Roving Thoughts archives

Looking back at the Spring 2018 anime season

Once again it's time for my traditional look back at what I watched in this past Spring season, to follow up on my early impressions and my 'midway' views. Even if I was lazy about it, this is an easy wrap-up because I only finished two shows, each excellent in their own way.

• Sword Art Online Alternative - Gun Gale Online: This had many good aspects that I could rave about, but above all it was pure fun from start to end (they even managed to make the 'episode 5.5' recap great, although it helps to watch it after you've finished the show so you get the undertones). The characters were great and worked well with each other, everyone was enjoying themselves in the game, the twists of the action were great, and the actual comedy was funny. It even managed to pull off being serious every so often.

  Gun Gale Online is my new standard of excellence in popcorn fun action shows.

  (With that said, the show probably was about exactly the right length and I'm not sure you could make more that still was as good as this was.)

• Hisone and Masotan: I don't fully understand what happened at the end there and I'm not sure how I feel about one aspect of the epilogue, but the show as a whole was a great ride and quietly took a point of view that I whole-heartedly agree with. It also had that rare thing, a romance and a romantic pairing that I could actually believe in (partly because the two people in question didn't start out that way at all).

  (This was deeper than GGO but not as purely and easily entertaining; this spring, that put GGO on top as my most anticipated and eagerly watched show.)

I dropped all three of the shows that I expected I'd probably dropped in my 'midway' views. There's nothing deeply wrong with any of them (with the possible exception of DarliFra), I just stopped being interested enough to watch more.

The two shows I finished were both great (in that I deeply enjoyed both of them), and that's enough to make the Spring season a pretty good one. My snap assessment is that it's better overall than the winter season, or at the very least it had more shows that I felt like throwing myself into watching every week when they came out.

My (Twitter) reactions to the first episodes of the Summer 2018 season

As before I'm collecting here all of my tweeted reactions to the first episodes I've seen (in the order that I saw them). This is a sparse season for me.

• Cells at Work! episode 1: That was reasonably fun and amusing, but the basic conceit feels like it's a one-episode show. I guess I'll see if next episode can do anything particularly novel and interesting. ♯

• Planet With episode 1: That was simultaneously quietly fun (and funny), deliberately confusing, and definitely interesting. I'm intrigued and I want to see more. A bunch of the show's look feels deliberately 90s or early 00s in a way we don't see any more. →

• I tried watching Chio's School Road and its humor didn't work well enough for me to keep me watching more than a few minutes. Part of it is that I don't like laughing at ostensible (and sympathetic) protagonists and it felt like it was heading that way. ♯

• Phantom in the Twilight episode 1: That was a pretty energetic and entertaining start. I like it. Our protagonist is not one of the ones that have to be prodded into motion; she's right out there cheerfully throwing herself into things. ♯

• Angolmois episode 1: That was pretty nicely done, with little flab or flailing and good directing and all that (I could have lived without that filter). I'm just not yet sold on the story itself or engaged with the characters themselves. Still, it was nice. →

• Revue Starlight episode 1: That was a pretty interesting presentation and the end of the episode was great, but I'm not sure I'm really interested in the apparent story here. We'll see; I'm certainly watching the next episode. ♯

• Sirius the Jaeger episode 1: This is stylish (or trying to be) and it had some good action, but there wasn't really anything else there and it certainly didn't try to tell us much of anything about the characters.

  (It feels kind of 80s in an odd way.) #

This covers everything that I seem likely to be enough interested in to watch the first episodes of. I've seen both Hanabado and Harukana Receive get praise as reasonably nice sports shows, but sports shows are almost always not my thing and neither seems strong enough to overcome that. None of the other comedies are appealing, and while Holmes of Kyoto seems okay, I think that niche is already filled this season with Phantom in the Twilight.