Roving Thoughts archives

Brief early impressions of the Spring 2014 anime season

It's time for my early impressions of this season so that I can organize my thoughts and then later see how badly I did at predicting what would be good and what would make me throw up my hands in despair. Early in the run of first episodes I thought I was going to have real difficulty sorting out what to watch, but as time went on I realized that there was a clear dividing line poking up out of my early confusion. Unlike back in winter this was not a line of active failure but instead a line of indifference.

Shows are ranked in rough order of how much I'm enjoying them.

Clear winners:

• Mushishi second season: It's just like the first series continued, which is great. I can't think of anything to say about Mushishi that I haven't already said in my entry on 2005.

• Hitsugi no Chaika: This had the most interesting and enticing first episode of the season, one that demonstrated a mastery of throwing us into the middle of things and illuminating the world through actions instead of exposition lumps. Never boring, always active, this episode went places. Now I just have to hope that the rest of the show keeps delivering (which the second episode did decently).

• Knights of Sidonia: I don't know how I'd feel about this if I hadn't read a lot of the manga but as it is the first episode works very well for me, partly because I know what's going on with a lot of the mysterious bits. But beyond that I think it did a good job of pushing the story forward, quietly setting up the world without infodumps, and so on. The CGI doesn't bother me but then I'm not picky about that stuff. The second episode did decently with the action and continuing the good work of the first episode and had some nice little touches.

Things that I'm reasonably enthused with:

• Ping Pong: The fact that none of the protagonists are particularly likable people makes me think that this may be doing something unusual with its plot instead of being yet another standard sports story. If it has something interesting to say I'm willing to keep watching.

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure - Stardust Crusaders: I'm taking another shot at watching JoJo's with this and so far it's going pretty well. The second episode had a surprisingly brutal bit and it remains very much the essence of action shonen. Hopefully I won't find it too over the top.

• Soredemo Sekai wa Utsukushii: Again, I've read the manga so I know what's going on and a bunch of what's coming, which inevitably influences my reactions. Nike and the other major characters are as charming (and sometimes irritating) as they were in the manga and I'm on board for watching more of the antics in animated form.

• Mekakucity Actors: The first episode was interesting but also deliberately opaque. The latter was well enough done that I want to watch more, although it could all collapse like a house of cards. I don't think its collection of standard Shaft stylistic tics either helps or hurts it, but other people may have stronger feelings about this than I do and I'll admit that not much actually happened in the first two episodes.

At least a bit marginal already:

• Ryuugajou Nanana no Maizoukin: I like the idea of the premise and the two episodes were decent although not spectacular, which is good enough to keep me watching for now.

• Black Bullet: The first episode was a sodden, charm-less light novel adaptation, complete with exposition lumps and vaguely cringe-inducing fanservice. People said good things about the second episode so I gave it another chance and the result was an order of magnitude better, in that it was reasonably watchable and interesting. I may not stay with this for long but I'm at least willing to give it a third episode.

• Captain Earth: This show is well done overall but has two strikes against it. It's a mecha show and I'm not particularly a mecha fan, and the second episode had one the most eye-rollingly cartoonish bad characters I've seen since the second half of Sword Art Online. Oh, and while it's well done there's nothing here that's really compelling.

  In short, sadly this is no Star Driver. It's much more conventional than that, to its detriment.

• Haikyuu!!: On the good side this has production values and decent characters, but on the other side it seems to be doing a relatively standard sports story and I'm historically not too attracted to those. This may fall down into the 'not for me' category. At the moment I feel like continuing to watch until the action slows down.

Watching despite myself:

• Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei: This isn't really a good show and it's not even good competence porn, but it is kind of fascinating to see the next way that the protagonist is going to turn out to be a special, misunderstood, and amazingly overpowered snowflake. He's already been revealed as a ninja master and special combat mage, so what will they come up with next? I expect to get bored of this at some point, probably when the show starts taking the 'plot' seriously and stops having the protagonist show off all the time. In short I'm watching this purely for the spectacle and I'm not all that engaged with the spectacle at that.

  (It's possible to do this kind of premise well but Mahouka is not even coming close.)

  Mahouka is sort of like Sword Art Online in that both clearly have a bunch of money and effort put into their production but suffer from defects in the actual core content. The result is something that's mostly quite watchable on a moment to moment level (because it looks good, scenes are decently well staged, and so on) but then you wake up and ask 'I was watching what happen?' See also Bobduh's takedown of episode 2.

The line of 'meh', where the shows are not actively repulsive but don't particularly inspire any interest in more:

• Seikoku no Dragonar: Bland but not actively irritating. There is nothing here that we haven't seen before and the execution isn't well enough done to overcome that. It deserves special note for particularly clumsily and badly executed fanservice.

• Akuma no Riddle (at 2 eps): This is teasing us with stuff I don't expect it to really deliver on, especially as it's adopted from an incomplete manga and we know how that one goes as far as answering mysteries and delivering satisfying conclusions.

• Soul Eater Not!: If I strip away all of my fond memories of Soul Eater, there's just not very much novel or compelling in here. We had one nice fight scene but apparently that's going to be a rarity and the character chemistry is too over the top to be really interesting.

• Brynhildr in the Darkness: Meh. The first episode was okay but not at all inspiring.

(Having written all that I'm feeling the temptation to give some of these another episode or two. Not so much because I think that they're better than I've rated them here but instead because I want them to be better than that and I keep hoping that maybe another episode will change things. This is a foolish hope but it tempts me.)

Outright miss:

• Atelier Escha & Logy - Alchemists of the Dusk Sky: I want to like the quiet and low-key mood, but after two episodes it's just too slow for me. To be honest part of it is that I'm simply finding Escha to be kind of irritating; she's a bit too squeaky and immature and over-genki.

• M3 - Sono Kuroki Hagane: Total failure to engage my interest. It's bland, absurd, and infuriating, combining an entire collection of lazy cliches with completely uninspiring production and writing that veers between clumsy and insulting.

So very clearly not my thing:

• One Week Friends: I've heard praise for this but at the same time the praise makes it pretty clear that this is not in my area of interest.

Have not looked at due to bad initial reports:

• No Game, No Life: I don't expect this to measure up to last year's Mondaiji (cf).

• selector infected WIXOSS

• Broken Blade: I've watched four out of the six movies already but have stalled out there, which I'm taking as a sign that I'm not going to be particularly enthused about the TV series version either. If I feel the urge I'll finish the movies instead of the TV series.

There are no ongoing shows that have carried over from last season, so I get to start with a clean slate this time around. I suspect that I'm going to wind up dropping at least some shows above the line of meh just because following eleven or twelve shows is a relatively lot for me.

Looking back at the Winter 2014 anime season

It's time for the usual retrospective look back at the season to go with my early impressions and my midway views. This time I've decided to be different in my ranking; instead of ranking series more or less on how good they are, which I usually do, I'm going to rank by pure enjoyment.

Plain good fun:

• Witch Craft Works: This show demonstrates the power of understanding that your basic premise comes straight out of bad light novel cliches (although it's actually adopted from a manga) and therefor should be ignored as much as possible. In the hands of anyone who took the basic plot seriously WCW would have been a disaster; instead it succeeds brilliantly at being entertaining by de-emphasizing the core plot in favour of a parade of diversions, from Tanpopo's antics to Kagari's deadpan craziness.

  WCW has no pretensions of being any deeper than a pothole after a rainstorm but it more than makes up for this with pure amusement value. That made it the most consistently enjoyable show I watched all season and gets it the first place ranking here.

• Seitokai Yakuindomo season 2: It delivered almost exactly what I was expecting, including an excellent troll in the last episode. Every episode made me laugh, often several times. I could ask for no more in a comedy.

• Sekai Seifuku - Bouryaku no Zvezda: Zvezda is the best show I watched this season. It had heart, intelligence, and a solid sense of fun and humour and was far more ambitious than WCW and SY. The problem is that while it quietly aimed high it didn't always hit that mark; while perfectly decent, the result sometimes felt like a bit of a letdown. This came to a head in the final episode, which was perfectly good but couldn't quite deliver on the promise of either the previous few episodes or the opening of the first episode.

• Noragami: This continued its good execution through the end and as a result I wouldn't mind a second season (as you might expect for a 12-episode series based on an ongoing manga, the major things are in no way resolved or concluded). I liked that it was willing to be subtle about some things. I disagree with people about the idea that the season should have ended with Yukine's plotline but that argument doesn't fit in the margins of this summary.

  (Whatever you do, don't watch the OAD. The OAD might as well be a different and significantly worse show, or at least a bad dream version.)

(In a way these four shows neatly split into two shows that were mostly about spectacle and two shows that were primarily about substance. The spectacle based shows executed it better than the substance based ones.)

Ordinary:

• Space Dandy: Ultimately this is an indulgent show, in that it indulges the animators, the writers, and the directors involved by allowing them to do pretty much whatever they want. The result is very uneven, kind of interesting on occasion, and not very compelling (I didn't find even the good episodes to be particularly powerful). In essence what we're getting here is a bunch of art cinema experiments and like most experiments many of them are only really interesting as 'look what we can do' things. Still, the zombies episode.

  Apparently this may be just what Watanabe wanted, so I can't exactly call Space Dandy a failure as such. But I don't think it's a success.

• Robot Girls Z: I wound up watching all three episodes, mostly out of a feeling that I might as well. It was okay, which makes it the kind of thing I've been trying to stop watching. Fans of old giant robot shows apparently got more out of it than I did.

Carried over from the fall:

• KILL la KILL: As I put it on Twitter KLK is an epic and spectacular show, and I'd add 'showy' to that list of adjectives. I think it clearly succeeded at what it set out to do, namely being BURNING ANIME in a good way. To deal with one issue: I don't think KLK (strongly) intended to have messages, although I do think it had themes that it worked into the narrative.

  Episode 22 and its ending and how people reacted to it is really the encapsulated KILL la KILL experience in one moment. KLK is all about delivering fanservice of the sort that doesn't involve nearly naked people (although it has them too, and in a much less fanservicy way than you might think).

• Log Horizon: This stayed strong through the nominal end. Since the show is getting a second season it didn't bother to invent some sort of temporary finish to things but just wrapped up the current story and hung out a 'here is your second season introduction cliffhanger' sign. I'm perfectly fine with this; the last few episodes were a good way to wind down from the more intense earlier ones. Log Horizon took a while to build up but the eventual payoffs were good.

  As peculiar as it sounds, I think that Log Horizon is above all thoughtful and intelligent. It did any number of interesting things with the intersection of MMO mechanics, MMO players, and a real world, and the smart characters in it felt genuinely smart. And I really liked a number of 'well of course' moments that it gave me, such as Crusty's enthusiasm for combat once he got into it. See also my fall retrospective.

• Tokyo Ravens: For reasons that boil down to 'I was bored and it was made to look appealing' I marathoned this right at the end of the season despite having dismissed it back in the fall. I don't regret this overall but I also don't regret skipping the show in the fall; I think it was drastically improved by being marathoned instead of doled out week by week. The first two episodes are weak and the final episode induced eye-rolling, but apart from that I found it surprisingly fun.

  (I also benefited from having been spoiled on one or two plot twists ahead of time, which made it easier to enjoy watching some bits.)

  One refreshing thing about TR is that it never beat around the bush about issues. Several times it raised suspicions and then immediately confirmed them in the next episode or two rather than drawing things out the way that many other shows would. The protagonist was still as dense as lead but the other characters were pretty smart and aware and not at all confused about who liked who and what was going on; as a result it skipped any number of tedious cliches that are common to the genre.

If I did a merged ranking of the carried over fall shows with this season's shows KILL la KILL would be clearly on top and Log Horizon might beat Witch Craft Works. Tokyo Ravens would be on the boundary of ordinary (and I would rate it much higher than Space Dandy, which spent the entire season on the edge of being dropped).

Ignoring the shows that carried over from the fall, I think this was a good but not great season. Four solidly enjoyable shows is not a bad number.