What Current Anime Are You Watching Version v4.0

[JB0]

1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Watching Pseudo-Harem, and to be honest its premise is feeling pretty thin even just two episodes in.  

It's just two weird theater kids flirting in the most awkward way imaginable with little to nothing in the way of a plot behind it.  It's cute, but it doesn't feel like there's any direction to it.

Wait, that got an anime and no one told me?

I love those two dorks.

[Raikkonen]

Finished Kaiju No 8. Became too predictable and cringy towards the end... 

[Seto Kaiba]

Wistoria: Wand and Sword has a new episode today... and I'm still not sold on this one either.  It was doing some interesting worldbuilding for a bit, but too much of that is starting to converge on increasingly blatant Harry Potter references.  Will Serfort was already a scrawny, short, geeky kid with ill-fitting glasses attending a wizard school in the company of an obnoxious girl prodigy... but now we have a bully teacher with long dark hair and unpleasant manner intrinsically associated with snakes who is trying his damndest to get Will expelled.  He's basically Professor Snape after a significant glowup looks-wise.

If I had to describe it in a single sentence... "This is what Mashle would be if Mashle weren't a comedy."

 

14 hours ago, JB0 said:

Wait, that got an anime and no one told me?

I love those two dorks.

Now you know... and knowing is half the battle!

Please see the quartermaster for the red or blue lasers that make up the other half.

[Seto Kaiba]

My Wife Has No Emotion's latest episode... well... hmm... 

This is clearly meant to be cute and funny, but I can't laugh or find it cute because the protagonist is clearly mentally ill.  He's a terminally lonely wage slave projecting his frustrated affections onto a humanoid household appliance... and outside of his sister, the people who've seen them together find it appropriately creepy and cringeworthy.

His sister... *inarticulate noise of disgust*... imagine writing a story where a character has to be introduced with this caption superimposed over them: 「異種間恋愛フェチ」 (lit. "interspecies love fetish").  That's how the series chooses to explain the protagonist's sister being OK with him being "married" to a robotic kitchen tool.

The whole premise is still incredibly sexist.

Edited July 14 by Seto Kaiba

[Seto Kaiba]

The Magical Girl and the Evil Lieutenant Used to Be Archenemies is pretty much the center of the Venn diagram of Villain-san's Day Off and Love After World Domination.  It's one of those half-length short series (11 minute episodes).  The premise is basically a gender-flipped version of Love After World Domination but with more of a Villain-san's Day Off slow pace.

The titular and extremely polite and proper Lieutenant from the nondescript Evil Organization falls in love at first sight with the equally polite and proper Magical Girl and, due to their shared incredible commitment to politeness, proper etiquette, and fair play they never do get around to doing any fighting.

Spoiler

The first episode is mostly just the Lieutenant plying the Magical Girl with desserts in a transparent effort to get to know her better, and then being shocked and appalled by her living conditions.

 

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

I watched the 1st episode of Atri: My Dear Moments and it was really good.  Finally something interesting.

[Dangard Ace]

Watched the first two episodes of Grendizer U.   FINALLY a new Super Robot show!   

 

Also started binging Daily Life of the Immortal King in english dub.  It's almost as bad-good as Ghost Stories english dub.

 

 

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

Spice & Wolf was great again today,  Poor Holo.

[Seto Kaiba]

Started No Longer Allowed in Another World after dinner... and this is kinda heavy.  Like really heavy.  Indecently heavy.  

I have to admit, it's definitely a fresh take on subverting the usual isekai formula.  A hero who has zero interest in, and negligible talent for, heroing and who is genuinely upset that his isekai-inducing run-in with Truck-kun wasn't fatal because all he wants to do is die and Truck-kun interrupted his double suicide attempt.  There doesn't seem to be any of the usual power fantasy and it seems determined to subvert the usual romance/harem fantasy too.  Is it gauche to say I'm going to keep watching this bizarre death-seeking hero out of morbid curiosity?

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

19 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Started No Longer Allowed in Another World after dinner... and this is kinda heavy.  Like really heavy.  Indecently heavy.  

I have to admit, it's definitely a fresh take on subverting the usual isekai formula.  A hero who has zero interest in, and negligible talent for, heroing and who is genuinely upset that his isekai-inducing run-in with Truck-kun wasn't fatal because all he wants to do is die and Truck-kun interrupted his double suicide attempt.  There doesn't seem to be any of the usual power fantasy and it seems determined to subvert the usual romance/harem fantasy too.  Is it gauche to say I'm going to keep watching this bizarre death-seeking hero out of morbid curiosity?

I agree 100%.  I will continue it.  I thought I would drop it but episode 2 changed my mind.

[Seto Kaiba]

Looking at this week's new releases...

Dahlia in Bloom is still pretty much the anime version of white noise.  A quarter of the way into its run and none of the characters really stand out at all.  We're starting to see some variety in faces and personalities but not to a significant extent.  The plot has finally gotten moving as of the end of the third episode, with the protagonist having her engagement dissolved because of her fiance's infidelity and starting her life over (for the second time), but it stops there.

Pseudo Harem is still a very cute and funny but directionless sort of series.  Wikipedia says the original source was a webcomic, and it does have that kind of 4koma-y sort of vibe with very little character development or sense of an actual plot.  It's adorable, but it's just a string of things happening without any semblance of going anywhere.

Failure Frame is... well... not improved by the return of the protagonist's classmates to the story.  The irony is that these characters are clearly aware that their classmates are awful people and even seem to briefly be aware that they too are no exception, but that self-awareness never gets far enough for them to actually change their behavior.  There is one bit that I wish the series would drop, and it's that Touka seems incredibly determined to spend half of each confrontation pretending to be terrified or unwilling to fight and stallling for time for no real reason.  It has never been convincing.  It's just padding the story out unnecessarily.

The Strongest Magician in the Demon Lord's Army Was a Human is pretty anticlimactic in general.  It's one where the story and the events actually being shown seem to belong to two very different plots.  Ike spends the first few episodes terrified that someone will learn he's a human, only to find out everyone in authority already knew and doesn't care, and there's some fuss about an ambitious rival trying to assassinate him but it basically comes to nothing.  Every episode just sort of leaves me wondering "OK, what was the point of all that?"

The Magical Girl and the Evil Lieutenant Used to be Archenemies is one title that I wish was longer.  They pack a lot of fun into those 11 minutes, though it's mostly the Lieutenant's tsundere overreactions and jabs at titles like Madoka Magica that sell it.  (The mascot creature who the magical girl works for is far more of a villain than the Evil Lieutenant or his organization... being, essentially, a yakuza thug.)

The Ossan Newbie Adventurer continues to be a hoot if you like that kind of Mashle and One Punch Man sort of "the protagonist is overpowered but nobody's buying it" comedy.  It definitely relishes that, so it sets its villains up to be as odious and arrogant as possible so the ensuing beatdown is maximally cathartic.  It's entertaining, but doesn't really do all that much to stand out.

My Wife Has No Emotion... this is probably the most depressing comedy I've seen since Watamote.  Unintentionally so, I fear.  This is like the story of one of those terminally lonely people who "marries" a body pillow or a realdoll.  We're watching a man go through life telling people that a vaguely humanoid kitchen appliance is his wife.  It'd be less pathetic if he were dealing with a ridiculously human robot like the "Super Mina" series introduced in the 4th episode, but the kitchen robot he's dragging to public places is about as human-like as C-3PO from the neck down and even less so in behavior.  Also I could swear there was a comedy manga that had basically this exact premise done better years back...

 

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

 

I watch the 2nd episode of Atri: My Dear Moments and I am bored with it. I hope the next episode is better.

[Seto Kaiba]

Nearly halfway into the current Summer 2024 simulcast season, and whooboy did this season turn out to be a crop of stinkers.

Wistoria: Wand and Sword's fourth episode dropped this week... and I am so tired of its protagonist Will Serfort.  He's a blatant Harry Potter expy, but even Harry Potter had far more grit than this guy.  Will Serfort's a whiny, indecisive, absolute doormat and the longer the story drags on the more obvious it becomes that the other students who bully him and say that he doesn't belong at their magic school are, despite their rudeness, objectively correct.  He can't use magic, so he's incapable of doing most of the coursework and would have long since flunked out if not for one professor keeping him enrolled via credits from field work he can complete using his physical prowess.

Spoiler

The whole first half of this episode is Will being reminded he's going to fail to graduate because he can't pass most written tests or any of the practical coursework, and his one friend trying to reassure him he could still move up as a nepotism hire if he manages to catch the eye of one of the world's top mages.

 

Dahlia in Bloom: Crafting a Fresh Start with Magical Tools took five entire episodes to actually get to its main plot, and what it delivered was almost comically lazy.  It's one of those weird revenge-fantasy sort of romance stories that starts with the protagonist's partner ending their relationship to be with someone else and then an impossibly perfect Hallmark hubby practically falls out of the f***ing sky and takes an immediate unprompted intense romantic interest in the newly single person.  It's actually kind of unintentionally funny in how utterly lazy it is and how blatantly it's pandering.

Spoiler

Dahlia, an office worker reincarnated in a fantasy world as the child of a prominent designer of magical appliances, finds her arranged marriage fiance wants to break things off because he's fallen in love with the daughter of a minor noble who works as a receptionist at their trade's guildhall.

So she breaks off their engagement, takes almost all of his money in the breach-of-contract settlement, forces him to buy the house they jointly built from her, and goes back to live in her father's old lab while all of the guild are basically falling over each other to encourage her to go into business solo and cutting her ex off.  She goes on a brief trip incognito and on that trip she rescues a knight who was wounded and lost in the woods and takes him back to his order's headquarters.  He's so completely taken with this rando he barely knows that he twists his superior's arm to get a letter of introduction to the guild to find the person who rescued him, and on their next meeting it turns out he's a "so hot every girl around has to comment on it" son of a major noble who's deeply interested in her work and immediately head over heels for her to the point of very blatantly flexing on her ex and his new girl when they try to apologize for what they'd put her through.

 

My Deer Friend Nokotan is just an Excel Saga-style drug trip.  It's actually pretty fun for all of that, but it lacks those moments of self-awareness that took Excel Saga from merely weird to outrageously funny.

 

My Wife Has No Emotion never really stops being cringeworthy.  This is, after all, a romcom about a guy who's so terminally lonely that he fell in love with a ChatGPT-enabled kitchen appliance because it's vaguely girl-shaped and his definition of "woman" seemingly goes no farther than "domestic servant".  🙄  It's one of those titles where I really want to just find the original author and send them to therapy.

 

Failure Frame is a pretty unremarkable isekai series.  It's actually gotten a lot better for the lack of the protagonist's classmates, who are shown to be actually pretty incompetent despite their advanced skills.  It is veering heavily into the fanservice side of matters now with the protagonist having acquired an elf girl sidekick who seems to have never heard about this marvelous invention called the "shirt".  Every antagonistic male character seems to feel compelled to rant at length about how hot she is and how they want to sexually assault her... and at least one of them actually makes the attempt.

 

The Strongest Magician in the Demon Lord's Army was a Human is pretty unremarkable as fantasy stuff goes.  The animation is pretty consistently low quality and the writing is form letter for the most part.  

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

I finally finished the 1st season of Chihayafuru.  It was good.  I might watch the other 2 eventually.

[Raikkonen]

Catching up on Nier:Automata. 

[Stampeed Valkyrie]

7 hours ago, Raikkonen said:

Catching up on Nier:Automata. 

I'm liking the anime adaptation,  its been probably 5+ years since I played through the game, so there is much I do not remember.

 

Tokidoki Bosotto Russia-go de Dereru Tonari no Alya-san -  is still my favorite this season.   Alya comes off too harsh at points,  but the gimmick is funny. 

Hazurewaku no "Joutai Ijou Skill" de Saikyou ni Natta Ore ga Subete wo Juurin suru made -   The whole Isekai a busload of high school kids died for me with last seasons ridiculous 1 hit death garbage series.    The only thing this has going for it,  is the elf..   not really much else.

Gimai Seikatsu -  this went downhill pretty fast.   Angsty teenagers,  silly and pointless drama.     Its a hair away from the Dumpster fire "Domestic na Kanojo"    I'm waiting for all the stupid anime tropes to hit at some point.. aka Suzuka,  or A town where you live..     Should rename this series.. tell me you wannna drill your step sister without telling me you wanna drill your step sister.

Maougun Saikyou no Majutsushi wa Ningen datta -   I think @Seto Kaiba said it best,   its pretty low budget.    While not terrible the copy pasta CGI is killing it for me.   I'm willing to bet the manga is pretty good.

Isekai Shikkaku -   I only watched the first 2 episodes.    The whole premise of wanting to find a place to die and do nothing is already stale.    Good luck with the next 10 episodes.

Shinmai Ossan Boukensha, Saikyou Party ni Shinu hodo Kitaerarete Muteki ni Naru. -   Surprisingly this one is turning out better then I expected.     Its nothing that hasn't been done before but it is entertaining me.   

Giji Harem -  not bad..   It's pretty straight forward right out of the gate with what to expect.    Poor girl is down bad,  and the MC is mostly dense.    Everyone else seems to pickup on it.    

Megami no Cafe Terrace 2nd Season -   I am enjoying this,  as I did the 1st season.    It reminds me of Love Hina,  so if your not into Harem Rom-coms then pass.

2.5-jigen no Ririsa -   .....     The Mrs said it best,    it has a skeeve vibe going.      I see its trying to ride off of  Sono Bisque Doll..  but maybe tone it down abit. 

 

 

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[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

I started Kimi ni todoke s3 today. It was so good. I just love Sawako's reactions.

[Seto Kaiba]

23 hours ago, Stampeed Valkyrie said:

Maougun Saikyou no Majutsushi wa Ningen datta -   I think @Seto Kaiba said it best,   its pretty low budget.    While not terrible the copy pasta CGI is killing it for me.   I'm willing to bet the manga is pretty good.

From what I've seen, the anime is a fairly faithful adaptation of the light novel... which suggests none of the versions of the story are very good because the story itself is generic.

With the anime, at least we get to see Jun Fukuyama do his very best Satoshi Hino impression. 🤪

 

The one title this season that's really stood out for me is the rather cute little romcom The Magical Girl and the Evil Lieutenant... though I'm increasingly feeling like that's less due to it doing anything particularly distinctive and more due to the rest of the simulcast season being devoid of attention-getters.

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

Isekai Shikkaku is a surprise to me.  it is such a strange show.

[Stampeed Valkyrie]

Good news for Spicy Wolf fans..  apparently they are going to adapt additional story that the original anime did not.. 

[Seto Kaiba]

Ossan Newbie Adventurer has apparently decided it's bored with being One Punch Man: Fantasy Edition and now wants to be a boxing anime.

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

I am watching the 3rd season of Kimi ni Todoke and it is great. 

[Stampeed Valkyrie]

21 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Ossan Newbie Adventurer has apparently decided it's bored with being One Punch Man: Fantasy Edition and now wants to be a boxing anime.

Thankfully the fighting tournament arc is fairly short.    It will probably be the capstone of the anime adaptation.

Spoiler

The Climax will probably end up with the fight between Rick, and Broughston. 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

The Magical Girl and the Evil Lieutenant Used to Be Archenemies continues to be a fun little parody of the magical girl genre.

Spoiler

This latest episode ramped up the parody of Madoka with another familiar who's recruited another magical girl... this one having the foulest mouth imaginable.  She drops F-bombs at a rate that'd make Gordon Ramsey proud.

 

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

I finally started Dungeon Meshi and it is good so far.

[Seto Kaiba]

17 hours ago, Hikaru Ichijo SL said:

I finally started Dungeon Meshi and it is good so far.

It's good all the way through.  A title that solid is a rare prize indeed.

 

The Strongest Magician in the Demon Lord's Army Was a Human continues to underwhelm.  Honestly, the 3D CG animation in this looks SO BAD that it actively detracts from the action.  It's really bad when the CG animated monsters have to talk, because they make almost no effort to match the lip flap.

My Deer Friend Nokotan has kind of fallen off into a "well, let's just do nonsense" approach, and it's not really funny anymore because they only really have one joke now.

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

Days with my stepsister has been great. I love the dynamic between Asamura and Ayase.

[Stampeed Valkyrie]

On 8/15/2024 at 6:20 PM, Hikaru Ichijo SL said:

Days with my stepsister has been great. I love the dynamic between Asamura and Ayase.

I passed after ep 2 where she tries to jump him.   Very much vibes of other series along the vein of brother/sister wanna bone.    Maybe it gets better keep us posted.

 

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

4 hours ago, Stampeed Valkyrie said:

I passed after ep 2 where she tries to jump him.   Very much vibes of other series along the vein of brother/sister wanna bone.    Maybe it gets better keep us posted.

 

I am reading the light novel so I am far past where the anime will end. 

[Dangard Ace]

Kinnikuman 2024. Aka Ultimate MUSCLE.  Fun watching them bring back this old show.  

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

Wow, dungeon meshi is just a great show.

[Seto Kaiba]

Dungeon Meshi really is just a great show.

My watch group has decided to go backwards a bit for two older shows.  Tonight we're starting Super Dimension Century Orguss and Phantasy Star Online 2: Episode Oracle, the latter being a loose adaptation of the first three episodes of the single player story from the Japanese MMORPG Phantasy Star Online 2.

A lot of shounen stuff is ending soon or has just ended... My Hero Academia finally reached its conclusion, and its fans seem to be pretty pissed.  I guess the ending was not a very satisfying one, considering how many bitter remarks are saying Deku's quirk should've been called "All For Nothing".  The Jujutsu Kaisen fans seem to be pretty up in arms too, not happy with the mangaka killing off so many characters in such quick succession.

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

Shikanoko was just hilarious today.

[Seto Kaiba]

Remembered that Code Geass: Roze of the Recapture exists, and decided to watch another few episodes.

I am, if anything, still impressed at Bandai Namco's commitment to having zero original ideas.  Might as well just call this Mobile Code Zeta Geass and have done with it... except it's nowhere near as good as Zeta Gundam.  The plot is, to the last, just a retread of the original show's with some proper nouns changed.

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

Wow Monogatari really got dark.