First Impressions Spring 2018 Wrap-Up

The Spring 2018 anime season is now well underway, so here is a post to wrap up this season’s “first impressions” period. In case you’re late in starting the anime season, here are all the full first impressions we have written this season, listed in alphabetical order:

In addition to the above shows, we have also watched various other shows that have caught our interest but we never got around to writing a first impressions post for. As such, to finish things off this season, we will present a First Impressions Digest for those other shows.

For me, the show that interested me the most outside of those I did impressions for is Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku, available on Amazon Prime. Featuring an otaku office lady who reunites with a childhood friend and fellow otaku, it’s a show with plenty of charm and humor. It’s quite amusing to see the female lead try to hide her otaku self at work one moment (while trying to determine if fellow co-workers are also otaku), and then hit the bar after work with the male lead for a co-op gaming session, but it also lays the groundwork for a nice story about being with someone who accepts you for who you are. A show I did not expect to like as much as I did is Major 2nd (available on Crunchyroll, as are all other shows I mention from here), a baseball anime following the son of the protagonist of the first Major series (which I haven’t watched, but you don’t need to to follow 2nd). What it lacks in raw sports action, it more than makes up with a compelling story about a son who wants to love baseball as much as the rest of his family, but gets crushed under the pressure of following in his father’s footsteps. As for Yotsuiro Biyori, that show is just super-relaxing, like an anime version of a coffee break, and I am always down for that. Speaking of relaxing, though, the second season of Amanchu! is also airing this season, and it’s gotten right into some wonderful moments that highlight this show’s message of enjoying life.

Finally, a couple of short-length shows caught my attention: Crossing Time is rather hit-and-miss as I didn’t care for the second episode at all but the first episode was actually pretty solid, telling a compact and solid little story of a burgeoning (yuri) romance; if more episodes can be like that, it’ll be good. And while I have problems with Isekai Izakaya‘s presentation as some kind of anime-fied variety show, with the show and episode titles constantly on screen and the constant visible sound effects, the food and fantasy-world aspects work well enough for what is basically a bite-sized Restaurant to Another World, albeit focused more on Japanese food and beer. It’s good for a fairly quick viewing; just make sure to have a snack nearby.

MDMRN

I also watched the first episodes of  Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku and Crossing Time, like stardf29. I liked them both quite a bit. Caitlin Moore at Anime Feminist really hit the nail on the head with how I felt about Wotakoi, pretty much reading my mind on it. Which is weird. I’m also so here for more episodes of Ninja Girl and Samurai Master (all seasons streaming on Crunchyroll); the show continues to entertain in short bites while teaching us a bit about a period of Japanese history that I know very little about. I made it clear in my First Impressions of Comic Girls that I had major, major issues with it. The more I stewed on the episode post-watch, the more those issues bothered me and I’m not planning to watch any more of the show. Space Battleship Tiramisu was a show I was not expecting much out of, and it has its moments of showing off a lot of butts, but it flies in the face of usual anime tropes and does a great job of using them for humorous effect. If it were a full length show, I don’t know if I’d like it. In short bites, I am here for more!

So what shows have you decided to watch this season? Let us know in the comments!

stardf29
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