Reviews

Panning the Stream: TERRAFORMARS, DENKI-GAI, Tribe Cool Crew

In which the Josei watches everything, so you don’t have to.

image

After spending much of the last week putting together that massive Summer Review post, I get to take all of a five-minute breather before launching into the Fall season. Who’s ready for this madness?!

I will be doing things a little differently this season. In order to get these posted in a timely manner, I’ll only be writing full “Meet ‘n’ Greets” for the series that made me want to watch more episodes. I’ll touch on the others and why I dropped them, but I won’t bother to give the full run-down on the studio, where it’s streaming, and so on. (And yes, I still only review licensed series, because for all its flaws I love the anime industry and want to support it in whatever small monetary way I can.)

So let’s dive into that stream and see if we can hunt down any gold nuggets, starting with our first trio of the season…

Continue reading →

Glancing Upstream: Summer 2014 Retrospective and Review

This season defied all kinds of initial expectations, for better and for worse.

image

Continue reading →

Series Review: Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun (“Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun”)

Yep – still great.

image

I don’t think it’s any secret that I love this show. Heck, I wrote an entire essay on why it’s freaking amazing. Hilarious and subversive, progressive and approachable, with one of the most lovable casts in recent anime/manga memory, I truly can’t think of a single thing to criticize about this series. Well… except maybe the fact that it’s only 12 episodes long (for now). I was really hoping for a Season 2 Announcement, but alas. Fingers crossed it could still happen. Until then, there’s always the manga…

Continue reading →

Season Reviews, Sports Edition: Baby Steps, Haikyuu!!

These two shows may share a genre (and a final grade), but they couldn’t be more different.

image

Okay, so technically this should be the “series” (not “season”) review of Haikyuu, but c’mon – we all know they’re going to make more. Of course the big surprise this morning wasn’t that Haikyuu DIDN’T get an official Season 2 announcement, but that Baby Steps DID. Yes, The Little Tennis Series That Could will be back in Spring 2015, with more of its unique MC and equally unique take on the sports genre itself.

I’ve quietly become a big fan of the sports anime/manga genre over the last couple years (thanks largely to Chihayafuru, the perfect “gateway” sports show for a shoujo fan if ever there was one), but one thing that continues to surprise me is just how different each show can be, delivering its own style and tone to a genre that is, at its core, about coming-of-age, hard work, and striving to achieve your goals.

Perhaps no two series are more indicative of the many ways a show can go about portraying these themes than Baby Steps and Haikyuu. To see just how different, hit the jump for some spoiler-free reviews on the first 25 episodes of these two sports stalwarts.

Continue reading →

Season Review: Tokyo Ghoul

Despite a lack of subtlety and some truly absurd story arcs, a well-developed core cast, a central question with no easy answer, and a riveting final episode make Tokyo Ghoul’s first season a worthwhile (albeit bumpy) ride.

image

Very mild spoilers throughout. I can’t review without discussing overarching themes and touching on some character arcs and plot points, but I’ll avoid any specifics.

Continue reading →

Season Review: Black Butler (Kuroshitsuji): Book of Circus

Ciel and Sebastian take their act to the Big Top and bring down the house in this, Black Butler’s best—and darkest—story to date.

image

A Note on Spoilers: I want to make these newbie-friendly, so I’ll try to avoid discussing specifics and instead stick to overarching concepts and themes. There are a couple paragraphs toward the end that deal with the finale, so I marked them with a warning message. Of course if you prefer to go into a series without knowing anything about it, then the short version is: It’s disturbing and heartbreaking and excellent. Go watch it.

Continue reading →

Panning the Stream: Summer 2014 Midseason Review

If I had to pick a single word to describe this season, it would have to be “eclectic.”

image

While this past Spring was dominated by very good sports series, and this past Winter was dominated by, uh… kami, I guess? (it was a pretty weak season), this Summer seems to have taken a cookie out of every genre jar. Action flicks, thrillers, rom-coms, satires, school dramas, period pieces, mysteries, Gothic horrors… you want it, this season has got it. And while none of them have been quite as jaw-droppingly perfect as Spring’s Ping Pong or Mushishi, on the whole I’d say there are a lot of solid, B-range shows on the schedule. It’s made it very hard to trim titles off my watchlist, that’s for sure.

And now that we’re six (or five, in Nobunaga Concerto’s case) episodes into the season, I figured I’d pop back in with some quickie reviews to talk about what’s still working, what reeeally isn’t, and everything in between.

Continue reading →