Yearly Archives: 2016

The Idolmaster: Cinderella Girls, S2 – Review

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Unsurprisingly, my journey back through Cinderella Girls’ first season was swiftly followed by a run through the second. And as it turns out, Cinderella Girls is actually a pretty great show! The show certainly lacks the easy humor and aesthetic brilliance of its predecessor, but it makes up for that with a set of dramatic conflicts that actually work. The corporate vision stuff that underlies the show’s entire second half is legitimately engaging, and even Uzuki’s final personal conflict feels very earned and dramatically effective. Cinderella Girls starts off very shaky, but it comes together quite nicely in the end. It’s not a personal favorite, but it’s a fine show.

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my episodic notes below!

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A Girl on the Shore – Part One

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“We used to wait / We used waste hours just walkin’ around / We used to wait / All those wasted lives in the wilderness downtown.”

– Arcade Fire

Inio Asano certainly has a way with words. Or it might be better to say he has no way with them. His stories seem translucent, any wisp of authorial voice appearing only in the fringes of unvarnished naturalism. He gives his characters’ interiority the drama they believe it deserves, but any magic in his stories is the magic of the world as it is. Characters interrupt each other and start again, tossing out simple observations and losing their trains of thought. You can feel the wind blowing between the staggered refrains of his mixed-up kids.

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Dagashi Kashi – Episode 10

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Dagashi Kashi pulled off a strong episode this week, sticking largely to its slice of life comfort zone while also peppering its one core concept with lots of nice incidental gags. There were good Hotaru faces and nice interactions between the friends and plenty of dagashi shenanigans to be had. Dagashi Kashi doesn’t have to be flashy to succeed, and when it does work, it’s a very likable show. It’s not going to win any awards or break any hearts, but it’s a fun series that I’ve enjoyed my time with.

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below!

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Puella Magi Madoka Magica – Episode 2

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Madoka Magica slows down in its second episode, as all that exposition stuff the first one avoided gets woven in with our formal introduction to Kyubey and Mami Tomoe. The episode is less overtly thrilling until its (tiro) finale, but that’s partially the point. There are consistent repeated shots and sequences here, from the moment Madoka turns before “waking up” to the various shots and full scenes used to represent her daily life. The show is establishing an initial sense of normalcy, and beyond that, how Madoka feels about her normalcy. This is a safe, pleasant, and relatively empty world – a world that demands little, but doesn’t offer Madoka much of an identity.

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The Idolmaster: Cinderella Girls, S1 – Review

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I apparently just can’t help myself with the dang idols, so I went back and took another look at Cinderella Girls. This show’s early material pretty much confirmed my first impression – the early episodes here are awkward, and the first major conflict kind of undercooked. On top of that, the aesthetic magic that made the original so unimpeachably solid is in large part missing here. Fortunately, the second half of this season pulls together fairly well, and at this point I already know the second season will be even more of an improvement. Cinderella Girls is a scrappy one, but it works out in the end

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my episode notes below!

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Dagashi Kashi – Episode 9

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Editor: Woops! I apparently forgot to post this last week, so here it is.

And making it an even three for three, this week’s third episodic review show also had a pretty lousy episode. This one was lousy in a way I’ve come to expect from Dagashi Kashi, though – it tried to be funny the whole time, and Dagashi Kashi isn’t particularly funny, and so that didn’t turn out well. The show stretched what were essentially four simple jokes out across the four segments that composed the episode, making me feel as exhausted as Kokonotsu by the end. It’s kind of unfortunate when a show is so totally confident in a strength it just doesn’t possess.

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below!

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Active Raid – Episode 11

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Active Raid had a relatively successful but also kinda bland episode this week, moving its pieces towards the end without much flair or energy. But that’s kind of the deal here – Active Raid has very rarely been an actually good show, it’s basically always just been a reasonably competent one. I never mind watching it, but also never feel legitimately invested in it. The giant robot episode was quite good, most of Rin’s material has been excellent, and that episode focused on Miho was also solid – outside of that, it’s just kind of a thing you can watch. Hopefully next season offers enough legitimately strong contenders that something like Active Raid’s bare competence wouldn’t put it near the top of the pack.

You can check out my full review over at ANN. No notes this time, I just watched this episode straight through!

Active Raid

ERASED – Episode 11

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ERASED was definitely much better this week, though a performance like last episode isn’t something a show can really recover from. I get into it in my review, but ultimately, it feels like ERASED would have been better off just not having a serial killer at all. The cat and mouse stuff in both timelines is almost uniformly worse than the rest of the show’s material, and the show doesn’t actually need a killer for this story to work. But either way, this episode was relatively low-key and full of nice character moments, so it falls in the good column even if it also included a speech about murdering hamsters. You take what you can get.

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below!

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Clarity and Humanity in The Beginner’s Guide

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The following post will contain plenty of spoilers for The Beginner’s Guide. I generally don’t include warnings like this, but consider the game is only a couple hours and well worth your time if you haven’t played it, I figured I might as well let you know now!

It feels more than a little awkward to be offering criticism of The Beginner’s Guide. After all, the game’s “villain,” if you can call him that, is a figure so intent on assigning a specific meaning to someone else’s work, and giving it a solvable “answer,” that he drives that friend out of creation altogether. On top of that, the game regularly analyzes itself – even if the narrator is incredibly presumptuous in the ways he defines and redefines the work of his friend, many of the questions the game implies are so directly entertained by that one self-conscious voice that analysis almost seems superfluous. The Beginner’s Guide is a set of concise arguments laid out both in dialogue and in actual, physical game space. It doesn’t have to say “for example” as it talks about some principle of game design or the fan/creator relationship – you play the example as the theory is discussed.

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Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 1 – Review

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This week I got around to the first volume of Legend of the Galactic Heroes! I enjoyed the book overall, though the prose was anything but graceful. The series’ best qualities are likely its scope and its anger – Legend of the Galactic Heroes tackles war and governance on a massive scale, and there is not one hint of glamour in its portrayal of combat. People die senselessly and in large numbers, and that’s just how war is. I appreciate that; plenty of stories in anime and elsewhere tend to make halfhearted gestures towards condemning violence while actually celebrating it, but Legend of the Galactic Heroes doesn’t indulge in any of that. It’s a very angry book.

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below!

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