My Hero Academia somehow managed to step it up from its consistently excellent execution to a whole new tier this volume. Midoriya and his classmates’ battle against the League of Villains’ new allies is a thrill from start to finish, offering some of the most unique clashes and astonishing visual spectacles yet. This manga cannot be stopped.
You can check out my full review over at ANN.
Hey all, and welcome back to the Week in Review. With the summer halfway over, it’s time once again for one of this blog’s more pointless traditions – ranking my overall feelings on the summer’s offerings at the point where it’s least useful to actually make such a ranking. The meaninglessness of this exercise feels even more pronounced this season, since the number of shows I’m watching can be counted on a single hand. I don’t think that’s actually detrimental here, though – if anything, it actually just plays into the general silliness of the system.
That said, considering how little I actually am watching, I’ll still be supplementing today’s post with thoughts on the latest Game of Thrones and all that. I may be struggling mightily to fill my other columns in a season with nothing to watch, but that doesn’t mean you guys have to suffer. Let’s get to it!
The hits just kept coming this week, a week that answered the desperately unnecessary question “what happens when you’re only watching a couple shows and even those aren’t very good.” This wasn’t exactly a bad week in anime, but when your season is already dangling by a thread, you can’t really afford to have lukewarm performances. The show that overperformed this week was Game of Thrones, so I guess that’ll once again be tying the whole Week in Review room together. We are living through some desperate times here, but I’m gonna fill that goddamn word count somehow.
Well folks, it’s time for the Week in Review. Once again, my lack of weekly anime watches has me fumbling around for other stuff to write about, but the anime I am watching was pretty strong this week, so I can only slightly complain. My Hero Academia friggin’ nailed the end of the Hero Killer arc, and Made in Abyss is already making the most of its great premise and gorgeous art design. This season may be a show or two short of a full package, but hey, that just means I can work on more Current Projects for everybody. We may be in the midst of a drought, but our backlogs are a vast ocean just waiting to be explored. Anyway, I’ll quit with the doomsaying here, and get work running this week down!
Hey all, and welcome back to the Week in Review. As I mentioned in last week’s post, this season’s utter dearth of watchable shows has left me without all that much material to riff on, meaning that for now, I’ll be extending the Week in Review to basically anything I’ve been up to media-wise over the last week. Even if airing shows aren’t giving me my fix, I am still a loyal consumer of all that nerd media we use to paper over the holes in our lives, and am happy to share my thoughts with you! But for now, let’s start off with the week’s actual anime hits, and see where the journey takes off.
Hey all, and welcome to the Week in Review. It’s time to get ruthless this week – with preview week having finished and all of the new shows starting to demonstrate their actual stamina, we now enter the time where we learn what truly survives, and what hits the seasonal chopping block. If abandoning all these new shows wasn’t enough, the density of preview week meant I also had to take some time off from last season’s continuing shows, meaning it’s also time to reassess which of those I really care about. Long story short, Re:Creators is getting the boot, and I’ll have to think about whether I’m catching up on Sakura Quest. This is going to be a lean, lean season, but I’m trying to make the most of it. Let’s run this week’s contenders down!
Things stayed at a pretty even keel for this week in anime, with my precious surviving shows offering neither stunning highlights nor frustrating failures. In The Eccentric Family’s case, the fact that this episode wasn’t a standout was itself kind of a disappointment – this was the final episode, after all, and so if this season had any pretensions of matching the original, now was the time. But overall, this week mostly just demonstrated that shows like Sakura Quest or Re:Creators have become very adept at maintaining their good-but-not-great dramatic ratios. With The Eccentric Family suffering a pretty meaningful decline from the first season, there’s nothing here that seems likely to claim the top spot of the year. Alright Kemono Friends, you’ve still got a chance!
Today I took advantage of Crunchyroll’s Hero Week to rep some of the best goddamn shows of the last few years. Gatchaman Crowds, Samurai Flamenco, and Concrete Revolutio are all near and dear to my heart, so I was happy to get a chance to celebrate them, and hopefully turn a few more people on to some of the most compelling stories in recent memory. Everybody deserves a little Nice Justice in their life.
Why It Works: The Stunning Highlights of Anime’s Hero Renaissance
The anime this week was… confusing. On the negative side, my two favorite shows of the season had pretty mediocre episodes. My Hero Academia was stuck in transition land, while The Eccentric Family decided to lean even more heavily into the same conflicts as the first season. On the positive side, basically everything below those shows had a terrific showing, with all of Sakura Quest, Re:Creators, and Tsuki ga Kirei pulling off some of their best episodes yet. I suppose that’s the advantage of watching this many streaming shows – even if the heavyweights momentarily stumble, there’s always something putting its best foot forward. Anyway, I’ve got a million words on Re:Creators this week, so let’s start at the opposite end and RUN THIS WEEK DOWN!
After a serious dip in general show quality, the anime returned to something of a neutral setting this week, lifted largely on the back of The Eccentric Family’s terrific performance. Sakura Quest, My Hero Academia, and Re:Creators were all just kinda middle-of-the-road, though their particular brands of middle-of-the-road all gave me unique things to talk about. So in terms of this particular article, I guess you guys once again get to reap the benefits of less than stellar cartoons. This season isn’t ending as well as it started, but basically none of them do – it’s a whole lot easier to make a great first episode than it is to make a consistently satisfying full season narrative. Let’s start out in the weeds of Manoyama and run this week down!