Posted on July 27, 2025 in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [7/26/25]

The Weekly Orbit is a (sometimes) weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

Hi folks! It’s probably late at night for most of you as I post this, but I wanted to get one out this week, so I was willing to put it up outside my usual posting hours. Weirdly, the late hour sorta works, here. We’ve got a buffet of somewhat darker episodes this week, with only a few exceptions. Do enjoy.

Takopi’s Original Sin – Episodes 4 & 5

I haven’t written about Takopi’s Original Sin basically at all since it started airing, and I think part of that is a desire to not pass any judgment on something like this until I fully understand where it’s going. But it’s worth breaking that silence to say; this might be the best-animated episode of any show this year. There is some steep competition in that regard, but the way the visuals wobble out to convey Naoki’s dissociative state throughout much of episode four is really something else.

Narratively, I’m slightly less sure of what we’re doing, but the series has been good enough so far that everything I’m about to say should be taken as, at absolute most, a minor qualm. I think you can put the three kids that star in this story on a scale as to how obvious it is that the show wants you to sympathize with them: Marina was the least sympathetic, an incredibly vicious bully whose outbursts were explained by the revelation that she was physically abused at home. Her being perhaps the “worst” (I use the term very loosely) of these kids made her death all the more shocking. It’s not punishment vested on a bad person, it’s an absolutely tragic end to a very unhappy child whose life was defined by abuse, which she was the victim of but also the further perpetrator of. Naoki is the most overtly sympathetic, being subject to harsh psychological abuse by his own mother for much of his life and having few of the more “unpleasant” qualities of the other two. Shizuka, our protagonist, is somewhere between these two poles, and that’s where I’m scratching my head slightly because the specific way she’s between those extremes feels like something I’m not entirely clicking with. (Saying all this, I must again clarify that I am referring to ‘sympathetic’ as in the way that the narrative presents these characters to us. Personally speaking, I sympathize with all of them, because they’re young kids trapped in absolutely awful situations. But I digress….)

Naoki is talked into being an accomplice to covering up Marina’s murder because Shizuka basically charms him. Now, in of itself I think the beat of Naoki falling for Shizuka and this informing his actions is fine. But the degree to which Shizuka leans into it and actively leads him on just strikes me as kind of odd. To be clear, I don’t think this is “problematic” or whatever, I think what the series is trying to do is make a point about how people tend to take after their parents (in particular, bad mothers, respectively neglectful, psychologically abusive, and physically abusive, are a shared commonality between Shizuka, Naoki, and Marina respectively. Naoki’s brother even compares him to his mom explicitly). The framing is what feels a little odd to me, which I imagine is a problem unique to the anime, with the cartoon gunshot sounds accompanying Naoki’s gaga heart eyes probably being the most over the top example. (Although to be honest, now that I’ve laid it out here, I think I’ve actually talked myself out of having a problem with it. But it does still feel like the anime is trying a little too hard to shock us with how “bad” Shizuka is, maybe that’s just in my own imagination.)

On another note, Naoki’s brother is handled in a really interesting way throughout this episode. The bit where he comfortingly pats Naoki’s head and it’s portrayed as this bright, cheerful bit of magic is another example of the show’s visuals being over the top, but in a way I really appreciate.

Episode five, meanwhile, is another swerve and once again takes things in a somewhat different direction. I’m using this space to both jot down some thoughts on episode five itself—which, this is the rare thing that’s exclusive to this column, I’m not pulling from my tumblr here—but also to bounce off of this reblog addition to what I wrote above on the previous episode by tumblr user angyo. Angyo puts forward that the reason behind the way the show treats Shizuka is that we are to understand Shizuka and Marina as being two sides of the same coin. People in what are, at the end of the day, actually quite similar situations, being driven to life-or-death extremes by respectively Shizuka’s need to see Chappy again (even though he is probably dead) and Marina’s need for approval from her mother. (“Cornered raccoon rules”, as angyo put it, a turn of phrase good enough that I’m stealing it.) And I do think this is directly relevant to episode five, because what the gradual darkening of Shizuka’s character—what I took for an attempt to shock the audience just two paragraphs back—is actually an attempt to underscore how easily these characters could switch places. It is very easy to imagine, for example, a situation where Takopi encountered Naoki or Marina first upon arriving to Earth and this entire narrative is framed differently, with Marina as the most overtly sympathetic of the cast and Shizuka as the “bad guy.”

In fact, you don’t have to imagine this at all, because that’s exactly what episode five is. Shizuka and Takopi make it to Tokyo only to find that Shizuka’s father has since started a new life with some other woman and now has two other kids. Any hope that her father might entertain the idea of helping Shizuka is dashed when one of his other children asks him who this strange girl is, and he shuts the door on her. Backed into a corner yet again, she takes it out on Takopi, bashing him with a rock hard enough to induce forgotten memories to rise to the surface. He remembers something—wait a second, he actually has been to Earth before.

In a previous timeline, Takopi met Marina first. Thus, the anime’s fifth episode is a rough perspective flip of its first. Takopi—not yet known by that name—befriends Marina, more or less, and helps her navigate life from ages ten to sixteen or so. Shizuka is actually barely present in this version of events. Instead, we focus on how here as in the timelines we’ve already seen, Marina’s youth is defined by the abuse of her mother, and there’s a heartbreaking bit where Takopi, again totally innocent, observes that Marina must smack him around so often because her mother does the same to her. It’s these moments where Takopi’s Original Sin is most devestated, not where things reach an elevated fever pitch, but when Takopi makes a simple observation that any child could.

As things seem like they might finally be getting a bit better for Marina, Shizuka reenters the picture at a crucial moment. She (inadvertently? I’d like to think so) steals Naoki, here Marina’s boyfriend, from her. This leads to a terribly sad series of events that culminates in Marina finally snapping under her mother’s abuse, killing her and, it seems clear, eventually herself. Takopi knows what he must do to prevent this; he has to kill Shizuka, and he’ll use the time machine on his home planet to do it.

Forcing his way to the machine, he is reverted to mental childhood himself by the mysterious mother figure of his home planet, and by the time he returns to Earth we’re back at the start of episode one, and he’s forgotten about Shizuka and Marina entirely.

The strongest parallel here is thus that despite Takopi’s best intentions, he has demonstrably led both of this show’s protagonists to bad places, and eventually their deaths. The show’s present timeline, which we return to at the end of the episode, gives him a chance to potentially fix all of that, but it’s difficult to imagine him succeeding for the same reason that Takopi is, despite everything, still ultimately sympathetic. He’s basically a child himself in his current state, he has a simplistic understanding of the world, which is why his most sophisticated attempts at problem solving in the entire show so far boiled down to “kill Shizuka” and “try to help Shizuka cover up that she killed Marina.” Episode five ends with the unexpected return of Naoki to the main timeline, and between him coming back and Takopi’s memories resurfacing it’s hard to say where all of this will eventually end, but any show that makes its viewership turn over character dynamics this thoroughly is doing something right. Just one week out from its finale, it remains one of the season’s most compelling.

There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless…. – Episode 3

I like to give a show credit when it manages to completely throw me off. I do see how we got here Watanare‘s first episode, but it’s definitely still not a direction I expected the show to take when I watched its premiere.

There’s a lot of things I could talk about here but I’m a little uninterested in attempting to make some grand proclamation about what this narrative development “means.” Because I’m sure tons of people are already doing that and, to be honest, I do not really need my fiction to be a morality fable, so I don’t have strong opinions on where they’re going to take this. I’m fine with anything as long as it’s interesting.

I actually wanna talk about the backgrounds, mostly.

I’m hitting the limits of my artistic vocabulary here, because I don’t know what about them makes them look this way, but a good amount of the backgrounds in this series have a very flat and fake look to them. These are spaces meant to emphasize their own artificiality, and it hits a height in this episode that I was worried we wouldn’t see again after the premiere.

This isn’t a bad thing, It’s clearly deliberate and is meant to convey a sense of alienation. It’s also a very subtle inflection, and it’s one of my favorite things about the show. It’s most obvious with Mai’s room in Paris-

-and the suburb Renako lives in.

But notably, Renako’s room itself takes on this quality during the night after the incident at the end of this episode, which I think is a great way of quickly and subtly conveying her anxiety and confusion.

I’m unwilling to contribute to the discourse (in both the literal and euphemistic sense of that term) around the show beyond this, at least so far, but it’s definitely established itself as quietly being one of the season’s more interesting anime. I salute that.

Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 4

I need an anti-favorite characters list on Anilist so I can put Eita on it. I get characters like this are supposed to be annoying and hateable so they can die late in the show for catharsis, but the dude is seriously just aggravating as shit. Also, I feel like there’s a version of this same character in every show like this so he’s not even particularly interesting or novel. Maybe my perception is skewed since I haven’t actually seen that many of these, but yeah.

Anyway, other than his being generally grating as fuck and the weird “on-screen chat commentary” gimmick, this is actually probably the best episode of the show so far. It’s also the best-looking since the premiere, a good sign for a show that would be lost without some visual oomph. I was a little worried we were already running out of ideas for death game setups with the second one, but the escape-room-with-the-directions premise the Old Gods field here is pretty solid. More importantly, the actual environment of Hotel Reversal, as it’s called, is really good, I love all the oranges and greens and the generally very zany vibe of the hotel itself. It makes it feel like a real escape room game despite the high stakes. We lose a few people this episode too, and it’s no big loss because they’re among the less interesting characters. My bet is that the teacher is the next person to die, but we’ll see.

Ruri Rocks / Introduction to Mineralogy – Episode 3

I’m really delighted by the decision to expand the show’s world a bit here. The anime’s first two episodes were nearly devoid of anything but Ruri and Nagi’s mineral expeditions. Here we meet one of Ruri’s colleagues, Imari Youko [Miyamoto Yume], and since we’ve roped a third person into this setup, the scope of the show expands too.

The entire iron mine trip is lovely, but obviously the bit at the end with the Flourite vein is the episode’s apex. We have an actual cliffhanger of sorts at the end and I really cannot wait to see what else this show has in store. The next episode of this show will likely have aired already by the time you read this, I’m sure that one will be lovely too.

It is also worth restating that Nagi remains just devastatingly hot. Anime woman of the year, I won’t apologize.

Call of the Night – Season 2, Episode 4

Well, this episode hit me like a ton of bricks.

Overall, Call of the Night has been improving steadily since it came back. (In fact, I’m starting to think the premiere was the weak link.) As such, there’s a lot to like in this episode; visually it’s an array of achingly lonesome liminal spaces, hospital rooms so dreary you can practically smell them, and dramatic, frightful closeups. The same borrowed horror language that the show used in its first episodes.

There’s all the show’s usual strengths writing-wise, including some great banter between Ko and Nazuna. But what really takes this episode to another level is its second half, where we learn the backstory of the character Honda Kabura [Itou Shizuka], a long-time supporting member of the cast and one of Nazuna’s fellow vampires. I don’t want to relitigate all the specifics, but the gist is that Kabura was, as a human, sickly, frequently in and out of hospitals. What we see of her friend group paints them as pretty unsupportive and shitty people, and in fact, her nurse tells her this outright.

Her nurse is, or at least appears to have been, Nazuna. But she’s not called Nazuna, as this person refers to herself as Haru. So either Nazuna went by a different name back then—it would track, given her almost total amnesia as to her earlier life established in last week’s episode—or there’s something else going on here and this is a relative or somesuch. Either way, Haru seems to be just about the only person Kabura really had in her life, so when things reach a breaking point, Haru is the person there for her. This all has an extremely strong gay overtone—more than that, really, since when Haru is running down a list of things that she hates and which have been imposed upon her, she includes men—and when it inevitably comes time for Haru to turn Kabura into a vampire, Call of the Night actually brings back its season one opening theme, drawing a direct line from what happened to Kabura in her own past and what happened to Ko at the beginning of this story.

Their specific situations are different. Ko’s problems seem to be mostly mental and social. Kabura’s to at least some extent are physical. But the effect is the same; these two are societal outcasts. When one of Kabura’s shitty friends visits her in the hospital, she ends up snapping at her. She hits the nail on the head though—these people really do look down on the sick and the unwell, those of us who walk slow or don’t socialize. When Haru offers to turn Kabura, she phrases it not as inviting her to vampirism but as inviting her to the opportunity to live a full life with actual meaning. “Do you want to be able to run?” asks the vampire. The girl who can only walk slow does not need to even speak her answer, for the vampire already knows it.

Anime – Non-Seasonal

The Epic of Zektbach

Well, this was quite a goofy thing.

Essentially, what we have here is a highly compressed attempt at a heroic epic about a character named Shamshir. Shamshir saves her country from an invasion, but her fellow soldiers are entranced by her “dance”—her fighting style—and eventually start committing murders, which Shamshir herself is blamed for.

This doesn’t really go anywhere despite a small handful of interesting ideas—we see things from Shamshir’s and also the murderers’ perspective a few times and they seem to see their targets as masses of binary code and chemical formulas—and the OVA unceremoniously peters out after Shamshir gives in to her bloodlust and murders her entire city, seemingly including her childhood friends.

Apparently, this is one facet of a larger franchise connected to a bunch of concept music, some small booklets, and a now-defunct website, so maybe this makes more sense in context (the series’ somehow still online Fandom wiki boldly claims the series has “gnostic themes”) but as an OVA it’s pretty bad. Not helping is the fact that it looks like absolute mud; almost everything is a shade of brown or red with occasional grays. The resulting visual effect is a bit like if a show had a sub-Attack on Titan color palette on Arifureta‘s visual budget. Still, there’s a charm to the specific kind of bad on display here, not so much so that this is worth seeking out, but I at least had a good time poking fun at it with my friend Josh, who I have now promoted to main-body-of-the-article status, I suppose. (Hi Josh.)

Josh and I started watching old OVAs together recently after having the brilliant decision to knock out famously bad anticlassic Garzey’s Wing together—if you see more OVAs here in the future you can thank them—and they in fact found one of the music videos that comprises the bulk of the remainder of the Zektbach franchise. It is way, way better than the OVA, and also has a much nicer art style. It lacks much of a narrative given that it’s, you know, a 2-minute music video, but it’s much more worth watching than the OVA, I think. I’ve embedded it below.

Puppet Princess

This, on the other hand, was just an absolute slap from start to finish.

These OVA centered around some kind of odd conceit from back in the day aren’t always as great as the general concept makes them sound. But this one and its puppet fighting gimmick really are just as much fun as the idea promises. Obviously, there are a lot of really excellent action sequences here, mostly revolving around our protagonist Rangiku’s [Uechi Aki] array of fighting puppets and the large box she keeps them in. But it really can’t be overstated how absolutely great this thing looks in general, the direction is razor-sharp and in particular the more horror-leaning scenes really pop. (As a side note, basically everyone suddenly gains individually-drawn teeth and bulging eyeballs when they’re going through terrible things. The former in particular means this probably has the most teeth-per-minute of any anime I’ve ever seen. Just something to think about!)

Also present is a master ninja / illusionist named Manajiri [Wakamoto Norio. Yes, really!] who serves as a sort of secondary dynamic. They have a solid dynamic. Although sullying it somewhat is that there’s a decidedly uncomfortable and unfortunately very of its time bit where he tries to grope Rangiku while she’s cleaning herself in a waterfall, although he does at least back off, which is more than can be said about many characters who’ve been placed in similar situations. It’s a little unfortunate since Manajiri is otherwise a pretty great character in his own right.

Rangiku’s puppets are easily my favorite thing about the OVA overall, though, she cycles through a couple of them over its 40-odd minute runtime and while the best is probably the large red samurai she uses for the first and last battle, they’re all great. Naturally, they become the tools of vengeance used to kill the man who murdered her father. Between the beats of the vengeance plot, there’s also some interesting (and harrowing!) stuff in here about how badly her father treated her in favor of the puppets. You can thus extract an interesting thematic line about a man in power favoring literal dolls over the human women in his life, but the OVA only has so much time to explore this. My only real complaint, in fact, other than the waterfall scene, is that I actually wouldn’t have minded watching a lot more of this. I think you could pretty easily extend this to a full series.

And interestingly, it almost sort of did? Puppet Princess itself never got a TV anime, but one of the mangaka’s other projects, Karakuri Circus, did, nearly twenty years later. It features a similar overall premise, which may be enough to finally get me to check Karakuri Circus out after having had it on my plan to watch….since it was new, I believe. There’s a lot of interesting anime out there! For better or worse.

That’s all for this week!

It’s been a long time since I did one of these, but on your way out the door why don’t you take a Bonus Screencap along with you? This time of Nazuna in her nurse getup from the Call of the Night midcard for this week.

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Posted on July 18, 2025 in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [7/18/25]

It’s been a minute! But I am a bit over belaboring the point; I do these when I have the energy to do them now.

Thus, a roundup of what I’ve watched this past week.

Seasonal Anime

Gachiakuta – Episode 2

I watched this while, among other things, clipping my toenails, which feels about right.

Jokes aside, I am a bit stunned by how non-invested I still am in this story. It’s cool that the show is willing to be genuinely kind of gross and unpleasant, given that it takes place in a giant garbage dump, but I also don’t really feel much for the main character which makes his rage hard to empathize with even if his reasons for it are completely understandable. He just—there is no politer way to put it—comes off as a bit cringey. It’s a teenager’s idea of what having real problems is like. “What if everyone was mean to you constantly and betrayed you and treated you like shit and it made you so mad that your secret superpowers awakened?” Again, I’m criticizing a show for kids here, so I don’t wanna be too mean, and if some 15 year old thinks this is the best thing ever I’m not gonna tell them otherwise. But it just feels a little short on actual ideas or stakes to me so far.

Enjin [Konishi Katsuyuki]—Umbrella Guy as I will be calling him—is kinda cool, but not enough to be a supporting cast on its own, so hopefully we start meeting some of the other people in the OP sooner rather than later. The bit at the end of this episode with the other poor Groundlings just stunned me. I realize this is probably not what the show is *trying* to say, but it sure feels like we’re doing something to the tune of “Yeah, rich people who destroy the environment are evil, but do you know who’s also evil? People who are too poor.” And I simply cannot get onboard with that, if I’m honest.

When I first wrote this over on tumblr I mentioned that I wasn’t dropping the show yet because I wanted to give it another chance, but it’s a bit more up in the air at this point. The series’ third episode has been delayed on account of election coverage in Japan, and I find it harder to imagine I’ll still have time and mental bandwidth for this show in two weeks. We’ll see, though.

Ruri Rocks / Introduction to Mineralogy – Episode 2

A delightful second episode from this one. I like Ruri’s little bit of character development over the course of this episode where she goes from being disappointed about the financial lack of value in pyrite to refusing to sell a rare gold sample because it means more to her to have it than having the money would.

Overall, I’d say this show is more cute and lightly entertaining than anything, but in moments like the one where she finds that lump of gold, the series really does come alive in a very vivid and poetic way. I hope to see it lean more into that going forward.

Turkey! Time to Strike – Episode 2

I was a little worried that Turkey would—aha—fumble the ball when it came time to commit to its actual premise as opposed to its fakeout faux-premise. I am pleased to report that this has not happened.

There are a few hiccups in this second episode, but not anything major, and by all indications this is about to be a really nice little time travel adventure series. I like how era shocked the girls (understandably) are throughout much of this episode, although the bandits who try to assault them are maybe a little too much of a jump from episode one right out the gate. Still, overall this was great.

If I have to give a shout out to any one moment in particular, it’s at the very end of the episode. Suguri [Inoue Kikuko], a Sengoku warrior who rescued the girls from the bandits (and was then rescued by them in turn when he was captured), takes them to the estate he lives on. There, we see that a character we’ve yet to properly meet, but who Anilist tells me is named Sumomo [Hidaka Noriko], is playing what can only be described as Sengoku-era bowling. It’s hilarious, and is the culmination of a surprising amount of bowling related trickery in this episode. (Have you ever wanted to see a Sengoku-era bandit get clubbed in the head with a bowling ball? Turkey delivers). The plot twist at the end of the first episode is that this is not a show about bowling. The plot twist throughout episode two is that, actually, it very much is about bowling.

Necronomico & The Cosmic Horror Show – Episode 3

So first of all, I cannot fucking believe there’s a completely straight-faced “if you die in the game….YOU DIE IN REAL LIFE!” in here.

Secondly, wow, the male characters on the human side of things sure completely fucking suck, huh? Other than I guess maybe Hat Guy, whose whole deal we don’t really know yet. This episode sees Eita—the gamer, you’ll recall, and the guy I flagged as the most annoying character in the first episode—betray the almost-as-annoying mangaka character NAO-KICHI [Ichikawa Taichi], tricking Nao into trapping himself in with one of the enemies in this particular death game. (At least partly because Eita was a fan of Nao’s manga but hated its ending. Can you imagine this happening to, I don’t know, the Jujutsu Kaisen guy?) Eita is theoretically more interesting as a villain, but in practice he’s about the same level of insufferable, just to different ends. It doesn’t help that his entire motivation seems to be that he thinks the world is “a shitty place,” which I guess entitles him to be Gamer Light Yagami. He also gets caught gloating at Nao’s death, meaning that his good guy cover is blown almost immediately. Rather incredibly, this happens while he’s condescendingly telling Nao that it’s easier to fool people if they think they’re smart. You don’t say?

Elsewhere in the episode, the teacher character “hilariously” admits he’s a pedo, which would maybe inspire some kind of reaction in me if I had previously thought about him even a little bit. Like, I didn’t care about this character before, but you’ve given him one defining trait and you’re treating it like a joke, so what am I to do with this information? It comes off as very amateur hour, and is pretty easily the worst and dumbest thing in the episode.

Cthulu is a highlight here, and I like her unironic shoujo villain laugh and I hope we get to hear it many more times over the course of the show. Other than that, this is turning out to be a bit of a trainwreck so far. Entertaining, but perhaps not for the intended reasons.

CITY The Animation – Episode 2

I think this is a list-topper of “anime whose worlds I’d most like to spend a two week vacation in.” I know it’s basically just Japan but it’s so utterly whimsical and fantastical that it just makes me want to live there. Also, the after-credits sequence with the demons was fantastic. Maybe the funniest single bit in this show so far? I just about cried when the Ars Goetia demon showed up.

My Dress-Up Darling Season 2 – Episode 2

Another delightful episode this week. The whole “Marin getting sick” plot was really sweet and well-handled. I said this on bluesky but I love how much of this show is powered by the fact that Marin is both a super hot gyaru and the sort of loser who’d own an ahegao shirt. One finds character depth in contradictions, even very silly ones. (Of course, much the point of Dress-Up Darling is that there’s not actually that much of a gap between these things as one might assume.)

As for the new character, the crossplayer, I’m a bit undecided. I feel like as a trans woman I’m kind of expected to have a kneejerk negative reaction to femboy characters. (Maybe that expectation only exists in my head? I’m not sure.) But I think this guy is fine. He seems nice, and the ending scene that gives the episode its title is funny. I’m obviously hoping we don’t do anything weird or offputting with him, but this show has never been like that, so I don’t think it will.

Anime – Non-Seasonal

California Crisis: Gun Salvo

Honestly, this is pretty much exactly as fantastic as everyone who recommends it says it is. Just 45 minutes of California as imagined by a Japanese creative team [led by Video Girl Ai director Nishikubo Mizuho], and it’s maybe the most flattering depiction of the US ever put to film. Bright, sunny, summer days, hot, neon-lit nights, filtered through a light sci-fi plot that essentially just kinda stops at the end of the movie. The narrative isn’t the point, though, as this is a visual showcase first and foremost and it’s a fucking great one. I see why people love this so much.

Posted on July 11, 2025July 11, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Summer Stragglers & Sequels

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 know how this goes. This time I’m also doing some writeups on sequels for shows I’ve previously covered here on MPA. Other than that, business as usual for one of these roundup posts.

Gachiakuta: A new shonen series, and an alright one overall so far, I think. It’s very edgy, and the social commentary is so heavy handed you can physically feel it while watching. But, I think this is if some teenager’s first exposure to a story that explores class dynamics that’s cool. Personally I think I am maybe a bit too old for this (a feeling I do not have with better shonen anime despite that still being kinda objectively true with those as well) but I’ll give it another episode, it may win me over.

Hell Teacher: Jigoku Sensei Nube: The problem I always have with anime remakes, and I have them even—maybe especially—when I haven’t seen the original, is that I’d usually rather watch the original, because you can often tell that they’re trying very hard to translate the OG’s style into the current anime landscape. The end result here is an anime that has a bunch of faux-90s affectations despite everything about the show screaming 2025 in terms of direction and animation.

I didn’t think this was bad by any means, and I actually liked the action sequence toward the end of the first episode quite a bit, but I feel like it’s more likely that the rest of the show will look more like the first half of the episode; a parade of pretty lifeless classrooms and just general visual flatness. I’m not sure what to think of it overall beyond wondering if this really does much of anything for anyone. I enjoy shows with this sort of premise, but wouldn’t it have been better to come up with something new instead of just rehashing an IP from 30 years ago? Granted, I get the business reasons for doing this—teenagers who grew up watching the original are in their 40s now and are prime nostalgia market targets—but that doesn’t dampen that the entire endeavor feels rather cynical.

Hotel Inhumans: In a world with seemingly about a thousand replacement-level narou-kei per season (look a few spots below for one of them), it’s really reassuring that something can occasionally step up and show them that it’s possible to suck in interesting, standout ways. Marvel at the unambitious direction and storyboarding, stand in awe at the all-suggestions, incredibly broad writing. Wince at the frightfully generic character designs. Listen to the soothing sound of the hilariously bad music placement. They just do not make many anime that are this hilariously incompetent anymore. If Hotel Inhumans has a selling point, it’s as a throwback to the way bad anime used to be bad 20 years ago, which is only a shame because the core conceit is interesting enough that I imagine the manga this is based on might actually be good. Still, if that appeals to you, then by all means, load it up.

Milky☆Subway: The Galactic Limited Express: A friend¹ put me onto this one, and I’m quite glad they did. In overall vibe Milky Subway has a lot more common with other web cartoons I’ve seen than most anime per se, but that’s fine. You’ve got a thing here that takes place in some kind of wacky far-future sci fi setting where there are physical highways and train lines linking different planets. Our two leads are a pair of I’m just gonna say girlfriends, respectively a robot and a demon, who in the short that serves as a setup for this series (“Milky Highway”) get arrested for speeding after they get too into a retro pop song that comes over their car radio.

The action is very fun and snappy and I enjoy the first short a good bit for that reason. The second sees them being press-ganged into community service, to clean a bunch of subway cars. Somehow, this ends up with the robot getting decapitated, although I can’t imagine she’s actually dead-dead given the largely upbeat and comedic nature of these shorts. The proper series (which is what Milky Subway is) will, I suspect, be a how-we-got-here leaning up to that sequence of events.

All told, it’s pretty fun. The setting is really unique and the art is quite fun. The voice acting is also excellent, it has a conversational, casual fuck-around vibe especially in the quieter scenes, and you get the sense that everyone here—including the officer overseeing the other characters’ community service—is in way over their heads. Also the look of the show is Interesting. I’d again compare the art, which is full-3D CGI, reminds me more of, I suppose, Amazing Digital Circus or something? Hardly the best comparison but it’s where my mind went. Overall, this is a very unique little thing. The only “complaint” I have is just that with only 4ish minutes per episode it’s a bit on the slight side, but that’s pretty minor overall. Even then, that’s a benefit, too, since their being so short means they’re very easy to recommend.

KAMITSUBAKI CITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION: I have been a fan, admittedly an off and on one, of v-idol group The Virtual Witch Phenomenon for a few years now, so I was pretty excited when they got their own anime announced. Having since watched the first episode (or technically “zeroeth” episode. Remember that convention? Not the only late-00s/early-10s thing about this show), and indeed the second, since I first wrote the version of this that’s going up on tumblr, I’m pretty baffled by the whole thing.

Despite what one might expect, given that this is being helmed by Ave Mujica director Kakimoto Koudai this isn’t really a music anime in the conventional sense. It’s more of a Madoka Magica / Yuki Yuna / etc. kind of thing. A grisly, dark magical girl series of a sort that was more popular about a decade ago. It stars the V.W.P. playing characters loosely based on themselves. KAF plays Kafu, the main character, which makes sense given that she’s the group’s center. She acquits herself decently as a voice actress, although I imagine most of her sung material (this is also a musical? Sort of?) being in her very high, whispery and peaky register might be a bit of a divisive element for some. (Personally, I’m fond of it, but I could imagine someone not being so.) Despite this, the music is the inarguable highlight here. Everything else is a lot more scattershot.

Visually the show is….okay? Not great. My main complaint is the rigging. This is a 3D series and in slower and more emotional moments the model work is pretty stiff, which is unfortunate. The other aspects of the visuals, especially the use of color and lighting, mostly mask it, but it’s occasionally noticeable. The action scenes are probably the visual highlight, and there are solid setpieces in both episodes to date, but that’s only one element of what the series is trying to do.

My main issue is just that both episodes are incredibly exposition-heavy but manage to be very low on context or stakes in spite of that. Of all things, a giant fish (originally from the “Eat The Past” music video, I think? Admittedly hardly the only music video it’s been in) is a main character, and can also turn into a cute anime boy, Laplace [Sakura Ayane]. He more or less serves as Kafu’s magical girl companion. That’s all well and good, but the premiere just stops dead after its first action sequence so he and a weird bird thing he summons can explain how the setting’s magic works in detail, which is pointless of course, because it’s all technobabble anyway and mostly boils down to “Kafu’s singing makes people feel things and therefore is magical.” In general there’s just a lot of talking, and it’s all a bit much. There are also two time skips by my count in the first episode alone, although the framing of these scenes makes whether they’re actually timeskips or not a little unclear at first, so the series just feels generally very bogged-down and disjointed, with an overall poor command of the basics of visual storytelling.

Initially, I was unwilling to write the show off, but having now seen the second episode, I think I’ll be steering people away from it, as the second episode is unfortunately more of the same. It’s cool that Kafu and the other girls are basically a magical girl Justice League now, I suppose, but the fact that all of the fighting is left to their companions makes this feel pretty hollow. (It’s not just Kafu, all of the VWP girls have a cute anime boy that doubles as an animal summon / stand / whatever. This not only doubles the size of the cast, it also makes the girls themselves, the ostensible focus of this whole series, feel pretty superfluous even if their magical singing is also nominally important.) In general, there’s just a deep incoherence here. A user on this site’s Discord server said Kamitsubaki City “radiates mixed media energy,” and I can only echo their sentiments. I’m not opposed to the format in general (two of my favorite anime this year, Ave Mujica and Cinderella Gray, are part of large multimedia franchises), but this is an example of the form being done pretty poorly. I like the big hat that Sekai [Isekai Joucho‘s character] has. Other than that, unless you’re truly starved for current magical girl-esque anime (and I’m weighing as I write this whether that describes me or not), you can give this one a pass. This entry probably could’ve been its own article. Oh well!

Onmyo Kaiten Re:Birth Verse: Sometimes I like to describe the premise of a series when starting one of these, but that’s difficult here because I barely have a handle on what that premise is. Very basically, it seems like our protagonist got Vision of Escaflowne’d at some point before the start of the series, but then he got sent back to his own world (implicitly our world), and then, not ten minutes into the first episode, he gets isekai’d yet again. He notes that this his 2000th time, so clearly the sheer amount of times he’s been through this is something we’re supposed to pick up on.

But he seems impossibly ignorant about the general mechanisms of this “ability” of his (if it’s indeed even something intrinsic to him at all), and doubly so about the world he ends up in, which is a blend of Heian-era Japanese aesthetics and mecha sci-fi. Twice in the same episode, he encounters “the mist,” black fog that summons monsters and freezes innocent townsfolk in their place. The second time, he turns into a black and blue tiger-oni-monster-thing and can fight it off for a while but he gets completely owned by the end of the episode and gets isekai’d again, except this time he ends up in the Heian-Sci-Fi world at the point he visited earlier in the episode.

It’s not that any of this is confusing per se, but it’s all delivered so rapid-fire and so nonchalantly that none of it has much impact, so it’s both a bit hard to follow and hard to care. Combine that with the generally unappealing design work, the extreme hoariness of some of the writing clichés at play here (there are two different “main guy falls into main girl’s boobs” gags), and you’re left with less the amount of unanswered questions you might expect of a first episode of an anime and more just a very weird and disorienting sensation of having been thrown into the middle of something in a not-entirely-intentional way. I have no idea what to make of this at all, and I might just watch an episode or two more just to get a better handle on it.

Ruri Rocks / Introduction to Mineralogy: Impressively, this geologically-minded slice of life series from main Studio Bind director Fuji Shingo is quite possibly the best-looking thing to premiere this season. And if it isn’t, it’s at least in an easy top five. Given some of its competition, that’s quite the feat. Replacing mono as my once-a-season-if-I-can-find-one “sightseeing” anime, Ruri Rocks is a funny, laid-back slice of life comedy about minerals. There’s a real sense of inspiring awe at the natural world in this one, and the garnet pool sequence at the end of this episode is easily one of my favorite visual moments in anything that’s come out this year. The show is surprisingly educational, too, if you’re interested in the actual science of how rocks form. I can, in theory, imagine the fanservice maybe being too much for some, but other than that one caveat, you’ll probably want to at least give this one a shot.

There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless….: Socially awkward girl Amaori Renako [Nakamura Kanna] is rescued from a life of loneliness by her beautiful blonde classmate, a total alpha named Ouzuka Mai [Oonishi Saori], who then decides she loves her. Renako doesn’t want that, thus leading to a series premised on, basically, gay chicken. They spend odd days as a couple and even days as friends, Renako trying to make sure they stay just friends, Mai trying to ensure that Renako falls for her. An entertainingly weird premise, and it lends the show a madcap energy that I actually really like quite a lot.

I think the visuals really help sell it; the actual drawing quality is a little up and down, but the animation is extremely fluid and expressive, and in particular the way the show’s colors are done is a huge part of establishing the energy of the adaptation, placing it somewhere pretty far from reality, despite the surprising depth of the character writing. (Most obvious, this early on, on Renako’s end.) Everything is super bright, there are almost no shadows, and a lot of the backgrounds have minimal detail, leading to them looking sort of like, I don’t even know, city pop album covers or something. It’s a really interesting visual identity for something like this, and shines brightest in a scene in the second half of the first episode where Mai takes Renako to an expensive hotel’s pool. It feeds into the zany but slightly bittersweet vibe of the subject matter to make one of the stronger premieres of the season. I will definitely be keeping up with this, and if you’re on the lookout for a good yuri pickup, I recommend you do the same.

The Water Magician: It’s so fucking tired to complain about bad isekai, but this one had an okay looking trailer and a pretty key visual, and I checked it out, hopeful that it would be a rare standout, or at least better than the baseline of uninspired drivel in this format that continues to trickle out season after season. It was not. Protagonist Mihara Ryou [Murase Ayumu, an actor I normally like] is reincarnated into another world, learns he can use water magic, and spends most of the episode reading a D&D-ass monster manual about the Big Scary Animals that live in his new neighborhood. There are some mostly pretty bad fight scenes. There’s an icebox in his house. It’s all very passé. There’s a dullahan, which is so out of place that it’s the one interesting element to grasp onto here, but even mentioning that much is me doing the show a favor. Everything feels so perfunctory and workmanlike that, even if you are a huge fan of this genre, I can truly not imagine getting anything out of this at all. There’s some alright water animation, as you’d expect from the premise, but other than that there is not a single fucking thing worth talking about in this show. It’s just total ass. It looks bad, is written badly, and isn’t really about anything. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to write this and I can’t imagine anyone wanting to watch it. Easily the worst premiere I sat through this season

And now, the sequels!

Call of The Night, Season 2: An interesting return from the vampire quasi-romcom here. I’m undecided as to whether or not I’ll actually keep up with this one. Despite really liking the series when it originally premiered—I rated it pretty highly on my 2022 year-end article—that was three entire years ago. This episode is very quiet, essentially picks up right where the series previously left off, and honestly it’s not terribly visually ambitious. But I do concede it was nice to hear from Nazuna and Ko for the first time in a long time, even as they’re still figuring out what precisely their relationship to each other actually is, and the show’s nightscapes remain lovely, so maybe I will stick with it. We shall see.

DAN DA DAN, Season 2: My main thought here is that this is an unfortunate and pretty noticeable visual downgrade from season one, which does just kinda suck. This is most obvious in the area of the color choices, which were much duller and less vibrant in this episode than they would’ve been back then. Pretty unfortunate! I’m gonna keep watching to see if it improves but I admit the first episode being so visually lackluster took a bit of the wind out of my sails with this one. The fact that I’ve since gotten mostly-current on the Dandadan manga probably isn’t helping, given that I know what to expect from the series at this point and my honeymoon period with it is several months in the rear view. Still, it wasn’t a bad first episode by any means (although all the usual caveats about Dandadan apply), and this series has the special status of being something I’m watching with a group of friends, so I will be keeping up with it regardless.

My Dress-Up Darling, Season 2: Here’s something to chew on. For some reason, this episode is called “Wakana Gojo, 15 Years Old, Teenager.” No, I do not know why Gojo is being reintroduced to us by All-Star Batman. This quirk aside, I was very happy with this episode overall. My Dress-Up Darling holds a bit of a special place on this site as easily the most popular series I have ever written about (seriously, you guys should see my statistics. Individual episode writeups for MDUD consistently clear almost everything else I put out). I started covering it because of a community vote back in 2022 when it first premiered, and it makes me very happy that, in spite of the gap between seasons, MDUD returns like it never left.

This is in fact easily the strongest return showing of anything here, and makes for a pretty dizzying display of technique. An array of different visual styles and well-timed gags make this one of the most purely fun premieres of the season period. Shinohara Keisuke and his team on are on top of their game here and I really cannot stress just how much fucking fun this premiere is. The opening few minutes are an anime-within-an-anime once again, and they’re so convincing that I actually briefly thought I’d opened the wrong series somehow. (This time, the subject of the episode, TsuCom, is a pastiche of the sort of zany action-comedies that were popular in the late 90s to early 00s. You can easily imagine this kind of thing having originally been a limited-run OVA of some sort before eventually popping up on RetroCrush years later.)

The episode follows Gojo’s attempts to make a bunnygirl outfit for Marin, and as is the norm with this series, this simple premise leads to tons of total goofball shit that really must be seen to be believed. My particular favorite gag ensues when Gojo talks to a fabric vendor and accidentally puts him under the impression that the bunnysuit is for Gojo. This man then has a whole awakening, reasoning that in the modern day, men can absolutely wear bunnysuits and he shouldn’t be so surprised by all of this, only for Marin to appear and for the man to realize his mistake. Obviously, as with all gags centered on pacing and presentation, this is much funnier to watch than it is to have relayed secondhand. Still, my point is that this episode is supremely funny. It’s also quite sweet in places! The episode ends with Gojo attending a Halloween party with Marin and some of her other friends, and he feels rather out of place until Marin mentions his doll-painting to someone else. Initially, he tenses up, but because everyone is impressed and interested in his dolls as opposed to put off—these are a bunch of otaku with varying offbeat hobbies of their own, mind you—the episode ends on a high note, with him finally feeling like he’s found somewhere he belongs. Frankly, I think I actually appreciate Dress-Up Darling now more than I did when I watched the first season. With hindsight, I think I spent far too much of my coverage of the show hemming and hawing on if its fanservice was “okay” or not. Full disclosure, that returns in full force here, too, but if you’re two seasons into this show you know what you’re getting at this point. So let me just say it for the record and wholeheartedly; I am really glad to have this show back.

1: Hi Josh

Posted on July 9, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: TURKEY! TIME TO STRIKE

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 is a real, delicate art to the bait-and-switch premiere. You basically have to sell the audience on two different premises, and you have to sell them on the second one hard enough that they don’t mind that you’re not really doing the first (or at least aren’t doing it the way they thought you would). Also, if you’re really committed to the bit, most or all of your pre-release marketing is going to be about the first premise. So you’re trying to catch fish with the wrong type of worm, essentially, and making it that much harder on yourself in the process.

Accordingly, anime that take this kind of swing are a bit rare. The most recent example I can think of is last year’s Bang Bravern, and its two conceits are closely enough related that I can’t imagine too many people were majorly disappointed when it turned out to be a super robot show instead of a gritty real robot show.

Turkey! Time to Strike was presented in its early marketing materials as a simple show about bowling. This is a valid niche within the “girls doing stuff” supergenre of anime, for sure, and it comes to us from Bakken Record, a studio whose main prior credit of note is Ippon! Again, also a show about a girls’ sport club—judo in the case of that series—so this seemed like a perfectly logical next step. No one had any real reason to believe this was anything but a straightforward drama (or comedy, or maybe both) about a girls’ bowling league.

In its opening minutes, that’s exactly what it is. We open on our heroines flubbing the opening match of a tournament, as our lead Otonashi Mai [Hishikawa Hana] gets a snake-eye split on her final ball and washes her team out of the match. Tensions run high afterward, with the serious and competitive Godai Rina [Ichinose Kana] accusing her of throwing the match deliberately. Rina has quite a lot to say to her other teammates, too, pointing the finger at Mitaka Nozomi [Tenma Yuuki] for doing her makeup and not taking the game seriously while it went on, Ichinose Sayuri [Iwata Haruki] for constantly throwing gutter balls because she tenses up so bad, and the nerdy Nikaidou Nanase [Itou Ayasa] she simply calls a benchwarmer.

As this argument drags on, it comes out that Nozomi and Sayuri only joined in the first place because Mai asked them to, and Nanase only joined because she thought the experience might “help her in the future” in some way. Upset with all of this, Rina quits the club. Mai reassures the others that she’ll talk to Rina at school the following day, since she doesn’t want the club to be disbanded for lack of membership. There’s some nice camera work here where Mai takes her ramune—this entire dispute started in the first place because the club bought a round of “celebratory” sodas despite losing—and drinks from it, the marble inside rolling around like a bowling ball as the camera fixes on it. So far, so sports drama.

On their way home, the remains of the bowling club spot a construction site where a pit is being dug. They remark that there was a secondhand book shop there just two days prior, and one of the girls muses that it takes only an instant to lose something. For whatever reason, this really gets to Mai, and she decides she has to reconcile with Rina right now. Thus invigorated, she and the rest of the bowling club make their way to the alley again to try to patch things up with her. Rina’s not terribly impressed by Mai’s pleas, but she offers a simple ultimatum: if Mai can beat her in a bowling match, she’ll at least think about coming back.

Thus, we get a nice setpiece of the two going head to head, one on one, the bowling balls thundering down the lane as a downpour breaks out outside. It’s honestly pretty solid, and you can see the kind of show that Turkey could easily have decided to be on display here. This sort of thing, the idea that the best way to understand someone, to get through to them, is to take them on in your shared field of competition, is very common in sports anime and fiction about athletics in general. It’s good stuff, and Turkey sells it well.

On the last frame, Mai throws a split again, and Rina storms off, assuming she’s doing this on purpose and that Rina’s being mocked. But Mai won’t give up, and she throws her second ball right as a bolt of lightning strikes a mysterious artefact dug up from the construction site outside. At that very moment, Turkey stops being a sports anime, and becomes something else entirely.

And that’s the end of the episode!

Seriously!

What utter goofball shit! What chutzpah! Why would you make a show like this?! Turkey, whose English-market subtitle Time to Strike suddenly makes a lot more sense, opens itself up to both barrels here. If you’re here for the sports drama stuff, the ending is going to throw you for a complete loop. If you heard about the twist beforehand and wanted the show to get to that, you have to get through a whole episode of teenagers arguing about fucking bowling first. So on the surface, this seems like a terrible idea. And yet, to me at least, this speaks to an unshakeable confidence in this story. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Turkey is going to turn out to be some kind of masterpiece, or even be particularly good overall, but come on! How can you not love that?

Even so, I do think the show has a good command of its own strengths. There’s a strong web of character dynamics underpinning this episode that works equally well for both the “sports drama” premise and the “stranded in the past” premise, and I think that’s going to be the secret sauce that ties the whole thing together. Even if it doesn’t, when you pivot from a bowling club to time travel in your first episode, I can only wonder what the hell else you have in store. Thus, Turkey is a representation of probably my single favorite thing about anime, its endless capacity for surprise. None of us know where this is going, but the second trailer for the series, released after the premiere dropped, provides a hint.

Where we’re going, we don’t need lanes to bowl.

Posted on July 7, 2025July 7, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: CITY THE ANIMATION

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.

Do you believe in the power of astrology? Most people these days do not, but some still find meaning in the old magic. There’s no scientific proof that it can actually tell you anything about anything, of course, but that’s just it, isn’t it? Of course there wouldn’t be scientific proof of a mystical art. But find yourself cursed with miserable luck some sunny Sunday morning and you may just wonder, well, my sign is Capricorn, and the newspaper said Capricorns have it rough today. Could that be why? If so, is there anything I can do to turn it around? Don a miniskirt, perhaps? Thus experiencing a mix of dizzy skirt-go-spinny sugar rush endorphins and sheer embarrassment because skirts aren’t normally your thing and your whole family knows it? That’s just one example, of course, but it’s the example most pertinent to CITY THE ANIMATION, Kyoto Animation‘s latest project and their second team-up overall with Nichijou mangaka Arawi Keiichi. (Director Ishidate Taichi was the assistant director on Nichijou, which feels equally pertinent.) It’s the premise, more or less, of the first segment, and a good primer for what CITY is all about.

Here’s what it’s not; Nichijou Season 2. Possibly one of the most longed-for hypothetical second seasons of all time, Nichijou‘s TV anime was never renewed after its original 26-episode run. For whatever combination of reasons, they just never went back to that same well, and anyone coming in with the expectation that CITY is going to somehow be “the same as” Nichijou, one of the greatest comedy anime of all time, is going to be a bit thrown. CITY is definitely playing in the same playground, but it’s using different toys, and the games it’s playing are slightly simpler. Rather than following a fairly small core cast, the focus of an episode of CITY seems that it will change from segment to segment, rotating between a vast array of characters that live in the titular metropolis, showcasing both how their lives intersect and also their individual peculiarities.

Two high school girls with no afterschool club to call home talk hypothetical superpowers, a woman in a bucket hat shows us her collection of stim objects and invents a god of her own making, only to start giving it offerings. A part-timer works at a noodle shop where she has to cover up an embarrassing incident. Wouldn’t you know it? The Capricorn in the miniskirt is the owner’s son. Pinning gags to the corkboard like this kills them, so I’m loathe to go into the peculiarities of how each and every one of CITY‘s little jokes pays off, but almost all of them hit, which is an impressive bullseye ratio for any comedy anime, much less one that fires this many arrows in a given episode. Much of the comedy is antics-driven and thus rather physical (and it will sometimes drop out dialogue entirely to emphasize the visual element), but there’s some verbal comedy in there as well. It’s a nice mix overall. I’d say my single favorite joke from this first episode comes from the noodle shop segment, where the owner, one chef Makabe Tsurubishi [Kawahara Yoshihisa], frets about how to cover up his ridiculous mistake of dropping a plate of crispy noodles into a customer’s handbag. His employee, part-timer Nagumo Midori [Komatsu Mikako]—possibly the closest thing CITY has to a main character so far, and indeed she’s on the key visual—wonders why he can’t just apologize and explain the situation. Chef Makabe is emphatic in his refusal: the customer might get mad and yell at him.

^{It really is that serious.}

We should talk about the show’s actual look, too. CITY closely resembles no other anime of 2025, with popping, bright, bold colors, thick character outlines, and an overall feel as reminiscent of a pop-up book as any other anime. You can definitely draw a visual line from Nichijou to this series, but CITY‘s a rare one in the contemporary landscape.

And really, that rarity is part of what makes this one of the easiest slam dunks of the year in terms of premieres. I can’t really find a single fault with this show. Sure, it’s again worth reiterating it’s not literally Nichijou Season 2, but you’re not going to find any better embodiment of that show’s spirit in 2025 than this. Our ordinary lives remain a series of miracles, it’s true. Really, really goofy ones.

Posted on July 4, 2025July 7, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: NECRONOMICO AND THE COSMIC HORROR SHOW

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.

“Humans are often fooled by hope, but can also be fooled by the idea that there is none.”

-Osamu Dazai, Pandora’s Box, as quoted at the beginning of this episode.

Because you clicked on this article, I imagine you want to read about Necronomico and The Cosmic Horror Show. Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where we have to bitch about the subtitle situation first. Yeah, again.

When Necronomico first went live on Crunchyroll servers, people discovered pretty quickly that the subtitles were absolutely awful. This was not a case like the above-belinked Nokotan where MTL involvement was merely suspected. (And in fact, Nokotan‘s case turned out to be a much more human example of bad subs.) No, this was so blatant that the German sub track still had “ChatGPT said:” accidentally left in one line.

To hear Crunchyroll tell it, this was a misunderstanding. They released a vague statement about the MTL subs violating their agreement with the vendor, and the subtitles have since been replaced by properly-done ones from CR’s usual in-house team, who really ought to be paid better for the sort of bullshit they have to put up with. Nonetheless, public outrage actually accomplished something here, and as such, it is now possible to take the show on its own merits.

This is a good thing, because while I wouldn’t call Necronomico’s first episode premiere of the year or anything, it’s at least entertainingly weird. And as I’ve said many times, if you can’t swing “good,” “weird” is at least a good second option. “Weird” will get people looking your way. “Weird” gets your foot in the door.

What we have here is a janky possible trainwreck-in-the-making, an exposition-frontloaded whatchamacallit that scans as a cross between a death game anime and ReBOOT. It is a loud, gaudy, and sometimes outright obnoxious show, but being brash to the point of being overbearing can be its own kind of virtue. Take a listen, for example, to Sugiyama Riho hollering into the mic—finally in a protagonist role where she can do what she does best for the first time since Wave, Listen To Me!—as she voices hotheaded livestreamer Kurono “Necronomico” Miko. Take a look at the hyper-saturated neon color palette. Fret over the size of the bloated cast. Bask in the shameless “ME!ME!ME!”-core character design of main antagonist Cthulu [Iwami Manaka]. It’s all quite a lot!

We open on Miko, our heroine, getting fired from her day job. Her boss tries to comfort her that now she can focus on her other job, streaming, full-time, but there’s no denying that this is bad news. Not just for the usual reasons—she has an apartment she has to make rent on, and a pet lizard she has to feed, not to mention herself—but also because a friend of hers is laid up in the hospital, and she’s worried that said friend will get hung out to dry. That friend, Mayu [also Iwami Manaka, but don’t worry, I’m sure that’s a coincidence], is in a coma. That’s been going around among streamers lately as it turns out, a well-placed bit of background exposition informs us that livestreamers have been randomly falling into comas and no one is quite sure why. Still, that’s hardly the thing on Miko’s mind as she tries to brainstorm how to get some cash together.

Desperate and out of options, Miko has little choice but to answer when she gets a very spammy-looking email, promising her a decent chunk of change if she attends an event for influencers that seems to involve some kind of video game. We’re introduced to a few other characters, such as Kagurazaka Kanna [Hazumi Nana, making her debut], who has something of a one-sided rivalry with Miko following an incident at another event some time prior, a truly annoying eSports guy named Eita [Kawashima Reiji], a fellow named Sano Seishirou [Tamaru Atsushi] who runs an educational channel about math, and so on, and so forth. Because of the ReBOOT comparison at the top of this piece, you can probably guess where this is going. Yes, our cast is coerced into playing the “beta” of a VR game, except, of course, the VR is some Sword Art Online deep dive bullshit where it directly interferes with your brain, which is, naturally, kept from our characters until they’re already actually in the game.

The game, in a bit of a twist from what you might expect from this sort of thing, is not some RPG or indeed really anything of the sort. Instead, “Super Rumbleland” is basically Fall Guys with some pretty basic linear platforming challenges mixed in. What really sells this though is that the show actually completely changes art style when inside the game. Meaning that for a good half of its first episode, Necronomico actually looks like this!

In fact, in one of the show’s funniest and best visual touches, the in-game avatars are sometimes even given Gundam-style cockpit cut-ins to show who’s talking.

Perhaps inevitably, this change for the even-goofier visually is where the story starts to acquire overt stakes. After having the gist of the game (“just get to the end”, essentially) explained to them by living tutorial NPC / displaced toku villain Tick Tock Man [Yasumoto Hiroki], our heroes make their way through the course. Tick Tock, or rather his “bosses,” get bored of the methodical approach deployed by some of the players, namely Eita, and introduce an ad hoc time limit mid-game. Our big action setpiece here in the first episode is thus the characters trying to scramble to the finish line while the world around them is enveloped in black fog and falling apart. All the while, a big ol’ sinister eyeball spies on them from below the course.

Miko, Kanna, and a few of the others make it out of the course, albeit only barely, where they are promptly ejected into a crowd of jeering and cheering space monsters. These are the titular cosmic horrors, and everything our heroes have done up to this point in the episode has been for their entertainment. Honestly, it’s a lot to take in, but I like these guys, especially the one who’s a giant chicken.

The episode ends with a crucial piece of context clicking into place; Miko actually recognizes Cthulu (not named here, but identified as such on character sheets), because she happens to look a lot like Mayu. Cthulu explains that, yeah, that’s on purpose, because the entire point of this whole arrangement is for the elder gods to leave the streamers that enter their game comatose, so they can “borrow” their forms to communicate with the rest of humanity. What exactly that entails long-term is a revelation the show is saving for later, as is why they want to talk to humans in the first place. Still, it’s a good hook, as is Miko’s raging defiance when presented with all this. She’s seething mad at Cthulu particularly, and it’s pretty clear from the brief flashback shots we get that Miko and Mayu were very close. I am choosing to believe romantically so, as it adds an overtone to Miko’s burning anger at Cthulu that I think is just delightful.

The ED ends with Miko flipping the bird to her newfound “audience”, as good a signoff as any anime’s premiere has ever had.

Taken on the whole, I’d say this is one of the season’s better premieres thus far. If there are complaints to be had, they’re about pacing, more than anything. And to be honest, complaining about the pacing in an anime often feels like complaining about the mixing on an album. It’s a real thing, it can definitely be bad, and it’s a valid point to criticize. But unless it completely ruins the experience I find it hard to devote too much space to. Yeah, there’s a ton of crammed-in exposition here and it’s a little awkward. It is what it is. Visually, the show looks pretty good. It’s a bit up and down in terms of consistency, but good sequences well outnumber the less impressive ones, and because the show seems like it’s going to be switching art styles once an episode, any shortcomings with its 2D animation are less of a big deal than they might otherwise be.

As for what, if anything, Necronomico is trying to say. Well, it doesn’t exactly seem to take a sterling view of the streamers making up its cast. So perhaps there’s something to be said in there about the over-commercialization of our lives, this black work of selling parts of our lived experience as packaged product for an audience—a mass of beings just as scary as the Elder Gods, perhaps—to gorge themselves on. Then again, maybe not. It’s early days, and there are many directions Necronomico could choose to take its freewheeling death game setup in. Mainly, I just hope the entire controversy with the subtitles doesn’t just sink this show’s chances of finding an overseas audience entirely, because this series is odd enough to warrant interest. Remember; the horror show is cosmic, but the #content is iconic. Or something like that.

The Magic Planet

Month: July 2025

The Weekly Orbit [7/26/25]

The Weekly Orbit [7/18/25]

Seasonal First Impressions: Summer Stragglers & Sequels

Seasonal First Impressions: TURKEY! TIME TO STRIKE

Seasonal First Impressions: CITY THE ANIMATION

Seasonal First Impressions: NECRONOMICO AND THE COSMIC HORROR SHOW