordinary High School Student™️ Koyo Kotesashi has taken a job as a live-in caretaker at the rather rundown Maple Lies dormatory in order to pay his way through school in order to pursue his dream of studying sport/exercise medicine. On his arrival, he learns that the tenants under his care are all elite nationally-ranked athletes from his new high school (Seiwa University HS). When one injures herself falling down the stairs, he examines her and discovers some mobility issues stemming from untreated sports injuries. He tries to help her by applying the seitai therapy he learned from his family. (A pseudoscientific "alternative medicine" practice based on Chinese traditional medicine AKA "unscientific nonsense" that is somewhere between chiropractic "medicine" and actual physical therapy mobility exercises.) The end result is the physical therapy version of Shokugeki no Soma's foodgasms. Eminently skippable.

AFAIK, there isn't currently a digital edition in circulation.

The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become the Strongest Another one of those weirdly specific premises that seems to have no end of stories built around it. "The adventurer party arrogantly banishes its white mage/support from the party on the (incorrect) assumption that they're not contributing anything from the back row, so they have to go off to start a New Life that reveals how awesome and overpowered they've literally always been while their old party learns the hard way that they were being carried." There were two shows with this exact premise last season alone, and this is like the 6th or 7th one this year. This is one of the most common isekai-adjacent fantasy story premises along with "starting my new life as a pharmacist in a small town". Court Mage Alec Ygret is kicked out of his party and has his rank and title as a court mage stripped from him because the arrogant princeling leading his adventuring party thinks he's not pulling his weight because he's only ever advising caution and casting support magic from the back line. Predictably, he's a complete doormat of a person who can't even bother defending himself and is held in such poor esteem by his own colleagues that nobody else bothers to defend him either. Of course nobody's willing to hear him out when he's finally found a little bit of spine, so he's conveniently picked up by a never-before-mentioned old friend who wants him and him specifically to join her A-rank adventuring party "Lasting Period". This series is so by-the-numbers and so devoid of original thought or anything to make its protagonist interesting or relatable that I honestly caught myself tuning it out or putting it on pause and wandering off to do other things multiple times during the first episode. This series is so tediously dull, so desperately boring, and so profoundly unimaginative that I'd recommend literally anything as an alternative to watching it. Watch something else. Read a book. Play a video game. Learn a new language. Study the tax code. Pay next month's bills early. Hug a cactus. Learn things man was not meant to know and go mad from the revelation. Just don't waste your time on this sad mess of a show. My Friend's Little Sister Has It In For Me! Ordinary High School Student™️ Akiteru has a problem. He's a man determined to bring efficiency to the world of romance (AKA clueless), and his best friend Ozuma's little sister Iroha likes to hang around his place and be an annoying pest because she obviously likes him and he could not be less interested in her. His hobby, which he wants to turn into a career, is game development. His game development circle "5th Floor Alliance" has put out an indie game that got over 1 million downloads and he's looking to go pro with a job working for his uncle's entertainment company. His uncle is willing to hire 5th Floor Alliance as devs without making them sit the company exam, but there's a catch... he wants his nephew Akiteru to be his daughter's fake boyfriend until they both graduate because she's transferring to his co-ed school and he wants to keep her away from boys. So starts an obnoxious love triangle. It's... not bad? Not great. This is another one of those premises that gets overused a bunch, with the guy's future being held hostage in order to force him into a relationship that eventually ends up as a love triangle because the girl he's forced to be with starts to like him and the one who couldn't confess fast enough suddenly spills the beans. Watchable, but nothing to write home about so far.

Almost certainly... they did basically the exact same thing with the Tomahawk beam cannons. What was done back in SDFMI-era publications didn't really go much beyond giving the VF-1 a Destroid's arm cannon for a gunpod or sticking the Tomahawk's gun clusters in place of the Armored Pack's chest missile launchers. Sticking whole Destroid body parts on a VF as a FAST Pack was something we didn't really see prior to Macross Ace and Macross the First when the Macross's chief engineer started to get weird about FAST packs.

May I Ask For One Final Thing? So... this one is another fine installment in that curiously specific genre of "a noblewoman who was engaged to the self-absorbed second prince until he decided to take up with a girl of lower social status and use malicious rumors and false accusations to ruin his fiancée's reputation and call off the engagement takes her revenge." It is WEIRD how often that one comes up. You wouldn't think such an incredibly specific premise would be very common, but this is like the sixth or seventh one I've watched with that exact formula in the last two years. This one's got moxie though. Instead of running away in tears until she's rescued by a better love interest or rejoicing and gladly running off to live her life as a free woman, Scarlet El Vandimion is having none of that "the best revenge is living well" nonsense and decides to get MAD. Three minutes and thirty seconds in and I am SOLD. This series did a better job making its protagonist relatable in three minutes than most shows do in three episodes. I am not only all in, at the end of the first episode I'm ready to declare Scarlet El Vandimion Fall 2025's Best Girl. 11/10. Wife material. Rollicking good fun and my top contender for this season's best show. I was so enthused I started the second episode straightaway...

Probably waiting for a less "austere" emigrant ship to set out on. 😆 The 1st Generation Megaroad-class ships were not the most comfortable place in the galaxy, with Macross Chronicle noting that rioting in response to the living conditions on those ships was not unheard-of. The really nice emigrant ships like the City-class are still about five years off, and the really posh Island Cluster-class is about sixteen years in the future yet. If Earth got wiped out, the rest of the galaxy probably went first. Earth in Macross is the center of the galaxy governmentally, economically, technologically, and militarily. It's so heavily defended you'd almost thing they took the whole First Space War thing a bit personally. With every major defense contractor and corporation headquartered there and the most advanced weapons available anything that can take Earth out is likely to have no trouble finishing the emigrant planets off.

If they changed the nose they could've pretended it's the one from that godawful Robotech Remix comic. Y'know, the one Titan comics based off stolen Macross-inspired fan art? I doubt anyone involved is willing to spend the money to make a new comic. The last licensee didn't fare so well. Tough, but fair. It really isn't lovely, that's for sure. It almost feels like the lower half is in a different scale than the upper half... like someone took the body of a 1/72 and tried to graft 1/60 legs onto it.

Let's Play A satirical exploration of the games industry and gaming culture based on the American webcomic by the same name. The story revolves around Samara Young, a recently graduated software engineer who dreams of becoming a game developer instead of taking over her father's software company. Her latest indie project, Ruminate, seems set for success when it gets review bombed into oblivion out of the blue by fans of a popular YouTube Let's Play reviewer who gave it a very negative review on his stream. Conveniently, that reviewer turns out to be the new tenant of the apartment next door which leads to her discovering an interest in romance and ending up the center of a love triangle between her boss and her new neighbor. The synopsis on Crunchyroll had me feeling a lot more positive about this series than I am now. This is pretty cringe, I'm not gonna lie. This is an American weeb from Kansas trying to write a cliche Japanese office romance and then set it in California because that's basically Japan, right? 🙃 The author of the webcomic wants to claim this is a realistic examination of gamer culture and office culture in the software/gaming industry. If so, I have to ask "On what planet?" It sure as **** ain't Earth. There are no less than six different incidents in this first episode that would have led to either career-ending HR complaints or multi-million dollar lawsuits for sexual harassment and workplace discrimination in the first episode alone. Most of them from the protagonist's own manager, come to that. (And I know I'm not being unfair about it because the protagonist AND her father both flag several of those as improper interactions.)

Solo Camping for Two (Second Cour) It's still a very poor ambassador for very hobby it's trying to promote. The writers finally decided to get off the dime and do some actual character development right at the end of the show's first cour, but it's all very flat, trite, and generic with no real emotional impact. The second cour does finally bring a vague hint of a sense of direction to the proceedings, as we learn that Gen's dream is... to own a campsite. He doesn't seem to be doing anything to work towards that dream, though. He's just sitting in front of his tent drinking cheap beer by the case until he dozes off. The series also seems to be taking the Eidos Interactive/Tomb Raider approach to the word "Camping", since apparently renting an AirBNB is "camping" by this show's standards. It's easy to see how they had the money to do a second cour... the animation quality is never better than mediocre and in more than a few shots looks like it was drawn by interns. It's pretty boring, mainly because the cast are completely flat characters. There are apparently FORTY-FIVE outdoor equipment companies cooperating with and/or sponsoring this mess, and it still wasn't enough to pay for actual writing or decent animation. A hard pass for anyone who's not looking for a sleep aid. A Gatherer's Adventure in Isekai I yearn for an end to the tyranny of the isekai genre. It's 99% lazy, derivative slop. This one is firmly in the lazy and derivative slop category. Statistically average workaday desk jockey Kamishiro Takeru is bored with his statistically average workaday life. So much so that he apparently dies of nothing in particular while sitting in front of his apartment's TV and finds himself talking to a being that claims to be a god. Said "god" sticks him with your average isekai cheat powers and tosses him into a world called Madeus that the god just can't seem to get working correctly in the hopes that he'll fix it. The animation quality is pretty average. Predictably, it's the D- form letter isekai writing where this series really falls down. It's incredibly generic and just as incredibly boring. The only things about it that really stand out are that its protagonist seems to be too stupid to realize that all of the words to activate his magic are in English and that he seems to be a literal giant who's a full head taller than anyone around him. A hard pass for... well... I can't imagine anyone this isn't a hard pass for. Maybe someone who gets their jollies from a recording of Ben Stein unenthusiastically reading the phone book?

Now, I am no toy collector so please take this for an ignorant statement if it comes across as one... but that looks kind of... awful? I can understand sacrificing screen-accurate proportions to make a toy's transformation work but this looks like they didn't even try.

OK, the Fall 2025 simulcast season has started in earnest... so let's kick the tires on a few of these new offerings and see what we got, eh? One thing is evident, the translation quality on Crunchyroll is definitely slipping. My Awkward Senpai The "romance with my senpai at work" genre of romcom is still alive and well. So's the trend of socially awkward protagonists from last season. In this case, it's a romance comedy all about an office lady who suffers from severe social anxiety. Her attempts to mask her anxiety have given her a fearsome reputation as a strict and uncompromising boss b*tch type in her company's advertising department. Her life is turned upside-down she can no longer avoid social interactions after being tasked with training the department's painfully earnest new hire. The first episode doesn't leave much of an impression. Mainly, I think, because the "comedy" is pretty thin on the ground and mainly consists of the protagonist agonizing over how her social awkwardness manifests as being bossy or standoffish. Pass the Monster Meat, Milady! ... which is NOT the title of an adult movie! This one's a fantasy romcom about a Count's daughter who is shunned and even a little feared in noble society for her unseemly enjoyment of eating the meat of magical beasts (monsters). While attempting to save an elderly couple when a magical beast attacks a garden party held by the King for noble matchmaking, she is rescued by the Blood-Mad Duke, a noble of similarly ill-repute who is infamous as a prolific hunter of magical beasts. The two of them hit it off almost immediately when they fail to be afraid of each other based on their respective reputations and he takes an interest in her peculiar hobby. Honestly... I am intrigued and would like to hear more. It's weirdly cute seeing these two otherwise-terrifying weirdos bond over the intersection of their respective hobbies to a mix of exasperation and delight from their families and retainers. This Monster Wants to Eat Me Which is also NOT the title of an adult movie! But it seems fair. I mean, the previous show's protagonist was eating monsters. This one's an adaptation of a yuri horror manga about a suicidal teenage girl named Hinako who just wants to die after being severely injured and losing her entire family in a car accident. While walking home from school one day, Hinako is attacked by an iso-onna yokai who wants to kill and eat her. She's rescued from this terrible fate by a mermaid yokai named Shiori, who tells her that her flesh and blood are particularly delicious to yokai and vows to protect her... until she reaches the peak of her flavor when she will kill and eat her herself. I have no idea what to make of this one, to be honest. What I can say is that the title surely did not lie. The monster really does want to eat her... just in a very passive-aggressive way. Then again, this is yuri... so "eat" may end up more figurative in the end.

Probably still on Earth. Those early emigrant fleets were partly crewed by clones in order to provide enough people with important skill sets, so a lot of folks with engineering and design backgrounds are probably still on Earth (or at best, Luna).

Got back to Onmyo Kaiten Re:Birth Verse, having basically forgotten it existed. After a few minutes of episode six, I remember why I forgot it existed. It's kind of s***. The center of a Venn diagram of the worst aspects of Re:Zero and Nobunaga the Fool, both of which are vastly superior stories it's cribbing from without an ounce of shame.

... wait, you mean there's some forgotten animation team out there that's still working on The Simpsons? 😶 Has the network just forgotten they exist and locked them in, or are they being held against their will? Seriously. I think the last time I spared a thought for The Simpsons was around the time the prior film came out... an upsettingly long time ago. Has it really been eighteen years? 🙃

Cultural Exchange with a Game Center Girl's final episode was released today. It's cute and inoffensive to the bitter end. Nothing I'd call substantial, but a fun little slice of life series at least. Ruri Rocks had its finale today as well. As deep in "thirst trap" territory as the official promotional art and fan art is for this series, I remain obscurely grateful that the series proper has never felt compelled to indulge in it despite the artist's personal preference for dangerously thicc girls being on full display until this final episode. 😆 They visit an onsen to talk about the mineral content in onsen water and how it builds up in pipes, and for the most part make a heroic effort to keep it on topic and avoid anything indecent. They have to fall back on censor steam in a few spots but there's nothing exploitative. They switch topics and talk about collecting material from meteorites that burn up in the atmosphere and they wrap up with Ruri contemplating what she might want to do for a career. All in all, very satisfied with this series. It was quite a bit of fun. Thinking of looping back and trying out Clevatess and Uglymug Epicfighter... since it's going to be a bit before the Fall '25 simulcast season really gets going. That said, the first few titles of the Fall '25 simulcast season have already dropped. The first episode of A Wild Last Boss Appeared and three episodes of The Fated Magical Princess are available on Crunchyroll. Neither of them really strikes me as worth watching, though. The Fated Magical Princess's description reads like it's a copycat series to Tearmoon Empire, and the A Wild Lass Boss Appeared series is another "reincarnated as the game's final boss" series which is overdone to death in the last few years.