PREVIEW GUIDE CONTINUES. I’m well and truly in it right now, with four reviews down yesterday and hopefully five total today. So far, the season’s playing out just about how I’d hoped – Oregairu remains excellent, Plastic Memories had a great first episode, Arslan seems perfectly watchable as a fantasy staple, and The Rest have flailed around and then slowly settled to the ground. Fun times with new anime!
Here’s another link to the preview guide, and you can check out immediate rankings and individual links below. FUN TIMES WITH TOO MUCH ANIME.
Plastic Memories – 4.5/5
Show by Rock!! – 4/5
Heroic Legend of Arslan – 3.5/5
Seraph of the End – 3/5
Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works – 2.5/5
Gunslinger Stratos – 1.5/5
If Plastic Memories could even be half as good and emotionally nuanced as Eve no Jikan, I’d be satisfied.
I’m worried about Plastic Memories not being very nuanced and straying too far into “cry porn” territory. I hope I’m wrong since that was a promising first episode.
I don’t get the reaction to Show By Rock!! at all. I thought it was a great premier, tons of fun, there are people online that seem actively offended by it though 😛
I don’t get anime fans sometimes, I guess CGI chibi animals are where we draw the line? Whatever.
Wait, what specifically were people mad about? I’m not really sure what you’d find objectionable within that first episode. The CG itself?
The more I think about the Plastic Memories premiere, the less I like it. The whole thing just reeks of emotional manipulation, and it’s apparently shedding the incredibly complicated ethical issues that its subject would entail for the sake of some good ol’ feels.
For example, mid episode, we see a young man running away with his female Giftia. It’s pretty obvious they form a couple of sorts. So this is a world where people can buy fabricated lovers to have sex and fall in love with, except these die after 9 years and odd. And these incredibly sophisticated AIs are for some reason perfectly fine with being used so, and the great majority of them also seems inexplicably at peace with its apparently arbitrary expiration date (is it an actual thing? Is it just planned obsolescence from the company? Because that would be simply EVIL). So there’s a lot of potential room for drama, but it seems like the only kind we’ll get is the human level one. If the show ever strays into “let’s question the status quo” territory I’ll be pleasantly surprised.