Impressions - Animefangirl!

One episode of Nagi no Asukara is enough

Actually I didn’t even finish episode 1 of Nagi no Asukara, so maybe 3/4ths is enough? You might be wondering why I tend to drop so many shows after just one episode, but I’ve been watching anime for almost 20 years now and I’ve learned a few things first about my own tastes and secondly about anime itself.

The first episode is basically an advert for the rest of the show – it’s usually the studio putting their best foot forward: this is what we have to offer and this is why you should spent 20 minutes every week for the next 3-6 months on this particular show. Episode one doesn’t necessarily have to get me chomping at the bit for the next episode. It’s enough for it to make me go “Hmm, that wasn’t bad. I think I’ll watch just one more.”

I can’t count the number of shows where I went “I think I’ll watch one more” 26 times and ended up finishing the whole series. On the other hand I also can’t count the number of times where I thought the first episode was crap but forced myself to continue and ended up regretting it, usually after quitting later anyway. Couple that with the fact that I have a large anime backlog that is getting bigger with every passing season and you have my One Episode policy in full bloom.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, what was wrong with Nagi no Asukara in particular? Nothing much, really. It didn’t have much against it, but it didn’t have much going for it either. In quick point form, the good things about it were:

+ Unique setting under the sea
+ I don’t mind love triangles, in theory
+ Art looks bright and gorgeous.

Everything else was against it

– I hated all the characters, especially the whiny, abusive male lead and the whiny, cringing female lead
– Love triangles are one thing, but this seems set to become a love decahedron.
– The undersea setting is wasted since people walk everywhere and eat carrots and chicken just like surface-dwellers do. You wouldn’t even know it was set under the water if not for some fish swimming by from time to time.
– Fart humor? No.
– Grown-up issues about ceremonies and modernization and a declining birthrate and speciesism and blah blah… so boring. Either focus on that or focus on the kids, it just get distracting when there’s all this stuff going on at once.

tl;dr – It looks nice but it’s not that interesting. The main characters really let the show down and nothing else picks up the slack. Even if I had nothing else to watch I probably wouldn’t watch this but luckily I do have other stuff on my list so *dropped*.

Unlimited Fafnir + Seiken Tsukai no World Break = Dropped.

Still trying some new series to see if there’s anything worth following, but I don’t think I’m going to find anything else. When you get this far in anime-watching there’s a lot of “been there, seen that” out there, and there’s no reason to force myself to try anything less than arresting when my backlog keeps growing every day.

Unlimited Fafnir – Monsters appeared out of nowhere and only kids with special powers can fight them. Kantai Collection has pretty much the same premise, and while I haven’t seen Attack on Titan, doesn’t that also have to do with fighting giant world-destroying monsters? And that’s not even going back in history to look at the Evangelions and Rahxephons.

But I didn’t drop it because of the lack of originality (which I don’t really care about, TBH), I dropped it because five minutes after the show started, the main character walked onto a beach to find a naked girl bathing there. “Oh, it’s going to be one of those shows, is it?” I thought. And as I suspected, right after the credits there were more comical hijinks involving said naked girl and so I closed the episode barely 7 minutes into the show. Dropped with extreme prejudice.

Seiken Tsukai no World Break – Magic high school series with kids in touch with their past lives or something like that. The action-packed first few minutes were intriguing, but I dropped it halfway through episode 1 because the characters were annoying. Some loud-mouthed girl with a brocon fetish who can talk a good game but can’t back it up and a milquetoast main character whose face I had to look online to remember and some other girls who will probably all be interested in main guy. Blah. There are better series out there, I’m convinced of that, so dropped.

Koufuku Graffiti – Didn’t even finish episode 1 before I dropped it

I thought for sure Koufuku Graffiti would be my favorite show of the season, but I couldn’t even get through episode 1. I’m not that crazy about Japanese food, but I like food (that’s why I’m still alive) and I enjoy cooking and cooking shows, so a food show should have been right up my alley. I also like slice-of-life and cute girls doing cute stuff shows so this should have been the perfect show.

And yet… this is the most boring thing I’ve watched all year! (Shh, I know it’s only February) Maybe the show just came on too heavy for a first episode, but it just wasn’t fun at all. First off, the whole ‘sexualized reactions to eating good food’ was completely off-putting. The minute the episode opened with the main character moaning and blushing over a bit of rice (complete with ‘sexy’ closeups of her lips) the show’s days were numbered. It was in dire straits, but then they made it worse with the main character’s boring voice. And her annoying introspection, boo hoo hoo, I’m all alone, I wish I had a boyfriend. Just shut up and eat your rice, you whiner!

After that her distant cousin (?) comes over to stay and she cooks her some stuff. I like nabe, but it’s just nabe, stop trying to make it sound like it’s anything special. That might be the problem with the show’s food – it’s hard to convey that everyday foods suddenly taste super-wonderful just because the some anime characters say so. “No, no, it’s really really good!” Uhhh… yeah. I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.

And then there was a long stretch without food, just with the cousin Kirin showing off her childishness and selfishness. Spoiled brats like her give only children a bad name. How old are these girls supposed to be again? Probably 3rd year of high school? Pssh, kids. Anyway there was a lot of talking about regular udon (it’s just udon, sheesh) and then another (!) scene of the main character slavering over inarizushi (it’s just rice and fried tofu, sheesh) and then blah blah my mom and blah blah my grandma… I think? I skipped around towards the end.

Same problem with other slice of life shows: I couldn’t find a character I liked and wanted to follow. And while life does involve just sitting around talking about our families, Koufuku Graffiti was trying way too hard to elicit certain emotions from the viewer instead of just letting them flow naturally. And a simple ‘getting to know each other’ show doesn’t need unnecessary blushing or sexualized images. And finally the food just wasn’t that special. Verdict: dropped like a hot bowl of kitsune udon.

Saekano episodes 1-2 impressions. Kept for later.

At last! I found a Winter 2015 anime that I actually plan to pick up when it’s complete. I tried to avoid reading up on Saekano beyond what the title said (Saekano = short for ‘Saenai Kanojo/Heroine no Sodatekata’ = ‘How to turn a boring girl into a heroine’), so I almost quit when I accidentally started watching Episode 00 and it opened up with naked girls at an onsen. So not my kind of show at all. But the title intrigued me so I closed that episode and tried episode 01 instead.

A game-loving boy whose name I can’t remember picks up a girl’s hat and is struck by how magical the moment is (uh… he’s a teenager, I guess). He decides to make a romantic visual novel based on that moment and tries to recruit his generic tsundere childhood friend and his generic tall and snarky beauty friend to help him, but they turn him down. Then it turns out his dream girl with the beret is actually his dull unremarkable classmate whose name I also can’t remember, but I really like her. His goal now is to turn her into a heroine that will move hearts, or something bizarre like that.

All I need to motivate me to follow a show is to find one character I like and can latch on to, and that has come in the form of Heroine X (really can’t remember her name, can’t be bothered to look it up… Megumi?). She may seem boring at first, as per the title, but that’s because she’s the only normal person in a cast full of anime otaku/otaku stereotypes. The other girls’ personalities have been seen a thousand times before, same with main guy, so it’s interesting to throw a relatively normal person into the mix and see what happens.

Come to think of it, this series reminds me a lot of Bokutachi wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai, especially the sniping and bickering dynamic between the two lead girls. They even look similar, and the black-haired one keeps getting the better of the blonde one, who has a secret passion for pornographic material, and so on and so forth. I wouldn’t be surprised if Saekano started out as a “What if” scenario for that kind of series and took off from there. Let’s hope this doesn’t degenerate into a harem show and that it actually ends well.

It helps that I like video games and dating sims like Tokimeki Memorial so I don’t mind seeing the effort that goes into creating one of them. I enjoy video game parody anime too. If they could wrap this up in 12 episodes, maximum 24, that would be great. When the series ends I’ll watch episode 3 and 4 and marathon the rest if I still think it’s good at the point.

Kantai Collection episode 1 impressions. Dropped due to meh-ness

If I recall correctly the story behind Kantai Collection is that monsters from the sea, known as Abyssals, have appeared out of nowhere and they can only be fought by cute teenaged girls possessed by the spirits of ancient Japanese battleships. Or maybe they’re reincarnations of the ships? Anyway, a bunch of girls named after ships take on a bunch of monsters because they’re the only ones who can.

Truth be told I’m actually rather fond of the “cute girls doing cute things” trend in recent anime. And I don’t have anything against the ‘only this very specific group of people can fight this threat’ premise several action shows have. And at least Kancolle has less fanservice than trashy shows like Strike Witches. So the odds were somewhat in Kancolle’s favor, at least at first. Having watched an episode though, I don’t think I’ll continue. My reasons are simply:

– Too many characters introduced all at once.

– None of the characters immediately grabbed my attention. Having characters the viewer wants to see more of is the key to a moe show.

– The ship gimmick is wasted on me because I know diddly and squat about the Japanese navy, historical or otherwise.

– Were the big-boobed commanders really necessary?

– Do they really have to fight in easily-ripped school uniforms instead of sensible battle clothing?

– Fubuki’s schoolgirl crush on Akagi-sempai is annoying. If she wanted to be strong for her own sake or to save the world I could get behind that, but ‘I want to be with my crush’ isn’t something I feel like rooting for.

– The action was boring. They skate around for a while, fire a few bombs and then the enemy crumbles to dust. If Fubuki wasn’t such an amateur she wouldn’t have been in any danger at all. None of them would have been. If the enemy isn’t threatening then the characters just look like bullies. I was almost feeling sorry for the Abyssals by the end.

Since there are so many moe girl shows out there, I don’t feel compelled to stick to anything that doesn’t immediately grab my attention. Kantai Collection is dropped like a sack of potatoes.