General Anime thread of whenever

[Ryong]

Log Horizon 10

Holy shit that was a long speech.

[phil_]

Originally Posted by Ryong

Log Horizon 10

Holy shit that was a long speech.

Your tax dollars at work. Thanks, Abe. I actually think they did a pretty good job with William's speech. The ghost thing was weird, but they needed something happening visually.

[Gregness]

Are you guys watching Danna ga Nani o Itteiru ka Wakaranai Ken (I Can't Understand What My Husband is Saying)? Because you should be watching Danna ga Nani o Itteiru ka Wakaranai Ken.

It's an adaptation of a Japanese 4-panel webcomic about a woman who marries an otaku, and it is probably the best comedy airing this season. The episodes are very short (~3 min each) so you can knock the whole thing out in a half hour or so, but they do so much goddamn work with those three minutes that you'll hardly notice.

[phil_]

I'd say, as far as fantasy anime go this season, Danna is the best. I can't decide right now whether Chaika or Yona takes second place right this second and you can't make me choose. Oh, or maybe Bahamut should be number two... in any case I'm happy to have so many fantasy cartoons to watch.

[Aldurin]

Sword Art II 23:

It's not the usual stuff, but it's a nice uplifting side story regarding both disability and gamer stigma.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

Yeah I gota say, I've been really liking this second season of SAO. I know a lot of people got turned off the show during the second half of the first season but they're really done a good job this time round.

And the feels on this latest arc, man.

[Aldurin]

Since Akame ga Kill! wrapped up I might as well talk about it as warning for wayward travelers.

Non-spoiler bit: It's an interesting concept for a supernatural combat-oriented anime in a fantasy pseudo-rpg setting ("leveling up" is a term used a couple times in regards to fighting "Danger Beasts", which are clearly bullshit rpg monsters that have no proper reason to exist in the otherwise normal ecosystem), and while it breaks some standard molds of the elements it utilizes, it ends up falling short due to others, and a bizarre case of taking the opposite of a really tiring anime trope from refreshing to ruining the experience. It's about a corrupt empire in a blatant classism divide where the rich nobles literally torture and slaughter peasants for fun, though it's only apparent near the capital. The show doesn't focus on Akame, oddly enough, but rather Tatsumi, a naive country teenager who receives the harshest wakeup call about how corrupt the empire is, and promptly joins Night Raid. Night Raid is actually a small division of the Revolutionary Army, which takes a very small team of elite assassins to eliminate the key components of the government's rotten structure. The show then enters a steady formula of having a couple of these characters get into impressive fights with their targets, involving "Imperial Arms" which are special equipment made from the strongest Danger Beasts in existence, each with their own properties and unique trump card move.

Unfortunately the show is very shallow. Aside from Tatsumi's "man up" character development that is resolved very early in the show, everyone is flat and their actions and decisions feel more like them reacting for the world around them than reacting to the world around them. Essentially everyone has their specific personality script where their attitude and judgement don't really change between the different situations, context being more or less irrelevant to their actions and dialogue. And the fights are dumb, too. They immediately open up with the combatants trying leverage the asymmetry between their Imperial Arms, and then at least one of them (usually the person currently losing in the fight) uses their trump card, which then falls back into the asymmetry leveraging that the fights live on. As spectacle fights, they're passable, but they're nowhere near a Jojo's Bizarre Adventure level of "smart combat". As for the latter-end of the show, without spoiling I'll just say that it's an emotional rollercoaster that just doesn't work at the end and leaves you disappointed.

Spoiler-full rant since I know some of you just don't care:Bad anime often gets a rap for death not being permanent with many characters, as they either were never dead because of bullshit or came back to life because of bullshit. Akame ga Kill takes the opposite end as everyone dies all the time and they don't come back, period. The writers took Andrew Hussie's character-killing philosophy too seriously and end up riding it into the ground. Many deaths feel anticlimatic and so many characters are wiped out that there's only four named characters at the end. Akame, who I guess will finally be the focus of the series now, Najenda, who has explicitly shortened her lifespan due to the downsides of her trump card and will clearly soon die, and two other characters who are so boring and inconsequential that they might as well be dead because no one cares. Oh, and the final death of the show is shockingly dumb and avoidable, making it clear that the writing was compromised in favor of forcing the cast into a clean sweep for whatever comes in the future. And the characters and storylines to get the most emotional investment out of end up fizzling into nothing due to the aforementioned plague of character death, and feel wasted.

Recommendation: Don't, unless you're ok with shallow spectacle combat anime and can avoid emotional investment regarding what happens to the characters. The manga for this is still going so there might be more seasons in the future, at which point there is possibly a justification for watching this then, but even then my money is on it not even worth watching this season for the background context.

[Magni]

Aldnoah.Zero was amazing. I haven't seen it mentioned here (at least back to October) and that is a shame. It's 12 episodes, I plowed through it all in one day, for the most part.

The second season starts in January sometime.

[Kyanbu The Legend]

Originally Posted by Magni

Aldnoah.Zero was amazing. I haven't seen it mentioned here (at least back to October) and that is a shame. It's 12 episodes, I plowed through it all in one day, for the most part.

The second season starts in January sometime.

You are not alone. I loved it so much. It has it's flaws but season 1 was a fun ride non the less. Looking forward to Season 2 which is now only a few weeks away.

[Ryong]

Log Horizon and Fate/Zero continue to be great and also what's up with doing Valentine's Day episodes?

I'm going to watch Aldnoah.Zero and am wondering about Amagi Brilliant Park. Something about it being roller coaster tycoon + touhou seems interesting.