Posted on October 12, 2025October 12, 2025 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 15 – “Our Story”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience.

Let’s talk about Super Creek [Yuuki Kana].

Actually, before we talk about Super Creek, let’s talk about characters, and how Umamusume handles them. Full disclosure, I’m going to be pulling extensively here—both in this column specifically and, honestly, probably whenever I talk about Umamusume going forward—from IronicLark’s excellent Umadacchi Densetsu blog, a fantastic resource for all things Umamusume and, so far as I am aware, easily the most thorough exploration of the series and its various components available in English. I highly recommend diving into it yourself sometime if what I am doing in these columns interests you even a little bit. Frankly, Lark is significantly more knowledgeable on the subject than I am.

So, characters. Most things I cover on this blog are either standalone anime projects, or they’re anime adapted from some single specific source, a manga, a light novel, etc. Umamusume belongs to the other category of things I cover here, and has more in common structurally with, say, Love Live, than most other anime I write about. What I mean by this is that it’s a media mix¹ franchise. Without getting too into it (because that distinction alone is worth having a long conversation about) what this essentially means is that rather than one component of the franchise being the “primary” unit that all other adaptations pull from, there are many distinct components given roughly equal weight. Now, this isn’t strictly the case with all or even most media mix properties, as in the case of Umamusume and many others, there is a “central” project—the game—but the distribution of influence is much more horizontal than it is in something like, say, the Yano-kun anime airing this season, which is a straight one-to-one adaptation of a single specific story.

This approach changes how a series handles many things, but most relevant here is how it handles characterization. Because, if you primarily know Super Creek from the Umamusume game—and I’m betting that describes at least some of you—you might wonder how that character and her doting, motherly personality fit in to the generally fairly serious ‘sports anime’ tone that Cinderella Gray has going on. The answer is that Umamusume, as with many media mix properties, tends to emphasize or scale back different character traits depending on the needs of the story. As such, different iterations of the same character can feel pretty distinct, even if the “core” remains the same. (As a complete tangent, the most extreme example of this approach I can think of is actually Transformers, a series in which this guy, this guy, and this guy all have the same name, at least some of the time, despite being nothing alike.) Nothing so extreme as that example is present in Umamusume, but I bring all this up just to say: when we see Creek here, she is somewhat different from the Super Creek you’ve seen people make all those googoo babies jokes about on the internet. (Although, elements of that doting characterization do remain, I don’t want to overstate the differences.)

Creek is formally introduced here after having kicked around in the background of Part 1, and—not to spoil anything—we are going to be following her, at least intermittently, for quite a while. Her introduction is actually relatively low-key at first, though. We see her training. We see her trainer, Fumino Nase [Yū Shimamura²] apparently a prodigy who’s brought her trainees pretty significant success even early on in her career, beset by reporters. Nase seems to find all the media attention annoying at best (and particularly bristles at an offhand mention of her father, evidently also a trainer), but she’s willing to throw them a bone by telling them that she intends to have Super Creek compete in the Kikuka Sho, one third of Japan’s Triple Crown and, importantly, the longest race of the three. This comes as a surprise to the reporter interviewing her as, to hear that reporter tell it, Creek’s race results haven’t been that impressive, and she’s actually not even a sure thing to so much as run in the race, as someone would have to drop out first. Nase is of course aware of all this, though, and explains that as a trainer, she considers it part of her job to believe in miracles, no matter how unlikely they might be.

Naturally, just then, word comes down the line that one of the other competitors has had to drop out. Super Creek has an in.

The actual Kikuka Sho race follows both Creek and one of her main competitors. Yaeno Muteki, whose name you probably remember. It’s hard not to feel a bit bad for Muteki, who keeps getting put in these situations where she’s trained so hard and has good prospects only to end up facing a rare, generational talent.

And make no mistake, Super Creek is one of those. For a race as long as the Kikuka Sho both physical stamina and clarity of mind are important, so while Muteki holds the most promising position for a majority of the race, Creek is eventually able to angle her way from the middle of the pack straight to the front, and she ends up not only winning but winning by a pretty large margin. (A quick reference check on the real race that this episode is based on shows that the real Super Creek overtook the second-place horse, Gakuten to Beat, by five lengths. I am choosing to assume a similar margin here, in the absence of any other evidence. I suppose he really did beat Gakuten.)

Creek’s strength, as emphasized here, lies in her incredible endurance. Something she and Nase have evidently been working on for some time. A brief flashback between the two invokes the Cinderella metaphor once again.

^{Apropos of nothing, it is worth pointing out that Creek and her trainer seem}^very^close.

It’s worth going over again, the term “Cinderella story” refers to, in sports, a longshot victory by an underdog. Usually several such victories over the course of a tournament or the like. In the context of Cinderella Gray, well, the second part of the title spoils that this mostly refers to Oguri Cap. But it can, just as easily, be taken to refer to many of Oguri’s contemporaries, including Tamamo Cross and, yes, Super Creek as well. (Given her chestnut brown hair, she’s an almost-literal dark horse.) Her victory here is clearly hard-fought, and the fire in her eyes on the final spurt is really something to behold. I’m probably not going to surprise anyone by saying I absolutely love Creek, especially this incarnation of the character. I am hoping this episode might turn at least a few more people in the world into Super Creek fans. Fingers crossed.

(On the note of “beholding”, it’s worth addressing the elephant in the room at least briefly. There has been some amount of discourse about the show’s somewhat reduced animation prowess from the first part of the first season, the Kasamatsu arc. There’s some truth to this, probably related to staff being shuffled around, but the highlights of this race stack up to anything else in the series so far. We’ll see how the rest of the season plays out in this regard. I feel the need to give a good amount of credit to the show continually paying attention to how the racers run, though. Even in the weakest moments of the race, Creek is consistently drawn as taking long, comparatively slow strides. Right up until that final spurt, where she starts really putting the pedal to the metal.)

In any case, while Yaeno Muteki takes her loss hard, she and her master keep up their training. Muteki has an endurance of her own, in this regard, and as I’ve gone through this story she’s become one of my favorite supporting pieces of Cinderella Gray‘s cast, which is not exactly lacking for strong characters.

And as for the Ashen Beast? Well, this arc does mark the point at which Cinderella Gray goes from being largely about Oguri Cap to being something of an ensemble piece, and I suspect we’ll get a lot more of these focus episodes in the weeks (and hopefully, years) ahead. But, she is here. The entire time Super Creek is making history on the racetrack, a pair of distant eyes are on her, and they are those of none other than our very own Gray Monster. She, Belno, and Musaka make a number of comments during the race, in fact, but what sticks out to me most are the ice-blue bullets Oguri stares into the screen when she senses she has gained yet another rival. Truly, our girl is a monster.

Super Creek will not be the last girl to give Oguri a hard time this arc, by a long shot. A brief post credits scene introduces us to Toni Bianca [Kaida Yuuko], the Italian umamusume who stands as one of many international racers Oguri and all other Japanese racers competing in the Japan Cup will have to face. Toni is wildly dismissive of them, time will tell if she can back up that talk.

Oh, and there’s another umamusume from abroad who arrives as well. Some blonde girl with tacky stars-and-stripes leggings. Probably no one important, in any case.

^{Famously a thing us Americans say a lot.}

But! We’ll get to find out together. See you next week, Umamusume fans.

^{1: While the Japanese term “media mix” is quite similar to the English phrase “mixed media”, I’m rendering it as-is here, because “mixed media” has a different connotation in English, whereas a “media mix” is something a fair bit more specific.}

^{2: As with the Sirius Symboli case in Part 1 of the anime, my usual sources are not helping me here, but I found a few stray references indicating that she’s voiced by Yu Shimamura, and am taking those at their word.}

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Posted on October 12, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Deep Space Wolves at The Door in GNOSIA

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.

Everyone who knows anything about GNOSIA has made essentially the same joke about it. Finally, an Among Us anime! It’s the kind of essentially-obligatory reference that can quickly get old, but, honestly, in the case of GNOSIA it’s not really a bad place to start in terms of describing the thing. And the series itself directly invokes Among Us‘ public-domain, lycanthropic predecessor werewolf.

GNOSIA is set aboard a space ship en route from one planet to another. On the planet they departed from, they were attacked by something called a gnosia, and now the gnosia is one of the people on board. What’s a gnosia? How does it spread from one person to another? We don’t really know that, yet! Things are kept in deliberately broad terms in this first episode. From what little we do know, it seems like some kind of virus that….turns people into? Replaces them with? Alien shapeshifters. Again! It’s all a bit vague.

But that’s part of the point, as it turns out. Because our viewpoint character is Yuri [Anzai Chika], an amnesiac freshly woken from suspended animation by Setsu [Hasegawa Ikumi], a non-binary soldier who seems to be the unofficial semi-leader of the proceedings. Setsu explains the entire wolf-among-us situation to Yuri, and Yuri’s drafted into the process of voting on which of the crew will be placed back into suspended animation. There are a few key points to absorb here, and the bulk of the episode is devoted to fleshing these out.

Here’s what we—along with Yuri—learn over the course of the first episode. One, this voting-out-the-impostor situation is mandatory, because the ship’s controlling AI, LeVi, will enable the self-destruct sequence if the passengers don’t attempt to get rid of the gnosia themselves. Two, the ship periodically jumps into hyperspace. Humans can’t stay awake during these jumps, but the gnosia can, giving them an opportunity to attack. Three, the fact that one person is placed back into cold sleep “per round” means that if the gnosia isn’t caught by a certain point, it will be down to just one human and the gnosia, at which point the human “loses.”

If all of this sounds very video game-y, that’s because GNOSIA is a relatively rare anime that’s actually adapted from a video game, in this case originally a Vita title that’s been ported several times over the years. (Hilariously, dating from 2019, it actually predates Among Us‘ explosion in popularity.) Usually, when an anime is said to feel “gamey” that’s a bad thing. But, for the second time this season, I’m going to suggest that something that’s usually a negative is not necessarily one. The gaminess lets us, the viewers, feel involved as Yuri learns about the setting and the cast of characters.

Speaking of, in addition to Yuri and Setsu themselves, the first episode also introduces a quiet, reserved woman named Jina [Seto Asami], a blunt enby who’s so straightforward that it’s to their own detriment who goes by Racio [Nanami Hiroki], and a flirtatious, charming, deeply suspicious, and radioactively hot woman with the somewhat cryptic moniker of SQ [Kitou Akari].

I have my favorites already, but in general this is a really strong group of characters, enough so that I didn’t want any of them to be the gnosia. (Another way my own point of view sympathized with Yuri. As they, naïve to the world, want to trust everyone here equally.) Of course, after two rounds of voting, we learn that, nonetheless, one of them is.

The second round ends with Yuri and SQ, who’s managed to sway Yuri to her side of things, locking Setsu in cold storage, after having lost Racio to the previous round and Jina to a gnosia attack during a hyperjump. This turns out to be the wrong decision, as SQ—the one who’s been acting very suspicious the entire episode—is, in fact, the gnosia. The good news for Yuri is that now that they’re equipped with knowledge of how the gnosia operates, they can do a better job next time around. But, ah, SQ attacks and kills them, right, since she’s the gnosia? So how could there be a “next time” for Yuri?

Well, before entering cryosleep, Setsu hands Yuri a mysterious cube which promptly breaks when Yuri tries handling it. This, they explain, will let them go beyond death.

Yes, on top of its main premise, GNOSIA is also a time loop anime. This takes things from merely interesting to absolutely fascinating. Introducing as it does two interlocking rings of mystery that must somehow be related, each of which raises more questions about the other than it answers. There’s a lot to like here, and with the anime slated for a full two cours there’s a lot of time for it to bend and twist our expectations in myriad ways. All this in mind, it might be the season’s easiest recommend, I could see almost any anime fan getting something out of this.

I should mention at least in passing that the show looks and sounds good, too. In particular, there are some really great cuts of SQ emoting in the premiere here that make me very optimistic about how much fun this show is going to be long-term, and the cold, sealed-off atmosphere of the ship itself is hard to beat.

Posted on October 10, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The All-Consuming Love of THIS MONSTER WANTS TO EAT ME

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.

“Until the day that beautiful monster grants my wish with her own two hands….”

The first thing is the pacing, and the second is the sound design. I’m late to this one, I know, but upon watching the first two episodes of This Monster Wants To Eat Me, the latest in a growing number of decent-to-great yuri adaptations from up and down this year, those were the two elements that stuck out to me the most. Normally, when one brings up an anime’s pacing, it’s to complain. It is all too easy to fuck up the sequencing of events when adapting a manga to animation; by rearranging them illogically, by sticking so close to the source material that you sap the life out of the thing (the more common of those two scenarios these days), or simply by pacing them wrong. Events that are snappy on paper aren’t necessarily so in motion, timing is a key consideration when it comes to picking an approach for adapting this material.

Keep all this in mind as I say, usually, when an anime feels slow, that’s said as a bad thing. Especially if it was based on a manga. Watatabe—as This Monster is more commonly known—proves that it’s not necessarily so. This is an anime that creeps, lurches, and crawls. What it lacks in traditional production polish it more than compensates with in deploying its sense of timing and its audio to create atmosphere. Despite being set in the dead of summer, this is an anime that most makes sense as a Fall series. Mermaids should get to trick or treat, too.

As for what this is all actually about? Well, our main character, Hinako [Ueda Reina], is depressed. We don’t have the details yet, but it seems that she lost her family to some tragic accident some time ago. She wants to die, but she either doesn’t want to or can’t bring herself to end her own life, so she spends a lot of time gazing into the sea and waiting for her time to come. Early in the first episode she runs into a mysterious girl, Shiori [Ishikawa Yui], who warns her that leaning over the railing by the coast isn’t safe. She could fall in, after all! Nonetheless, when she returns to the same spot to do more or less exactly that later that day, strands of thick, dark hair creep out of the water like animate seaweed. Our heroine is thus attacked by an iso-onna, who drags her into the water to consume her.

In its way, this isn’t so bad, Hinako thinks. Sure, it was out of the blue, but this is what she’s been looking for, isn’t it? And nothing, not even the attempts of her best friend (the rowdy Yashiro Miko, played by Fairouz Ai), has really helped. But, in an even more surprising turn of events, the girl from earlier intervenes, sprouting fishscales and a long, sickle-wicked claw to drive the water ghost away.

This isn’t anything as simple as a rescue, though. Shiori wants to eat Hinako, too. She’s just not quite tender enough, yet. So begins a particular flavor of twisted love story.

These first two episodes, especially the second, largely take us through the paces of Hinako’s daily life, and how it changes in the presence of Shiori. Hinako technically never straight up says she’s infatuated with Shiori, but lines like the one quoted at the top of this article make it pretty clear how she feels. The dynamic Watatabe is building here is an interesting one. Hinako wants Shiori to kill and eat her. Shiori is explicitly interested in keeping Hinako alive until her flavor reaches its peak. She explicitly compares Hinako to livestock, in fact.

The important bit here is that Shiori is going to eat her eventually, but not right now. This actually bothers Hinako, not because she’s afraid or repulsed, but because if she’s going to be eaten she’d really rather it be soon. Despite the grim tone and the slow, creaking nature of the storytelling, there’s also an almost bratty overtone to the whole thing, as though Hinako is a needy submissive and Shiori, her domme, is teasingly avoiding giving her what she wants most.

This is, of course, the point. Watatabe’s premise is a take on the whole “domestic girlfriend” fantasy—found more often in heteroromantic romance manga, but it can be seen in yuri as well—wherein a depressed character is lifted to life and warmth by someone who insists on taking care of them. (There is in fact an entire style of romance manga and light novels built on this premise. If you’ve ever seen anything tagged “Rehabilitation” on Anilist or MyAnimeList, that’s what that means.) The roles of the nurturer and romantic partner are rolled into one in these scenarios, and Watatabe‘s playful skewering of them involves giving the caretaker/partner character an explicitly malicious overtone. Remember, within the world of the story itself this isn’t actually a metaphor: Shiori literally wants to kill Hinako and eat her, head to toe. But Hinako, depressed and longing to be reunited with her family, either figuratively in death or literally in the hereafter, is fine with that, and in fact wants that. In its way, Watatabe‘s story is quite a wicked little thing.

I don’t think it would work nearly so well without the audio component. The music here is straightforward but devastatingly effective, an arsenal of simple piano and string pieces that hammer home the oppressive summer that Hinako has been living for so long, and remind us that there is a final, sharp end to her relationship with Shiori. The voice acting here is excellent, too. Ishikawa Yui lends a breathy, ethereal tone to Shiori that really sells the idea of her as some otherworldly creature. She can also make Shiori sound forceful, which is helpful when the character needs to project ferocity (as at the end of the first episode), or make clear to Hinako that she doesn’t get to make all of her own decisions anymore (as at the end of the second). Ueda Reina makes Hinako sound exactly the right amount of withdrawn and closed-off. For an example, visually speaking, her daydreams about ocean life intruding into her everyday existence are reasonably effective but hardly flashy. It’s really the flat, deep-sighing tone of voice Ueda brings to the role that ties it all together.

Having the aural advantage is good. The elephant in the room here is that the show doesn’t look fantastic. It doesn’t look bad, I wouldn’t say—although its frequent use of frame-blending pushes things—but it’s definitely a shoestring production and looks the part, and doesn’t hit the visual heights of, say, the best episodes of the similarly-abbreviated Watanare. (Although that had its lesser moments, too.) Similarly, the actual shot composition is effective but largely unspectacular except for a few particularly striking moments. None of this is all that surprising for a low-resource anime at this stage in the medium’s history, but it is at least worth knowing going into it, and if it pushes people toward the manga instead, I don’t think that’s necessarily such a bad thing, even if they are missing out on the lovely sound design here. It is, in any case, a minor weakness. Or at least it is if I’m the one being asked.

The second episode ends set against the interesting love triangle building between Hinako, Shiori, and Miko, who spends much of the episode being jealous of the mysterious relationship that Hinako and Shiori seem to have suddenly developed.

She, in fact, asks Hinako to a festival. Hinako turns her down—it would seem that the accident that caused the deaths of her family is somehow related to this very same festival—but Shiori, not content to let her prized pig simply sit and girlrot, forces her to go. We don’t know how that’s going to work out for either of them, yet. (Or for Miko, for that matter.) But I certainly plan on tuning in to find out.

Posted on October 5, 2025October 5, 2025 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 14 – “Another Peak to Climb”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience.

Oguri Cap faced her first major defeat on the race track at the hands of her rival Tamamo Cross in the finale of Cinderella Gray‘s first cour back in late June. Since then, the world has appreciably changed for Umamusume as a series. Perhaps most notably, the Global (read: English-language) version of the mobile game this is all meant to promote finally launched, and I know for a fact I was hardly the only person there on launch day to redeem my 3* voucher to get Oguri herself. This is relevant because, due to the game’s success, there is a very real possibility that this column going forward will have a much larger potential audience than it did back in Part 1. To that end, I’m gonna go ahead and say that if you’re not caught up with these columns, I, a completely unbiased source, think they’re pretty worth reading, and you can do so here. Also, welcome aboard.

I’ve also read the manga, or at least, what exists of the manga fan translated into English. I won’t spoil any twists before they come, but it has given me the confidence to say that Cinderella Gray not only remains as good a powerful sports shonen narrative as it was in the first cour, but it actually gets even better over time, right up to the present. There are stories I can’t wait to share with you all, and characters I can’t wait for you to meet. But we’ll get to those as they happen.

What’s not a spoiler, or indeed a surprise to anyone who’s been watching the trailers ReMOW has been putting up, is that this upcoming arc focuses on the Japan Cup, a prestigious international race that will see Oguri and some of her domestic rivals compete against umamusume from all over the globe. That Cinderella Gray returns today, on the day of the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe—a different prestigious international horse race that Umamusume as a series is somewhat obsessed with (it was a plot point in Umamusume‘s third season, in fact. This despite the fact that a Japanese horse has never won it)—feels significant.

Interestingly though, that’s not where Part 2 starts. Instead, it makes the rather interesting decision to adapt the one-off spinoff The Mermaid Left Behind. What this means is that rather than diving straight into the Japan Cup stuff—what all of Part 2’s trailers were about, mind you—we instead return to the setting of the first half of Part 1, Kasamatsu, and the first story of the second cour is not about any of Oguri’s current rivals, but her first: Fujimasa March.

As Umamusume goes, what unfolds here is a pretty simple tale of rivals whose emotional bonds are unaffected by the physical distance between them. March is fresh off a haircut and a major loss at the Tokai Derby. We saw her conversation with Oguri Cap back in episode ten, where it seemed to reignite her competitive fire and give her renewed confidence to try again.

Yamano Thousand, the umamusume that March actually lost to in the Tokai Derby, does not see things that way.

Thousand is offended that March keeps trying to chase after someone who isn’t even here, and accuses her of running after ghosts. (She also insults the Norn Ace / Mini the Lady / Rudy Lemono trio by calling them Oguri’s “groupies”, which is admittedly pretty funny.) But if this seriously shakes March in any way, we don’t see it. It’s Mini, funny enough, who assesses Thousand accurately; her bark is worse than her bite, and her end closer strategy is a poor fit for a track with corners as tight as the ones here. In the end, March’s renewed passion perhaps as much as any strategic consideration lets her win handily, and she explains to Thousand—and implicitly to us as well—that she’s not chasing Oguri’s ghost. She’s chasing the real thing. This is the same March who first lit Oguri Cap’s competitive fire, and Thousand failing to understand that the glint in her eye and the blush on her cheeks are both because of Oguri Cap is part of why she loses. I don’t believe we’ll get another check-in on Fujimasa March like this, so this episode is, in a way, a nice sendoff to a Oguri’s first rival. A promise that her story is still being written, somewhere just out of view.¹

The second half of the episode returns us to Tokyo. It largely focuses on Oguri’s national rivals but, once again, opts to refocus on who we already know instead of rushing headlong into introducing new characters. Most of these little vignettes focus on the umamusume preparing for their next race. For Oguri, that’s the Japan Cup that’s the center of this arc. Some of her rivals will be there too, but others, such as Dicta Striker [Hanamori Yumiri] have different aims. The latter in particular leads to a very charming scene where Striker attempts to do the old “intimidating rival challenging the protagonist on a level playing field” bit, talking about how she wants to hand Oguri her second loss in the Mile Championship, only for Oguri to promptly explain that she isn’t actually running in that. (She’s tailing Tamamo Cross, of course: the Japan Cup and the Arima Kinen, best known to players of the Umamusume game as where careers go to die, are her next two destinations.)

If there’s a unifying theme here, it’s that Oguri Cap and Tamamo Cross’ showdown has inspired everyone with an eye on the scene, from Oguri’s hometown friends to her rivals in the nationals, to greater heights. Even Sakura Chiyono O, the actual winner of the Japanese Derby that really was haunted by the ghost of the missing Oguri Cap, gets a scene here to show off that she’s not resting on her laurels. Nor is Yaeno Muteki, another of Oguri’s rivals and a perpetual underdog. Dicta Striker will get to run against her eventually, as well: she’s aiming for the Arima Kinen, too.

This even applies to Oguri herself to some extent, as Fujimasa March looks toward her, so does Oguri look toward Tamamo Cross. Each serves as the proverbial new peak to climb for the previous racer. (We must naturally assume that there is, thus, also some fresh-faced new student at Kasamatsu who thinks of Fujimasa March as an ideal to aspire to.)

All told, this is an odd and transitional episode and, generally speaking, a bit of a strange choice for Cinderella Gray‘s triumphant return. Still, it’s nice to see Fujimarch again, and the strong thematic throughline makes it make emotional sense as a returning point. Plus, the few crumbs we get here are going to feed March x Oguri fans for the next several months, so it certainly isn’t a bad episode by any means. It’s hard to deny though that the real lightning-in-a-bottle moments from this arc are very much still ahead of us. Part 2 is short—just ten episodes as opposed to the thirteen of the first cour—so I imagine we’re going to be getting into the main body of the arc relatively soon, within a couple episodes at most. We’ll see what that looks like in the weeks ahead.

^{1: Interestingly, March’s race against Thousand is also done in full racing silks. This goes against the series’ usual conventions as I understand them, where only national G1s are run in silks. Still, I’m not going to complain. March’s snazzy blue outfit is lovely.}

Posted on October 2, 2025October 2, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Love Hurts in YANO-KUN’S ORDINARY DAYS

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.

Yoshida Kiyoko has a crush. Kiyoko [Nukui Yuka], a friendly, kind, and if we’re being honest, slightly dim high school girl finds herself seated next to Yano Tsuyoshi [Amasaki Kouhei] at the start of the school year. Yano, himself friendly, kind and a bit dim, is also horrifically accident-prone, getting knocked with all sorts of bumps, bruises, breaks, and other injuries. This is, naturally, played totally for laughs.

Yes, in a world full of girl-with-a-gimmick romcoms—a subgenre I’ve covered extensively in these seasonal premiere columns, ranging as they do from the good, to the merely okay to the confounding—Yano-kun is a boy-with-a-gimmick romcom. I’m not going to go so far as to say that merely switching the usual genders makes some huge difference—if this show didn’t have the fundamentals nailed down it’d be as tedious as any lesser example of this style—but it’s refreshing in its own right. That the show is actually pretty good makes this a quietly charming early seasonal highlight.

I’d pitch the series this way: if you’re the sort of person who enjoys screencapping characters making gag faces or doing silly things, likes lines written with the kind of amusingly clever dumb-ness that you can only get from someone with a keen eye for character, and generally pointing at your favorite and sarcastically asking “are they stupid?” (the answer is always yes), you’ll probably get a kick out of Yano-kun. If you don’t, you probably won’t. It really is that simple, and so in a sense, there’s not much more to say. Especially in terms of what passes for a plot here. Yano is seated next to Kiyoko and it really only takes a few days of worrying about him and his endless parade of injuries for Kiyoko to realize she’s got it bad for the boy. So invigorated, she and her friend Mei [Tanezaki Atsumi, doing what’s essentially a slightly higher-pitched take on her Frieren voice] brainstorm ideas as to how to get the two closer together.

This leads to a few amusing hijinks on its own, but it turns out that they needn’t have bothered. The final stretch of the episode sees a horribly worried Kiyoko run to the hospital after finding out that Yano’s been hit by a truck. It turns out this isn’t actually what happened, and he’s fine (or at least as fine as Yano ever is). But it leads to a sweet, short scene where Kiyoko asks if there’s anything she can do for Yano, offering to treat his injuries when they happen while she’s around (a small medical bag she carries as the result of being an older sister comes into play here), and Yano, touched, responds that he just wants to live an ordinary high school life. Roll credits, simple and sweet.

A premise this bone-simple is always going to come off a slightly corny to a certain kind of person. Honestly it is slightly corny, but it’s also very sweet, and the overall light and fluffy tone presents it from feeling cloying or overbearing. Many of the show’s best moments are in little details that are tough to nail down outside of their home medium. In addition to just generally having a very pleasant art style, Yano-kun frequently deploys a further simplified one for straightforward reaction shots.

There’s nothing technically crazy going on here, but they’re incredibly endearing, and, as the friend I was watching the premiere with (hi Josh) pointed out, they give Kiyoko a tiny dash of Bocchi-ness that makes her even more likable. Tied together with the gentle, flat coloring of the art style, and rookie director Matsuo Shinpei‘s team at Ajiado capably translating mangaka Tamura Yui‘s realistic character designs into something slightly more stylized, Yano-kun is, overall, filled with the exact kind of easygoing warmth you’d want out of something like this. If you’re looking for a simple romcom anime to round out your Fall season, consider this one an easy recommendation.

Posted on September 28, 2025 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Summoning the Start of a New Season with A WILD LAST BOSS APPEARED!

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.

Another season, another isekai thing that starts like a week before every other premiere. I’m not hating, TV anime being what it is, you have to pull out every trick you can think of to get your foot in the door, and sometimes that just means having it there before anybody else. (We’re conveniently ignoring several other anime that have already premiered, which I either did not watch or did watch but had nothing to say about. Still, the general point stands.)

You can glean a lot of what you need to know about A Wild Last Boss Appeared! from its title alone. If it’s bringing to mind images of overpowered protagonists staring at stat screens then, yeah, congratulations, you’ve figured the show’s general deal out pretty well. What is less apparent from a cursory look is that the series does boast a few distinguishing characteristics. First of all, our protagonist was a man in the real world but, upon being isekai’d into his favorite fantasy MMO, Exgate Online, inhabits the body of his female player character Lufas [Koshimizu Ami], a ludicrously-powerful winged person who, among other things, united the entire game world under her banner as a domineering queen before being killed by a party of heroes in a thrilling, violent opening fight scene. The heroes were, of course, other players. (The kind of stuff you can do in an imaginary MMO vs. a real one is truly mindboggling.)

The gender stuff is noteworthy but not entirely out of place, as there have been several “I was a boring, ugly guy on Earth but in the isekai world I’ve been turned into a totally hot babe with a great rack and magical powers” isekai over the past several years. Nonetheless, it’s still a lot rarer than the usual main character these sorts of things have, which remains “just some guy.” Lufas has a solid character design, too, with gigantic black angel wings and a cool red-and-gold outfit that makes her look appropriately regal. Characters like this tend to inspire a lot of hay-making in certain social media circles about whether they “count” as transgender. I have never managed to muster up a strong opinion on this subject in the broad sense despite being a trans woman myself, but, in this case it’s worth noting that Lufas gets over the shock of her transformation extremely quickly. So, if you’re trans and want to project onto her, I’m sure as hell not going to try to stop you.

^{It’s a magic HRT glowup anyone would envy, honestly. Where are}^my^{black angel wings, medical science?}

Second and perhaps more important to the success of a show in this genre, Last Boss has a fair amount of production polish. It comes to us from a new-ish but definitely not rookie director, Horiuchi Yuuya, whose prior two directorial credits were on the two seasons of NIJIYON ANIMATION, a chibi spinoff of Love Live Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, which he also served as the assistant director on the second season of. (His team are under WAO World, a studio who have a few sparse credits under their belt since the start of the decade but were responsible for Anime-Gataris back in 2017. That’s barely relevant to this piece, but you better damn well believe that if I can connect Anime-Gataris to a column I’m writing I’m going to do it. Watch Anime-Gataris.) This is all, in any case, basically the long way around of saying that the fight scenes that bookend the episode look good, although in the latter case it might be more appropriate to call it a full-on slaughter scene. (That’s not a compliment. We’ll get to it.) There are also some striking shots in the middle, particularly when Lufas, newly summoned 200 years after her defeat, returns to her old base, a massive tower decked with stained glass windows.

All told, the show looks good enough that, if you were just looking at stills, you might be able to convince yourself it was compellingly-written, too. Anime is after all a visual medium, so if something is strikingly directed and animated, it’s halfway there, right? Arguably more than halfway.

Sadly, this isn’t entirely the case. For one thing, Last Boss falls into the same trap as essentially every other “totally OP protagonist” isekai, which is that if the character is monstrously strong, we already know who’s going to win every conflict, and thus, there aren’t really any stakes to, at least, any physical confrontation. What saves the script from being a total wash is that Lufas does actually have some genuine charisma and dignity. Koshimizu Ami’s performance does a lot to uplift the broad writing of the character in this first episode. She’s commanding and has gravitas, and sitting alone in her all-but-abandoned fortress, you can, briefly, see her how the people of this world might see her. Regal, with a quietly crackling power just waiting to be unleashed.

This itself is, unfortunately, undercut by her interior monologue, which seems to switch between Koshimizu’s narration for Lufas herself and Horie Shun‘s interior speech for Minamijuuji Sei, the #epic #gamer who was Lufas’ real-world player, and whose narration’s generally goofy tone and loose fourth-wall jabbing jibes very badly with the rest of the narrative. The very first scene after Lufas is resurrected actually seems to imply that these are two separate characters somehow, and they seem to briefly be in conflict as Sei struggles to communicate to his summoners in a non-domineering fashion, but after turning off some passive skill or another on Lufas, this problem is immediately overcome and the now seemingly just-one-person Lufas flies off, free.

On its own, this would be easy enough to overlook, but this paper tiger problem of setting up some kind of conflict, only for the main character to interface with a poorly-defined Skill (in the video game / D&D sense) of some kind and then resolve it immediately is illustrative not just of the flaws in Last Boss‘s first episode, but of those in this genre in general. No matter how many times I see a show do this, I am always going to have this base-level negative reaction to it. It’s just no fun to watch.

Handled a little better is Lufas’ relationship with Dina [Usui Yuri, in what seems to be her debut role as a major character]. In the actual MMO, Dina was quite literally just a prop, an NPC that Sei plunked down for decoration in his base and never gave much thought beyond this. But, seemingly because he gave her a loose backstory, Dina is recontextualized in the world of Exgate as Lufas’ advisor, a trusted confidant who is overjoyed to see her ruler once again. It’s nothing terribly complex, but that she has an attachment to Lufas beyond fearing her is a massive step up from essentially every other character in this episode. This is vaguely reminiscent of the whole Machina / Veltol dynamic in Demon Lord 2099, although I’m sure there are other examples across the genre as well.

Other than this, Dina’s ultimately also a fairly basic character, at least in this first episode. The second half of it consists of Lufas taking up adventuring odd jobs. (Because she needs money, because it’s been 200 years since she ruled anything and the coffers Dina was watching over are empty.) Upon entering a tavern, Lufas and Dina take a gander at a quest board, and, ultimately, Lufas decides to do what she does best. Thus, the last few minutes of Last Boss‘s first episode are dedicated to adding to the growing number of anime scenes that just consist of a character brutally slaughtering orcs, goblins, demons, or whatever particular humanoid bugbear the writer has decided are not worth consideration except as cannon fodder.

Sigh.

Look, the fraught-ness of orcs is a well-trod topic and I’ve gone into it and similar things myself on this blog before, so we’ll skip past that for the time being. The problem here is that orcs just aren’t interesting opponents. I have no problem fighting them in a video game, but in an anime, which I am watching and not playing, I want some visual panache to the bad guys at the very least. Not helping matters is that Lufas, upon goring a bunch of them by summoning a huge cluster of glowing swords, feels the need to remark that doing so does not disturb her. Mere seconds after wondering in her mind whether she actually has the stomach to do this. Once again, problem raised and immediately surmounted: can Lufas bring herself to kill living, thinking creatures? Sure seems like it! What a boring thing to write.

Generously, you could say that Lufas’ lack of a reaction is the result of Sei more fully merging with his character, that her mentality has begun to override his. Mostly though, it just feels handwavey. I don’t expect a show like this to get into the ramifications of how it feels to take another life, or what it means for a species to essentially be born evil, a point of view Dina outright reinforces—this, after all, is quite literally the old Tolkien-derived Problem With Orcs, it’s not like this convention is Last Boss‘s fault—but I don’t think it’s too much to ask that, either, the series just not bring this kind of stuff up in the first place, or, if it’s going to do so, actually explore it in some depth rather than just dismiss it out of hand. It is of course possible it will return to these ideas later and actually grapple with them in some way, but if I’m honest, I kind of doubt it.

The word I’ve been dancing around this entire column is “edgy.” It’s very passé, and ironically, kind of childish, to dismiss something out of hand for being edgy. If Last Boss wants to have its protagonist aura farm by slaughtering a bunch of monsters, I’m not going to tell it that it can’t do that. (Aura farming is great, and gets a bad rep.) But there needs to be some craft to this stuff, and while Lufas ruthlessly slaughtering the orcs is definitely striking and well-animated, it’s not actually interesting. They’re not dragons, they’re not sinister-looking demonic beasts. They’re just orcs like you’d find in any other fantasy series. She says herself that she’s not even expending a modicum of effort. Everything interesting about the scene is in spite of the fact that they’re orcs. Why are we going through such lengths to portray the equivalent of killing Level 1 Rats like this? There’s just a mismatch in what’s actually happening and how impressed the show wants you to be. This does not warrant this treatment! Yeah, this is a brilliant and creative way to show the disparity in power that the orc feels as Lufas kills them, but why, if orcs are just brutish pests worth no further consideration, should I care how an orc feels in the first place?

Combined with the fact that a different significant chunk of the episode is taken up by just straight-up exposition about the game systems of Exgate, this all adds up to a first episode that is fun in spots but, overall, is mostly dry and, for something that looks this good, surprisingly boring.

In the end then, I think whether Last Boss can manage to wring a compelling narrative out of its setup is going to boil down to whether or not it’s willing to let Lufas actually struggle a bit. This doesn’t have to be in terms of combat, it could be anything. Just, some way in which she’s not solving every problem the minute it happens. There are some seeds of a longer-term plot in here! Mentions of some of Lufas’ old comrades defecting to the army of the mysterious Devil King, a figure she seems to regard with complete contempt, are something to grasp onto. So I’m not going to dismiss this series out of hand and say that this can’t work as an idea. It clearly can! It does in the show’s opening minutes! It just needs to commit to some actual narrative buildup. The question of course is if it can actually do that. And I do want it to! Fall is looking like a pretty barren season as far as new anime go, I only have three other anime on my personal shortlist, and one of them is a sequel. So I have every reason to want Last Boss to succeed here, but admittedly, I’m keeping my expectations tempered.

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

Seasonal First Impressions: Summer Stragglers & Sequels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now, the sequels!

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

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

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

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

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

1: Hi Josh

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

Seasonal First Impressions: TURKEY! TIME TO STRIKE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that’s the end of the episode!

Seriously!

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

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

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

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

Seasonal First Impressions: CITY THE ANIMATION

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

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

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

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

^{It really is that serious.}

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

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

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

Seasonal First Impressions: NECRONOMICO AND THE COSMIC HORROR SHOW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Magic Planet

Category: anime

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Seasonal First Impressions: TURKEY! TIME TO STRIKE

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Seasonal First Impressions: NECRONOMICO AND THE COSMIC HORROR SHOW