I liked Vol. 2 of Unnamed Memory. There’s tragedy, mystery, history. “Oh, sorry. I guess it really is a kraken after all.” War, the emptiness of revenge, vacation. Time travel (maybe). “Why did you end up killing another country’s god when you just went out on a short observation mission?!” And entertaining banter between the… Read More Review & Rambling: Unnamed Memory Vol. 2
Neku wakes up in middle of the Shibuya Scramble Crossing, invisible to others and with a ghost-like ability to phase through people and vehicles (think Geordi and Ro in the Star Trek: the Next Generation episode “The Next Phase”). He can also read people’s minds while phasing through them. Frog monsters appear to attack the… Read More First Impression: The World Ends With You The Animation
A sinister cloud spreads through a swamp. Office lady Sei arrives home after working extremely late, only to be transported to another world…along with some other random girl. The local prince ignores Sei and immediately decides the other girl must be the magical Saint they were trying to summon to drive out the monster-spewing miasma.… Read More First Impression: The Saint’s Magic Power Is Omnipotent!
The episode opens with student council president Faria, a girl in military uniform, standing in a destroyed town, muttering about being too late before singing a song. Her subordinate Ellen joins her and they board a train. Elsewhere, monsters are destroying another town and devouring people, whose corpses turn into more monsters. A boy unsuccessfully… Read More First Impression: Seven Knights Revolution: Hero Successor
The shows opens with robots massacring humans while an idol-robot sings happily in front of a flaming auditorium full of corpses. Some old guy does something with a computer and mentions Diva. Then we some exposition about how AIs could not handle multiple tasks; instead each needed one singular mission. Next, we meet Vivy (a.k.a.… Read More First Impression: Vivy -Fluorite Eye’s Song-
I tend to be a “The book was better than the adaption” guy. That is, if a story first exists as a novel, is later adapted to some other medium, and I have the opportunity to experience both, odds are I will prefer the book. This has been the case throughout my life, and remained… Read More Holy Week 2021 [Arise]: Our Last Crusade or the Rise of Something Better Than the Anime
Given the choice between being “strong” or “weak,” few people, if any, would pick the latter. Yes, yes, I know there could be specialized contexts where “weak” makes sense, but in general, we have an understanding that strength is preferable to weakness. That’s lovely, but it leaves us with the problem of defining concepts like… Read More “Great Warrior? Wars Not Make One Great.”
Amid shots of gorgeous scenery, a handful of elementary and middle school-age kids attend the Japanese equivalent of a one-room country schoolhouse. Silliness ensues, periodically interrupted by more landscape shots. The heart of Non Non Biyori is Renge, a precocious and hilarious first-grader. Then there’s Hotaru, a former city girl whose family moved out to… Read More First Impression: Non Non Biyori, Season 3
Tomozaki is a gamer. In fact, under the handle nanashi, he ranks first in online play in Japan for a fighting game rendered in the the light novels and Japanese dialogue as “Atafami,” and in the subtitles as “Tackfam.” (Both are abbreviations of “Super Attack Families,” a clear nod to Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. series.)… Read More First Impression: Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki
Because I’m a hopeless SAO fanboy, I’m writing about Sword Art Online‘s Christmas episode…again. I did so last year, and others have done the same three and five years ago. But I couldn’t let the chance to write more about SAO slip past me. To recap: In the third episode, “Red Nosed Reindeer,” Kirito joins… Read More 12 Days of Christmas Anime, Day 5: Sword Art Online