I started watching this one with my husband over a year ago, then I could never pin him down to get him to continue watching it, so it is trapped in "need to wait for someone else" limbo.
[TV] The What Anime Are You Watching Thread!
I'm probably going to play the video game novel version instead.
fade
Staff member
I'm still this way on Santa Clarita Diet and Game of Thrones. Both have been deemed "watch together" by my wife, yet we haven't watched a single episode in over a year. It's time to move on without her, I think. Though in fairness, despite being a huge fantasy fan, I just can't get into Game of Thrones. Can't really see what the buzz is about.
GasBandit
Staff member
Just a heads up for everybody, there's NSFW ads on that site.
GasBandit
Staff member
I binged season one of Overlord tonight after getting home.
Mild spoilers follow.
Mild spoilers follow.
Oh look, yet ANOTHER "an MMO turns real and the protagonist is trapped in his avatar" anime. That's really the flavor of the month in Japan right now, I guess.
This one has a slightly interesting twist, though. In Sword Art Online, or Konosuba, or In Another World With My Smartphone, or Log Horizon, etc, the main character is (to varying degrees) what one might call a "hero." Not quite so, here.
The main character here is the guild master of a defunct top tier guild whose other players have all moved on. After 12 years, the game "Yggdrasil" is finally shutting down, and Momonga sits alone at the round table in his guild hall, reminiscing with bittersweet fondness about the accomplishments of his guild that are about to fade away forever. He's stayed in the game alone for a long time, unable to bear the thought of his and his friends' accomplishments fading away or falling into disrepair. So he has kept a solitary vigil, maintaining the guild hall and its NPCs, until the very end.
The appointed hour of the game shutdown arrives.
And passes.
But Momonga is still here. He tries contacting a GM to see if the shutdown has been rescheduled, only to find that the message fails, and he can't contact any other players anymore, either. In fact, his UI is missing, and he now notices that the NPCs are actually moving their mouths when they talk, and he can smell and touch them. Checking the environs outside his guild hall, the landscape is completely different. He, the guild hall, and all its attendant NPCs and treasures have been transported to a new world. One he can't leave - and he's not sure he would really even want to anyway.
Here's the twist. Momonga is a greater lich. The guild was a PK guild, the guild hall is "The Great Tomb of Nazarik," an immense labyrinthine extradimensional mausoleum, and his now-living and intelligent vassal former-NPCs are all vampires, demons, and monsters that worship him as a living god. Momonga renames himself after his guild, Ainz Ooal Gown (seriously, yes), disguises himself, and heads out to perform great deeds in its name, so that any other Yggdrasil players that hear about it will recognize the name and, hopefully, come running. Momonga, or rather, Lord Ainz Ooal Gown hopes in particular to be reunited with his old guildmates. And, while he's at it, maybe he'll just go ahead and take over the world, since as far as he can tell, the most powerful beings on the planet aren't even half as powerful as he is.
It's got some teeth to it. I have to admit it caught and kept my interest right off the bat.
But, naturally, I have some gripes. And they're not trivial gripes.
First and foremost, this show is WAY up its own ass. Everything is SUPER SRS BZNS, in a crapsack world setting. And it's not afraid to spend an entire episode on needless and meaningless waving of arms (and flapping of gums) that serves no purpose other than to say "Check out how cool this shit is, aren't you impressed?"
Second of all, like IAWWMSmartphone, the main character is pretty much nigh invulnerable. Unlike Smartphone, however, Overlord tries to put on a paper-thin pretense that he might not be, even though he always is. And it spends too much time on it. There are other interesting things going on in the periphery that deserve more screentime than Lord Ainz butchering yet another trashmob.
Third of all, there are pacing issues. Too much time is spent on tedious things (especially the things involved with gripes 1 and 2), and not enough time on exploring the interesting parts. The last 3 episodes of the season were particularly egregious in this regard, stretching out a battle in a manner the like of which I haven't seen since Dragonball Z 20 years ago, with no real reason to do so. I don't know why these writers think shouting attacks and real-time mockups of MMO-battle dynamics are still interesting. There was more interesting plot development during the ending credits of episode 13 than there was in the actual episodes 11, 12, OR 13. It started to feel like a story being told by a 4 year old - you know, the kind that goes on forever because the kid keeps getting bogged down in details that don't matter. Which is really a shame, because the first 10 episodes were pretty engaging and didn't have this problem quite as acutely.
My final gripe is that the show can't seem to decide whether Ainz is a villain or an antihero. It toys with the idea of him redeeming himself and becoming a hero, inspired by the example set by one of his guild mates, but the next moment he'll be callously disregarding human death and acting as a true lich would - cold, calculating, uncaring. He'll save a village one day, the next day he'll be completely unmoved by the slaughter of the group of adventurers that he was, for all appearances, becoming friends and close compatriots with over the course of several days - and despite it being in his power to resurrect the dead (and not just reanimate them a la necromancy), he never even considers using it even in the face of truly poignant death of characters whose backstories were just beginning to be explored in such a way that the audience was clearly meant to believe they'd be recurring.
Despite all that, I think I'll be watching season 2, as soon as it is dubbed into english. This series is way too dialog heavy for me to bother with subs.
This one has a slightly interesting twist, though. In Sword Art Online, or Konosuba, or In Another World With My Smartphone, or Log Horizon, etc, the main character is (to varying degrees) what one might call a "hero." Not quite so, here.
The main character here is the guild master of a defunct top tier guild whose other players have all moved on. After 12 years, the game "Yggdrasil" is finally shutting down, and Momonga sits alone at the round table in his guild hall, reminiscing with bittersweet fondness about the accomplishments of his guild that are about to fade away forever. He's stayed in the game alone for a long time, unable to bear the thought of his and his friends' accomplishments fading away or falling into disrepair. So he has kept a solitary vigil, maintaining the guild hall and its NPCs, until the very end.
The appointed hour of the game shutdown arrives.
And passes.
But Momonga is still here. He tries contacting a GM to see if the shutdown has been rescheduled, only to find that the message fails, and he can't contact any other players anymore, either. In fact, his UI is missing, and he now notices that the NPCs are actually moving their mouths when they talk, and he can smell and touch them. Checking the environs outside his guild hall, the landscape is completely different. He, the guild hall, and all its attendant NPCs and treasures have been transported to a new world. One he can't leave - and he's not sure he would really even want to anyway.
Here's the twist. Momonga is a greater lich. The guild was a PK guild, the guild hall is "The Great Tomb of Nazarik," an immense labyrinthine extradimensional mausoleum, and his now-living and intelligent vassal former-NPCs are all vampires, demons, and monsters that worship him as a living god. Momonga renames himself after his guild, Ainz Ooal Gown (seriously, yes), disguises himself, and heads out to perform great deeds in its name, so that any other Yggdrasil players that hear about it will recognize the name and, hopefully, come running. Momonga, or rather, Lord Ainz Ooal Gown hopes in particular to be reunited with his old guildmates. And, while he's at it, maybe he'll just go ahead and take over the world, since as far as he can tell, the most powerful beings on the planet aren't even half as powerful as he is.
It's got some teeth to it. I have to admit it caught and kept my interest right off the bat.
But, naturally, I have some gripes. And they're not trivial gripes.
First and foremost, this show is WAY up its own ass. Everything is SUPER SRS BZNS, in a crapsack world setting. And it's not afraid to spend an entire episode on needless and meaningless waving of arms (and flapping of gums) that serves no purpose other than to say "Check out how cool this shit is, aren't you impressed?"
Second of all, like IAWWMSmartphone, the main character is pretty much nigh invulnerable. Unlike Smartphone, however, Overlord tries to put on a paper-thin pretense that he might not be, even though he always is. And it spends too much time on it. There are other interesting things going on in the periphery that deserve more screentime than Lord Ainz butchering yet another trashmob.
Third of all, there are pacing issues. Too much time is spent on tedious things (especially the things involved with gripes 1 and 2), and not enough time on exploring the interesting parts. The last 3 episodes of the season were particularly egregious in this regard, stretching out a battle in a manner the like of which I haven't seen since Dragonball Z 20 years ago, with no real reason to do so. I don't know why these writers think shouting attacks and real-time mockups of MMO-battle dynamics are still interesting. There was more interesting plot development during the ending credits of episode 13 than there was in the actual episodes 11, 12, OR 13. It started to feel like a story being told by a 4 year old - you know, the kind that goes on forever because the kid keeps getting bogged down in details that don't matter. Which is really a shame, because the first 10 episodes were pretty engaging and didn't have this problem quite as acutely.
My final gripe is that the show can't seem to decide whether Ainz is a villain or an antihero. It toys with the idea of him redeeming himself and becoming a hero, inspired by the example set by one of his guild mates, but the next moment he'll be callously disregarding human death and acting as a true lich would - cold, calculating, uncaring. He'll save a village one day, the next day he'll be completely unmoved by the slaughter of the group of adventurers that he was, for all appearances, becoming friends and close compatriots with over the course of several days - and despite it being in his power to resurrect the dead (and not just reanimate them a la necromancy), he never even considers using it even in the face of truly poignant death of characters whose backstories were just beginning to be explored in such a way that the audience was clearly meant to believe they'd be recurring.
Despite all that, I think I'll be watching season 2, as soon as it is dubbed into english. This series is way too dialog heavy for me to bother with subs.
I guess you'll probably want to skip Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody, then. Game dev winds up in a mashup of a couple of projects he was working on in the real world, winds up massively overpowered, and decides to spend his time there as a... tourist. And the UI from the game is almost always present and giving information... in Japanese. The second episode finally translated the UI popups, but we'll see if they keep that up.
GasBandit
Staff member
Spice and Wolf
Well, this is certainly a change of pace. As in, this show could almost be called... sedate. Stately, even.
This is one of those shows that's always on every "essential classic anime you have to watch" lists that get tossed around twice a week, and I've always meant to get around to watching it, but there was always something else to watch and never enough time for everything. But when you're too exhausted to do anything but lie on the couch and watch TV, you start chewing through a backlog pretty fast.
This is clearly not for everyone. There's practically no action, and most of the conflict/plot centers around fictional economics and mercantilism. It's extremely dialog heavy, so I definitely recommend the english dub unless you enjoy speed reading your TV screen. That said, if you like slice of life and romance type stuff, this would probably be your bag. Once you get used to what it is, the pacing is consistent and the story is engaging. It's satisfying that both protagonists are demonstrably flawed but also experiencing growth, and it's also nice that the stakes have never been lower, to subvert the cliche. The plot arc goal is to escort the wolf girl home to the north, and maybe make enough money along the way for the peddler to open a shop of his own. All the struggles are personal ones, pretty much. It's quite the palate cleanser, between watching shows about undefeatable protagonists grabbing the world by the horns and carving new destinies or timelines, etc.
I did chuckle though, at the throwback 90's nudity (She has no nipples! Can't get mad! No nipples! Can't get mad!) for the brief instances where the story called for it.
Well, this is certainly a change of pace. As in, this show could almost be called... sedate. Stately, even.
This is one of those shows that's always on every "essential classic anime you have to watch" lists that get tossed around twice a week, and I've always meant to get around to watching it, but there was always something else to watch and never enough time for everything. But when you're too exhausted to do anything but lie on the couch and watch TV, you start chewing through a backlog pretty fast.
This is clearly not for everyone. There's practically no action, and most of the conflict/plot centers around fictional economics and mercantilism. It's extremely dialog heavy, so I definitely recommend the english dub unless you enjoy speed reading your TV screen. That said, if you like slice of life and romance type stuff, this would probably be your bag. Once you get used to what it is, the pacing is consistent and the story is engaging. It's satisfying that both protagonists are demonstrably flawed but also experiencing growth, and it's also nice that the stakes have never been lower, to subvert the cliche. The plot arc goal is to escort the wolf girl home to the north, and maybe make enough money along the way for the peddler to open a shop of his own. All the struggles are personal ones, pretty much. It's quite the palate cleanser, between watching shows about undefeatable protagonists grabbing the world by the horns and carving new destinies or timelines, etc.
I did chuckle though, at the throwback 90's nudity (She has no nipples! Can't get mad! No nipples! Can't get mad!) for the brief instances where the story called for it.
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The answer to all of those questions is "because they can."
Just be sure to stick around for ep. 2. It's worth it.
GasBandit
Staff member
I watched 1, 2, AND 3, because apparently I do not value my own sanity.
GasBandit
Staff member
Black Lagoon -
It's still good. And one of the best localizations ever attempted. It's so much more enjoyable an experience to watch the english dub than to read the japlish subs.
The theme song is still hilariously bad word-salad, though.
And every single fight scene is bollywood levels of ridiculous. Nobody can hit anybody but mooks, ever.
It's still good. And one of the best localizations ever attempted. It's so much more enjoyable an experience to watch the english dub than to read the japlish subs.
The theme song is still hilariously bad word-salad, though.
And every single fight scene is bollywood levels of ridiculous. Nobody can hit anybody but mooks, ever.
Found the rest of the Samurai Champloo episodes so YAY I'll get to finish it.
That's the only show on my MAL dropped list. I was in the middle of the series when the house burned down, and I never got around to continuing.
Have you picked up any from this season?
Not yet. I don't want to make another Black Clover mistake.
Yuru Camp. Trust me. The comfy goes to 11.Not yet. I don't want to make another Black Clover mistake.
I watched the first three episodes I can watch on Crunchyroll for free (have to wait a bit to watch the next one) and you are right.Yuru Camp. Trust me. The comfy goes to 11.
The OP is great too. Definitive a good choice for a feel good anime. Sounds a bit like "I want you back".
GasBandit
Staff member
Amagi Brilliant Park
I'm 7 episodes in to a 13 episode (and 1 OAV) series, and I'm rapidly losing interest. Not even rampant fanservice is enough to keep my interest up. I don't know if I'll make it through to the end. I can't exactly put my finger on what I don't like about the series.... it's just not... grabbing me.
I'm 7 episodes in to a 13 episode (and 1 OAV) series, and I'm rapidly losing interest. Not even rampant fanservice is enough to keep my interest up. I don't know if I'll make it through to the end. I can't exactly put my finger on what I don't like about the series.... it's just not... grabbing me.
I actually loved this one.
GasBandit
Staff member
I think part of it may be the pacing. Despite only being 13ish episodes, it feels more like a decades-long sitcom where everything resets back to status quo between episodes. I'm halfway through the series and the dude is only about 4% of the way toward saving the park, and all the episodes feel like filler.
Yes, that's it. Every episode feels like a filler episode, and we're running out of episodes.
GasBandit
Staff member
Hey @DarkAudit, turns out you're *not* the only person in the world watching the new winter anime season after all!
Dammit, now I gotta sit around waiting for Overlord season 2 to finish getting subbed.
Dammit, now I gotta sit around waiting for Overlord season 2 to finish getting subbed.
Recommend me an anime for my daughter. She likes Slayers, Saber Marionette J, and Angelic Layer. She did enjoy Yuri on Ice, but it's the only anime I've ever been able to get her to watch subbed. She's also creepily obsessed with Danganronpa. Some fan service is ok, but she's 12, so let's not go full hentai. 
GasBandit
Staff member
Jeez, uh, I've not watched ANY of that. So... I don't know.Recommend me an anime for my daughter. She likes Slayers, Saber Marionette J, and Angelic Layer. She did enjoy Yuri on Ice, but it's the only anime I've ever been able to get her to watch subbed. She's also creepily obsessed with Danganronpa. Some fan service is ok, but she's 12, so let's not go full hentai.
I mean, you pretty much know all the anime I've watched and what I think about them, right?
I spout off about it enough.Stupid question, you've tried showing her the basic everybody-animes like Inuyasha and stuff, right?
How the fuck have you not seen Slayers?!Jeez, uh, I've not watched ANY of that. So... I don't know.
I mean, you pretty much know all the anime I've watched and what I think about them, right?
Stupid question, you've tried showing her the basic everybody-animes like Inuyasha and stuff, right?
AS HAVE I! Speaking OF-need to finish Revolution...or was it Evolution R? God that name is ridiculous.
There is no Slayers after Try.
There is no Slayers after Try.
So yeah, according to Dei only watch the first three seasons! 'Slike, just 26 eps per season, that ain't no thang.