Roving Thoughts archives

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.

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.