Blog Status Update: August 31st, 2015, My Life and E-Sports

For anyone who’s followed me on things outside of this blog, you’ll know that I’ve been playing the MOBA Smite competitively for the better part of a year. As of yesterday, that ended. My Smite career is over, at least competitively. I figured I’d talk a bit about my experience as well as what this means for the future.

But, for those of you who don’t want to read about my gaming experiences, I figure I should probably just tell you upfront what this means for my blog. In short, I have a lot more free time, which means that I should be able to blog more again. I don’t know for certain how much more, as I’m still busy with school among other things, but the lack of Smite has freed up a good 4-6 hours a day for me to do other things, including cartoons and blogging, though probably not exclusively that. I think it’s likely that after I get settled into a new schedule I should at least be able to do something like 1 to 2 posts a week again, though I don’t want to promise anything other than that there will be more posts and more frequently.

Feel free to skip the rest of the article now, for all you non-gaming fans out there.

Summer 2015, First Impressions – Part 2, Fantasy

Fantasy is one of my favorite genres. In fact, I’m kind of a huge fantasy nerd, as anyone who knows me already is aware. Most fantasy kind of sucks though, so it’s rare to get a lot of good fantasy anything, let alone anime. But we have quite a few fantasy shows present this season, so I figured I might as well do a first impression post entirely about fantasy. Even more unusually, most of these anime don’t suck, which is pretty shocking, but hey.

This post will cover: Akagami no Shirayuki-hime, Chaos Dragon, GATE, Overlord, Rokka no Yuusha, and Ushio to Tora

Summer 2015, First Impressions – Part 1, Comedies

Comedies are the worst anime to review or do writeups on of any kind. All of criticism is pretty subjective, but comedies basically comes down to: how funny do I find this and is there any value to this show besides humor? So that’s the question I’m gonna ask for all of these shows, and just leave it at that.

This post will cover: Charlotte, Homouto! Umaru Chan, Joukamachi no Dandelion, and Prison School

Yuri Kuma Arashi – Review and Discussion, Story Over Symbolism

(Review and Discussion, or R&D for short, is a review format where I first give a short, spoiler-free review, followed by a more in-depth discussion of the anime’s story and themes)

Review

Yuri Kuma Arashi is the latest anime from Kunihiko Ikuhara, the creator of such classic series as Revolutionary Girl Utena and, one of my personal favorite anime of all time, Mawaru Penguindrum. Ikuhara returns to anime once again with another work where literally everything is a symbol for something else. As always, his ability to convey themes through metaphor are quite possibly the best in the business of storytelling period, and Yuri Kuma Arashi is no exception. However, unlike his previous works, Ikuhara’s usual stellar characterization and storytelling leave quite a lot to be desired when compared to his previous anime.

The following review will contain minor Penguindrum and Utena spoilers, as well as Yuri Kuma spoilers. If you’re reading this review and haven’t  already watched one or both of those series, then I have to tell you that you’re doing something wrong, as I think it’s almost unanimously agreed upon that both are better than Yuri Kuma Arashi. So, I strongly recommend that you go and watch those before even contemplating watching this.

Discussion (FULL SPOILERS BELOW)

Rolling☆Girls – Review and Discussion, For the Roll☆volution of the World

(Review and Discussion, or R&D for short, is a review format where I first give a short, spoiler-free review, followed by a more in-depth discussion of the anime’s story and themes)

Review

Rolling Girls debuted to a lot of praise from anime fans. I in particular was completely taken in with the anime. About a century ago, I wrote a piece about how much I liked it and how taken I was by its stylistic direction and themes. It was funny, charming, action packed, vibrant, and generally awesome. I stated some general directions and themes that I hoped the series would explore on its 12 episode run, and said that the series would succeed or fail based on how good the characterization, thematic elements, world exploration, and action were (not that these goals are particularly remarkable).

The show started strong and showed a good direction, but did it ultimately succeed or fail? Well, the answer is kind of both. While it ultimately did a really good job conveying most of the characterization and thematic elements, the world exploration and a lot of the plot was just kind of unexplored or made no sense.

Ultimately, I really liked the anime, but it’s very, very, very far from perfect. It didn’t fall on its face like I was afraid it might, but the results were somewhat… mixed. So lets break the anime down into its component anime and talk about them, so I can bitch about everything that annoyed me and praise all the things that didn’t.

Discussion (FULL SPOILERS BELOW)

Blog Status Update: 5/27/2015

So hi, I’m a bit overdue for posts on here, and I think it’s time I told everyone what’s been happening as I’m over a month overdue for returning to this blog. I figured no point in updating till I knew when I would be back, but now I think things have settled down enough for me to actually start getting back into this.

Rolling☆Girls episodes 1-4 – Scrambling for Greatness or Falling into Mediocrity?

So, if you’ve followed my Arbitrary Anime Rankings (or my Twitter account), you’ll know that I really liked the two part premier of Rolling☆Girls. I would’ve written something on it before now, but I wanted to see how the show would develop after the first two episodes, which were very clearly something of a prelude to the actual show. Now that I’ve seen episode 3, I can make some more educated guesses as to what the majority of the show’s direction will be like, as well as what it’s trying to do, and what my hopes and concerns are regarding said direction.

Arbitrary Episode Rankings – Winter 2015, Week 2

So I was watching 15 anime at the start of this week. That is WAY too many damn anime, so I’m gonna start dropping things like flies till I hit a manageable number. This is incredibly strange because it’s freaking winter, IE the season where NOTHING GOOD EVER AIRS. Except this Winter is amazing. Who would’ve thought it?

Though I guess we were due some amazing after last year…

Arbitrary Episode Rankings – Winter 2015, Week 1 (First Impressions)

The first week of the winter anime season is at an end. Now for Arbitrary Episode Rankings! In this edition, I’m just going to talk about new shows (meaning things not around in Fall).

This appears to be the season of moe infecting everything. Cute girls are everywhere, not just in cute girls faffing about shows. If you really hate cute girls being main cast members, you’ll probably hate most of the season, which would suck for you because there were a TON of breakout premiers this week. It’s been a really great start to the winter season, and it carries most of the good stuff from last season with it. This could probably be a year’s worth of good anime right here. I’m super excited for Winter. It seems like it’s gonna be great.

Yuki Yuna wa Yusha de Aru – Review and Discussion, Saving the World With Willpower… or Something

(Review and Discussion, or R&D for short, is a review format where I first give a short, spoiler-free review, followed by a more in-depth discussion of the anime’s story and themes, PLEASE NOTE the discussion portion of this review contains Puella Magi Madoka Magica spoilers as well)

Review

Yuki Yuna wa Yusha de Aru drew obvious Madoka comparisons out of the gate form the way it hid that it was a magical girl show to begin with. Later, it ventured into the sub-genre that can only be referred to as Madoka-clones, with the characters finding horrible secrets out about their mission to protect the world from space monsters, and succumbing to despair, etc. It’s rather reminiscent of Evangelion as well, though it’s mostly a surface resemblance.

In general, the show was a decent Madoka clone, up to a point, but it fails on multiple levels to recreate what made the original great. The show suffers from weak characters, inconsistent themes, badly-done tearjerker moments, a disjointed larger picture that overtakes a better-constructed personal one, and one of the worst endings to anything ever. It has some interesting ideas, is absolutely fantastic aesthetically, and did have some pretty great moments in it, but the product as a whole was simply a clone of better anime. Moreover, the ending was so utterly atrocious that it ruined any and all good feelings I might have had towards it.

Discussion (FULL SPOILERS BELOW)