The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I summarize my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material.
Hi folks! I’ve been crazy busy this week with impressions articles (a trend that will likely continue at least somewhat into next week and possibly even the week after), so I haven’t had a ton of time to write much else. (Especially considering that for administrative reasons, it’s arriving a day early.) Still, I hope you appreciate the Priconne writeup below.
Before that, though! The Community Choice Poll has concluded, and in hindsight the victor was perhaps a bit obvious. Still, I didn’t expect it to absolutely crush its competition in the way that it did.
So! Our previous community choice winner–My Dress-Up Darling–was a CloverWorks-animated romcom. Congratulations to our new community choice winner. SPY X FAMILY, a CloverWorks-animated romcom.
Jokes aside, I hope you look forward to my covering the series. I’m sure you’re all as excited to see Yor animated on the silver screen as I am. And I’m sure the rest of the show will be pretty good, too. Best of luck next time to the runners-up Nijigasaki High School Idol Club Season 2, The Demon Girl Next Door Season 2, and BIRDIE WING.
Wait, really, BIRDIE WING? Huh.
In any case, you can look forward to seeing those shows covered here on MPA as well to at least some extent.
Not on the Frontline Report though, because this is the last edition of this column.
By which I mean, I am changing the name. The column will be on hiatus next week, since I have more premieres to cover and some real-life stuff to get done. (Taxes, ahoy!) When it returns, it will be under the name Anime Orbit Weekly, a name that better fits my site’s loose “planet” theming and….frankly is just better in every way. I’ve never really liked “Frontline Report” and have largely stuck with it out of inertia. The new name is catchier and also easier to Google.
Anyway, on with the column!
Weekly Anime
Princess Connect! Re:Dive
They really didn’t have to go this hard. That’s what I kept thinking as I finished up the second season of Princess Connect! Re:Dive. This episode is a finale, so it should look good, but the fact that they were able to do this without visibly sapping resources from elsewhere in the production–aside from maybe a single filler episode near the middle?–is astounding. Shows just being produced this cleanly is a rarity in of itself. Add to that the following; Princess Connect‘s season finale is a symphony of magic fireworks; magical-digital floating spell circles, fuckoff-huge sword beams, gloopy swarms of shadowy darkness, CGI metallic projectiles, pick a favorite visual trope that a fantasy-action anime of the past 10 years has come up with, it’s in here somewhere.
But I fear that in my coverage of Priconne I’ve maybe over-emphasized the production merits and made it seem like that’s the show’s only strength. So, all I’ll say further on this front is that I wouldn’t be shocked if this whole damn episode was on Sakugabooru.
Fundamentally, the finale is a huge tug-of-war between the Gourmet Guild and Omniscient Kaiser. It is, in a lot of ways, super basic. The heroes triumph over the big evil villain via (spoiler) the power of friendship. But if, in a meta sense, Princess Connect has any core thesis, it’s that you can build a perfect machine from imperfect parts. There is not a wasted moment in the whole episode; every line sharpens the show’s emotional core just a little bit more. You’d have to be a real stone-face to not grin while watching this, its sheer enthusiasm for its own genre, its strength of belief that this is an impactful story that will light a fire in your heart, is infectious.
Kaiser even gets a somewhat sympathetic backstory squeezed in here, where the sheer ennui of being a tyrant in the name of a failed utopia quite literally consumes her alive; she’s eaten by the mostly-dead shadow clone we thought died last episode, in an honestly pretty damn gruesome bit of body horror for something that’s generally been pretty conservative with even showing blood.
In the last raising-of-stakes available to a VRMMO series, it’s made clear that if Kaiser dies while under the Shadows’ influence that she’ll be gone for good. And that’s just not allowed, of course. So the show’s big final act is our heroes venturing inside this giant End of Eva shadow lady to bust Kaiser’s soul out like this was the world’s most high-stakes heist movie. Karyl does most of the actual convincing Kaiser not totally give in to nihilistic solipsism, but Pecorine performs well throughout the episode, too. Throughout the whole series, Pecorine has felt like the “real” hero, and it’s cool that she mostly gets to ride that status out here as her kingdom is finally restored to her at episode’s end.
Yuuki gets a great showing here as well, and honestly, this is probably the most he’s ever felt like the protagonist he ostensibly is. But even with all he gets done over the course of the finale, he still only gets eight total lines–I counted–and two of them are just “Go!” and “Nice.”
Still, it’s worth noting that the final battle does technically ride on him–he refuses another pass through the time loop from Ameth, choosing to live or die by the bonds he’s formed with his friends. That faith in them pays off, and all present are, in fact, able to defeat Omniscient Kaiser, who is returned to her normal state.
It’s Labyrista who sums up the episode’s–and really, whole show’s–theme best.
It’s simple, but simple works for Princess Connect, a series that–despite its ostensibly complicated “lore”–is very much focused on the fundamentals. The show’s very few problems; Said lore’s complexity, Kokkoro not getting much of a role in the finale, and arguably the oddly showy outfits, do not really ding it at all. At the end of the day, Princess Connect is just a really damn good fantasy anime. When the Gourmet Guild officially reforms and the World is Once Again Saved, it feels like the most logical ending possible for such a pure, warm series. Even here, there’s one last fun little character detail; Karyl is the one who cooks the Gourmet Guild’s first meal back home after their big adventure, and we see the scrapes and burns on her hands from prepping the food.
Everyone settles in for some good, hearty food, and the credits roll. Will we meet the Gourmet Guild again? It’s not impossible, but if this truly is the last episode ever of Princess Connect, it’d be hard to complain. What else could you ask for? Everyone lives happily ever after.
This section is pretty long this week.
Seasonal First Impressions: Get Away from It All with ESTAB-LIFE: GREAT ESCAPE
ESTAB-LIFE isn’t the best thing airing right now, but it might be the weirdest, as the two episodes since that have involved a mob boss who wants to be a magical girl and KGB penguins have proven.
Seasonal First Impressions: Conquering the Pop World with YA BOY KONGMING!
Ya Boy Kongming! is a weird one, a solo-focus idol series with the bizarre high premise of said idol’s manager being Chinese military genius Zhuge Kongming, who was brought to the present….eh, somehow. It doesn’t really matter. The first episode of this was surprisingly affecting, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.
Seasonal First Impressions: THE EXECUTIONER AND HER WAY OF LIFE is a Knife in Isekai’s Heart
The Executioner and Her Way of Life is what we call a “banger,” friends. God knows if it’ll keep up the impressive visual quality and interesting–if a bit edgy!–storytelling throughout this whole season, but I certainly hope it will.
Seasonal First Impressions: AHAREN-SAN WA HAKARENAI is a Sleep Aid in Anime Form
I don’t get it.
The first season of Nijigasaki High School Idol Club was one of my favorites when it aired back in 2020. This first episode of the second season doesn’t quite match up to some of season one’s highs, but I have confidence that it’ll get there. Plus; the new girl introduced in this episode is just a deliciously excellent heel. Girlboss fans everywhere, eat your heart out.
Finally, there’s this. As I’ve now indicated in the article name, this was just an April Fools’ prank. One I inexplicably decided to spend like 2 months working on. It’s a review of the fake magical girl anime from My Dress-Up Darling. Except, given that that show doesn’t exist, most of it is just made up. This was a fun creative writing exercise but also a huge amount of work, surprisingly. So, I doubt I’ll be doing it again. Enjoy this odd-man-out of my website; file it next to the Mao Mao review and the ENA writeup. Huge thank you to commenter momomanamu for playing along in the comments, it made my day.
And that’s about all for this week. There may or may not be articles tomorrow and Monday (my schedule is a little off, right now, as I’m sure you’ve noticed by the fact that I put up three articles today. Something I almost never do.) But articles should resume on Tuesday at the latest, where I plan to cover the BIRDIE WING premiere.
Until then, anime fans!
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