Spring 2016 – First Impressions, Part One

Preview week has begun! The shows are already starting to pile up, and as usual, I’ve got a bunch of picks and unpicks and first impressions for your approval. The season has sadly not measured up to expectations so far, what with one of my top picks (Mayoiga) turning out to be so-bad-it’s-good and one of my speculative picks (Kumamiko) just turning out straight bad. But I’ve still already got several shows I’m planning to follow up on, and the deluge of shows has only just begun. There’s nothing out yet that I have high hopes of truly loving, but if you’re an action fan, both JoJo and My Hero Academia are sure to please!

Kumamiko

You can check out the full list of shows so far over at ANN, and as usual, I’m including individual links and grades for everything I’ve hit so far below the cut. Happy anime hunting!

My Hero Academia – 4.5/5

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable – 4/5

Mayoiga – 3/5

Endride – 3/5

Kumamiko – 2/5

Ace Attorney – 1.5/5

10 thoughts on “Spring 2016 – First Impressions, Part One

  1. Yeeaaa seems like it’s better to stick to Jojo and hero academia for now. Maybe I’ll give a shot to Mayoiga if it gets goodworse in it’s next episodes.

    Hero academia was load of fun and had some pretty unique reaction faces me and my sis were weirded out and confused at some ahah. Love the show use of line weight.

    And has you said seems like Jojo finally come back to a more effective use of colors and art direction in general, season 2 had some weird set ups.

    • Yeah, the line weight in MHA was strong! That’s taking straight off the manga, so I hope they keep it up

      • I haven’t read much of the manga but some scenes looked better in the anime to me line wise. Mostly because they didn’t had the (sometimes) awkward cross-hatching. The hatching was more lively and minimalist. But that’s nitpicking really..

  2. You forgot about Kiznaiver

    Summary: Should we prepare a rerun episode? It will be the first time an anime has started with a rerun episode! . . . Yes please. . .

    And oh why Kumamiko you had such potential, all you had to do was be cute and enjoyable.

    • At least it’s called an “Episode 0”, so we know it’s basically just glorified promotional material. The “Chapter 0” of the manga instead was an actual prologue, but it was pretty short and rushed, and somewhat confusing. I don’t really hold many hopes for this show; even Imaishi apparently would rather direct the short Space Patrol Luluco (which by the way is hilarious IMHO).

  3. My Hero Academia and JoJo’s are keepers for sure. Intentional or not, Mayoiga is entertaining enough for me.
    Ace Attorney is a train wreck and Kuma Miko just isn’t that good.
    Is Endride worth watching? I read your ANN impression, but I’m still on the fence.
    Re:ZERO also aired this week, and I found it to be surprisingly not that bad. It is really good at creating atmosphere, and the humor resembles the ups of Konosuba. It’s one of my top picks.

  4. I feel a little ashamed for actually liking Kumamiko’s first episode. It’s very culturally stilted, but I guess sexualizing a 14-year old can only go so far. The show has moments where it’s adorable, but it also has this underlying sense of “this is wrong” to it. Such a shame.

    I’m still getting up to speed with the remainder of the season, but the current status appears to be that most of the works that didn’t do so well are also those that had promising production notes, RE: Zero being one of those casualties. It almost begs the question whether or not we actually need another “stuck in a fantasy world” story.

    • Think in terms of execution, not in tropes. I mean, I CAN describe Boku no Hero academia as generic shonen MC weak to strong friendship bullshit with not a single unique bone in its body and it’ll be totally true, but it really doesn’t give any validity to how good the show is, right?

      Same goes to RE:Zero. It’s about how well a show is done, not the tropes, settings, or plot used to describe it.

      • But isn’t the choice to use tropes or rehashed settings precisely how they chose to EXECUTE the show?

        To be honest, I kinda liked Re:Zero at first. The art is great and I’m totally sold by it. But I can’t help but feel like it’s being too self-aware about its genre, which makes it lean in too much with its genre tropes and rehashed characters.

        But there’s nothing wrong with doing that. I just feel like I’d like to see something more out of the show before it gets called out as a generic rehash. I called it a casualty because it failed to establish itself as a decidedly different show in this theme of “stuck in a fantasy world” within the double-episode premiere. I could chalk it up to poor pacing and ineffective dialogue, but it only goes to show that I’m partly hoping that the show does better in the succeeding episodes.

        • “But isn’t the choice to use tropes or rehashed settings precisely how they chose to EXECUTE the show?”

          No, it’s not. It’s not at all.

          It’s like calling an ‘action/fantasy’ show ‘how they choose to execute’ the show. The categories and tags do NOT define a show, it’s about how they execute the show: the production values, the animation (budget), whether music fits in or not, is the dialogue hilarious or stunted, does the show speak anything of the human condition, etc. etc.

          Grimgar is another ‘teleported into fantasy world’ trope. So is konosuba. So is Sao, log horizon, and a host of other shows. The TROPE is known and recently popular, but the execution can be as it pleases: Grimgar, konosuba, sao, etc.etc. are vastly different shows.

          There IS trope saturation and way too much of a genre, but that doesn’t mean every new entry in the genre is shit. I could be someone watching any of the shows mentioned above for the first time and it’ll be totally new to me, or a anime watching waifu married veteran who’s seen everything and would decry it as shitty because I’ve seen the trope a hundred times. Not valid criticism without considering how well it was made.

          As for RE:Zero…. well, based on what I’ve read and hearsay, it’s gonna get way more intense. I think manga wise I’m 2-4 episodes ahead, and it actually plays out pretty well SO far, and the LN/WN readers are very eager the deeper in the show it becomes.

          An interesting description is that it’s like someone gave you icecream that has nails in it: the first half of ep 1 was ice cream, the second half nails, and there’s much darker story to come.

          I can’t say how true it is, and only hope it continues to do well and keep my attention.

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