[TV] The What Anime Are You Watching Thread!

GasBandit

Staff member
I tried to watch Mysterious Girlfriend X.

Guys, swapping spit is supposed to be just a metaphor. A turn of phrase. Bleh. I've watched some fucked up shit, but I don't enjoy watching people literally eat each other's saliva with exactly zero romantic motivation.

Bleck. Barely made it to the end of the first episode. One and done. Thank you, next. Life's too short to be nauseated by what I'm watching.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Nanana's Buried Treasure

1587693552778.png


Genre: Drama, action, comedy, supernatural, adventure

Fanservice: Egregious boob fixation

Premise: A broke, disinherited high school student transfers to a school on an artificially created island, and lucks out in finding an apartment for $50 a month, provided he pay the whole year in advance. Only after paying does he learn the catch - the apartment is haunted by the spirit of a girl named Nanana who was murdered there 10 years ago. No refunds! But it turns out this girl was a legendary treasure hunter who scoured the world for magical treasure, and then built artificial "ruins" all over the island to hide them in - full of dangerous traps and mind-bending puzzles. Thus, the boy, Yama Juugo, falls headlong into a dangerous world of intrigue, theft, double-crossing, violence and death where everyone is out to be the one to uncover Nanana's Buried Treasure.

It has an interesting hook, and some of the characters are interesting - but others are just irritating, if not 1-dimensional. It probably would have all balanced out to an average 2.5 anime if not for two big strikes against it:

First, there's no dub and the sub translations are stultifyingly literal and weeby. It's not localized for western audiences at all. Which I guess is a forgiveable conceit for the more weeby among us, but it's 2020 - life's too short and there's too many well-made serieses to waste time on bad localizations.

Second, It's 11 episodes long, ends on a cliffhanger/teaser, and got cancelled without a second season. Apparently the source material didn't sell very well, and so the whole thing got scrapped. So, if you're someone who likes a series to end with lots of dangling threads and nothing resolved, this is the series for you.

Verdict: 2/5. What's there isn't terrible, but the blue balls left by its premature termination mean you're probably better off skipping this one.
 
Thanks, COVID-19! Millionaire Detective has given up after just two episodes and will try again in July. Fishing Girls is also on hiatus until who knows when.
 
Listeners. For people who enjoy being beaten about the head and neck with thinly disguised music references masquerading as a plot. It has Rieri as the female lead, but that's enough to save the show for me.
 
Also started Sing "Yesterday" for Me. Slice-of-life about 4 young adults navigating their way through love, loss, and life's weirdness. It's only up to episode 4 right now.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Qualidea Code

1588133994682.png


Genre: Action, Drama, Sci-fi

Fanservice: Beach episode, some revealing clothes

Premise: Extradimensional beings simply called "Unknowns" suddenly invade earth (and more specifically, Japan, of course). Helpless before the surprise onslaught of alien technology, the Japanese put thousands of their children into cold sleep deep underground. Unknown years later, the few surviving adults who have established a small safe zone in Southern Kanto begin to bring the children out of stasis - and find that as they are revived, each child has a unique superpower. Thus they are conscripted, and with their help, the humans start to push back and turn the tide against the Unknown agressors.

This series has a very interesting hook and a lot of potential that just got absolutely squandered. Despite a good premise and some interesting plot twists, there are way too many problems for this to be an enjoyable anime.

First and foremost, almost all the characters are irritating. They're either dysfunctionally overconfident, irretrievably stupid, or just straight up one-dimensional tropes. At no point in this series do you really develop any kind of attachment to any protagonist character. Indeed, the antagonists are actually much more interesting - but we don't even really get to meet them until the last few episodes of the series. Almost all the protagonist dialog is either cringey or insulting (to the viewer's intelligence), and too much of the plot is moved forward by stupid people doing stupid things that should have been no-brainers to NOT do.

Secondly, quite often the artwork or animation takes a huge quality dive. A lot of the artwork gets sloppy. There's tons of panned still frames and low framerate sequences. They were really trying hard to make this a series about set pieces and spectacle and combat sequences, but they really didn't put in the time or effort to wow anybody watching.

Thirdly, this series is so far up its own ass it's practically a human pretzel. It takes itself WAY too seriously and shows absolutely no self awareness or irony - it thinks it is SO COOL and wants you to see how COOL everything is and how COOL and EDGY all the teen protagonists are and it just comes off even more eye-roll inducing than trying to put up with all the worst elements of, say, the homestuck fandom. This is a great show for reminding people why nobody actually likes teenagers in real life.

It's not the worst anime I've ever watched, but it is one of the most irritating. It's way down there. There are a few interesting tidbits that could have made it a better show, but they were not leveraged and the series becomes equal parts tedious, irritating, and cringe. I recommend avoiding it.

Verdict: 1.5/5.
 
I just looked up Boku no Pico after not understanding memes about it and now I feel like it might be in my legal interest to nuke my search history.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I just looked up Boku no Pico after not understanding memes about it and now I feel like it might be in my legal interest to nuke my search history.
Boku has a write up in the house of filth, in the NSFW section. I agree with DA, it's time for self-defenestration.
 

fade

Staff member
Listeners is pretty interesting. It's an exercise in "How close can we get to copywrited content without getting sued?" which is doubled down on by the subtitle translators, who take it juuuust a little further away from the sources than the Japanese audio. Basically, it's a music themed mecha anime, where everything---like EVERYTHING---is a song reference. There are tons of easter eggs (like students literally smashing pumpkins in the background), obvious homages to real musicians, etc. About half the dialogue is song lyrics, though, like I said, changed juuuust enough. Like the male duotagonist seeing the female duotagonist in a blue dress for the first time, and then mangling a recognizable but lawsuit-free reference to She's a Rainbow. Pretty good though. It's a simulcast on Hulu, so only 8 episodes so far, and like all the other simulcasts, probably on Covid hiatus.
 
Listeners is pretty interesting. It's an exercise in "How close can we get to copywrited content without getting sued?" which is doubled down on by the subtitle translators, who take it juuuust a little further away from the sources than the Japanese audio. Basically, it's a music themed mecha anime, where everything---like EVERYTHING---is a song reference. There are tons of easter eggs (like students literally smashing pumpkins in the background), obvious homages to real musicians, etc. About half the dialogue is song lyrics, though, like I said, changed juuuust enough. Like the male duotagonist seeing the female duotagonist in a blue dress for the first time, and then mangling a recognizable but lawsuit-free reference to She's a Rainbow. Pretty good though. It's a simulcast on Hulu, so only 8 episodes so far, and like all the other simulcasts, probably on Covid hiatus.
Anything from this season that was going on hiatus already is, so for better or worse this show should finish its run.

That said, I dropped this show at week 4 (along with a *lot* of other people) when it turned into nothing BUT one reference after another. Sorry, Rieri.
 
Top