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 Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
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 Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
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 mostofthem. 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 Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
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 Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
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 Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
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 Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
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 Directoryto 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.
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 Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
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 Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
I am getting a little tired of talking about how tough my life is, so I’m going to skip most of it. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know things have been complicated around here lately. I bring it up at all only to explain why the format is so different from last year’s Year-End List. This year slipped through my fingers, so I have not had the time, energy, or frankly the desire to concoct a nice and neat worst-to-best list like I did last year and in 2020. To be honest, it’s just also felt like a particularly mediocre year for anime. Certainly it’s the weakest since I started this blog.
That said, a brief Top 5 like I did in 2021 also felt inadequate. So, instead of a carefully curated list where I weigh all of my options intelligently, I’ve decided to embrace the chaos. This is less of a curated list and more of a sideways data dump. Some of these things have been written for a while, and are only finding a home here. Others are new. Some are very long, and some are quite brief. Length has no correlation to quality here; there were a few things that I really liked but could only summon up brief takes on (or none at all, in a couple cases, but we’ll touch on that again at the bottom of the article).
Furthermore; the entries here are not in any particular order beyond a favorite being at the top (which is actually the bottom because that’s how listicles work). They’re still mostly anime that came out this year, but some of them, as the title implies, aren’t anime at all, and a few of these things are—gasp—not even from Japan. Instead of worrying so much about format and qualifiers I decided to just write about the things this year that gave me a strong emotional response, made me think, or brought me some comfort in these bizarre times. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the madness.
That said, I wouldn’t quite feel right—
MAGICAL DESTROYERS
—if I didn’t start off talking about one of the few true clunkers I watched end to end this year.
Ah, Magical Destroyers. There’s something tragic about the complete sputtering-out that happened to this series, a reasonably strong first couple of episodes lead into most of the rest of the show being absolutely dismal, and if you wanted the bite-sized review of the show, that’s about all you’d have to say.
Of course, we’re not interested in being bite-sized here. What’s interesting to me about Magical Destroyers, some months on, now that the dust has settled, is the sheer scale of the drop-off. There was a big fall here, and I’m not sure how obvious that was to people looking in from the outside.
In premise, there’s nothing inherently wrong with Magical Destroyers. As I’ve said many times, its core conceit of a world where general, sneering dislike for the nerdy and withdrawn among us turns into outright persecution is a bit indulgent, but it’s not completely crazy. Nor is the idea that they’d then fight back. Other anime (Rumble Garanndoll and Akiba’s Trip, mainly) have done interesting things with this material, so it’s not that the show’s premise is the problem. Instead, what sinks Magical Destroyers is a massive sense of inconsistency, both in tone and just general competence. We’ve been here before, where an anime having bright spots makes the whole thing worse given their proximity to the mediocrity that makes up the rest of the series. Those bright spots aren’t meaningless, but with time, more removed from Magical Destroyers than I was when I first reviewed it, I mostly just remember the whole thing as a letdown.
Worse, there’s a particularly bitter postscript here. Like many anime, Magical Destroyers was created in part to promote a mobile game and hopeful cash cow. All told, Magical Destroyers Kai—the game in question—was active from just April to August of this year, a service life of less than six months. A failure to clear even the incredibly low bar set by such projects of ill repute as Pride of Orange’s mobile game. This is a truly depressing flit and sputter from what started out as such a promising project. Worse, given that I imagine quite a few people are out of a lot of money given Jun Imagawa’s pet project completely tanking, it seems entirely possible that the man will never lead an anime project ever again. Magical Destroyers represents more, then, than just the failure of a single series. It is the failure of one man’s entire creative vision, and the decision making of those who supported him. Worse shows definitely aired this year—the usual slate of iffy sequels, bottom-of-the-barrel narou-kei adaptations, deep pools of mediocrity like Revenger (brilliantly reviewed here by my friend Julian), and whatever the hell was going on with The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses—but I can think of none that so thoroughly embody disappointment as a concept. The rest of this list is going to mostly be positive, but I felt the need to revisit Magical Destroyers. For better or worse, the letdown has stuck with me.
“SHINKIRO”
About half of you are cheering right now, and the other half of you have no idea what this is or why it’s on this list. What is “SHINKIRO”? Aren’t those two of those girls from Hololive? What’s going on?
Well, yes, they are two of those girls from Hololive; that’s Gawr Gura and Houshou Marine (operating here as a very creatively named idol unit; GuraMarine), two of the VTuber Agency Imperial’s most popular talents. This is a music video. Specifically, a really fucking good one that reimagines Marine and Gura’s friendship as a sort of bittersweet romance. It’s inspired, is what it is. The pirate and the mermaid, more or less. A summer that lasts the rest of your life. The key to that vibe—a mix of nostalgia for a time and place that never quite really existed and an implied sadness that it’s forever out of reach—is the music video’s art style, a dreamland pastiche of pre-Millennium anime, reinterpreted through a modern lens by Studio KAI of all groups. I’m guessing the general idea was either Marine or Gura’s (I’m not huge into VTubers these days, but I know Gura is a city pop fiend and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn Marine was too), and was followed through by art director Yuusuke Takeda, who has been in the industry for long enough that he’d have been working when this style was current.
The song itself is worth at least touching on, too. I’m not a music critic, so my vocabulary here is even more limited than it’d be otherwise, but to my ear this is almost indistinguishable from “authentic” city pop from the 80s. Things like this can seem transient, and thus not worth discussing in the same breath as “real” anime or similarly longform art like games or manga. But here, when I’m writing this in the second week of a particularly dark December, it reminds me that summer, no matter how far away, is real somewhere.
Oh, and Marine and Gura totally fuck in this video. Like, they don’t literally show it but there are a limited number of ways to interpret “two people wake up naked in a bed together.” Wild.
MAKE THE EXORCIST FALL IN LOVE
Here’s an elevator pitch for you; psychosexual Catholic battle shonen. This is another rule-bendy entry, since Exorcist here technically started back in late 2021. But it’s still ongoing, and yours truly happened to only find out about it this year, so this is where it gets written about (for the first, but maybe not the last? time). Exorcist is a real oddity, a battle series that leans pretty heavily on Catholic myth and morality for its worldbuilding to weave the tale of a teenage exorcist forbidden from the usual affairs of his age because he’s destined to save the world from Satan, a rare appearance by the capital D-L Demon Lord in contemporary manga. The general premise of said exorcist having to protect a seemingly-innocent girl who is actually a demon might sound like the setup for a fairly goofy romcom, but that would belie the fact that Exorcist is actually one of the gnarliest things that runs in Shonen Jump, if only intermittently. There’s something very surreal about the more straightforward romance manga aspects rubbing shoulders with the battle shonen flash, body horror, and unflinching depictions of abuse that otherwise color the manga.
Full disclosure, I was raised Catholic but am contemporaneously a practicing neopagan. So, the manga’s strange mix of subject matter feels like it’s simultaneously meant to cater to and repel people like me, folks who have not set foot in a church in many years and might never do so again. I think this may also be why Exorcist has struggled to really find an audience over here, but at the same time, that singularity of theme and subject matter is what makes it so distinct. Every chapter is a parade of these disparate concepts, and there’s much to be found in seeing how they’ll manage to work together this time, even as the material itself is often grim (see, any number of the manga’s very upfront depictions of sexual assault) or puzzling (the character of Aria and her concatenation of every possible meaning of the word “idol”). Exorcist is a true oddball, I’m hoping against hope that it gets an anime someday, but even if it doesn’t, it’s definitely worth a read if you can stomach what it’s putting down.
CASSETTE BEASTS
The first of several “there is really no way to argue this is even remotely anime” entries on this list, Cassette Beasts is a creature collector game from smallish studio Raw Fury. If you just want the buy/not buy verdict on this charming little indie game, I’ll give it to you in two sentences. Cassette Beasts is Pokémon for depressed burnout Millennials. This is unequivocally a good thing, and if you’re struggling to imagine how, you are not the target demo for Cassette Beasts.
Creature collector games developed in “the west” tend to get slapped with the Poké-clone label regardless of how closely or distantly they adhere to Pokémon’s formula. But while Cassette Beasts is definitely a riff on that formula, it’s far from just rotely copying it; more than can be said of some games in this genre. Aside from a number of flavor differences—for one thing, you don’t command the monsters, you turn into them, here. Feel free to provide your own “henshin!” shouts at the start of each battle—there are some important mechanical ones, too. The vast majority of battles are two-on-two, and you go through the whole game with one of several partners, who you can swap out freely at a café. In addition to Pokémon’s usual types, or close matches thereto, there are also Plastic, Glass, and “Astral” monsters, who lack any real equivalent in that other series. (Astrals are often themed in a broadly similar way to Ghost-type Pokémon, but they work very differently.) Speaking of types; hitting a type-advantageous move doesn’t just do more damage than usual, every single interaction of that sort has some kind of effect. For example; if a Fire-type attack hits an Ice-type beast, it’ll melt, turning into a Water-type. If that same attack hits a Poison-type, the toxins within the monster will ignite, causing a burn status. Metal attacks will shatter Glass-type beast, spreading damage-dealing shards all over the battlefield, but that same monster could strike a Lightning-type beast and cause it to become “Insulated”, reducing its targeting range in the process. There are quite a few of these interactions, and learning the ins and outs of them is recommended for those seeking to truly master the combat system.
The monsters themselves are fun, too. Not every single design is a winner, but of the 120 on offer here, the vast majority are fun in a fresh way that gives them a distinct look in comparison to Cassette Beasts’ genrefellows. One minor point of contention might be the often-punny portmanteau names, which is a naming scheme directly cribbed from Pokémon and used in many other games in this genre besides. Still, it’s hard to get too mad about gems like “Salamagus” and “Crowpocalypse.”
Some might also take issue with that “120”, since that’s relatively small a number for this genre, but if the pool of monsters and moves seems limited, it’s broader than it seems at first glance. For one thing; techniques aren’t picked from a simple level-up list here, and you have far more than four slots per ‘mon, comprised of both active attacks, buffs and debuffs as well as passive skills that are always in play and require no further input from you the user. They’re also not stuck on the monster that learns them; instead, they’re items in the form of stickers (those are what you earn from levelling your monsters), and can be freely swapped out at any time. (Sadly, although understandably since otherwise there’d be no real gameplay reason to use different monsters, there is still only a limited selection of what stickers are compatible with what tapes.) This lets you build different instances of ostensibly similar monsters pretty differently, and if you’re creative with your stickers you can come up with some powerful stuff. My personal right-hand man during my playthrough was an Artillerex—a flak cannon / T. Rex hybrid—who I stuck a variety of “gun” attacks of different elements on, plus the very useful passive Roll Again, which gives monsters a chance to strike a second time at the end of their turn and use a random move they have enough Action Points for. The broad type coverage and multi-striking made it a machine gun of total elemental destruction, and I never got tired of using it. Other monsters have more narrow applications, of course, but the fact that you can fiddle around with your creatures like this provides a huge amount of appeal to even casual experimenters, and I’m sure those who love min-maxing will find even more to tinker with here.
For two; in addition to the basic 120 beasts, every single creature also comes in a variety of “bootleg” types, which tint its sprite a different color, give it a different typing, and change what attack stickers they get as they level up. If you’re not picky about art, you could only a little disingenuously argue that there’s really more like 1,500-odd creatures, and the vast majority of them just happen to be insanely rare, since bootlegs have a Shiny Pokémon-esque rarity to them. Still, they’re often worth seeking out, especially since bootlegs earn rare upgraded attack stickers with bonus effects more often than normal monsters do.
Now look at this, a half dozen paragraphs about the gameplay and almost none about the story or anything else. That shouldn’t be taken to mean Cassette Beasts‘ only strengths are on the gameplay side. The story itself is a little rough, but the general premise—CB’s world is a mysterious island that our protagonists, and everyone else who lives there, are isekai’d to from our own world without warning—is intriguing, and more than the actual narrative per se Cassette Beasts excels at vibes. The main town’s theme; the melancholic, gauzy “Wherever We Are Now“, is an absolute masterpiece of game music and sets the tone perfectly. My generation is all getting older, and it’s nice to play something that understands that on an empathic, thematic level.
IPPON! AGAIN
The first offering from new-to-the-game studio Bakken Record, Mou Ippon! rang in the new year with a smile.
Some folks probably argued—amongst themselves or with others—over whether Mou Ippon was a sports anime or a school club anime. The truth of course is that it’s both, combining the former’s invocation of intimacy by way of physical contact with the latter’s easygoing warmth. Lot of blushing in this one. Between that and the constant grappling between girls, it’s hard to argue that this show isn’t at least a LITTLE gay. (There’s a pretty great sequence at the show’s halfway point where a new girl, the self-proclaimed “Wonder Child” Ana Nagumo, joins the club and demands to be thrown. Said girl joined the club in order to get closer to her friend. I leave the conclusions there to you.) It’s not the best-looking show on this list by a long shot (the actual judo is always drawn and choreographed quite nicely, anything else is a crapshoot), but it has heart.
At the end of the day, this is a series about the pure joy of athleticism. Anything else is secondary. Both our central cast and the series’ many supporting characters (mostly other judoka) face a fair number of trials during the show’s run—outside pressure to succeed, the difficulty of overcoming natural differences in ability, etc.—but inevitably, the spirit of the sport wins out.
MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM: THE WITCH FROM MERCURY
I’m fudging my own numbers here, since technically Witch From Mercury started last year, but I didn’t cover it in the 2022 end-of-year writeup, and the second season aired this year. So it gets to stay here, keeping the company of 2023’s motley crew.
I’ll be honest, I mostly think of Witch From Mercury as a yuri series. That’s not strictly true; it’s a war drama and a couple other things besides, but given that mousey protagonist Suletta Mercury’s relationship with her rich-girl crush Miorine Rembran defines the entire thrust of the series, it makes sense, at least to me, to put it in that category. Throughout, they struggle together and apart as the political landscape of the Utena-inflected school they both attend whirls around them, eventually engulfing the whole solar system in a conflict orchestrated by the main villain, Suletta’s sinister—and very attractive—mom.
In an intellectual, detached sense, my main criticisms remain the somewhat spotty plotting; the conclusion is just a bit too neat and it avoids asking many really hard questions. In addition—and maybe this is a me problem—the show’s sheer complexity and the amount of overlapping power plays, etc., prevented me from getting emotionally invested in much of the story in a very immediate way. Suletta and Miorine’s relationship ups and downs were really the only exception there.
Yet, it’s hard for me to be mad at something that can muster up this much genuine optimism and empathy even in the face of an overwhelmingly bad situation. (And the things going on in the show’s universe are certainly not great.) Plus, it has a canon gay-married couple. That’s genuinely significant, given how huge Gundam is as a franchise, even if the show’s owners tried and failed to walk it back in one of the most comedically cowardly company moves I’ve ever seen. A move that was eventually undone by the show’s own director. You can’t keep a good power couple down.
HELL’S PARADISE
It just ain’t fair. Back in the day, Hell’s Paradise would’ve gone to a workman studio and aired for a good 2, 3 years straight. It would’ve picked up innumerable filler arcs along the way. There’d be shipping wars. It would’ve been great.
But we are not back in the day. It isn’t 2006, and Hell’s Paradise was brought into a significantly less forgiving anime industry and absolutely choked out by the sheer volume of competition. That in mind, I really don’t know if I could tell you why this show, of all the ones I started but didn’t finish this year, is one that I went back to and eventually completed in the dying days of December, here. Maybe it’s just that despite various deficiencies (janky visuals, rote character arcs, questionable gender politics) it’s still pretty good at delivering good old fashioned brawls, with fights that make up what they might lack in visual polish with a genuine cool factor and a powerful sense of rhythm that lets our protagonists always feel like the underdogs in their quest on the violently hostile island referred to by the show’s title. Maybe it’s because it had the year’s single best opening theme. Maybe it’s because Gabimaru managed to be the ultimate wife guy in a year where we also got another season of Spy x Family (and on that note, I was dead sure his wife and Yor Forger shared a voice actress, but nope! Different people). Maybe it’s the killer aesthetics, with gnarly monsters derived from a deliberately twisted interpretation of Taoism.
Whatever my reasons might’ve been; the themes don’t hurt; by its end, the first season of Hell’s Paradise stresses that we’re all in this together. Perhaps appropriately, this ended up being the last anime of 2023 I finished, and that spirit of solidarity is worth carrying into the New Year.
OSHI NO KO
Lady Gaga summed it up best when she called the rerelease of her first album The Fame Monster. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; the Pop Machine eats its own young, and few in the industry are ever really spared. This is the thematic thrust of Oshi no Ko, and is a huge preoccupation that takes up most of the manga (and of course, this anime adaptation), irrespective of its actual plot points. But we’ve gone over that on this site before. What’s interesting to me about OnK is how as a piece of art, it itself is complicit in this cycle. This is both why it’s on the list at all and why it’s not higher up.
Oshi no Ko‘s main characters are Aquamarine and Ruby, children (/reincarnated fans of. It’s complicated) of the late idol Hoshino Ai. Yet, it’s Ai herself who ends up on posters and in key visuals, in the shockingly large amount of tie-in commercials related to the series, and so on. There’s haunting the narrative and then there’s haunting the broader sphere of Japanese pop culture at large, and that latter stage is where Ai is really at. There’s an apparent contradiction here between Ai as a symbol of promise and life snuffed out too soon and Ai as a commercial titan, but any disagreement between these aspects is illusory. Ai is viable as a commercial idea because she dies in the show’s debut episode; that’s the start of her legend, and is why people care about her at all. One leads to the other, and no matter how convenient it might be to try to separate the two, doing so is impossible.
On a more serious note, this same self-contradictory nature is why I haven’t really covered OnK here since abruptly dropping my Let’s Watch of it back in June. For some fans, the strength of the narrative overtook its real life influences when the mother of the real person who Akane’s early story arc is based on complained, and that woman was subsequently harassed by fans of the series.
Things like this make it difficult to go to bat for OnK, despite its strengths. The unfortunate truth for me is that, like a problematic pop star who ends up in headlines as much for bad behavior as great singles, I will probably keep following the anime, and it might even show up on this list next year, if I make one. Don’t expect to see it between now and then, though. Sometimes it’s best to keep your fandom to yourself.
THE 100 GIRLFRIENDS WHO REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY LOVE YOU
In a sense, what is there to say here? It’s a comedy show and it’s funny. Mission accomplished. On the other hand, though, there’s a real accomplishment in how affable 100 Girlfriends is despite the fact that it’s an over-the-top horny harem comedy that by its premise requires The One Guy to date many, many girls simultaneously. That sounds like a recipe for disaster in the context of a romantic comedy, but our boy here, Rentaro, just genuinely is that good. If you can remember the general sell on Catarina from In My Next Life as a Villainess!, the general idea is the same. Rentaro manages to feel like he really is the right person for all of the show’s women just by dint of the fact that he’s insanely likeable, with eyebrows the size of banana leaves and an even bigger heart; a total genius of emotional intelligence who knows exactly what to say and when to say it, a supernaturally smooth operator just because he’s so good at connecting with people on an emotional level. No wonder a half dozen girls and counting are falling over themselves to smooch him.
Which would be meaningless if the girls weren’t also great, but they thankfully are. Each is a classic harem series archetype either dialed up to eleven or tweaked in some other way, all of whom work together to create an absolutely pitch-perfect ensemble cast. Tossed in a blender of absurd comedy, overflowing with puns (thanks in part to a delightfully loose official sub track) and slapstick while mostly remaining good natured, a handful of exceptions aside. (I could probably do without the entire character of the old schoolteacher. But she’s a bit character and doesn’t show up much, so we’ll forgive it for now.) It’s also shockingly good at the more tender and serious parts of romance. It really seems like this stuff should suffer given the sheer amount of characters, but somehow all of them feel like they really do work not just with Rentaro but also with each other.
100 GFs is a silly, sometimes outlandishly horny show, but I think its genuinely big heart makes a case for it as perhaps the year’s single best comedy and one of its best shows overall; a perfect polyamorous fairy tale for the modern age. What else could you ask for?
TENGOKU DAIMAKYO
It’s probably for the better that this list isn’t organized like last year’s. If it were; where the hell would I put Tengoku Daimakyo? (Heavenly Delusion unofficially and widely, despite the Disney+ English release using a straight transliteration of its Japanese title.) We’re in murky waters, here. Heavenly Delusion goes some very strange and very dark places over the course of its 12-episode run. A run that feels, frankly, too brief to possibly contain everything the show explores. The series maps out a grim coastline populated by all the horrors, real and imagined, of the human psyche. Abuse, violence, teenage pregnancy, mental illness, human experimentation, the damaged relationships between people in crisis, eugenics, murder, and rape. This is bleak, bleak, bleak territory. Maybe too bleak? It’s hard to say.
The big Discourse Point about Heavenly Delusion was its adjacency to queer issues. “Adjacency to” because the plot point in question—spoiler alert, here—that Kiruko, one of the leads, has the brain of their own younger brother Haruki, forcibly transplanted into their own skull via some horrible procedure. This was criticized for appropriating the transgender experience, a point of view which, as a trans person myself, I sympathize with but don’t really find compelling, if only because Kiruko/Haruki’s experiences are so different from actually “being a guy in a girl’s body” (or any permutation thereof) that any similarity seems coincidental. (I’m open to the idea that I might be wrong, and if it is intentionally supposed to parallel the trans experience then it says some very bad things about original author Masakazu Ishiguro‘s opinion of trans people, but that seems like a big if.)
I’ll admit, though, it took me a while to come to that conclusion, partly just because wow is that a fucking plotline to put into your show, but also because Heavenly Delusion legitimately does dip into some dicey territory. I find it hard to justify the show’s ogling of Kiruko’s body, for example, and I have no idea what to make of a lengthy subplot that, without getting into the details here for the general sake of saving space, I found weirdly ableist. But I’ve also seen the exact opposite interpretation. Was I just reading it uncharitably? It’s hard to say.
But then again, I don’t entirely know what to make of most of Heavenly Delusion in general, and all that in mind you might think I dislike it. That isn’t really the case, though! In addition to its more obvious visual merits, the show has a real warmth and empathy to it in its best moments that does feel, despite the vast differences in just about every other respect, of a piece with the original mangaka’s best-known prior work, And Yet The Town Moves. A core part of a certain strain of post-apocalyptic fiction is that regardless of circumstance, people are fundamentally the same. Heavenly Delusion seems to believe that too, and is undecided on whether or not it’s a good thing. This is without getting into the show’s more bizarre, out-there sci fi elements. Even in brief summary, there’s just so much to this thing that it’s hard to condense into tidy little phrases.
I feel much the same about the show overall. I wouldn’t sort my thoughts into neat categories like calling it good or bad or even saying I have “mixed feelings.” But I have a lot of feelings, and a lot of thoughts. I think to a certain degree, simply being so memorable will count for a lot in the long run. Beyond that, who knows? Maybe I’m just not ready for this one yet.
VOID STRANGER
Inside the box is just another box. Void Stranger, a Sokoban-inspired block puzzle game from Finnish development team System Erasure, is by an order of magnitude the most opaque thing on this list. It’s also, just a fair warning, one of those pieces of art that is impossible to discuss without spoiling the hell out of it. So if you’re just looking for an endorsement, I would recommend buying this game immediately and enjoying being lost in it with the rest of us.
For the rest of you; Void Stranger‘s simple-on-the-surface mechanics and deliberately retro presentation belie what I’ve come to loosely term an experiential game. That meaning; figuring out just what kind of game exactly you’re playing is part of the game itself. What sort of story is this? What exactly can you do with these puzzle elements? Are there things the game isn’t telling you? These are some of the broadest questions you’ll be asking yourself as you work through this thing. During which time you’ll learn about Grey, a woman from a fantasy kingdom, and how protecting her charge, a bratty princess, led her to the bizarre labyrinth that is the game’s primary setting.
For a while, it will seem fairly standard, until it becomes clear that it’s very much not. To me, it really clicked when I “finished” the game for the first time. On your first pass through, you’re locked into what’s essentially the “worst” ending. The dungeon dissolves into incoherent chaos around you, a song plays, the road ahead becomes less and less clear. You have succumbed to despair and the world is nothing but a whorl of confusion. But then you start again, and things start to make a little more sense. Rinse, repeat, spend many hours cracking the games ludicrously elaborate codes, and things become a little clearer again. The game is a tug-of-war in this way; between the constant hazy fog that comes from knowing you don’t really know what’s going on and the little gemstone moments of clarity that do shine through. It’s an interesting, rewarding experience, and one I recommend if you’ve got the stomach for the game’s truly staggering difficulty.
Even if you do, it will take you a very, very long time to properly finish Void Stranger. I got quite far myself and still haven’t actually finished the whole thing. I plan to, of course. What’s the other option? Stay trapped in a monochrome labyrinth forever? Don’t be silly; even when you leave the maze, the memory remains.
SOARING SKY PRECURE
Sky fly high. They didn’t have to go this hard, is what I kept thinking to myself. Pretty Cure’s 20th anniversary is essentially an ongoing holiday, in between two adult fan-oriented sequel seasons as we currently are, but it was the main line of the series, Soaring Sky Precure, that best held my interest in 2023.
It’s not fashionable to say this, but at its heart, Precure is a fairly change-averse franchise. The series more or less found its pay dirt formula with Yes 5! and has been riding that train to the bank every year since, but what this means is that even changes that would seem minor to an outsider can be absolutely seismic in context. See, for example; Cure Sky, this year’s lead, being blue. It’s hard to overstate how enthused people were about the simple fact that the lead Precure of this year’s season was identifiably a color other than pink. Similar hype followed for similar reasons; Cure Wing is the first boy to ever join the main cast (he’s not the first male Precure full stop, that’s a different character from a prior season), Cure Butterfly the first adult, and so on.
This spirit of comparative experimentation did not stay throughout the show’s run, as what followed was a fairly typical (if notably episodic) Precure season. The ebb and flow of online discourse has of course led to some concluding that this makes the show bad. I say fuck that; this season ruled. Sure, you could describe Precure as artistically conservative if you wanted to, but the flip side of that coin is that it’s consistent. Every year you get 4-6 girls in colorful outfits punching the themed forces of evil to death, and it kicks ass every single time. This year had a particularly strong cast of villains, with the oafish Kabaton being succeeded by the leering, smug Battamonda, and then the honorable, upright Minoton, before looping back to Battamonda, giving him something of a redemption arc, and then finally revealing the main bad’n for the final few episodes. It was a ride!
Admittedly, I would not personally place Soaring Sky in my absolute upper echelon of Precure seasons; Fresh, Heartcatch, Tropical Rouge, and—sorry, haters—Healin’ Good, but it’s still a delightful and entertaining piece of work. I expect I’ll say much the same about Wonderful Precure next year, and I’m looking forward to doing so.
That said, there’s more than one way a kids’ anime can be great, and while some stuck to the tried-and-true methods, others were much more willing to experiment.
POKéMON HORIZONS
As I discussed when the original anime finally, incredibly, came to a close back in March, I have basically loved Pokémon my entire life, for better or worse. It’s baked into my DNA, and I’m never going to be rid of it. Pokémon Horizons, though, has made the series feel essential—like an actual part of the cultural current, relevant to non-lifelong fans—for the first time in what feels like a million years. There has, in actuality, been lead-up to this of course. Some of that was when Ash Ketchum finally became a Pokémon champion in November of ’22, some of it was in the making long before that, but with the new series it really feels like a page has been definitively turned, and a lot of that has to do with how different it is from the previous Pokémon anime.
Pokémon Horizons has nothing to do with being “a Pokémon master.” Competitive battling in the usual sense is barely a factor, our main protagonist is meek and initially doesn’t actually care about winning at all. And, oh yeah, she’s a girl. Liko, who had the unenviable task of stepping into Ash’s shoes this April, has done amazingly well for herself as the new face of Pokémon. She doesn’t have to do it alone, thankfully, as co-protagonist Roy balances her out and makes up the more fiery, battle-oriented half of their duo. Joining them are the Rising Volt Tacklers, the do-anything crew of the airship Brave Olivine who initially meet Liko when their captain, Friede, is asked to keep her and a mysterious pendant she carries safe. Suffice it to say; we don’t really know for sure where the whole pendant business is headed yet, but we know it involves a legendary hero of a bygone age, the machinations of a villainous group with the deceptively innocuous name of “The Explorers”, and a smorgasbord of cool-as-hell Pokémon battles. Did I mention there’s a Pikachu in a captain’s hat? His name is Captain Pikachu and he is cooler than any of us will ever be.
The main thing is that the series excels at a sense of adventure. The first Pokémon anime had been airing for so long that it tended to fall into tropes of its own making, and that continued to some extent right up until its very end (not to say that it was bad or anything, it could certainly be great, too), Horizons manages to feel as fresh as it does partly by simple virtue of not being its predecessor, but there really is a genuine sense of the new and unexpected with each and every episode. The airship gives the show license to set its adventures basically wherever, and it often takes advantage of that, helping even inconsequential-in-the-long-run “filler” episodes feel fun and purposeful. There’s also a lovely paralleling between the makeup of the Brave Olivine’s crew and the actual people who’re watching this show, with both adults and children represented, with Friede and company helping to mentor Liko, Roy, and tertiary protagonist Dot. In a real sense, the series feels like it’s bridging the gaps between generations, and that’s a lovely thing to see as a long-time fan of Pokémon. Here’s to 900 more episodes, god willing.
CHAINSAW MAN: PART 2
Wherefore The Chainsaw Man? Part 2 of the manga—which we’ll be discussing here, so the spoiler averse should skip down the next entry—began last summer to a fair amount of anticipation. Some of that has cooled in the intervening months, but for the most part, the manga remains very popular and widely-read.
This is a little surprising, all things considered. Chainsaw Man‘s second half is a very different beast from its first. Most of the original cast have either died or otherwise departed the narrative. Denji has a costar now; Asa, human host of the War Devil, and a sort of adoptive little sister in the form of Nayuta. In the process, Denji has lost one family and gained another.
But the biggest change has actually been in terms of pacing, of all things. Chainsaw Man Part 2 is a noticeably slower affair than Chainsaw Man Part 1. Indeed, the manga has adapted a deliberately tease-y tempo as Part 2 has gone on, even as the tension has mounted and literal prophecies of armageddon have begun to fill the air. But it has kept its core emotional roughness; a kind of pain that resonates very broadly and is the main reason that this thing is still so popular. Denji’s old life keeps haunting him, as disparate forces conspire him to pull the ripcord once more. He is still searching for answers to life’s big questions, he’s still not happy, and the world’s still going to hell. So of course, they’ve succeeded. As of its most recent chapter—its final, before a hiatus into the new year—Denji has once again cast aside any pretense of ordinary life to become Chainsaw Man, laughing like a maniac in the manga’s final image of 2023. The poor kid can’t catch a break.
ELPHELT VALENTINE
Look, this is basically a filler spot, but what are you going to do, stop me? This is my article, and if I say a DLC character from a fighting game I like (Guilty Gear -Strive-) gets on the list, she gets on the list, logic be damned. I barely knew who Elphelt was two months ago, and now she’s my absolute favorite pink and white marriage-obsessed heavy metal singer of a blorbo. It helps that she’s fun to play (and fairly simple, which as someone who is still very much a neophyte to fighting games as a genre, is welcome). I paid another human being $30 USD (plus tax and tip) to make a chibi drawing of her eating a large pretzel because I wanted my own unique Elphelt icon that badly. She’s great, and you will pry her from my cold, dead hands.
I don’t have the space to earnestly get into Guilty Gear’s genuinely weird-as-hell lore here, but her backstory is genuinely pretty compelling, as is the silliness of her arcade mode story in Strive‘s story. Bottom line; she brought a damn sight more joy to my life than most things this year. For that, she gets a place at the table.
SLAY THE PRINCESS
The other video game with an expanding, changing narrative on this list, Slay The Princess is a good deal more accessible than Void Stranger by virtue of being a visual novel and thus posing no difficulty beyond reading and clicking. But that shouldn’t be taken to mean that it’s somehow the lesser of the two (I wouldn’t say I cleanly prefer either to the other), or even that it’s harder to spoil (this is another section you’ll want to skip if you care about that kind of thing). The story is simple; you are on a path in the woods, at the end of the path is a cabin, and in the cabin is a princess. Your charge? Kill her. Failing to do so will, at least so you’re told, end the world and doom everyone in it.
Of course, things are more complicated than they first appear. The stern narrator who tells you all this seems untrustworthy at best, and there are voices in your head beside your own. The Princess herself is no ordinary human, either. But eventually, you’ll make your choice, to either free or kill her, which seems like it should be the end of this story.
Except, it is obviously not. You are on a path in the woods. You find her and save or kill her again. You’re on a path in the woods.
Time loops are one thing, but Slay The Princess’ entire narrative structure is based on iterative rings like this. What you do changes the woods, the cabin, yourself, and the Princess. No matter what you do, you’ll discover that the two of you are deeply connected. This is, after all, a love story. You kill, you die, you try again. Slay The Princess reveals itself as a love song from one myth to another. You are on a path in the woods. You are a path in the woods.
LEVEL 1 DEMON LORD AND ONE-ROOM HERO
Ecchi slapstick political satire fantasy!! It’s a genre jambalaya. And of the various fantasy anime that tried to tackle serious issues this year, One-Room Hero might honestly have done it the best. I’ve talked about this before, but it’s worth reiterating how utterly weird it is that this series, with its burned-out loser JRPG hero protagonist and his 404 gender-not-found shapeshifting demon lord frenemy, is probably the best satire of imperialism I’ve seen in a mainstream TV anime in years.
That’s not to say the show is an intellectual powerhouse or anything; there’s a difference between being witty and being smart, but it should probably say something that all of these cultural currents are so dumb that even a show with a character who dresses like this can poke fun at them. Other anime swung more for the fences this year, but I don’t think anyone hit higher above their weight class.
OTAKU ELF
In my head, Otaku Elf is this year’s version of My Master Has No Tail. Absolutely rock solid comedy / slice of life shows with a fantasy bent that seemingly rather few people actually watched. (I think Otaku Elf did a little better in that regard than My Master Has No Tail, but not much better.)
In premise, Otaku Elf is pretty simple. The title character, Elda, is a classic high fantasy-style elf who has inexplicably been enshrined as a kami in a Japanese shrine. Here, she uses her position to while away the centuries by indulging in her nerdy, nerdy interests, all while basically never leaving her house, often using her put-upon shrine maiden Koito as a go-between. Think Himouto! Umaru-chan if Umaru herself was taller, a bit less abrasive, and had magic powers, and you’re in the right ballpark.
Much of the comedy here is referential or (very) lightly satirical, but throughout, the show commands an impressive and easy charm that mixes well with its occasional moments of real pathos, like when Elda remarks that the way Koito eats her ramen reminds her of her late mother, the previous shrine maiden. Heart like that can’t be faked.
Undead Murder Farce
Another oddball that defies easy genre categorization. Undead Murder Farce seemed from a distance like it might belong to that millieu of Bakemonogatari-ish (and consequently, Boogiepop-ish) shows like In/Spectre and Rascal Doesn’t Dream of the Bunnygirl Sempai. In practice, it ends up watching like a strange cross between a detective novel, Bakemonogatari itself, and the Fate series if it were set in the Victorian era.
The detective part is the main hook, though, with the titular Undead girl being an immortal named Aya, a literal talking head who serves as a detective for supernatural cases that more traditional sleuths can’t really crack. Throughout the series, she, her assistant Shinuchi, and her maid Shizuku traipse across Europe solving supernatural mysteries and hunting for her missing body. Whether their cases are actually Fair Play ™ or not I can’t definitively say, but they at least seem solvable, giving the show an element of involving the viewer, as well as more traditional mystery series thrills. (And it does do those pretty well; it’s worth noting that this series is from Kaguya-sama director Shinichi Omata, and some of that style shines through.) Later, things get a bit more action-y as a plethora of period-appropriate public domain characters turn up—Sherlock Holmes, Carmilla, Frankenstein’s Monster, The Phantom of the Opera, you get it—which is where that dash of Fate spice comes from. These disparate parts work together pretty well, with elements like Carmilla’s queer-tinged rivalry with Shizuku adding additional intrigue.
Really, the only bad thing about this series is that it ends without resolving its main plot, being adapted as it is from a series of novels far too long to condense into a single anime cour. If there’s justice in the world, we’ll get more Undead Murder Farce. But if not, at least it made a strong showing while it was here.
SCOTT PILGRIM TAKES OFF
“At its finest, Scott Pilgrim is much, much more than it appears to be. It’s an ambitious meditation on what growing up means to a generation for whom comics and video games are not just cultural touchstones, but the dominant iconography.” That was The Globe & Mail, Canada’s newspaper of record, on the original Scott Pilgrim graphic novel and the then-upcoming live action film, way back in 2010.
I’m writing this, myself, on the last day of November, 2023 (and editing it nearly a month later). Two weeks ago, I had no working relationship with this series whatsoever. I wasn’t really planning to watch Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, Science SARU’s still-inexplicable anime take on the series. I had no reason to, having never seen the movie nor read the comics. But, circumstance is a funny thing, and what initially started as me wanting to spite a group of deeply annoying people (it’s a long story) has led to me flipping this thing over in my head several times. The nature of this list makes me deeply hesitant to crown an overall single “best anime” of 2023, even in the narrow category of ones I actually finished, but if this isn’t my single favorite, it’s at least one of several.
First, if you don’t know the story of Scott Pilgrim in general, of how an uncomfortably relatable loser-everyman manages to forge maybe the first real connection of his entire life with an uncomfortably relatable loser-everywoman after being forced to (among other things) fight her exes in combat, this whole entry might scan as a little incomprehensible to you. Sorry about that!
Scott Pilgrim is one of those things that started out fairly niche, and then became a touchstone, and then (probably unfairly) a shorthand for a Certain Type of Guy. So Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is then much less about Scott Pilgrim (the guy) and much more about Scott Pilgrim (the story). In general concept and execution, it’s not entirely dissimilar to something like Rebuild of Evangelion, in that it’s not a reboot exactly or a straight sequel exactly but more of a front-to-back rewiring that keeps the main players intact but does pretty different things to and with them. It is also a sequel, though. So to understand it we should at least touch on the original comic, which I read essentially in preparation for watching this anime.
To be honest, I would’ve loved nothing more than to completely bounce off Scott Pilgrim. The entire franchise—from the original comic, to the live action film by Edgar Wright to, I assume it’s only a matter of time, this anime—has been simplified into a punchline these days. You’ve all seen the tweet; “you are not Scott Pilgrim and that girl on the bus is not Ramona Flowers.” This is wrong on several counts of course; the girl Scott meets on the bus in the original comic isn’t Ramona, it’s Knives Chau, a high schooler who becomes his ill-advised mostly pretend-girlfriend. Also, I absolutely am Scott Pilgrim. So are you. So is probably everyone who’s ever lived, or at least everyone who’s ever grown up in this strange, strange era of history we live in. Millennials, who are ostensibly “the generation” meant to identify with Mr. Pilgrim, are defined by anxiety. We don’t hurt people because we mean to—who does?—but because the alternative to hurting people is doing something scary, and lots of us don’t know how to handle scary things. We’re all Ramona Flowers, too—I’m aware I’m contributing to a stereotype by being transgender and identifying with the character in any respect—in that for many of us, at least sure as hell for me, the default way to disengage with people is to just silently drift away without a word. Reader, I would so love to tell you that this is all me being dramatic, but if there’s any projection here, it’s solely on my part; Scott Pilgrim vs. The World read me to fucking pieces. I was embarrassed. It was bad, but I can only respect a piece of art that prompts me to do some genuine reflecting.
Of course, this entry is, actually, technically, about Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. The brand-new anime from Science Goddamn SARU, that has, actually, not a ton in common, at least plot-wise, with its forbearer. But it’s important to understand what vs. The World actually was. Because, just to hammer this home one more time, while Scott Pilgrim (the comic) was largely about Scott Pilgrim (the guy), Scott Pilgrim (the cartoon) is largely about Scott Pilgrim (the story). It is also kind of about Scott Pilgrim (the guy), to be fair, but only in the sense that everyone is “Scott Pilgrim” (the archetype).
Because Takes Off is also a sequel, thematically if not entirely textually, it can get away with snipping out character arcs in some places. Knives, for example, is reduced to a bit player here, and, as others have pointed out, the actual damage of Scott’s insensitivity—in the original, he hastily breaks up with her in a rush after meeting Ramona that leaves her heartbroken and defines her character for the rest of the comic—is by consequence pretty much entirely erased. Is this harmful to the character? Is it harmful to the show? I don’t know! On the one hand; Knives gets to be happy for most of the anime because she had her character development back in the comic and came out the other side a much more mature person. The fact that the show doesn’t literally chronologically follow on from the comic, so this is not technically “the same Knives”, is true, but pointing it out feels like nitpicking. The emotional logic of this sort of thing is a lot more important than the actual logic. On the other hand; Knives being reduced to basically a series of fanservice (in the old sense of the term) cameos guts her character and thus most of the reason people liked her in the first place. Changes like this one are divisive, and they are so for a reason.
The people who do get arcs are the exes—they’re the real stars of the show here, and in particular Roxie is elevated from basically a living joke about “girls having a gay phase in college” to a character with some actual pathos—and Ramona herself. It’s interesting that Ramona gets so much spotlight actually, because while the original comic was definitely mostly Scott’s story, she still got a fair amount of play. Perhaps it’s because the comic was definitely also guilty of sometimes treating Ramona as the unattainable, mysterious maiden she attempts to present herself as. Attempts that are, as the comic points out, covers for her own emotional flaws. Again; the main reason that Ramona and Scott get on so well is that they’re very similar people. The actual plot is a whole haphazard patchwork of goofy shit involving time travel and a whole very meta thing where the events of the series are made into a movie in-universe while they’re actively happening. Explaining all this in more detail would I think get in the way of an important fact; Scott’s biggest enemy is himself. No, literally, as in, him from the future, where he’s broken up with Ramona and is torn up about it and tries to sabotage his own past because of it.
Since, of course, a huge part of Scott Pilgrim is that trying to fix your mistakes is way more important than just feeling bad about them, they eventually reconcile to try again. They will probably try again forever. The amusingly huge Divorced Guy Energy of Future-Scott aside, it’s hard to imagine the two of them ever having a smooth relationship. But a smooth relationship and a fulfilling one are different things, and no matter what form it takes, Scott Pilgrim does understand that much.
On a more lighthearted note the whole thing just looks great. And it left a lot of questions in my mind, too. Questions like “if Scott Pilgrim met Shinji Ikari would they be friends or enemies?” and “how does Ramona dye her hair so often without it getting all dried out?” Anime that make you think are good, I’d say.
All of this then said, the question of whether or not this reimagining is actually “good” seems kind of quaint. I’m still not terribly keen on a future ruled by reboots, reimaginings, and redos, and I still think that this whole phenomenon of western companies hoisting sacks full of money on anime studios and telling them to make a Whatever Anime kind of sucks—although I should take a second here to concede that Brian O’Malley at least seems to have been much more involved in this than is the norm for these things—but if we’re going to keep getting more of these, more of them should probably be like this.
And that’s the list. More or less.
Is Scott Pilgrim Takes Off actually my anime of the year? I don’t know. I didn’t do the whole cutesy “guess my top anime this year, everybody!” contest on social media this time around. Partly because I don’t have a Twitter account that I use in any major capacity anymore, partly because it just seemed like a trick question. I’ve quite liked a few anime this year. Oshi no Ko was much farther back on the list, but despite what I said I probably like it more than this. Or do I? I go back and forth. The same is true with Pokémon Horizons, 100 Girlfriends, and Trigun: Stampede, which I couldn’t manage to finish a writeup on. Some of the older anime that I watched this year, like Earth Maiden Arjuna and The Devil Lady will definitely stick with me more than the vast majority of 2023’s own anime will. And even some anime from this year I genuinely thought were really good, obvious standouts like Skip & Loafer and BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!, I didn’t actually finish. Because! You know! Life is weird and difficult and sometimes even something as simple as making yourself watch a cartoon can be tough! This is without factoring in shows that actively disappointed me, like, again, Magical Destroyers. Or hell, Frieren, a letdown that I don’t really want to talk about in detail. With no better place to put it, here is a short list of honorable mentions that I liked—really liked in a few cases!—but couldn’t come up with even brief writeups for, didn’t finish, or otherwise did not get a full writeup despite every one of them having definitely deserved it.
Anime
High Card
Buddy Daddies
Dead Mount Death Play
Trigun: Stampede
The Ice Guy & His “Cool” Female Colleague
Skip & Loafer
Helck
BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!!
SHY
YOHANE THE PARHELION -SUNSHINE in the MIRROR-
Manga
Touge Oni: Ancient Gods in Primeval Times
Sakamoto Days
Witch Watch
Magical Girl Tsubame: I Will (Not) Save The World!
Go! Go! Loser Ranger!
Kindergarten Wars
Destroy It All and Love Me in Hell!
Touhou Suichouka: The Lotus Eaters, Drunk & Sober
Cipher Academy
Otherside Picnic
Games
Ultrakill
Yume Nikki Online Project
Pokémon Violet’s Teal Mask and Indigo Disk expansions.
Art really has helped me get through an immensely difficult year, and more than just being a source of comfort, it’s given me things to discuss with others, things to look forward to, and moments of genuine sublimity that make the time I put into this medium feel worth it. I’ve rambled a lot in this article, but at the end of the day, I really just want to help people appreciate art, in my own, very specific way. Hopefully, this article helped you do that in some fashion or another. That’s really all I can ask for.
So where does all that leave me, other than with another year down? I honestly don’t know! I have no idea what the future looks like. I was going to type “for this blog” after that, but honestly, it’s just true in general. The future is an open void of unknowability. These days, I’m just thankful for every day I make it through.
And on that note; who knows what 2024 holds? I’m reluctant to make any specific predictions.
But hey, Metallic Rouge looks pretty promising, right?
See you next year.
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