Month: January 2024

Posted on in anime

Seasonal First Impressions: Breaking Down the Madness of BRAVE BANG BRAVERN!

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Anime with protagonists in the military are a bit of a tough sell for me, for a variety of reasons, with only a couple of exceptions. Thus, when I went into Brave Bang Bravern!, the latest from CygamesPictures (and a rare original from them), it was mostly off the strength of its staff. That studio, Masami Ōbari involved as the director, etc. I had no idea what to expect, since all promotional materials suggested that this was going to be on the “fairly realistic war drama” end of the spectrum, as far as mecha anime go. You know, your Gundams and such.

In hindsight, there were several tells that this wasn’t exactly the case. For one thing, there’s that title; “Bravern” does not sound really sound like the name of a robot in that sort of thing. But I admit that’s a dubious imperfect metric (“Gundam” doesn’t necessarily sound like that either). And secondly, Obari is not really known for being involved in anime that are, in basically any way, down to Earth. So this show, with its JSDF mecha brigade protagonist Isami [Ryouta Suzuki], seemed like an outlier.

All this in my head, I went into Bravern a bit skeptical and very unsure of what to actually expect. To the show’s credit, that uncertainty turned out to be intentional. On the other hand, I’m still not entirely sure to what end precisely it’s doing all this, but there’s something to be said for going for broke, and I think there’s some good evidence that Bravern‘s heart is in the right place, as we’ll get to.

As for what it’s actually about, well, we open in the middle of a joint US / Japan / a couple other countries it’s not totally clear mecha training exercise, as one does, where Isami wins the day in-simulation by storming an enemy position by himself, backed up only by US Titanostrider pilot Lewis Smith [Youhei Azakami]. This opening scene portrays Isami as a classic wild gun, loose cannon sort. He goes against orders to do this, and is duly reprimanded, but the narrative seems to paint him in the opening half of the first episode here as a guy Willing To Do What Must Be Done. You know the sort if you’re familiar with any even vaguely macho military fiction.

As it turns out, this is the first of several fakeouts. The characterization of Lewis as a stock cool guy, on the other hand, seems pretty accurate. The show’s opening minutes do a lot to build up a tense but ultimately still friendly rivalry between the two. At one point, Lewis challenges Isami to a mecha showdown, asking if he’s not “brave enough” to accept, in a bit of fun foreshadowing.

The second fakeout dispels any idea that this is going to be a grounded, politically-driven mecha series. Somewhere in a control room, an alarm suddenly blares and a mysterious object appears on-screen. You know the deal here, too, most likely; an invasion from space, they show no mercy. The same bullet points that indie game ZeroRanger memorably pared down to their barest, most elemental form in its opening cutscene. They’re treated with a similar, perfunctory but punchy approach here. The invasion is swift and brutal, some real War of the Worlds shit as the aliens stride in, coldly levelling anything and anyone in sight with their pinkish UFO-mecha. This is about where most people might assume they’ve got Bravern figured out, if they’re entering sight-unseen. Those people would be wrong.

The situation falls to pieces quickly enough that the group who engaged in training exercises early on are left to fend for themselves. Isami tries and fails to save some of his comrades, including his blue-haired girl buddy Hibiki [Yume Miyamoto]. He does not do well, and it really seems like this is the end for Isami right up until the exact moment that one of the enemy’s blazing lasers is intercepted by an equally-bright green flash from the heavens above. Enter the show’s title character, Bravern [Kenichi Suzumura], a giant robot of a very different sort than we’ve seen up to this point.

Regardless of anything else I have or will ever say about this show, the turn-on-a-dime “what the actual fuck” spectacle of what happens here is absolutely immaculate. It’s the best capital A-M Anime Moment of the year so far. It is some absolutely cool as fuck nonsense. Isami goes from a foot soldier to plunged into the cockpit of Bravern, a dyed-in-the-wool super robot in the classic mold and a character in his own right. He has a flaming sword, he fires blasts of green energy, he arrived on a beam of green energy. He has diegetic in-cockpit theme music. It is a few absolutely wonderful, absurd, totally ridiculous minutes, and even if everything else this show does ends up absolutely paling in comparison, it will always have this.

It’ll also always have its actual, real opening credits, which seem designed with that same classic, old-school mentality in mind; a steel aircraft carrier beneath an azure sky, glowing, neon outlines around a cast of menacing, gargantuan robot silhouettes aglow with neon lines that we have yet to meet. It’s awesome. It promises a lot. Delivering on that is going to be the hard part, but it’s a promising sign that, as he sits in Bravern, Isami realizes that when he was a kid with dreams of justice, he didn’t really want to be a spec. ops. guy, a fighter pilot, a tank driver, or even a Titanostrider operator. He wanted to be a hero.

All of that is to the show’s benefit, because from here on out, starting in episode two which I’m also covering here, figuring out what this series even is becomes a lot more complicated. Because, you see, in addition to being a willful juxtaposition of super robot science-fantasy against a fairly gritty invasion story sort of thing, Bravern is also….a BL-inflected comedy.

No, really. Buckle in, because this is where things get weird weird.

When we see Isami at the start of the second episode, he’s being detained by some shadowy group or another and very literally tortured. This is a pretty sharp tonal departure from the end of the last episode, but what’s intercut with it is even stranger; Bravern, attempting to explain the situation to the group of military officials still gathered on the aircraft carrier and them largely not understanding. To be fair to them, his explanations include a lot of shouting his own name, Isami’s name, and doing things like relating his life story like a literal book complete with chapter titles. Also, his fixation on Isami is very clearly meant to resemble a gay crush, and his description of their first time “piloting” together very quickly becomes laden with so much innuendo that the term ‘subtext’ no longer feels sufficient. The show playing this for comedy is….a little blue, to say the least. (As is the show’s apparent intentional juxtaposition here. Isami is literally being tortured, the military officials are being ‘tortured’ by Bravern’s mannerisms. Eh.) Much of this seems designed to raise the question “what if the super robot you were piloting had a thing for you, and he was kind of annoying about it?”

By contrast, the actual situation Bravern’s explaining is pretty dire. The peril invading their world is an alien invasion of bio-machines, spearheaded by eight ships called Deathdrives, each containing a swarm of mecha and a single more powerful unit. One of which, the blue anti-Bravern called Superbia, we meet here. Superbia and Bravern fight, of course. Since Isami is still being detained by some aloha-shirted torturer guy, Bravern comes very close to losing that fight, as he’s noticeably weaker without someone in the driver’s seat.

Isami has to be convinced to get back in Bravern, in true mecha anime fashion, as his, ahem, “first time,” was not had under the best circumstances and he’s still processing all this stuff. (That’s all text, by the way, I am doing very little interpreting here.) At one point, Lewis tries to pilot Bravern instead, sweet-talking to the big red boyscout with talk of how he, too, wants to save the world and everyone on it. This almost works, and we are treated to a delightfully goofy scene where the whole conversation is rendered like something out of an old shoujo series, but Bravern seems to be monogamous. No one gets in him but Isami, and that’s final.

When he finally does get in Bravern, the dynamic duo kick Superbia’s tailpipe, of course. Including a charming, doofy scene where Bravern goes in for the super move kill and then stops himself because he insists that he do a different one this time. It’s charming, it’s very silly, and I think all this taken together maps out Bravern as being focused on, in roughly this order; being awesome, being gay, and being funny. That’s not a bad thing to be, even if the finer details of its themes remain ambiguous. Isami still has military command to deal with, after all.

My bet, if I can try to manifest something into existence here, is that Isami’s emotional journey will be attached to his learning to grow out of this role he’s built for himself as a soldier—one he’s already very much leaving behind as of episode 2—and into the role of a real hero, and there’s one final piece of evidence that might support that reading.

Just when it seems like the second episode could not possibly get sillier, Isami’s clothes explode in the final minutes of its main closing scene, and he is stuck inside Bravern as the episode ends, in an apparent parody of that one Evangelion episode. A ridiculous gag with no further meaning? A symbol of him being forced to shed his “soldier’s uniform” and confront reality as it truly is? Both of these things, somehow? Bravern’s sheer absurdity practically demands this kind of overanalysis, even as it can absolutely just be enjoyed as pure entertainment.

All told, the operative adjective here is definitely “campy.” And there’s a lot that I haven’t mentioned, including our main mechanic character, Miyu [Ai Kakuma], whose interest in Bravern quickly gets into robotfucker territory. (She thinks he’s handsome. Can you blame her?) There’s a pretty great scene where a German official speculates in her native language with one of her cohorts that this whole thing might be some kind of ploy by the Americans, only for her to be loudly reprimanded with Bravern’s absolutely awful German. There’s the show’s bizarre, maybe intentionally funny? art style dimorphism between the men and the women, where the former look like they’re from a relatively grounded military series and the latter look like they’re from a KyoAni production. (Quite possibly also just reflective of the interests of main character designer Jae-Uk No.) There’s a gag where Bravern cuts off a government official by loudly yelling his transformation phrase (obviously, he can turn into a futuristic jet fighter) and flying away. The fact that this thing is clearly heavily inspired by—and might be part of? I’m not clear on this—the Brave series. The fact that Isami and Bravern’s shouts are out of sync the first time they do their finishing attacks. And on, and on, and on. There’s a lot to like here, a lot to be puzzled over, and a few things to take issue with. It adds up to one of the season’s best premieres, and certainly one of its most ambitious.

It’s totally possible that all of this completely flames out, of course. This has happened before. Giving a story tons of slack because it’s weird or absurd can lead to Magical Destroyers situations, or even, in a worst-case-scenario, a Darling in the FranXX. Still, what’s the point of flying close to the Sun if there’s no risk you’ll be burned? Icarus was a chump.

After a supremely homoerotic ED sequence, Bravern‘s second episode features a brief post-credits scene, where Lewis quite literally stumbles over a girl in a crashed UFO-like ship, by implication, this was the pilot of Superbia, and is our local Rei Ayanami. This fairly standard sci-fi twist after such a weird premiere made me absolutely redouble my commitment. More than anything else that’s premiered this season, for Bravern, I will be there no matter what. I have got to see where this goes. Join me if you’re brave enough.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch DELICIOUS IN DUNGEON Episode 3 – “Living Armor”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime over the course of its runtime. Expect spoilers!

Ah, damn it. I didn’t want to do these anymore.

Let’s Watch used to be my most consistent regular column; but it’s been nearly a year since I last wrote one, and the facts of the anime industry, and my own tendency to randomly burn out toward the end of an anime season, make doing them consistently a fraught prospect. But I couldn’t help myself today, this week’s Dungeon Meshi episode was just too freakin’ pretty. So even if this doesn’t mark the return of the column in general, I hope you’ll enjoy me puffing the series up a bit, here.

This week’s episode, its third, was just an absolute visual treat. It’s one of the best-looking episodes of the year so far in general, actually. TRIGGER continue to deliver absolutely great-looking stuff a decade into their existence as a contemporary studio of note. I suspect it has a different episode director than the prior two; the character animation is noticeably looser and the storyboards seem more willing to deviate from the manga. This was one of my few complaints about the anime so far, that it was sticking maybe a little too close to the source material, so I’m happy to see some extra expression this time around.

The obstacles / menu items for our heroes this time around are suits of living armor. As Senshi so wisely points out in the episode’s opening minutes—and to Laios’ immense disappointment—armor itself is, you know, metal. It’s not food. You literally cannot eat it.

Look at him, he’s so sad about this.

This does little to keep Laios from wondering, though, and since the party inevitably crosses paths with a swarm of suits of living armor guarding the path they’re trying to take further into the dungeon, it’s a somewhat relevant concern. (Actually, what is the term for a group of these things? An armory? A war chest? Who knows.) It’s especially so since they’re acting different from usual; rather than just springing to life when passed by, and returning to wherever they previously stood when the threat passes, these suits of armor seem to be deliberately trying to prevent our heroes from getting through the area. This is especially weird since, as Marcille points out, living armor aren’t alive, they’re magical constructs.

As our party struggles to deal with all this, we get some really nice fight scenes here. Action is not a main focus of Dungeon Meshi, but it is definitely a feature of the series, and it’s nice to see it fleshed out here with some of TRIGGER’s usual flash. There’s a lot of fluidity and style to the main fight scene here, with Marcille specifically often getting in a lot of goofy expressions (even moreso than the norm for this series) contrasted by some genuinely cool moments as she’s fighting the armors. The armors themselves are actually animated in a way that subtly hints as to what’s really going on here by having them move in a jerky, imperfect fashion. Needless to say, this is an absolutely lovely touch.

Particular attention is also paid to Laios’ imagination, which we get to see a little more of than usual here, and is expanded upon slightly from this part of the manga. Laios eventually finds and confronts the apparent ‘queen of the hive’ here, so to speak, which is wearing an ornate, rather Ornstein-ian design as opposed to the regular knights seen up to this point.

Laios happens to spot something on the inside of its tower shield, and we’re treated to a delightfully weird and loopy-looking segment where he flashes back to his childhood.

Doing so helps him put 2 and 2 together; the thing on its shield is an egg sac. A little more work, and he discerns the true identity of these creatures; they’re not the suits of armor themselves, they’re mollusks—things that look a bit like a cross between a sea slug and a scallop, specifically—hiding inside of them and mimicking muscle movements.

This, of course, leads Laios to an important revelation; he totally can eat them.

And so, the episode ends with the usual cooking portion. These creatures are new to Senshi, so only some of their dishes turn out well (an attempt to steam the creatures in the armor’s helmet ends poorly). This also makes Marcille’s usual food skepticism a little more understandable—honestly, as someone with an eating disorder who cannot eat a lot of foods, I always have wished the series was a little nicer to her about this. Maybe it is later on? I am still in the process of reading the manga—and even Chilchuck and Senshi make Laios eat the food first. But everything basically turns out alright, and Laios even picks up a passenger, which he keeps secret from the rest of his party, when he salvages a new sword from the defeated armor mollusks.

Surely, this is not a decision that will have no consequences whatsoever, right?

In any case, anime fans. I don’t necessarily want to sign off with ‘see you next week.’ My schedule remains very much in flux and 2024 promises to be a very busy year for me, but I do have some more articles in the pipeline (including one that should be out tomorrow or so), so I will definitely be seeing you in some capacity, somewhere soon. Ciao!

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Feminism, Football, and FAREWELL, MY DEAR CRAMER: FIRST TOUCH

This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question and give my honest thoughts on it. Thank you for your support.

There’s a long, and pretty embarrassing, story behind this particular column.

A solid sixteen months ago, I was commissioned to watch this film by a Twitter follower. I added it to my queue and intended to get to it pretty promptly. After all, movies are pretty short time commitments compared to, say, a whole cour or two of TV anime. Somehow, over the next several months, I’d managed to incorrectly get it in my head that I’d gotten through the entire batch of commissions that I took around that time, instead of just most of them. A fair bit later into 2023, shortly before I had my massive burnout episode in August, I realized I’d never actually finished this, and another commission. (Which will hopefully be up on this site, soon, but is a bit more of a time commitment, being for a whole series instead of just a movie.) Yesterday, in the middle of January, a year and half later, I finally had both the time and motivation to watch and do a writeup on the film.

So that’s why this column exists. At this point, I have no method of contacting the original commissioner (I, a brilliant mind as always, forgot to write their name down, and I don’t have that Twitter account anymore), and thus have no way of letting them know the work has finally been completed. Hopefully, they somehow see this. If not, this is an endeavor I embarked on purely to make myself feel less bad about essentially scamming someone by accident. Genuinely, I feel pretty terrible about this whole thing, and this entire explanation is only that and not an excuse, of which I have none. But I figure the least I can do is give the film an honest go.

And if there’s a silver lining to this entire rigamarole, at least on my end, it’s that I got to watch a pretty decent sports movie. I’ll go farther actually; Farewell, My Dear Cramer: First Touch, is a good sports movie. It’s a fairly typical underdog’s journey kind of thing, with the additional slant that there’s a bit of tackling of sexism in sports here as well.

Our main character, Nozomi [Miyuri Shimabukuro], is forever frustrated that, following an injury in her first year of middle school, she’s not usually allowed to play in official matches with her school’s soccer team with all the boys, despite the fact that she really wants to.

Nozomi’s the one with her arm in a cast.

People tell her, explicitly, many times throughout the movie, that girls are just weaker than boys and that she will never be able to compete on even terms. This is a bit silly, even in-universe, because generally speaking, throughout the film, Nozomi is shown to be very good at soccer. The source of much of the film’s conflict is actually just that her soccer team’s coach [Kouji Yusa] won’t let her play in any serious context. He’s too worried that she’ll get seriously injured and ruin any chances of a future career, apparently ignorant of the psychological damage he’s doing in the present in the process. In his limited defense; Nozomi does get hurt during a game near the start of the film, but it’s hard to read his attitude as anything but condescending when this same incident is still being cited as a reason not to field her months later. It’s only toward the end of the movie that he changes his tune, and how that happens dovetails nicely with First Touch‘s other big thematic point; soccer as an expressive medium.

There’s an old cliché you’re probably familiar with: “it’s not about winning or losing, it’s how you play the game.” In First Touch‘s world, they’re instead about equally important, which is still more consideration of that old chestnut than a lot of sports anime give. Much of this, in the context of the film, is devoted to showing how truly dedicated Nozomi is to playing the game. It’s not just that she’s good at soccer, it’s that she’s passionate about it, and her friend Sawa [Shion Wakayama] describes her play as “inspiring.” A decent stretch of the film is devoted to showcasing her determination; she’ll practice ’til she drops, and if more formal equipment isn’t available she’ll practice kicking against concrete struts beneath a highway bridge under a grey, drizzly sky. It’s a common sort of visual language for this kind of movie, but it’s effective, and it does a lot to drive home that Nozomi cares a lot about soccer. It makes you care, too, even if you’ve never played the game in your entire life.

This isn’t necessarily as effective with some of the film’s other main characters. Take Yasuaki “Namek” Tani [Shinba Tsuchiya] for example, who we could probably call the film’s antagonist of sorts. Namek starts the film, in a before-the-main-story scene that takes place several years prior, as the curly-haired baby of a young Nozomi’s soccer-playing friend group, who nicknames her “Boss.”

When they meet again in the film’s present, he at first tries to be friendly, but when Nozomi, frustrated by the goings-on in her life, is hostile, he very quickly turns nasty and sexist, and some of what he says is downright gross.

Now, let’s be fair here; these characters are middle schoolers, and middle schoolers will absolutely just Say Some Shit to get under each others’ skin. But this whole exchange is definitely deliberately uncomfortable, and sets Namek up as the closest thing we have to an outright bad guy here. The thing is, Namek is also the other main character of this story, and he and Nozomi get about equal screentime. There’s something to be said here about how Namek doesn’t really seem happy with his own attitude, and tellingly, he abandons it at the end of the film. Misogyny does have an emotional impact on the men who propagate it, too, especially when they’re this young. The film’s attempt to address that is blunt, and doesn’t entirely connect, but trying at all is worth something, and it’s usually a decent sign when the worst thing you can say about a film’s thematics is that it’s probably trying a little too hard. This is all perhaps best encapsulated by a flashback to Nozomi rescuing a young Namek from a bunch of bullies by soccerballing them in the face, which is hilarious. Taking all of these things together, it’s clear that he actually idolizes her, which makes his macho disrespect of her just a few years later in life, evidently a cover for his own insecurity, kind of sad.

All of this is fine, on its own. However, as Nozomi and Namek’s rivalry escalates, it quickly gains a romantic overtone that it really probably didn’t really need. I can’t help but wonder if the movie wouldn’t feel more coherent if Nozomi’s rivalry with him lacked this inflection, since it can make the film’s portrayal of Namek a bit muddled and notably less sympathetic, since it feels like it’s trying to build an excuse for him. (The whole “boys pick on girls that they like” trope.) Middle school kids hate each others’ guts for much less good reason than Nozomi has here, there’s no reason to turn it into a romantic thing beyond lacking the imagination to do something else with the plot here, and it’s just a little disappointing to see the movie fall back on cliché in that way. That said, in the final stretch of the film, we do get a very nice scene of Nozomi reminiscing about how far he’s come as a player, actively cut in with the ongoing final game, and it’s very visually striking, so that’s something.

Let’s talk visuals in general, in fact. There’s something notable in how First Touch feels like the starting point for LIDENFILMS’ ongoing flirtation with nighttime settings; enough of the movie takes place at night, including a couple pivotal scenes, that it’s noteworthy, and this seems like foreshadowing of the powers they’d later put to fuller practice with Call of The Night and Afterschool Insomniacs. I know the Farewell, Cramer TV series is not liked specifically because of its production woes, but the movie doesn’t really struggle with that at all, perhaps indicative of shakeups of some sort at LIDEN around that time, although without having any primary sources on hand it’s hard to say for sure.

Sonically, there’s not much to say, other than that First Touch has a heavy reliance on insert music that veers between endearing and cloying. Not exactly a rare phenomenon in this genre, but at its best it does make the soccer feel more impactful.

All told, First Touch is very much at its best when reinforcing the point that competition isn’t all there is to these things. Its highest points highlight soccer’s ability to serve an expressive medium, and its value as, purely, a fun activity. (Again, remember that all of these characters are middle schoolers, we’re talking 14 year olds or so at oldest here. Nobody in these games is actually playing for world championships or anything, despite Nozomi’s Coach’s high hopes for her as the film comes to a close.)

The final game, where Nozomi is able to play in an official school-to-school match by pulling off the brilliantly silly maneuver of stealing her brother’s jersey and sneakily substituting herself in in the second half of the game. Films like this need to have A Sports Moment of this type, where the actual rules of the game are, if not flouted, definitely at least stretched to their limit, in the service of an elevated hyperreality. This moment is basically the only thing First Touch does that’s like this, but it makes it count. In the end, Nozomi’s team loses the game but she wins a far more important emotional victory over Namek. (Honestly I might’ve preferred a clean victory, but whatever.) In First Touch‘s closing minutes, the two reconcile, and Namek sobbingly confesses his love to her in a pretty hysterical cry of “SUKI DA, BOSSU.” This doesn’t change the fact that Nozomi honestly has more chemistry with her gal pal Sawa than she does with Namek—it is after all, Sawa’s cheering that encourages Nozomi to make the inspiring, climactic play that eventually earns her the respect of the rest of her team—but it’s a cute and funny note to end on, enough that it can make some of the film’s writing flaws easy to forgive.

If there’s a downside to this whole ending bit, it’s that the movie is probably a little longer than it needs to be. (Remember what Pompo said about the 90-minute rule.) Personally, I count no less than three points where the movie could’ve ended but felt the need to try stretching its last emotional beats one more time. That’s a reductive and overly mathematical way to qualify these things, of course. The film drags, but it doesn’t overstay its welcome badly enough to undo its stronger points. The film understands the expressive power of sport, and that pulls it through any issues it might have. If not necessarily a great film, it’s firmly a pretty good one.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime

Seasonal First Impressions: Mysteries on Mars in METALLIC ROUGE

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Somewhere on Mars, in a sci-fi future, the android Rouge Redstar [Yume Miyamoto] and her human partner Naomi Ortmann [Tomoyo Kurosawa] hunt down nine of Rouge’s own kind, a band of superpowered “immortals” that present a threat too great to let lie.

So says Metallic Rouge‘s summary, at any rate. I’m not sure you’d get much of that at all from the show’s first episode. Rouge is the latest in a long, proud lineage of sci-fi anime that just drop you head-first into things from the start of their first episode and leave filling in the gaps of just what is actually going on to you, the viewer. This can make them a bit disorienting to watch, especially to anyone not used to this storytelling style, but they’ve remained a present force in anime for decades. Even now, we tend to get one or two per year. (Last year, continuing into this very season, it was SynDuality: Noir. The most recent I covered in any detail was Vivy: Flourite Eye’s Song, not exactly a shining example of the form.) That kind of staying power comes from somewhere, and in the case of this particular sort of sci-fi, it’s from the genre’s ability to filter contemporary social problems through the lens of speculative fiction—itself a foundational purpose of sci-fi in general—and combine it with a sense of intrigue descended from film noir. Not for nothing, Naomi appears to be some kind of detective, with Rouge as her naïve but well-meaning assistant.

The setting has a fair bit of noir-y ambiance as well, with the rain-soaked Martian city that our story takes place in recalling the settings of genre classics like Ergo Proxy. The dominant art styles have changed in the past twenty years, so it’s not quite as heavy on the shadow as that show, but it’s at least speaking the same language. If we’re talking aesthetics though, one thing very much sets Metallic Rouge apart. Its very strong, obvious toku influence. I’ll admit I’m out of my wheelhouse here—I’m not a toku watcher, having perhaps not ascended to that level of otaku just yet—but the combat forms that some androids, including Rouge herself, can assume are definitely intentionally reminiscent of your Kamen Riders and such. In the final stretch of the episode, that influence is put to work in a pretty spectacular fight scene, where Rouge takes on the violet, toku armored “Gladiator” form of a singer android named Sarah Fitzgerald [Yuu Shimamura], herself one of the aforementioned immortals.

About Sarah; Metallic Rouge‘s actual plot is, as mentioned, fairly obscure. We’re dropped smack-dab in the middle of things in this first episode, and hit with a barrage of jumbled-up proper nouns and unelaborated-upon plot threads. Rouge seems to be living with Sarah, taken in, apparently-amnesiac, after the two met in a literal alley. Except Rouge’s entire situation here is some sort of deep cover thing; she’s taking orders from Naomi, controlling a talking bird-drone, and keeps tabs on Sarah.

The substance that keeps androids alive—Nectar, also usable by humans as a powerful drug—is involved, too. You have to straighten all of this out yourself, the storytelling is fragmented and seems deliberately obfuscated. Why that’s so is as yet unclear, but it’s not rare for this genre. The only thing we know is that all of this comes to a head in the episode’s last few minutes, where Rouge and Sarah fight. Not without the egging-on of a mysterious Joker-like figure who, one imagines, will be another major force going forward.

It’s too early to draw many conclusions about the show’s narrative or world, but it does seem to be actively attempting to set up dominos that will only really start falling much later on. That’s a nice feeling to open a series on, even if I’m sure it will unfortunately lose some people in the process, and if Rouge is great anything, it’s making you wonder where all this could be going. All told, this is a solid premiere, and it’s very distinct against the backdrop of the rest of the season. I don’t like to just drop my premiere impressions writeups into a solid “watch this” or “don’t watch this” box, but I do think this one is worth checking out.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: SENGOKU YOUKO is Good, Thank God

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

You who lament this barbarous age; rejoice! Sengoku Youko is pretty good, the work of cult mangaka Satoshi Mizukami will not all be turned into anime sludge in the vein of the previous project to bear his name, the absolutely tragic anime adaptation of The Lucifer & Biscuit Hammer.

To be realistic for a moment, after that debacle, the bar is basically on the floor. Sengoku Youko is playing with a stacked deck, with both the greatly hedged expectations coming off of the last Mizukami adaptation and the fact that Sengoku Youko the manga is probably the least-read of Mizukami’s major works. (It’s the only one that I haven’t read, in fact.) As with Biscuit Hammer, it’s also on the old side to be getting an anime adaptation now, having started back in 2007 and wrapped up almost a decade later, but historical fantasy is a timeless genre on this medium, so this is not really any kind of issue. Given all this, it has a much better chance at making a favorable first impression than its ill-fated sibling. Still, even that in mind, Sengoku Youko’s premiere is just a solid slice of historical fantasy, featuring a great dynamic between its three leads, a couple funky monster designs, and some really nice action animation.

As for what it’s actually about, our setup here is pretty simple. Set in the mid-1500s, during the massively unstable sengoku period (hence the name), Sengoku Youko follows a pair of spirits, the short fox girl Tama Youko [Yuuki Takada] and her ‘little brother’ Jinka Yamato [Souma Saitou], as they fight evil.

Tama is the one with the adorable fox ears.

No, literally, that’s their whole thing, per Tama’s instruction. (Jinka, who is bigoted against the humans they often end up saving, only seems to go along with it with great reluctance.) They’re also joined by a cowardly ronin, Shinsuke Hyoudou [Ryouhei Kimura], who is transfixed by the vast strength that Tama and Jinka display, and hopes to somehow get stronger by going along with them.

The first episode sees Tama break up a bandit ring that turns out to be led by….ah, this.

This leads to some of the episode’s best visuals, in particular a very striking sequence where Tama and Jinka combine their powers, turning Jinka into a white-haired fox warrior that trounces his opposition fairly easily.

A later confrontation with a strange monster menacing some Buddhist monks ends on a cliffhanger, providing a nice hook to get folks coming back next week. That said, I have a suspicion that all is not as it appears in Sengoku Youko. Even if it stays episodic like this, it will probably be a fun time. However, given Mizukami’s usual M.O.—a desire to take genres apart and then stitch them back together in a different shape, exhibited with battle shonen in the Biscuit Hammer manga, reincarnation fantasy in Spirit Circle, and mecha anime in Planet With—I really doubt that it’ll be content to stick to any kind of formula. Time will tell, but I’m interested in finding out, and I can give this first episode no better endorsement than that.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Puzzle of PON NO MICHI

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

The seasonal anime churn is pretty accessible nowadays compared to where it was even 15 years ago. Most shows get officially brought over in some capacity and are available on some streaming site. Because of that, in the rare case where that’s not true, it’s worth seeking out the odd show with no official North American release just to see what it is that could be holding it back from an official pickup.

With Pon no Michi, there’s an obvious answer; the subject matter, a parody-heavy slice of life comedy about riichi mahjong, is very Japanese. But that said, this has never really stopped the importation of mahjong-themed anime and manga before, so it’s a bit of a mystery as to why this one specifically didn’t get picked up for the ol’ US of A, especially given that mahjong is probably having the closest thing to a Moment in recent years over here as it’ll ever have, given the recent popularity of games like Mahjong Soul. (You can try to watch it on BilliBilli’s English site, but doing so, at least in the US, gets you a “video unavailable due to the request of the copyright holder” notice. So who knows what’s going on there.)

It’s also a bit of a shame, because while Pon no Michi is probably not going to be anyone’s anime of the season, its premiere is a delightful and quirky little thing. This is the kind of low-stakes comedic fun that tends to get shows slapped with the “cute girls doing cute things” pseudo-genre label. I’ve never been fond of that term myself, but, if you wanted to apply it to Pon no Michi, it’d be hard to argue against. There are girls. They are cute. They do things (play mahjong poorly and also just generally dick around). The shoe fits. This is all also lightly inflected with Gay, as such anime tend to be. Not enough to earn it a yuri label, but enough that fans of yuri will probably have fun shipping this cast of wonderfully silly idiots. It’s a nice watch.

It’s also surprisingly odd. Elements like a magic, talking bird that claims to be a “mahjong spirit”, frequent style cuts that parody a plethora of other mahjong manga and anime, and a character who appears late in the episode to call our lead “ojou-sama” would seem incongruous in an even slightly more grounded show. But here, where the actual mahjong play is secondary to the gags, they fit just fine.

The actual plot is so barely-there that it only just counts as one. The gist is that Nashiko Jippensha [Kaori Maeda] is being too loud when hanging out at home with her friend, Pai Kawahigashi [Iori Saeki]. Nashiko’s mom kicks them out of the house and they’re forced to go be noisy elsewhere. Nashiko and Pai chill in a park for a while until Nashiko gets a convenient phone call from her conveniently off-screen father. He then tells her that he just so happens to have recently bought an old, unused mahjong parlor nearby. With her dad’s blessing, Nashiko and friends make their way there, call in a third friend—the sprightly redhead Izumi Tokutomi [Shion Wakayama]—and get to work straightening the place up so they can claim it as their own personal hangout spot.

While doing so, they stumble upon its mahjong-enabling accoutrements, including an electric shuffling table. In the process, Nashiko meets the aforementioned magic bird, who the girls name Chonbo [Akio Ootsuka], and the remainder of the episode is spent on silly nonsense.

The girls don’t actually know much about mahjong, is an important point. Nashiko knows by far the least, having apparently never even heard of it. As such, the girls’ first “mahjong game” quickly deteriorates into the lot of them being goofy, such as Nashiko declaring she’s using her “Red Dragon Beam” when slapping down a Red Dragon tile. This is also where most of the aforementioned parodies of other anime come into play (I’ll admit to most of them flying over my head, but even I know about Akagi, since it’s by the Kaiji mangaka.)

Did I mention that the rich-girl character who calls Nashiko “ojou-sama” in the episode’s closing minutes is named Riiche [Yui Kondou], after the mahjong term? Again, the show’s a bit silly.

All told, this seems like a solid pickup that one will unfortunately have to go a bit out of their way to experience. Still, for those among us who appreciate a nice slice of lighthearted comedy with a wildly catchy theme song, it might just be worth doing.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or similar technology is used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Shambolic Anime Podcast

The Shambolic Anime Podcast Presents – The Week in Isekai, Pt. 1 & 2

Today on the rarely-seen, super-casual Shambolic Anime Podcast, Julian M. and I talk about two very different isekai anime that have premiered in the past week; the absolutely maddening My Instant Death Ability is Overpowered and the surprisingly solid The Wrong Way To Use Healing Magic.

If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Munch Squad for Monsters in DELICIOUS IN DUNGEON

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

There are two ways you can look at Delicious in Dungeon.

The first is as an adaptation of a very well-liked manga; a classic fantasy series with a notable twist and some strong worldbuilding that sets it apart from many of its peers, and a strong sense of characterization as well.

The second is as Studio TRIGGER’s first plain ol’ TV anime since SSSS.DYNAZENON three years ago.1 If we discount sequels, it’s their first since Brand New Animal back in 2020. It’s also the first full directorial turn for Yoshihiro Miyajima, who’s been part of the studio for years but has mostly done storyboarding and direction of single episodes.

Combined, these facets put Delicious in Dungeon‘s anime in an interesting (if not necessarily enviable) spot. Fans of the manga are largely going to demand fidelity to the source material. Long-time TRIGGER heads will be disappointed if the series doesn’t go all-out with explosive action animation. (This has never been all that TRIGGER is good at, but it remains the studio’s defining characteristic in the minds of its western fanbase at the very least.) So far, it seems like those who want a fairly straightforward adaptation of the manga are winning out.2 This first episode is, true to the opening chapters of the manga, fairly slow and expository, neatly setting up and then demonstrating our premise.

Speaking of, that premise is thus; some years ago, an ordinary village was disrupted by a fissure from the ground. From the fissure came the undead form of an ancient king, who promised riches to those who would liberate his kingdom from a wicked magician. The only problem? The kingdom, and the magician, are buried beneath what were once crypts and graves, but have through magical influence grown and warped into a massive, labyrinthine dungeon. Delicious thus marks itself out as one of the relatively few pieces of fantasy media that kind of cops Wizardry‘s Whole Thing but actually tries to explain how any of this—including such gamey staples as partying up, an entire ‘dungeon town’ economy, complete with in-universe resurrection in town upon dying, etc.—actually works, and integrate those mechanics into the story. From what I’ve read of the manga, it’s not always successful at this and I’ll admit to being a bit less enamored with Delicious in Dungeon than some, but it’s still a solid idea, and I give the series a fair amount of credit for trying.

As for whose story specifically we’re following, the anime opens as the manga does, with a party deep in the dungeon encountering a mighty red dragon—our second of the anime season, if you’ll remember the last article I wrote—which they cannot defeat. Of these adventurers; two quit, one, Falin [Saori Hayami], is eaten by the dragon, and the other three; Laios [Kentarou Kumagai], Marcille [Sayaka Senbongi], and Chilchuk [Asuna Tomari], are resurrected in town without a penny to their names, stuck in a pretty awful spot in that if they don’t hurry back to the bottom of the dungeon, Falin will be digested, and at that point there’s certainly no hope of resurrecting her at all. (Thankfully, we learn that dragons digest things very slowly. Still, our heroes are definitely on a clock here.)

So, with a little prodding from Laios, who seems awfully eager to try this in the first place, the party adopts an unorthodox approach which forms the crux of the whole series; they’ll live off of whatever they can procure in the dungeon, which means a whole lot of meals prepared from JRPG enemy staples like giant scorpions, slimes, ambulatory mushrooms, and so on.

The final piece of the puzzle here is the dwarf Senshi [Hiroshi Naka], who the party meets while trying (and failing) to prep scorpion meat. Senshi claims to have been researching monsters and the food that can be made from them down in the dungeon for over a decade. A fact Marcille openly questions, but nobody can fault his cooking prowess. Using the aforementioned Floor 1 mobs, Senshi is able to whip up a pretty tasty-looking stew, and goes into a fair amount of detail about how he’s doing so while he does it. This is the show’s essential appeal; the fun thought experiment of using a D&D Monster Manual as a cookbook.

All told, the premiere promises a fun if straightforward adaptation of the source material. What’s carried over particularly well is the character dynamics, which are enhanced by the obvious benefits of an anime adaptation (voice acting, character animation, and so on). Laios and Marcille have the best of it, here. The former is largely a lovable dumbass, whose fixation on eating monsters (considered strange even in-universe) contrasts with how Marcille is only going along with this very begrudgingly. Marcille’s delightfully bitchy, nervy personality in turn pings ineffectually off of Senshi, who is too busy imparting Cooking Wisdom to care. All three are rounded off by Chilchuck, who serves as a snarky sounding board in this early stage of the story.

Some specific scenes are worth highlighting; there’s a particularly great bit of comedic editing where Laios asks Marcille, just freed from the clutches of a predatory plant, how it felt. In his mind, since the plant has to secure prey (mostly animals) without making them uncomfortable enough to struggle, he thinks it probably feels pretty nice. Marcille’s reaction is this;

I didn’t edit that. (Although I will ask you to forgive my subpar screen-recording software.)

Elsewhere, the actual cooking scenes are the star of the show. This only makes sense, given that they’re the main draw of the series, and the pseudo-tart3 that Senshi prepares in the second half of the episode looks good enough that you’ll be a bit annoyed it’s not a real thing.

All told, this looks like a solid adaptation of an all-around good source manga. I fell off of said manga a while back (not for any reason to do with the story, to be clear, sometimes I just lose track of things), so it’s nice to be reminded of why I liked these characters in the first place. I think, despite the differing desires of the two main groups that are going to check this show out, everyone will walk away satisfied. There’s nothing to complain about here, and with a slated 24 episodes, the series looks to be a delicious two-cour-se meal of fun fantasy anime.

1: Cyberpunk: Edgerunners was a weird net animation thing. This series is being released by Netflix in the west as well, but as a simulcast rather than as something they directly funded, at least going by who’s listed as being on the production committee.

2: I know some folks were worried that TRIGGER might insert a bunch of extra fanservice that wasn’t in the original manga a la the Mieruko-chan anime or something. I’m not sure why people were worried about that, given that TRIGGER’s few other adaptations have been very faithful and straightforward, but if you’re in that crowd do rest assured that there’s nothing like that, here. Even in the one scene where there’d be an easy opportunity to add a bunch of extraneous ecchi material, they simply do not. Also, anyone who has read the manga knows that the character it’s horniest about is Senshi.

3: Pseudo because the crust isn’t edible. Which I guess makes it more like some kind of weird pudding?

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Dragons, Tigers, and Isekai in FLUFFY PARADISE

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

A new year means a new anime season; a fresh turn of the calendar page for a medium that, at least as far as TV anime goes, often feels defined by a chase for the next big cultural touchstone. 2024 does, in fact, have plenty of upcoming anime that look pretty promising, from the battle girl android action-yuri of Metallic Rouge to highly anticipated manga adaptations like Delicious in Dungeon, to whatever Jellyfish Don’t Swim in the Night is going to be. But today, January 1st, the very first anime to make its TV debut in 2024 is this; Fluffy Paradise. It’s an isekai, of course.

It’s hard to even feign shock at the sheer deluge of isekai series anymore, and to be honest talking about the genre’s saturation has started to feel pat. (Plus, there actually aren’t that many this season, compared to some seasons still fresh in memory where we’ve had up to ten airing at once.) So let’s just skip all that and get to the actual meat of this thing, or what meat of it there is anyway. For one thing, yes, this anime starts with the obligate scene of the protagonist dying in the ‘real world.’ I have to admit I’ve always found the fact that they seem to feel the need to show this directly kind of morbid and I’ve never totally gotten over that. For another, the protagonist, in her previous mundane life, kind of looks like Kobeni from Chainsaw Man, so hey, that’s something. (And this seems like something that would happen to Beni, given her rotten luck.)

The fact that she’s a woman in the first place shouldn’t go unnoticed, either. Isekai anime remains very lopsided in terms of protagonist gender, and it is nice to see one that’s not vaguely otome game-themed have a female lead.

Our girl is of course given the obligate talking-to by a deity who offers to compensate her for her short life by fixing things in her favor in the next. He does ask for her help with something rather specific in return, though. We’re told that in this world, humans are persecuting “non-human creatures,” complete with some silhouettes of what sure look like catgirls and doggirls and such. The show doesn’t really circle back around to this until the very end of this first episode, but it is the one point that sticks out.

I say this because much of Fluffy Paradise is frankly dull. It leaves no real impression for most of the length of its runtime. We could get into specifics about its plot and characters, but they feel so cursory in of themselves that there doesn’t seem like much a point. Our girl ends up in a very plain isekai setting, born (of course) to noble parents. There, she’s given the name Nefertima—Neema [Ai Kakuma] for short—and the show begins in earnest. The main focus here is that she wished to be able to “pet lots of fluffy things” as part of her reincarnation, so animals love her, and it’s from this that the series gets most of what flavor it does have.

Anywhere she goes, Neema is surrounded by a Disney Princess-esque parade of adorable animals. This extends even to befriending the divine “sky tiger” that she meets upon a visit to the royal palace. All of this is pretty cute, but it’s not really ever more than that, and even the few moments that seem like they’re trying to be vaguely transgressive (eg. a few mildly charged interactions between the three-year-old Neema and the teenage prince) don’t accomplish even that much. They’re too tame to even be tasteless.

Meh.

Arguably, the entire point of “cozy isekai” like this is that they never do too much. But by introducing that whole Man vs. Nature element at the start, the show inherently asks to be taken more seriously than as just another lazy Monday series. I’ll also admit, I tend to be a bit harsh on this subgenre in general. I’m a longtime iyashikei apologist, and even I tend to find that most of these “slow life” shows are boring rather than actually relaxing, usually owing to their iffy visuals and general lack of atmosphere.

The production values are decent, on that note, but come with their own set of caveats. The animation is just expressive and bouncy enough that Fluffy Paradise escapes the fate of its often-stiff isekai brethren. Even then, there are still a few spots that are disappointingly under-animated, such as a magical board game played in the episode’s middle portion. You could also be forgiven for not really noticing, because the actual art direction is very drab and generic. Pity any RinBot player with this and even just a few other isekai in their back catalogue, because they’d largely be indistinguishable. This is true of the setting as well; an ISO Standard vaguely European isekai setting with basically no characteristics to set it apart from its genre-fellows whatsoever. You can get away with this if your show is funny enough or has strong enough characterization (eg. in the case of In My Next Life as a Villainness! or such), but that’s not really the case here, and the nondescript visuals contribute to an overall feeling of interchangeability. This show could’ve aired at any point in the last decade and it wouldn’t seem out of place. That can be a good thing, but in Fluffy Paradise‘s case, it really isn’t.

But, there is a silver lining here, the one spot where the show seems willing to take a risk, and that’d be the dragon.

Bro thinks he’s Smaug.

In the episode’s closing minutes, Neema’s sister summons a dragon during a magic demonstration. We’re not told anything explicitly here but she sure seems intent on killing it, until Neema rushes out to get between her sister and the dragon. The episode ends on that note, providing a cliffhanger and a (theoretically at least) solid hook to bring people back next week. If Fluffy Paradise ever breaks out of the middling isekai box—and hey, it’s happened before—it’ll be there, with Neema as a defender of the world’s wild things against her fellow humans. Still, given everything else about the first episode, I don’t have a ton of faith it’ll actually follow through on this idea.

I could sit here and wax further about how there are just so many isekai and how it’s such an over-saturated genre and so on, but at some point you just have to let things be what they are. Fluffy Paradise seems basically fine as far as such things go, but it also seems solidly “safe.” There’s nothing in here that a hundred other anime haven’t done, and if I want to put on my Nostradamus hat and make big predictions, I kind of wonder if the lower amount of isekai this season means people aren’t maybe finally getting tired of this whole setup.* Who knows.

I won’t keep watching Fluffy Paradise, personally. But for the people who do, I legitimately hope it turns out to be better and more ambitious than I’m predicting here. In cases like this, I like to be proven wrong.

(Also, the ED is a cute thing with a lovely felt stop motion visual style. That counts for something, too.)

* A very rare after the fact edit from me, here. What was I talking about when I wrote this? This season is absolutely swamped with isekai.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.