K-On! – Review

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Stepping back even further than Symphogear and Idolmaster, this week I reviewed the nameless moe beast itself, K-On! I was a firey young jerkoff the first time I watched K-On!, and dropped it a handful of episodes in, but this time I had a pretty good time with it. It wasn’t astonishingly good or anything, but it was a very enjoyable time, full of strong character animation and nice character-based gags. There were even a couple really heartfelt moments – most of these came from simple gestures of friendship between the characters, but the last, when Yui had to run to make it to their last performance, was a genuinely gripping sequence. K-On! probably won’t change your life, but it certainly works as a fuzzy temporary vacation from it.

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

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Owarimonogatari – Episodes 1-3

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We’re in the thick of a new Monogatari season now, and this one’s shaping up to be a fine followup to Second Season. A whole bunch of that comes down to Ougi – Ougi both forces Araragi to consistently confront his own deepest fears and just possesses a great deal of charisma in her own right. This Araragi-Oikura story also has plenty of momentum so far, and seems to be pushing Araragi’s character forward far more consistently than Tsukimonogatari did. What do you know, when you replace Yotsugi lolicon shenanigans with Ougi’s mockery and psychological battles, you can actually make a damn good Araragi arc.

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

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10 Royal Games Update

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Hey guys! 10 Royal Games is still plugging along, though the schedule got wonky there for a couple days. We’ll hopefully be recording a whole new crop of videos this weekend, and might introduce some classic Dark Souls at this point – I’m sure we’ll be digging into the Bloodborne DLC when that arrives, but for now, nothing to do but stick with the classics.

A couple of the MGSV segments got skipped for some reason, but they’ve since been added back into the list, so there should be a smooth run of episodes from beginning to our current point on both games. We’ve also updated the video images to actually include relevant game and video number info, which will hopefully making keeping track a little easier! You can check out all the videos over on youtube, or see the specific missing segments (Dan’s inglorious attempts to rescue good ol’ Kaz) here and here. More coming soon!

10 Royal Games

The Perfect Insider – Episodes 1-2

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And here’s my first writeup on the season’s most interesting new prospect, The Perfect Insider. This show’s definitely keeping its cards pretty close to the vest so far, but there’s a lot to like in its winding conversations and carefully drawn characters. It’s interesting to see a show where one of the central characters is so frankly unlikable, and even framed as such by the narrative. We’re kept pretty close to Moe’s perspective, meaning there’s basically no way the professor could come off as sympathetic. I’ll be very interested in seeing how the doctor and Moe interact once Magata escapes from her cage, and also interested in seeing how the show’s tone changes once it shifts from establishing pieces to actually playing out some kind of central mystery. Either way, the show seems confident as hell so far, so I’m on board.

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

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Beautiful Bones – Episode 1-2

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My first episodic review of the season is up! Don’t get excited though, it’s just Beautiful Bones. I end this review by calling Beautiful Bones “watchable,” and that’s exactly what it is – not good, not egregiously terrible, just twenty minutes of fairly bland mystery shenanigans and occasionally really bad dialogue. So far it’s the anime equivalent of white bread soaked in water – I’d like for it to improve and be something actually worth talking about, but we’ll have to see. Hope springs eternal!

You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes for episode two below.

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Fall 2015 – Week 2 in Review

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Wednesday has come again! And it’s the second week of the season this time, meaning it’s time to a long, hard look at the shows I was iffy on for the first episode and likely drop half of them down the trap door. There were definitely some shows that earned the big red button this week, but also ones that held strong, and I even managed to find a show to pick up since my preview retrospective. I’ll just be covering second episodes here – you can find my impressions on all of the actual premieres back in that retrospective, and it’ll be going forward that all the shows get to share some space again. But it’s looking like they actually will have to share that space, since dear lord, this season might even have four or five solid shows. Let’s start at the top and RUN ‘EM DOWN.

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Symphogear G – Review

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I mean, did you think I wasn’t gonna keep watching Symphogear? Symphogear is goddamn awesome, of course I’m gonna keep watching it. G is actually even more “focused Symphogear” than the first season, which was really fun to talk about in a review context. The show plays in what might traditionally be considered “so bad it’s good” territory, where I find the drama as presented totally ineffective according to traditional storytelling metrics (I don’t actually care about the emotional problems of the characters, for example), but still brilliantly entertaining as narrative absurdity. And so I basically gave the show’s story a very fond C, where its very issues are what make it great. I could easily see the argument that this means the show’s story is successful, but considering either of these responses amount to “I had fun with it” and my review is overwhelmingly positive anyway, I think that’s a kind of hair-splitting distinction. Symphogear’s great, G was a solid sequel, bring on GX!

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

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Fall 2015 – Virtually Every First Episode Retrospective

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The preview guide is once again nearing its end, meaning it’s time to run down every single one of these goddamn cartoons that never stop coming out for one second ever. The actual hits this season were pretty limited, but that’s pretty much what I expected going in – even in my preview post, I was only actually looking forward to a bare handful of shows. Most of those shows turned out to be either solid or display some potential, though there weren’t any real positive surprises outside of just how nicely composed One Punch Man turned out to be. But what the hell are we even doing here if we’re not watching cartoons, and I gotta earn my too-many-words keep, so let’s run ’em all down anyway. TAKING IT FROM THE TOP!

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Giant Robo and the Beautiful Night

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A new essay has arrived! I finished Giant Robo a little while back, but it took me some time to really hammer down a piece on it. I’m happy with the result, though, and certainly happy with the show. Giant Robo is a titanic, triumphant series, a glorious melodrama that revels in old-fashioned adventure and giant robot storytelling while crafting a narrative pretty much anyone could appreciate. It’s both soulful and beautiful, full of riveting characters and gorgeous visual compositions. It’s a masterpiece, basically – you may not be the biggest fan of its style of storytelling, but it is essentially a perfect version of what it is trying to be.

My piece is up now over at ANN, so please check it out, and I hope you enjoy it!

Giant Robo and the Beautiful Night

I also wrote notes that got more and more thorough as I made my way through the series. You can check those out below!

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Owarimonogatari – Episode 1

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Monogatari is back, again (again). This new arc already seems far more compelling than Tsukimonogatari though, so I’m very ready to see where it leads. I already wrote a full piece on this episode over at ANN, but I also took a pile of episodic notes, and figured someone might get some use out of those. So here we go!

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