Is this really a field of law? Impressions: As poor as the first two thirds of this episode was, I think it's really the end the drove the nail in the coffin home. It's Halloween! So are we doing a Halloween bit? Some Halloween jokes? No. A quick dressup montage, and then it's time for a alternate-world history lesson about Nobunaga. Because when I think of Halloween, the thing that comes to mind is definitely Nobunaga fanfiction. But that shouldn't take away from the first half, which was another bullying thing. They defeated it by… recording the bullying, and then saying that the ..read more

  …Riiight. Impressions: I'm ready to call it quits on this one too. The awful mysteries are bad, but that's par for the course for anime. Not the awful fanservice either, because pinning down a woman to crawl and sniff all over her is definitely needed, to say nothing of the multiple clothes explosion scenes. Far too much time is spent on explaining the mechanics and the trivialities of the exact mechanics while the actual investigation and pursuit of the true culprit or source of the issues is completely skipped over. There's no actual mystery here, despite the title repeating ..read more

    Two cities of plant people in one episode? Impressions: Back to mostly schtick, which is hard to say anything about because it's all so ephemeral and pointless, with about two thirds of the episode being them just rolling straight through some wacky area and screaming at the random things either assailing or ignoring the train. Goat people, space organs, a golf course, etc. I like how there's a city of plant people, a city of statue people, and a city of plant statue people. Really putting the old creative juices to good use there. I assumed the growth on the one g ..read more

  That's not how that works. Impressions: I guess I'm giving this the nod over Yozakura Family since its third episode continued to be more of the same. A training episode where, you'll never guess it, but he had to try his best, but he tried his best too much, so he won everybody over because he tried his best. At least they're trying to push the plot forward in this show, even if the characters and writing have the structural soundness of a popsicle fort. But at least it's trying to tell a story, not just falling back on the laziest of tropes and entering filler spin cycle an ..read more

  You'd think one of these shows about using the internet would have people who used the internet. Impressions: I guess it's at least trying, but I'm not sure it's getting across the actual messages that it wants, which is kind of ironic when the whole setup is putting on a play that is literally the exact situation they're going through, and the only parts of the play that they're going to talk about or explain is that 10 second speech saying "this is literally the exact situation we're going through." I understand the banal, yay friendship, thing they were going for, but she w ..read more

  I think the reasons I'm done here are self-evident. Impressions: The action sequences remain nonexistent; just explosions from a distance, then being one-shot from off-screen, also at a distance, and the yelling continues apace. But the writing? Also remains terrible. Now that we have our premise of dude-turned-monster, we can… go to school and have a whole test/tournament arc. Come on, Japan. At least do the whole vigilante monster thing for a while first before being forcibly recruited. When a dude gains super powers, their first thought should not be to use them to che ..read more

  You know this is not in any way how cults form or function, right? Quasi-Impressions: This had the 'better' third episode between it and Wind Breaker, largely because that was two two iterations of "We're about to fight… but maybe later," both stretched out for five minutes, with another 10 minute info dump in the middle. This had me a bit curious when it went into clan stuff, especially given, you know, the Abe assassination over clan stuff. There are lots of ways you could've taken it for a comedy. The girl's too thick or clueless to be recruited, or is a pain in the ass. Or maybe it ..read more

  Why did we infiltrate the school just to hide until after school again? Impressions: I wasn't hugely impressed with the script in the first episode, but eesh. This episode. Dress up in this school uniform. Now, let me explain why you should dress up in this uniform. You must never use this power. It is a curse that kills you. Okay, with that talk out of the way, let's use that power, for fanservice. We need to infiltrate the school by doing a 21 Jump Street. Now that you're in, hide until after school. There's nothing unusual about our school at all. Oh, except for the inexplicable ..read more

  Ew, fungus. Impressions: This is the first episode that was more like what I expected of this show, though it did have me worried at the start as it spent the first five or so minutes doing local regional schtick again. Thankfully, the rest of it moved into a pretty standard zombie/cultist/Children of the Corn kind of schtick, except with head mushrooms. I don't think it actually executed on it all that well though. Too much of the early stuff relied on the characters being excessively…well.. dumb, which, sure, is a horror movie trope, but not to this level. Especially with how muc ..read more

  Like that's rare in anime. Impressions: I was really hoping at least one of the shounen shows would be tolerable, but optimism is running thin. Both share a lot of problems. Wildly inconsistent and inappropriate tone. Nonsensical settings. Violence that it can't seem to decide whether or not is serious or on the level of Looney Tunes. They both introduce literal clowns and tried to hype them up as serious antagonists to be taken seriously, not helped by the terrible, completely inept protagonists who are barely capable of attempting the absolute minimum but have nonetheless spent the la ..read more