Not quite sold on this yet, but I'll keep going for now. The animation looks excellent, though the arm designs I found a little too detailed to follow well during some of the action sequences. The characters and world feel thought out, but we haven't really seen much of the substance yet. If it actually does give us little bits of that character- and world-building as we go forward, I think this will be a standout of the season, but it does currently also have the potential to play its cards way too close to the vest and end up a more frustrating watch. I give the premiere a 3/5 with room to grow.
glilimith
joined 1 year ago
Excellent! Thank you!
I barely remember Slow Loop at all (cgdct is very much not my genre) but I'd guess they don't have a ton in common beyond being about fishing.
Left more in-depth thoughts in the other thread, but I'm giving this premiere a very mixed 3/5 - what would have been an easy 5/5 fumbled with a large focus on sexual assault. I'll probably watch an episode or two more to see if it rights its course....
This one looks great, but it just isn't doing it for me. Both of the friends felt fun (would love to see more of them), but the actual leads just didn't really click for me. It's a bit hard to get invested in their romance when it feels like I don't know them very well and they also don't know each other very well.
It sounded like this was a pretty hotly anticipated show, and I'm glad that it looks like y'all got all the production values you could have dreamed of, but I think I'm going to pass on this one. I give the premiere a 3/5.
This one is really cute! We've got some relatably introverted leads and a romcom-style fake marriage, and I'm eager to see these two grow both individually and as a couple. If it can follow through on the genuine romance elements as the season goes on, I think this is going to be a very comfy show. I give the premiere a 4/5.
I'm a bit of an angler (though mostly freshwater drifting/trolling), and they did a pretty good job showing off the hobby - i especially loved the animation on those spinning reels. The fish on the other hand, um.... they're scary. The cgi always looked unnatural next to the hand-drawn characters and the way they moved felt janky. I do not like them.
As for the story, it's fine? It seems like one of those hobby shows where someone's problems will get solved by them discovering a love for whatever thing the show is about, which always feels kind of hollow to me and just an excuse for a writer to recruit people into their hobby. This one's an anime original, so I'll give it a bit more time to prove itself, but the premiere is a 3/5 from me.
I really liked this one. It's got some obvious similarities with Gushing Over Magical Girls, an anime that really impressed me but was a bit too much ecchi for me to be able to tolerate, so I was ready for a comfy substitute that I'd have a bit better of a time with. However, this one definitely brings its own charm that makes it more than just a knock-off (on top of its source material coming out first).
I really like the tension between the main character's desire to see Berry shine in the heat of an intense battle and her sense of justice that is what drew her to the Berry fandom in the first place. Meanwhile, Chrome is a delight to watch (especially as a fan of flamboyant and camp villains), and he rides the line perfectly between being a dumb idiot whose plans succeed on accident and a genius tactician and actor skillfully playing everyone around him into doing exactly what he wants. The action scenes work well, and the artstyle and color palette give it a bright and energetic tone. I'm absolutely on board for this one, 5/5.
P.S. It looks like this is studio Voil's first anime and the director is also relatively unproven?? This feels way too put together for that to be true, lol.
I'm already not a fan of the villainess isekai genre, but this one felt especially empty to me. I do enjoy characters that have fun acting evil, and our main has that going for her, but I struggled to ever root for her when one of the first things she says was basically "the villainess is right - bullying uppity commoners is good, actually, because they should know their place", which is a wild position to have in the modern day. I then got a bit distracted when they introduced our romantic lead, who appears to be a good 5 years older than our main. As teenagers this would be creepy enough (if she's 15 and off to magic school, he'd already be 20), but he starts following her around and staring at her when she is 8 and he is probably 13, which was a HUGE red flag for me that I don't think I'd be able to get past. It's so bizarre to me because why not just make them the same age?
I'm getting a bit bogged down in these details, but I think that's largely because it didn't seem to have any substance to preoccupy myself with instead. It seems like the main draw for the show is to see her have fun trying to be evil, but that really isn't enough for me. I give the premiere a 1/5
It's sad to see stuff end, but honestly I'm glad whenever fiction gets a real ending instead of just dragging out for a million years.
And it looks like the author is planning a new comic about gay bird boys, a topic I somehow keep finding more comics about, lol.
This art is very cute so I went to read the comic and it is also very cute!
And for once it's some mer content that's not full of the dreaded (by me) mermaid knees....
I don't really get it. It seems like we're also meant to be drawn in by Haru's charisma, but I just found him an insufferable asshole, which made Gaku look like a spineless rube. Maybe it's just my hatred of corporate politics or the fact that I can't see having a trillion dollars as a worthwhile goal (what, substantially, is even the difference between that and having a billion dollars, other than being top of the wealth leaderboard?) I couldn't bring myself to watch the second episode. 1/5.