#three (personal) aoty contenders in one month

[minjv]

🌸 favorite may releases 🌸

albums + eps

right place, wrong person - rm

<assemble24> - triples

armageddon - aespa

<dall> - artms

songs

girls never die - triples

nuts - rm

lost! - rm

supernova - aespa

how sweet - newjeans

virtual angel - artms

bubblegum- newjeans

domadachi - rm (ft. little simz)

lose my breath - skz (ft. charlie puth)

woke up - xg

bahama - aespa

diorama - yves

summer dayz - soojin

[deltaengineering]

Winter Anime 2017 Part 4: Odds and Ends

Took a while for the last show to roll around, and I also had a backlog of shows with weird licensing, one show from the next season, and a sequel. Spoilers: This post covers both the best and the worst of the season.

Forest Fairy Five

Ha, you thought it wouldn’t get any worse than Hand Shakers. Usually awful comedy shorts get their own dumpster, but Forest Fairy Five is both pretty sizeable at 10 minutes and also a bad time to a degree rarely seen at any length. It is in fact so terrible that even though Crunchyroll licensed it (likely against their will), no rip group even bothered to steal it! So what’s so bad about it? Well, for starters it’s another “seiyuu improv comedy podcast with the cheapest possible 3D animation on top” show (so it’s not even a novel or interesting kind of awful). However it is, quite unbelievably, much less funny than even the likes of Tesagure Bukatsumono - or indeed gdgd fairies, which it is a blatant ripoff of. Like all of these it attempts self-aware otaku humor, but the best these people can muster is to remind you that otaku exist by looking at live action footage of some. So not only is it 100% unfunny by virtue of hardly even trying, but also completely boring. Just a waste of everyone’s time.

Onihei

Onihei is police procedural, except set in the Sengoku Edo era so it’s a rather violent affair. Constant bloody murder is not necessarily my thing, but Onihei seems pretty cool; it’s less about the cases and more about the personal stories behind them, and so far these stories have been well-written and engaging - reminiscent of Death Parade, if Death Parade wouldn’t have had a nonsensical premise, nonexistent protagonists and a bulk discount at the contrivance store. It looks pleasant too, with detailed drawings and pretty background work. Maybe the color correction gets a little out of hand sometimes, but this is a show you might want to take screenshots of. However, the downside of all that is that the animation’s not quite all there - it does what it have to in the rare action scenes but by default it’s minimally present and what’s there is jerky. But I can be convinced to watch a slideshow if the story makes up for it, and so far Onihei has been good enough.

BanG Dream!

This is the next “crossmedia franchise” by Bushiroad, and you know what that means: gotta sell some albums and live tickets. So it’s another music show, this time not about idols but about a rock-ish band (as if that makes much of a difference). Essentially it’s the basic plot of K-ON with the general tone and character writing method of Love Live, and there’s nothing much wrong with that. It’s just not very exciting, especially since it lacks the production values of either. This seems like a show one could grow to like, but once again this season is not at all short on basic bishoujo material. I’ll give it another episode... maybe.

Granblue Fantasy The Animation

This one is actually airing next season, but since I didn’t have high hopes I thought I could just do the whole “watch the one prerequisite episode and then forget about it” thing early. And yeah, “forgettable” pretty much sums up Granblue Fantasy, especially as far as the plot is concerned. It’s pretty much the most generic and low-effort beginning of a JRPG I’ve seen in ages, with a white haired princess falling into the lap of a rural local farmboy and his supremely irritating mascot sidekick, and them embarking on an adventure... after they finish the tutorial section in the woods the first episode gives us. I know that Granblue is supposed to be a throwback to old Final Fantasies, only with more trendy mobile micropayments, but come on. The most interesting thing about the plot is what it doesn’t do, i.e. it hearkens back to a time before talk about literal stats, reborn otaku shitters, ironic detachment and all the other LN plague hallmarks. But what it does have is lame, even the broadly similar Chain Chronicle has more going on. The only thing I’d actually give it credit for is the look, which is bright, colorful and has natural, sketchy outlines - in short, it looks like Grimgar’s backgrounds with Occultic;Nine’s foregrounds, which effectively makes this A-1′s new house style, I suppose? In any case it looks pleasant, but the yawn factor of everything else is too high to even consider waiting three months for more of this.

Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu: Sukeroku Futatabi-hen

Hell yea dawg, guess who’s back. Rakugo Shinjuu was the official™ delta anime of the year 2016, and the sequel owns as well. This isn’t much of a surprise, so I’ll just go through a few quick thoughts: It’s just delightful to see old man Yakumo effortlessly hang out with the bizarre patchwork family of weirdos he has attracted, after we’ve seen almost his entire life in the first season. Yotarou and Konatsu also fully deliver on the small bits we’ve seen of them before. The new OP is fantastic, even if it’s arguably the most morbid thing I’ve seen since Shiki. And the best thing is still that everything in this show matters; The first season already moved deceptively quickly, but we’re skipping years between episodes routinely now. This makes the whole thing more episodic, but it also means that there is no filler and it’s always on fire. It couldn’t work without all the groundwork of season one, but as it is it’s pretty fantastic. If you’re not watching this, you’re making a big mistake because you’re missing a strong contender for AOTY two years running.