New Game! – Review

Today I dove into the first season of New Game!, which certainly offered plenty to talk about. New Game! succeeds well enough as a standard slice of life, but its choice of setting means it naturally comes off a little differently from its high school-situated compatriots, and often not in flattering ways. The softening of conflict and character that tends to come along with the genre meshed pretty awkwardly with the brutal realities of game design, leading to a unique overall production. Let’s get into it!

You can check out my full review over at ANN.

Summer 2016 – Virtually Every First Episode Retrospective

I think we’re gonna make it through, everybody. I was a little worried for a while there, as the first half of this season’s premieres made it seem like I wouldn’t hit even half a dozen potential shows. But the second half rallied with a few very necessary surprises, and so now I’m at the point where it should take me a good three or four weeks to determine that anime is terrible once again.

The season’s highlights slot into a solid variety of genres, leaving us fans with at least one thing to enjoy regardless of whether we’re fans of drama, slice of life, idols, or Toonami, the four core pillars of anime. Last season’s lack of a strong character-focused show will hopefully be made up for by this season’s Orange and ReLIFE, and it’s great to see that Sunshine actually seems to be improving on the Love Live formula. As usual, I’ll be breaking this season’s premieres down into flawlessly objective tiers for your perusal, and including links to all of my longer reviews over at ANN. We’ve got a whole lot of anime to fight through, so let’s get right to business and RUN THIS SEASON DOWN.

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Summer 2016 – First Impressions, Part Two

Welp, looks like it’s time for the second wave of new summer premieres. This one’s a pretty questionable crop, frankly – sweetness & lightning is fantastic and Cheer Boys!! is perfectly reasonable, but outside of that, we’re looking at a whole bunch of middling-to-poor genre pieces without all that much to distinguish them. There are still a fair number of premieres to come, but things are looking a little dire at the two-thirds point this time. But hey, you get to read my increasingly despairing reviews either way, so, good deal!

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