arcaneranger

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - The Yakuza's Guide to Babysitting

It's very nice, but the title feels a bit misleading.

The Yakuza's Guide to Babysitting may give you the first impression that it's going to be some kind of dark comedy with drama splashed in, but by the end of it, I was feeling much more Fruits Basket than anything else.

The last show I finished was Akiba Maid War, and the contrast between the two is stunning - while the yakuza as depicted in Maid War was unrealistic due to the over-the-top violence on display in every episode, Babysitting swings too far in the other direction. The Family depicted in this show feels less like the yakuza, and more like a group of roommates who happen to have a leader.

The main character Kirishima has a violent past, for sure, but the vast majority of this show is meant to be about him overcoming that. I can appreciate that as a story angle, but the problem here is that every conflict that comes up is solved ridiculously quickly to get back to the sugary sweet family comedy stuff.

It robs what could have been a more meaningful narrative of any stakes - towards the end, we of course get Kirishima running away because he's afraid he's going to relapse into the "demon" he was before the story began, but a search party is sent out for him and he ends up coming home without a fuss, despite the heavy angsting he'd been doing only minutes prior.

These feel like story beats that were hit for the sake of having a plot, rather than being written with any kind of intentionality, and it left me wishing the show could have been deeper than just being a cute time.

Basically, despite the title, it's essentially just another father-daughter show without much going on beyond that. It's a decent one, but don't go in expecting more than that.

7/10.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Fruits Basket The Final Season

This is a review that's been four years in the making.

As I've been watching the Fruits Basket remake, it's predictably been difficult to really find things to say while we were still on the first or second season. This was a story that was going to live and die by how it ended, and TMS had promised to tell the entire thing. The community waited nearly twenty years for a proper retelling of Fruits Basket that would reach all the way to the conclusion.

There is a good reason this story is so beloved.

These thirteen episodes are a rapid-fire masterpiece of dramatic character writing that deftly moves between the series' massive cast and yet manages to feel like nobody really gets left behind. The transition from lighthearted romantic comedy with dramatic elements, into a full-power drama with barely any jokes in sight was a difficult one, but the way it was split up ended up working directly in its favor as well.

Where the second season of Fruits Basket ended up leaving off on an underwhelming reveal, all we have here is satisfying conclusion after conclusion to each and every character's narrative, as the cycle of abuse is finally brought into sharp focus. The story of Akito was going to be a tricky one if she's meant to be redeemed in the end, and yet it's pulled off flawlessly with the centering of her narrative around her father.

Akito can't understand that what she does is wrong, because she was taught that she could do no wrong, deliberately skewing her view of the world so that she would pass on the abuse to those around her and continue to propagate the curse. As her world begins to crumble under the weight of self-examination, we see that the bonds between her and the cursed family members break one by one, and ultimately Tohru's act of offering her the first real friendship she's ever had is what brings the dam down entirely.

The comedic concept of people who transform when they're hugged is refocused and turned on its head, and becomes a heavy and tear-jerking desperation on their parts for physical affection. As each of them are relieved of their curse, they all immediately move to hug the nearest person to them, for the first time in their lives able to actually express such emotional intimacy.

And the story draws to a close as each of them begins to make plans for a life outside of the control of the family and the zodiac curse, for once allowed to make their own choices. Some choose to stay, others choose to leave, and we end with one final character arc for Tohru's late mother Kyoko. The payoff for this elephant in the room is massive, and had me bawling for a good ten minutes before I could calm myself enough to watch the final episode - and then it gets brought back around.

Yes, the problematic elements of the story are still present. There's still probably too many characters, the family members getting together is still weird and no attention is really drawn to it, and the adult-teen relationship ends the series intact.

But if you just let Fruits Basket sell you into its world, you might not even notice anymore. It's such a well-told story that its 90's-era problems are, in the end, very easy to forget, and what you're left with is one of the greatest stories in any anime, and probably a very red face.

10/10.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Salaryman's Club

I've got something of a personal, broad take on sports shows. Typically, if they're only one cour, it's seemingly never enough time to tell a complete and compelling story.

Salaryman's Club attempts to subvert this problem by deciding to speedrun a full tournament arc in only twelve episodes, and I'm happy to say that it mostly succeeds.

The most striking thing about this show is that it's a sports anime about adults, a rarity in and of itself. Given that the story is about working-class adults competing in what seems to be an amateur corporate league, it has to establish stakes beyond just "the seniors really want to win before the graduate". It mostly succeeds by executing the arcs of its two leads.

The more straightforward protagonist is Mikoto, a recent high-school graduate who attempted to play for champion-class team Mitsuhoshi Bank but failed due to an issue with PTSD caused by his high school doubles partner being injured due to his mistake. He gets recruited by the much more laid-back Sunlight Beverage corporation, and partnered up with the other main character. Over the series, he confronts the issues with his past and gains experience in his new position as a salesman while recovering his badminton career.

Then we have Tatsuru, who is one of the oldest members on the team at 32, and is approaching an age where he won't be able to play competitively anymore. He actually met Mikoto when he first started the Sunlight Beverage job and Mikoto was a child, and inspired him to take badminton seriously in the first place, but now he has to confront both the possibility of aging out of the game and the consequences of backsliding in his work.

It has to skip over a lot of stuff to get there, but Salaryman's Club does manage to competently tie up both of these arcs in full in only twelve episodes, and while it's a bit jarring to have entire matches happen offscreen, it does end up working in favor of the pacing.

Really, the thing holding Salaryman's Club back is that it's nothing too special. Despite the twist of the adult characters, it plays out like a pretty ordinary tale in its genre, making it a very enjoyable time, but not a particularly distinct one.

7/10.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Skeleton Knight in Another World

I tried, I really did.

You already know what happened here. The graphic, brutal scene at the beginning of this premiere was a shot heard around the anime world. It is exactly as unnecessary as it sounds, and the reality here is that it poisons the mood.

Skeleton Knight should be a silly comedy, and that is actually what it's going for, but the tone is just so completely ruined by the first sixty seconds that there is no recovery. I tried really hard to engage afterwards, because the jokes were solid and I like a himbo main character as much as the next gay, but I just couldn't get myself to be amused, especially knowing that they repeat the scene later in the episode.

It really doesn't matter what else happens, there's no coming back from something so gratuitous, ridiculous, and offensive as beginning with a pointless sexual assault scene. This is just one of the worst tropes in any story, and you could indeed neatly excise it from the story without losing anything, but it's the very first thing that the audience sees. I don't know why the fuck it's in there, but it just is, and it totally ruins the entire thing.

Dropped.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - The Greatest Demon Lord is Reborn as a Typical Nobody

If Misfit at Demon King Academy is anime junk food, this is the shitty dollar-store knockoff of that junk food.

While The Greatest Demon Lord is, like I'm Quitting Heroing, not technically an isekai, the worst excesses and indulgences of that particular story genre has bled out all over fantasy of any kind at this point. Case in point, here we have a power trip fantasy about a boy with poor social skills and godlike magical power.

This could have worked as a farcical comedy of some kind, but it's played almost entirely straight, and by the end of the episode we've already had our awkward reborn protagonist decide not to take a girl telling him no for an answer. She gets herself in trouble, he saves her, gives her life advice he just heard himself like five minutes ago, and it's all just a huge waste of time.

It's played straight, because of course the protagonist is meant to be a self-insert for any socially awkward chuuni guy who has phenomenal cosmic power inside his own mind. We can't make fun of him too much, because he represents the audience. This of course is also why he gets to hound a girl who keeps telling him to fuck off (because her dad said it was okay, which makes it worse), because this is how pre-incel types behave. Either she'll cave, or he'll end up a misogynist.

I can't even complain about there being a potentially better version of this, because The Misfit at Demon King Academy literally already is. And it's getting a second season. Just skip this and wait for that.

Silver Link could be making so, so, so many more interesting things than this right now. Drop.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Tomodachi Game

So close to being decent, but it fails at one really particular thing.

In today's "Honey, we have Danganronpa at home" copycat, five friends are kidnapped and forced to play a mind game by a mascot character that will end with at least one of their lives ruined. One of them appears to have stolen two million yen out of a class fundraiser, but nobody knows whom it was, and they're all about to be punished for it.

The game they're forced into in episode one is decently clever, as far as social engineering games go, and the show is very nearly watchable. The issue here is that, well, the thing is called Tomodachi Game (as is the in-universe event) and I was just not sold at all that these people were even friends. A lot of dialogue was spent insisting on this point, but they don't even really seem all that close, and I think that's a key point to at least start out on. I'm not invested in seeing these people succeed in saving their friendship because I'm not really sure they even started with one.

It's also just not that compelling when you realize that all that seems to be on the line is money. I'm sure the money is going to escalate in future episodes, but this first episode kinda just sets up a Kakegurui situation where I have no idea what this amount actually means to anyone.

Basically, I'm done with this unless I find out it takes some massive upswing later. Drop.

[arcaneranger]

Final(?) Thoughts - I'm Quitting Heroing

I'm probably just dropping this, but there's like a 10% chance it develops into something interesting.

I'm Quitting Heroing does, full credit, present me with a story concept I haven't seen before. It's not an isekai, to my knowledge, but a fantasy story about a very animesque fantasy world. This story asks what happens after the Big Bad Evil Guy is defeated, most particularly about the hero that bested them. They're super-powerful but they don't have much to do now that the Great Evil has been defeated.

What if he went to work for them?

This is a fascinating premise for a comedy, and yet this first episode chooses to make a terrible first impression by being largely comprised of flashbacks to the hero defeating the demon lords. I didn't even finish it because I was so bored. This KonoSuba-y story idea is totally wasted by how straight it's all being played.

The main character isn't even interesting. He could be this glorious hero with a hammy personality, but instead he's just like any isekai protagonist, the sole difference being that he's from the fantasy world.

Ugh. I'm rambling. My friend is still watching, and I'm gonna ask him if this ever lived up to its potential, but I'm not here to watch a show aim for 6/10.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs

Someday, this war will end. But not today.

The title of Trapped in a Dating Sim will tell you absolutely everything you need to know about this show, on more than one level. The fact that it's written like a One Direction fanfiction title tells you the competency of the author, the length tells you that this is a Light Novel Anime, and the title itself tells you that it's going to be yet another goddamn dating sim isekai.

Mobsekai asks the daring, dangerous question on everybody's minds: what if the person being reincarnated was...a mediocre man with black hair?

Sure, it might look like he's got some circumstances working against him because he's reborn as a random peasant NPC, but by the end of the episode, he's already drowning in money and cheat powers by using his knowledge of the game to acquire a literal space ship.

Basically, take all of my complaints about Slimesekai, and just put them on fast forward for this one. It's already power tripping in episode one, and that gives me no hope that it will be at all interesting going forward. Easy drop.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Love All Play

It's not the worst thing I've seen, but it comes at a really unfortunate time.

Love All Play is a show about a boy joining a high-school badminton team, and it's nothing so much as it is boring. I really don't have much to say here other than pointing out that it's a phone-in job from a legendary scriptwriter clearly past his prime, and a notable director also past his prime.

Oh, and it's coming one season after the obviously much-better Salaryman's Club.

I don't really feel I should have to put more effort into this write-up than what went into the show I watched for it. Easy drop.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Estab-Life: Great Escape

Okay, so, it's The Matrix (kinda), only instead of Morpheus, Neo, and Trinity, we have teenage girls, and they don't break people out of the system, they just move them to different ones if they're unhappy.

Oh, and it's made by Polygon Pictures.

Estab-Life throws viewers into an in medias res story and refuses to really make it clear what's happening for the entire premiere, but I've managed to piece together that in this setting, Tokyo has been divided into separated cities governed by a computer system. The main characters are Extractors, who take on the illegal job of moving people between these Clusters if they're unhappy with their lives, which is where the action portions come in.

This premiere comes pretty close to working once you've got it all pieced together, but unfortunately, Polygon's distinct style of clunky CGI creates too much distance between a viewer and their ability to connect with a character. The fact that the girls are cardboard cutouts doesn't help, though they do have entertaining back-and-forth dynamics.

It gets worse when you look into it though, only to find that this show was planned by Goro Taniguchi (who has long been on a downward slump) and Full Metal Panic creator Shouji Gatou, and is really obviously not either of their best-quality work. This one's gonna get swiftly forgotten, and I'm not really here to try to fight back against that.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Sabikui Bisco

Probably should have listened to my first instinct on this one.

Sabikui Bisco made a pretty bad first impression by having its first three episodes tell both a present-day and flashback story at the same time, and in the process, it established its universe as a deeply weird place. Once I was convinced to get through this rough portion, I will admit that I started to have a good time.

Sabikui's world is a post-apocalyptic Japan where many animals have grown enormous, a mysterious rusting disease is claiming lives, and mushrooms have become functionally illegal to cultivate because the public believe they're causing that disease. A young doctor from the city has made it his mission to cure his sister (a ranking guard and extremely capable fighter) of this rusting disease before it eventually kills her, by experimenting with the supposedly harmful fungi. He meets a hot-blooded "terrorist" who can make massive mushrooms grow instantly, who informs him that the truth is inverted - the mushrooms can actually reduce the rust, and there's one that can reverse it entirely.

So, for a while, the show becomes a road trip story where the two outlaws partner together to find the Rust Eater, riding atop their faithful crab steed Actagawa. Sabikui Bisco settles into an entertaining groove where it gets to just play with its world, even if it ends up feeling a bit derivative of Gurren Lagann.

And then the big villain is introduced, a mad scientist who essentially is responsible for the spread of the rust, and the stupidity just bleeds out all over the narrative.

This is a show where both the main characters appear to die and then are resurrected. Nino gets shot in the back five times at the end of an episode only to recover by the beginning of the next. Bisco has an onscreen death where he supposedly kills the scientist as the rust is causing his body to crumble, only to be reborn in the body of the giant monster fought in the climax, so fully-reformed that it somehow regenerated his clothes too.

And then in the end, it turns out Bisco is literally immortal now, and the show hasn't even provided a reasonable explanation for how he comes back to life. Evidently it was just because his friend was calling his name on top of the monster, and he just wakes up and crawls out of it.

Dumb. This is dumb. Please don't kill off your characters and then bring them back without any explanation. I feel like I shouldn't have to say this out loud.

5/10.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - NOMAD: MEGALOBOX 2

I hope it's understandable that this one took me a while.

Back in 2018, I was in a very different place in my life, but I stand by my decision to give the original MEGALOBOX a perfect score. Even though I was basically forced on a break from anime when NOMAD was airing, I managed to set aside some time alone in the dark to watch the first episode...and that, by itself, was also a 10/10. It took months for me to work up the nerve to actually keep going.

The worst thing that a second MEGALOBOX could have done was to try to be more of the first one, and full credit, NOMAD is absolutely not that. It's brutal, upsetting, and emotional, and it knows well enough that just doing a sports movie sequel would not be doing justice to the original. NOMAD takes the focus off of the ring (especially Joe's) and places it squarely on the aftermath of trauma.

Six and a half years after the conclusion of the original show, the Joe we are introduced to is so different that he's not even using the name anymore, going by the new title of the show - Nomad. He's washed-up, he's failing to fight, and he's addicted to painkillers to try and keep himself floating through whatever is left of his life. And he's being haunted by a hallucination of Pops, who we learn, has died.

This is, of course, a pretty far cry from how the first season ended, and one of the driving mysteries is how the hell things got so bad. It turns out that although Pops died of natural causes, the situation surrounding that event completely shattered the sense of family that the surviving characters had together, and having flown too close to the sun, Joe fell just as hard as Icarus did.

The first story arc is a self-contained tale of Joe encountering a community of immigrants hated by society for basically the reasons that they are in real life. While the story of Chief and the immigrants is effective in and of itself, and extremely moving, the first stumble of the season comes with its depiction of racism. While accurate, NOMAD misses the opportunity to show anything but the most obvious and overt bigotry, rather than the way said bigotry can manifest in smaller and more deep-seated ways.

Moving on from this, we get into the real meat of the season, which is the newly-clean Joe's efforts to reassemble his old life despite nobody that knew him now wanting anything to do with the former champion. This is followed by a more cyberpunk-themed story about a boxer who had left the ring for a career in law enforcement, became a local hero, and was nearly paralyzed from the neck down until a miracle machine came from a pharmaceutical company that would restore his body with the use of a computer implanted into his brain. The negative side effects, unfortunately, are threatening to rip his family apart.

I want to stress that NOMAD is a great show with many triumphant emotional moments, but unfortunately it ends up fumbling the ball in a few key ways that prevent me from awarding it with the same perfect score as its predecessor.

The first is in said depiction of law enforcement. It's squeaky-clean and without any interrogation of the systems at play, which is unusual for a cyberpunk-genre story, particularly when corruption is a theme in the side of the story involving the pharmaceutical company (who want to sell their miracle machine to the military).

The second is the final episode. Whereas Joe and Yuri's fight from the end of the original felt like it had massive emotional stakes, Joe and Mac's fight here doesn't really have any.It ends extremely prematurely in a way I can only imagine was written because they didn't have enough room in the episode to have both this last bout (which is constantly interrupted with plot flashbacks) and the story wrap-up, and since the penultimate episode is mostly just set-up for the fight, I probably would have spread it over both that and the last episode. Joe and Mac don't really seem to care who actually wins here, it's purely symbolic, but that also means that the audience likely doesn't care either.

But the ride to get there and the phenomenal character writing is still enough for me to give NOMAD a spot in my Hall of Fame, with a 9/10. It's not as good as the original, but it has the balls to go in a different direction, and it executes almost all of that in a perfect, moving way.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - My Dress-Up Darling

My first show of 2022, done and dusted. What did we get?

My Dress-Up Darling, more than possibly any show I've ever talked about, came right the fuck out of nowhere, and its surprise popularity utterly flattened everything this season not named Demon Slayer or Attack On Titan. As I'm writing this, it is the third-most popular Winter 2022 show on MAL behind only those two, and the fourth-place show (Arifureta Season 2) has less than half of its member count.

And all of this over a moderately-horny romantic comedy about a shy boy who makes fancy dolls and a trendy, sex-positive girl who wants to cosplay.

Dress-Up Darling does deserve the hype, though. It's pretty unfailingly cute, the leads have a boatload of chemistry together, and it's honest about how awkward the entire thing can be for a boy who's never had an interaction with a girl his own age before. Their first major conversation involves him basically totally forgetting that he's even talking to a teenage girl because he's so wrapped up in critiquing the quality of her work from his artisan's point of view.

As the show goes on, it introduces some very nice genre curveballs (the girl falling for the guy way ahead of time, for example) and some unfortunate and stale tropes (like the middle-schooler who looks eighteen and has massive boobs). While I find the characters' personalities enjoyable, I think the story would have been fine just paring some of these elements down. Being openly horny is fine, being wholesome is fine, and smashing them together can work out fine, but anime as a whole needs to move on from the trope of sexualizing young girls' bodies on TV.

The other cultural issue that the show unfortunately belly-flops into is racism. There is an entire episode about the heroine putting together a costume for a character who wears extremely revealing clothing (which is where most of the jokes in the situation come from), but unfortunately for the viewer, this also involves her deliberately darkening her skin in order to more closely resemble said character. This really doesn't get touched on, but it's deeply uncomfortable to watch, and you can't really escape it because this costume appears in the show's opening.

That stuff out of the way, though, My Dress-Up Darling is still a very enjoyable romantic comedy that breaks from the typical formula in some ways, and executes that same formula excellently in others. While the ending is fairly unsatisfying, the journey to get there is fun, it looks great, and I can't imagine we won't get to see more of these crazy kids in the near future.

8/10.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun Season 2

My favorite comedy of 2020 returns with a slightly improved production job, a really annoying new opening song, and just as much pure charm as ever.

Charm is absolutely a key word I would use to describe what makes Welcome to Demon School! so good. Yes, it's funny, but even when it's in between jokes (or worse, something isn't landing), the show is able to coast on its demonic-Lisa-Frank aesthetic and the inertia of its characters until the next thing that makes you laugh.

And those characters are basically all featured heavily this season. Despite having fewer episodes, I feel like I got to know every single member of the somewhat expansive cast better over the course of this second season, and seeing the friendship that our protagonist develops with his demon friends is extremely wholesome. I actually commented to one of my fellow writers that it didn't seem like Iruma even needs to still be concerned about his classmates finding out that he's secretly a human, because they all have developed so much respect for him that I can't imagine they would actually eat him at this point.

And Iruma himself remains one of the show's greatest strengths, as a protagonist with personality flaws that only make him more endearing. This season truly fleshes him out into a more complicated character as we get to see his "evil" side, and this alter ego version of him is driven, relentless, and yet still fairly selfless in his pursuit of a goal that benefits the entire class. (Side note: Evil!Iruma sitting on the Demon King's throne is easily one of my top ten anime moments of 2021.)

All of that being said, this season's second half does unfortunately get a bit dragged down by an extended story arc taking place away from the school, and while that isn't a bad thing on its own, the "demonic amusement park" setting is pretty quickly made irrelevant when the place gets wrecked by giant kaiju and then several episodes are spent fighting said kaiju. There's a few good character moments here for the rest of the class, but it goes on for too long, and focusing multiple episodes on slow-paced action battles doesn't really suit the strengths of this story.

All of that being said, by the end of the season, summer break is over and the kids are returning to school, with a new ultimatum and a lot of hard work ahead of them. Season 3 is coming in October, and I can't wait to see how this turns out.

8/10.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - Jujutsu Kaisen 0

Oh, boy. You ever look at a movie's audience score and think you must be taking crazy pills?

Jujutsu Kaisen has emerged as a massive breakout hit for Shonen Jump in the wake of the Demon Slayer manga ending, and for good reason. I have positively compared this property to Yu Yu Hakusho and gave the first season a 9/10, easily placing it among my favorite shows of 2021. The story is excellent thus far, the tone is perfect and all of the characters are likeable and memorable.

Jujutsu Kaisen 0 is...an anomaly, and my opinion of it is not going to be received well.

I have in the past made the comment that some 12- or 13-episode shows I've watched may have worked better as a movie, but this is one of the rare times where a movie really should have been a show, and the entire first half of the movie certainly feels like three episodes of anime that pretty cleanly divide from each other. The villain takes half of the movie to be established, but I have greater sins to discuss regarding him later.

If you accept the weird structure, the first half is actually pretty okay. We get a lot more characterization for some side characters from the parent story and more time to get attached to them, the protagonist Yuta's backstory is goofy but acceptable, and it actually mostly works even for viewers who haven't seen the first season of the TV series.

All of this is completely thrown out the window by the second half, wherein all notion that this film could stand on its own are thrown completely out and the pacing jumps off of a cliff. Given that the source material is a four-chapter manga volume, it is bonkers how much feels totally skipped-over as if they had to cut stuff for the sake of the runtime. Major fights between important characters happen completely offscreen and the emotional moments that have any chance of landing just don't get time to breathe.

The biggest offender here is the villain, who has very nearly nothing at all to do with Yuta. Geto Suguru is, right down to his name, very clearly meant more to be a foil to Yuta's teacher, Gojo Satoru, but despite being a genocidal extremist, he has absolutely no personal beef with the protagonist until the fighting has already started and Geto has hurt Yuta's friends. Yuta, in this moment, self-actualizes out of nowhere and suddenly decides that killing Geto would fully satisfy his character arc somehow.

In terms of screentime, they met for the first time about twenty minutes ago.

The climax then totally abandons the self-contained notion of the story by shoving in an extended scene with several of the side characters from the parent story, who receive no explanation regarding their identity or presence, shoved into the middle of the final fight between Yuta and Geto. This movie already has half a dozen underutilized villain underlings whose plots go nowhere and apparently resolve offscreen as well, but sure, let's cram in a bunch of people who don't belong here for the sake of fanservice.

And the entire time, the movie just repeats through internal dialogue over and over again that all of this is crucial, that this is Yuta's reason for living, is to kill this guy he's barely ever interacted with...and then it's proven correct at the end when his curse breaks for no reason whatsoever.

What could have been an emotional moment between Yuta and his deceased childhood friend is totally robbed of pathos because of how much progression they'd apparently made together offscreen during a series of unmarked timeskips, and the idea that fighting Geto has anything to do with his character arc is extremely flimsy. Yuta himself says he doesn't even know if he disagrees with Geto's genocidal ideals, and he's fighting purely because his friends are hurt, which feels like the movie itself admitting that his motivation just isn't very strong here.

The second half of Jujutsu Kaisen 0 is an absolute disaster of jarring pacing, messy plot construction, and wasted narrative potential. The longer it kept going, the worse the bad taste in my mouth got.

From a productions standpoint, it's a few steps up from the show but anything beyond the one-on-one fight scenes just doesn't match what we saw just last year in the Demon Slayer Mugen Train movie. It's great, it's what I'd hope for from Mappa, but most of it is just above the quality of the show rather than feeling particularly jaw-dropping.

I walked out of the theater feeling pretty upset, honestly. This is such a massive step down from the show I fell in love with, and I have to hope that that's mostly due to 0 actually being written first, when the author had less experience. But seeing the rapturous praise with which this film has been met is leaving me pretty dejected at the thought that this could be a sign of what I can expect for the second season.

My solution? As I said earlier, I just don't feel like this should have been a movie. If the author wanted to expand on this story to this degree, this form factor and limited runtime ended up working against him because of just how much of the ideas have no time to resolve or even be properly established in the first place. This story seems like it would have been better suited to being the first cour of the second season, like how the second season of Yuki Yuna was divided. There's a lot of untapped potential in these characters and the film ultimately doesn't do them any favors.

I'm willing to give this a 5/10, for the solid first half and the enjoyable character moments we did get, but the sour taste in my mouth at the end was unrelated to my choice of movie theater candy.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - World Trigger Season 2/3

World Trigger, from austere beginnings, made a surprise revival in 2021 and just blew nearly all of its competition out of the water.

I've talked about this show before, a very long time ago, but getting a full, higher-budget continuation this year was not something I'd ever expected to happen. World Trigger was originally aired before the perpetual-animation concept had really and truly fallen apart (sorry, Boruto and Black Clover) and aired over seventy episodes in its first "season", which clearly was meant to keep going, except that the author of the manga had to take an extended break from the project. Without any new manga chapters in sight to come back to, the show was cancelled.

But despite being initially ridiculed for its fairly poor production job (even for a Toei Animation joint), World Trigger had steadily been gaining an audience interested in its writing, worldbuilding, and its extremely interesting fight sequences.

In most other shounen anime, the main characters will simply develop brand-new superpowers as the plot needs, or through character development, or even just naturally as the show goes on. World Trigger's bread and butter lies in the hard rules of its universe, which basically runs on "what if Midichlorians but not stupid" rules. People have varying levels of energy capacity and a certain number of ways to use it, with their "trigger" abilities largely being shared powers that must be combined or utilized in interesting ways to fight against their enemies, and each other.

This leads to tons of extremely cool and unexpected moments where characters come up with plans like making a giant energy meteor that crashes into a shopping mall by just increasing the input of a regular environmental-destruction attack, or using a trigger that's meant to let you change your angle mid-air to create a fearsome pinball attack that bounces a projectile in a thousand different directions.

And then you have the main character Osamu, whose defining traits are that he's pretty decent at strategizing and has a far-below-par energy capacity that he must find a way to work around and make useful, which leads him to investigate less-used support powers that can combine well with his unique team in order to make himself useful in combat.

This show manages to juggle that with a massive cast that rivals any sports anime, and yet gives you a total sense of who everyone in a fight is and what they're capable of by the end of it. These two seasons cover the rest of the "Rank Wars" arc that pits the human characters against each other in squad battles to determine who gets to go on a mission to a neighboring planet, and every single one of these fights is incredible because of how many different ways the story is able to set them up and pay them off.

I really can't say enough good things about World Trigger, and while I think it's got a while to go before we get to the meatier and more emotional parts of the story, I'm immeasurably excited to have it back, and have the possibility for more of it in the future.

9/10.

[arcaneranger]

Final Thoughts - The aquatope on white sand

Last year, thanks to having a second job and not a lot of time, I ended up taking a bit of a break from seasonal anime. I still talked every day with my friends at AniTAY, but I just could not burn the candle at any more ends, and as a result, one of the most packed years in anime history just kinda passed me by, and now I'm playing catch-up.

And what a show I picked to finish first.

The aquatope on white sand is the third in P.A. Works' catalog of loosely-connected shows about female professionals (after Shirobako and Sakura Quest), and that alone leaves it with an extremely high standard to live up to. Shirobako is considered a modern classic, and I gave Sakura Quest a 10/10. The only way to navigate the creation of this show is to give it a completely different flavor, and they hit the nail on the head here.

Aquatope essentially follows two protagonists, both of them teenagers in their last summer of high school who are dealing with the total collapse of their aspirations. One of them having accidentally gotten herself ejected from an idol agency due to being perceived as not wanting the job, and the other being placed in charge of her grandfather's aging aquarium, scheduled to be closed permanently at the end of the summer.

And the setting of Gama Gama Aquarium is almost a secret sauce for Aquatope, as it represents different things to all of the characters and is gorgeous to look at despite being as old as it is. It's a place of inherent and magical melancholy, and the atmosphere of the aquarium bleeds into anywhere else the characters go. For Fuuka, it's much-needed purgatory between the hectic life she's leaving behind and the real world she will eventually have to return to. For Kukuru, it's a physical representation of her dream of preserving the lives of other creatures after the death of her own parents at a young age, and the impending doom of that dream drives her to cling to it more and more desperately.

This show is beautiful and heavy, and I cried probably four or five separate times, both in the sad moments and the brilliantly triumphant ones.

The other half of that, of course, is the knowledge that Gama Gama's days are numbered. The magic can't last forever, because the place is falling apart and can't possibly make enough money to hold together for another year. Gama Gama is going to close, and there's really not anything that the cast can do about it. This reminded me a lot of how it felt to watch the second season of Assassination Classroom or Love Live! Sunshine! (both of which I also gave 10's), in the way that such impending tragedy puts the actions of the characters into context. You can tell that no matter what she's told, Kukuru is hoping that she can do well enough as the acting director to save the place, and that it just isn't going to work.

Of course, all of this is just the first half of the show. The trouble here is that while the second story arc is also great, it's noticeably not as good as the first. The stakes are lower and the cast gets a bit too spread out, and even though I liked all the new folks, it did end up taking a lot of time out of what might have been more complete arcs for the Gama Gama crew. I won't go too much further though, not wanting to spoil too much about what's going on here, but it wasn't quite as impactful for me.

It pains me a bit that I can't be a sappy fool and give Aquatope a 10 just for making me cry, but I'm more than happy to award it with a 9/10 and a spot in my hall of fame. It's good to be back.