Fall 2014 – Week 2 in Review

The week in review returns! Nice to finally be back covering stuff here again. This post is gonna be all second episodes – I know some first episodes came out in the past week, but I wrote about every goddamn one of them over on the preview guide. Right now, I’m in “what the fuck can I actually drop” mode – after a slow start, this season ended up giving me somewhere around fifteen shows I wanted to continue, and the physics of that kind of schedule just don’t work out. In light of that, I’m gonna try to be pretty ruthless in what I drop throughout the week. Unfortunately, enough shows seem to be holding together that I’m likely going to be in “anime or sleep” mode for a while yet. Let’s run them down!

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Gundam Reconguista in G – Episodes 1/2

Management: Yeah, I’m aware episode 3 is out. This is the writeup I wrote just in case G Reco got picked up for streaming – but the preview guide’s over now, so I figured you guys might appreciate my thoughts anyway. Complete with ANN scoring and everything!

Rating: 3

I have very, very strange feelings about these first two episodes. On paper, they did a bunch of the standard things mecha shows like this tend to. We started off with an upbeat, overachieving protagonist, Bellri, out on a space elevator ride when a space pirate attacks. Bellri uses his training suit to defeat the pirate, his superiors capture her familiar-looking mobile suit, and Bellri is immediately starstruck by the dashing pirate lady. Then in the second episode, the ostensible pirate’s teammates attempt to free her from Bellri’s academy-slash-military-base, and Bellri this time ends up using her mobile suit to fight off the attackers. Throw in a mysterious amnesiac girl, a few school buddies, some scattered adults, and you’ve got all the ingredients for a standard mecha drama. But it’s really the way those pieces came together, or didn’t, that both intrigued and distanced me here.

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Fall 2014 – Virtually Every First Episode Retrospective

I have been very busy these last couple weekends! Working on the ANN preview guide has meant I’ve had to watch and write about virtually every full-length show that premiered this fall – I believe the only ones we missed were G Reco, Amagi Brilliant Park, and Seven Deadly Sins, and I actually wrote about the first one and took notes on the second anyway. Of course, since all that was for ANN, you guys over here haven’t had heard as much from me. So in light of that, I’ve decided to do a hyper-speed mega-Week in Review rundown of my most summarized thoughts on every goddamn show, complete with links to individual ANN pages where you can find the small essays I wrote on every single one of them. If you want to hear me praise stuff, stick to the top, if you want to hear me tear shit apart, check out the bottom. There’s been a wide, wide range of shows this season, and every one of them has earned a whole bunch of words. LET’S DO THIS.

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