2019
10.30

Azur Lane

Azur Lane is a mobage featuring WWII-era ships anthropomorphized into cute girls with giant guns and cannons strapped onto them. “Wait a minute Hellrider, isn’t this just Kancolle?” And you’d be correct, dear reader.  Not one to be outdone by glorious Nippon, China has decided to go in on that gacha money and release their own equivalent to the WWII mobage, but with the added benefit of something resembling actual gameplay.

It’s also significantly hornier.

Unlike Kancolle this anime follows an ensemble cast of US and European naval ships fighting against the Japanese and German fleet. A Japanese anime based on a Chinese mobage where the villains are Imperial Japan. Go figure. Despite a slow start the anime’s first episode picks up at the half way point and goes balls to the walls crazy. Girls fuse with their ships to shoot down aircraft and ride unicorn plushies that shoot out dog fighters to combat a giant nine-tails equipped with cannons summoned by a lesbian siscon foxgirl.

If that doesn’t sell you on the show, then I don’t know what to tell you.

Suffice to say that Azur Lane will be the go-to stupid fun action show in this otherwise dry season, and unlike Fate/Grand Order’s anime, it doesn’t require you to have knowledge of the game’s storyline to enjoy it or watch a boring prologue episode where fuck-all happens to get newcomers up to speed. If you want a simple dumb-fun action show with a bishoujo cast to fill the Symphogear-shaped hole in your heart, then you can certainly do worse than Azur Lane. – CrimsonRynnec

Cautious Hero: The Hero Is Overpowered but Overly Cautious

Oh, Not My Goddess

Remember KonoSuba? I thought KonoSuba was okay. But a lot of other people remember KonoSuba, so I guess that show still has plenty of shelf life among anime fandom. And I suppose enough people remembered KonoSuba that they’ll Diet KonoSuba, hence necessitating the creation of Cautious Hero.

I’m glad this show isn’t just following the same steps 90% of other isekai do by focusing on the wacky goddess from the alternate world more than the regular guy who gets thrown into said world, but it appears to be more of a light push than a fierce shove. The show tries to break out of the osmosis, but still finds itself stuck in the regular pattern. I don’t know what it says that even shows that take the piss out of their own genre are becoming played out, but it’s so tiring when even the parodies of the parodies become stale. Even more when the show that predate them cast a heavy shadow impossible to break out of, and you’re only stuck thinking of comparisons rather than unique observations. An anime being self-aware just isn’t impressive anymore, and watching this show try to be the funny light novel adaptation, I only chuckled maybe once. I guess if you really wanted more characters like Aqua in your seasonal anime, give this a try. I don’t know why in all honesty you would want more Aqua, but I’ve seen worse taste. – BloodyMarquis

High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even In Another World

Our departed’s engraving on their tombstone

The swarm is nigh. Everywhere we go, it’s alternate world this and self-insert fantasy that. No matter what barriers we use, the isekais adapt and break through our defenses. They always take new yet familiar forms all season, every season. Sometimes, it’s not even a truck anymore that starts the conflict. For this specimen in particular, it was a plane. And it wasn’t one Japanese teenager thrown into the void, but seven. The early autopsy showed no case of blunt force trauma or lacerations on the skin but substantial evidence of food poisoning. The texture had a flavor so well-known yet so unwelcome for this kind of show, stuck to my tongue like a cancer on the pancreas, it was, it was… Danganronpa?

But it was true! Unnaturally gifted high school students thrown into an environment unknown to normalcy. It had to be Danganronpa. But why did this isekai creature have traces of Danganronpa DNA in its system? That organism was too old to beget the bastard offspring otherwise known as knockoffs. And yet, there it lay in the deceased’s body. Due to lack of substantial information, there was no more I could do that night. I walked across my room until the lights of the candle melted into shadows, asking myself “Why? Why was this simple beast born to begin with?” Surely, the presence of elf women and dog people were indications this animal wouldn’t survive the autumn, but it was allowed to live among its damned herd. The legs began to tire and sleep took my senses, yet the dull eyes on the isekai’s corpse stared into my dreams, asking “Please sir. Please buy my blu-rays. I’m a starving boy and blu-rays sales help my adolescent growth.” Perhaps I was the beast making a mockery of this organism, born into a world with no purpose or desire to reach our heavenly father. – BloodyMarquis

No Guns Life

Premature trigger-pulling

I was actually a little excited for this one, only because the main character had a gun for a head. I’m so tired of all the samey seasonal anime, that a guy who could bullets out of his face was an instant plus. But then I actually watched the show, and while it’s tolerable, it’s not as fun as the premise sounds. When you think “hard-boiled action crime drama where the detective has a gun for head”, you expect wacky Inferno Cop shit to happen except with a budget because Madhouse. Something that turns noir on its head and goes so off the wall it makes Space Dandy look like watching paint dry.

But instead, it’s looks and acts like a regular detective show and the gun for a head appears to be little more than a gimmick to hook you in because the show couldn’t think of anything else. If nothing else, that worked for the trailer and the first few minutes of the show. But once I got used to that, there isn’t anything left to catch my interest. You can only shine the spotlight on the dancing bear for so long before the audience gets bored. The worst part is just as the episode got interesting again, the credits rolled. That old republic serial tactic of putting the cool moments in the very beginning and end, while writing the rest of the fifteen minutes of airtime with dull padding. And if you’re only worth watching for the cliffhangers, then what are you good for? – BloodyMarquis

ORESUKI Are You the Only One Who Loves Me?

“I don’t know what this Emergence is you’re talking about.”

Oh, thank God. A show this season that’s not shit. I was fully prepared to throw this show into the trash like the rest. Another wacky high school comedy with a love triangle, oh joy. But then the second half of the show happened, and the main character Joro turned out to be a piece of shit playing mind games on everyone, while becoming target of a game himself. I liked that, even though I know Kaguya-sama did something like that too a couple seasons ago. But unlike Kaguya, I wasn’t pissed off at the lead character. The show knows he’s trash. He’s such an asshole that he almost becomes charming to watch. It’s fun to watch all his romantic endeavors go to shit while the only girl who actually wants to love him is a crazy stalker. It’s great when awful things happen to awful people. And it’s a shame I don’t know what else to say. This show might be junk food, but it’s comfy junk food. – BloodyMarquis

Outburst Dreamer Boys

Maybe this show gets funnier in Spanish?

Remember that show Genshiken? I never finished the whole show, and even though there were other anime like it before like Otaku no Video, I thought it was a little funny that anime became so much its own subculture they made an anime about said subculture. From the episodes I watched, I remember liking how down to earth it was and how much it said was pretty on key with anime fans I knew at the time. Like that quip making fun of incest fans by saying anybody who watches incest hentai’s never had to deal with an actual little sister in their life. But then making anime about anime fans became popular, and we got all that shit like Oreimo. One of the biggest problems when making anime where the main characters are fans of anime is the writer can easily forget the line between the two, leading to the main characters acting like typical anime cliches no different than the show within a show they’re watching. That was what ruined Oreimo and the creator’s next work Eromanga-sensei. They forgot that making the characters no different than the works these characters consume in-universe only leads to a gelatinous mess.

And that problem rose again when watching Outburst Dreamer Boys. Just like Genshiken, it’s about a seemingly normal person getting thrown into a club. But this time, the club members are all insane nerds who act like every stereotype imaginable. One of them’s a tokusatsu nut who keeps calling the girl the Pink Ranger of the club throughout the episode. Even though it’s supposed to be annoying, it crosses that threshold from funny annoying to actually annoying. This show would be much more interesting if it was down to earth instead of a wacky comedy. Because when making an anime about anime, you have to figure out the differences between real world logic and typical dumb anime logic. And if you confuse the two, you only get cardboard cutouts responding to other cardboard cutouts. That’s what you get in this show, and it sucks. – BloodyMarquis

Stand My Heroes: Piece of Truth

It’s so depressingly easy to imagine this line from a Lindsay Lohan character.

Oh look, a show about an investigation unit on the mission to take a bite out of drug crimes. This might sound cool, even if there are two or three other cop shows this season. Wait, why are there so many pretty boys and why do they all look the same except with different hair colors? Why are they introduced like this is a character selection menu? Why are they spending more time eating strawberry shortcake than solving crim—oh. This is a dating sim adaptation, isn’t it? And not even an actual dating sim, but a phone game, right? A Candy Crush-style phone game too according to gameplay videos on YouTube. Okay, I’m out. Not even the fact the main character’s last name is Kujo and she’s working for an organization called STAND is going to reel me in. At least with isekais, they at least come from light novels that have a plot easy to translate into anime. But with phone games, those never work out because you’re stuck trying to adapt a stage of a puzzle game into a narrative. – BloodyMarquis

Stars Align

Every character model in this show is as blobby as pic related.

Golly. Mari Okada doesn’t even have to write an anime this season, and I still feel her presence in this show. I suppose since she’s the second most popular anime screenwriter in the last decade, of course copycats would flourish sooner or later. Success breeds sameness. One hit anime of the year spawns a dozen other bad animes of the season. And of course we were going to get a melodramatic teen drama about * rolls the wheel * tennis. Combine sports anime with a show where teenagers talk about their feelings, and you have a show I was destined to dislike one way or another.

Okay, that’s completely unfair, and this show’s nowhere near as dull as some other shows this season, but there’s a scene near the first episode’s ending that drives home just who this show’s aimed at. When after we’re introduced to the main character and how timid he is, suddenly his deadbeat dad shows up, beats up and kicks him, then steals all his money and leaves. The intended audience is going to think that’s tragic and a horrifying statement on broken families, kind of like the abusive dead mom from Your Life in April. But I thought that was a hilarious bit of unintentional black comedy. The episode up until then was typical mopey teen show, and then it goes up to a hundred with gratuitous child abuse. I feel terrible, but it’s just like that show from last year Magical Girl Site. Even if it was more realistic in this show, that scene just didn’t hit the right emotional beats it should have. – BloodyMarquis

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