What Current Anime Are You Watching Version v4.0

[Seto Kaiba]

Started The Brilliant Healer's New Life in the Shadows today.  By about 3:30 into the first episode, I was ready to call it quits.

The synopsis on Crunchyroll promised me a drama about a back-alley healer in a fantasy world running a secret clinic for the city's impoverished souls.  What Studio Makaria put out, however, is a downright cringeworthy, low-quality harem series about a nondescript guy who lives with a bunch of standard anime Little Bit Beastly monster girls.  It's half an episode gone before the protagonist, dressed in this season's hottest chuunibyou fashion and behaving like a standard overpowered isekai MC, gets to actually be relevant to the story in any way.  (What he does isn't even healing, it's beating the stuffing out of someone followed by an exorcism.)  It's eminently skippable.

 

The other day, my watch group also watched LucasFilm's last pre-Disney non-Star Wars original feature Strange Magic.  It really is quite something... in a bad way.  The only way I can describe it is that it's like what you'd get if you described a Disney musical to a studio in a country where Disney musicals don't exist and then asked them to make one... it's subtly wrong in so many fundamental ways that it manages to be off-putting and even a little upsetting without actually crossing the line into being unwatchably bad.  It stands quite amply as an example of why George Lucas should not write.  Ever.

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

I watched the 2nd episode of The Brilliant Healer's New Life in the Shadows today.  I think this should have been episode 1.  I like the character introductions 1st.

[DewPoint]

I would have had a better opinion of that show if that had been the 1st episode.  I pretty much agree with everyone's opinion about it.  I'm still likely to drop that show.  right now it gets another week of viewing.

[Seto Kaiba]

Watched the second episode of The Brilliant Healer's New Life in the Shadows, and this show writing is a collection of tropes from the worst kind of amateur-hour light novel BS.

Spoiler

Awesome McCoolname chuunibyou fantasy protagonist Zenos is kicked out of his up-and-coming elite party of Adventurers (the story never bothers to stop and explain why Adventurers are a thing) because they're social-climbing and he's from the slums.  They treat him like cr*p despite the fact that he's been carrying them the whole way, and is nevertheless persuaded to leave without comment or complaint. 

Even though the previous episode established that this story takes place in a nation which is famous for producing large numbers of healers, everyone he meets seems to be amazed by the very existence of healing magic.  Whenever he heals someone, they react with shock that their injuries have healed and then switch seamlessly to obnoxious toadying praise to the extent that almost all of their dialog is fawning praise for this flat character.  So much so that other characters seem to only be in this series to either needlessly antagonist the protagonist and get humbled, or to remind the audience of the conceit that Zenos is The Best, And Nothing's Gonna Ever Keep Him Down.

Somehow, despite having worked as a healer for an adventurer party for years and living in a nation that is famous for producing many healers, Zenos has never heard of the idea of working as a healer.  He has to reason his way through the concept of "money can be exchanged for goods and services" based on the idea that the restaurant he ate in exchanges money for food.  So he just randomly decides to become an underground/unlicensed healer and walks off to go find an abandoned house to set up in.  While searching, the only suitable house he finds has a wraith living in it (a monster we're told is a death sentence for anyone) and he casually tells his elf-toady that he's slain hundreds of wraiths without issue... leading him to no-diff the Queen of the Wraiths in a matter of seconds.

We basically then get walked through the rest of the introductions to the harem from the first episode, who are clearly designed for fetish appeal and not much else.

This might become one of the rare titles I drop before the end.  It's that bad.

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

I did not like the apothecary diaries this week.

[Seto Kaiba]

17 minutes ago, Hikaru Ichijo SL said:

I did not like the apothecary diaries this week.

Definitely one of the weaker episodes... between this being yet-another "Lady Lishu is bullied by her own ladies-in-waiting" episode AND another "Maomao investigates reports of a ghost" episode, it's definitely not a particularly strong story.

 

Started Can a Boy-Girl Friendship Survive? today over lunch.  It's got a lot of energy.  A LOT.  Every character in this is extremely energetic.  The protagonist is a quiet guy who wants to make jewelry for a living, and his best friend (the girl of the boy-girl friendship) is an astonishingly genki girl with no sense of personal space and a terrible sense of humor who enjoys teasing him.  As teenage will-they-or-won't-they's go, this one's actually pretty believable in that they give off strong "No way, he/she's like a brother/sister" energy.  It's quite fun so far.

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

8 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Definitely one of the weaker episodes... between this being yet-another "Lady Lishu is bullied by her own ladies-in-waiting" episode AND another "Maomao investigates reports of a ghost" episode, it's definitely not a particularly strong story.

 

Started Can a Boy-Girl Friendship Survive? today over lunch.  It's got a lot of energy.  A LOT.  Every character in this is extremely energetic.  The protagonist is a quiet guy who wants to make jewelry for a living, and his best friend (the girl of the boy-girl friendship) is an astonishingly genki girl with no sense of personal space and a terrible sense of humor who enjoys teasing him.  As teenage will-they-or-won't-they's go, this one's actually pretty believable in that they give off strong "No way, he/she's like a brother/sister" energy.  It's quite fun so far.

The last few episodes of Apothecary have been lousy.  The charm of this show for me is wearing off.

[Stampeed Valkyrie]

I've got a few on my list initially for spring..

Can a Boy-Girl Friendship Survive? -  2 episodes in and seems interesting so far,  if it keep up the pace for the whole series it might be an enjoyable watch.

Haite Kudasai, Takamine-san -  premise is pretty absurd.     2 episodes in and it needs to be pulled over by the Horny police..   just sayin.

Katainaka no Ossan, Kensei ni Naru -  Backwoods sword master who is humble moves to the Capital because he is forced to..   ok so far could be interesting depending on how it develops.

Chotto dake Ai ga Omoi Dark Elf ga Isekai kara Oikaketekita -  ummm    yeah another gooner title.

Apocalypse Hotel -  strong vibes of Planetarian..    we shall see.

Kijin Gentoushou -  this one has caught my attention,  2 episodes in and its weaving a very interesting story.    

[Seto Kaiba]

The Gorilla God's Go-To Girl is... quite something.  I'm not completely certain what, but it's definitely something!  It's the story of a girl in a fantasy world who just wants a slow life and to be normal... only to find out at a coming-of-age sort of ceremony when teens receive a blessing from animal spirits/gods that confers special abilities that she's found the favor of the Gorilla god.  So this petite little lass who wants nothing more than to fly under the radar finds herself all but drafted into the knighthood because her blessing confers MASSIVE (and unladylike) speed, strength, and resilience far beyond what the men around her have... catapulting her into a reverse harem sort of situation where she's got a few prettyboy knights all surrounding her.

Once Upon a Witch's Death is also quite something.  The story of a witch's apprentice in what appears to be an alternate Earth where magic is just a thing nobody really questions, who is told by her mentor on her 17th birthday that she's going to die in a year because of an inherited death curse.  So this slightly bratty witch has to collect 1,000 tears of pure joy in order to concoct a magical solution that will prevent her from dying on her 18th birthday.  Aside from its incredibly genki protagonist, it's pretty much just the protagonist going around causing Hallmark moments with magic.  Nothing to write home about.

[Seto Kaiba]

Started Classic Stars... a series that does such a bad job of explaining its own premise that I'm still not sure what it's actually about.

The best part is, nobody else seems to know either.  Its English wikipedia page has no real info, and its Japanese wikipedia page doesn't exist.  (It literally just redirects to the stub article for the production company.)

What little I can glean from this atrociously written mess is that the protagonist is a teenage boxing enthusiast who suffered a career ending eye injury, and in exchange for a very pricy surgery to restore his vision he agreed to attend an exclusive private school.  What he wasn't told (or didn't pay attention to?) was that he was to attend as a music major not as an athlete and that he was to be involved in some kind of project to study emotions (or manufacture a boy band? I can't tell) using a massive holographic stage and pop songs based on public domain classical music.

Spoiler

... apparently it's for proxy warfare?!

The opening blurb from the second episode seems to imply that there's some kind of Gundam Fight sort of situation where nations duke it by competing in cultural pursuits instead of combat?!  I AM SO CONFUSED!

 

EDIT: No amount of context can make this make sense.  At one point, a character says without a trace of irony "That's right! You can even punch people with songs!".  F***ING WHAT.  Nobody tell Basara. 🤣

Edited 3 hours ago by Seto Kaiba