2018-08-04
Brief impressions of the Summer 2018 anime season so far
As before it's time for my relatively early views of how this season has shaken out so far, following up on my first episode reactions. At this point I'm three or four episodes into everything I'm still watching, which is long enough for the shows to have shown their cards.
Excellent:
- Planet With: This is a great show and very much one of the kinds of thing that I enjoy. All sorts of things are happening and the show's definitely not making us wait around to get revelations. The characters are pretty great, the events happening are weird and interesting, and the plot twists are one part surprises and one part predictable but not being drawn out. I can't wait for each new episode.
Enjoyable but I'm not sure I understand it:
- Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight: There's a lot going on in the show
and I'm pretty sure I don't understand it all, even though I find it
very interesting to watch. This is the kind of show that feels like
I'll get a bunch more out of it on a rewatch. Since the show is so
relatively cryptic to me at the moment I don't have much more to say
except that I'm enjoying watching, especially the wild spectacular
bits.
(The portions of the character beats that I can follow are interesting too.)
Popcorn entertainment:
- Cells at Work!: I think I'm following this because it's hitting the
right combination of entertaining and educational. Without the steady
supply of interesting information about how bodies work I probably
wouldn't care enough about what's going on; as it is, it's pretty
entertaining even if it's a bit predictable.
- Phantom in the Twilight: This is definitely popcorn entertainment (for me) but so far it's kept having enough action and plot twists to keep me watching. I'm not particularly close to any of the characters, but it does have them and they're reasonably interesting. I suspect that it may be about to get mired in more boring material so I'll drop it, but we'll see.
I decided that I wasn't interested enough in either Angolmois or Sirius the Jaeger to give either of them a second episode. Their first episodes were perfectly good action shows but they failed to engage me very much beyond watching the spectacle, and apparently just action spectacle is no longer enough to keep me around (which feels like a change from the past).
Two solid shows and two additional shows for entertainment is down on my past watching levels but it feels about right for me today, and if I wind up dropping the bottom two I don't feel like I'll regret it. Apparently I no longer feel the urge to fill up all of my spare time with anime watching.