July 15, 2012

Summer season progress report

There were eight shows I originally intended to give a try. Here's how it came out:

Binbougami ga -- dropped. The emotional whipsaw was too much for me, and madcap farce just isn't my thing.

Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate -- dropped. The first episode was great, but the second episode might as well have been from an entirely different show. I didn't even get halfway through it.

Dakara Boku wa, H ga Dekinai -- dropped like a hot rock. Watching the first episode made me feel soiled. I wanted to shoot the protagonist. This show is utter trash.

Hagure Yuusha -- continuing. There's too much fan service. (Ever think you'd read that here?) But the basic story is interesting, and there's potential. It looks like Myuu is the audience viewpoint character, not Akatsuki. He's an enigma, and it looks like the story is us finding out his true character. (Just in passing, I think this show will get a whole lot more interesting if Akatsuki gets the shit kicked out of him one time. Right now he's too full of himself.)

Campione -- continuing, but on the bubble. It really depends on whether the main character develops, and keeps, a backbone. If Erica keeps pushing him around, I'm through.

Dog Days -- is just as good as I hoped it would be. Better, even. I now suspect that Becky is going to be the main character in the series, though there's also going to be story about Shinku and Nanami.

Sword Art Online -- never started. I had intended to watch this, and I even downloaded the first episode. But once I had it, I found I didn't give a damn.

Oda Nobunaga -- and same with this one.

So I've got three shows continuing, and they all happen on Friday or Saturday. I wonder what I'll find to post about the rest of the time?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 04:11 PM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
Post contains 321 words, total size 2 kb.

1 Zero overlap again. I follow Tari Tari and Joshiraku. And there's a large backlog as usual.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at July 15, 2012 05:10 PM (5OBKC)

2 As Toren said one time, if we agreed on everything then one of us would be unnecessary.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 15, 2012 05:46 PM (+rSRq)

3 I really enjoy your reviews.  Any previous series you'd intended to review but hadn't gotten around to?  (See -- that was a question, not a suggestion.)

Posted by: Dave Young at July 16, 2012 08:19 AM (6ffrc)

4 No, not really. When Dog Days 2 finishes, I'll certainly do a review of it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 16, 2012 10:59 AM (+rSRq)

5 I might have to force myself to watch Upotte so I can review it, given that Wonderduck isn't going to. (Sob)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 16, 2012 11:01 AM (+rSRq)

6 Yeah, that's a sob. I quit Upotte on ep.6. But you can do it! We believe in you!

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at July 16, 2012 12:14 PM (5OBKC)

7 I don't think I could do it justice the way he would. Snark doesn't come naturally to me. ("Snark snark snark" says the durck...)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 16, 2012 02:04 PM (+rSRq)

8 It's a skill.

Posted by: Wonderduck at July 16, 2012 04:05 PM (Kv7m+)

9 Of the two series you didn't bother with:

Sword Art Online really is dotHack, but so far it's less about the mysteries in the game than it is about being trapped in the game and having to survive.  So, not as interesting as dotHack/Sign.

Oda Nobuna (yes, they renamed the character) is not quite as insulting to the Sengoku era as Sengoku Collection, as there are little tidbits of history sprinkled throughout, but the main character alternates between being a lech and then some sort of retainer of the gods.  Plus Nobunaga as a young woman.  It's as stupid as you'd expect.

Posted by: wahsatchmo at July 16, 2012 04:09 PM (r4uXE)

10

So, not as interesting as dotHack/Sign.

That really is damning with faint praise, because .Hack//Sign was dreadfully uninteresting. For most of the series, nothing happened.

The important plot points of the entire series could have been compressed into three episodes with room to spare.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 16, 2012 04:33 PM (+rSRq)

11 Yeah, I probably didn't mean to damn with faint praise, but I also found .Hack/Sign to be a bit of a chore to get through, even though I liked the idea of it.  I've tried watching the other sequels and I can't get through them.

Sword Art looks good, but I feel like I'm watching a dramatization of World of Warcraft.  When the only twist is that it's a MMORPG with real life consequences, I feel like there's not much there.

Posted by: wahsatchmo at July 16, 2012 06:20 PM (gY5xe)

12 And they DID compress the entire .hack/sign storyline into three episodes with .hack/Quantum.

There was only one plot point in .hack/sign that I liked.  When Lady Subaru got her ass kicked by a character with a similar avatar because she spent all her time politicking rather than leveling up.  She looked pretty cute all disheveled too.

And the music was good.

I haven't downloaded anything this season yet.  Although I'll probably start on Dog Days 2, since I downloaded the first season, but haven't watched it yet.

I've only watched about 30% of everything I've torrented.

Posted by: Mauser at July 17, 2012 02:17 AM (cZPoz)

13 On Sword Art Online/ .hack//Sign and associated works:

I'm a big BeeTrain fan and have always liked their works, but the thing about .hack//Sign that people forget is that it's really not got much of a story.  It's got a lot of good ideas that don't necessarily work together, but it *still* has one of the best OSTs put to an anime and it's super, super pretty.  They spend a whole lot of time just sitting and looking at the background art while talking.

The series works to its strengths (visual & audio presentation, likeable characters, interesting world) and doesn't insult you with the story.  That pretty much little happens for the entire series is its major flaw. 

SAO doesn't have that luck in production and it's really not that type of series.  .hack//Sign was completely original, so it could do what it wanted to do.  SAO is a Light Novel conversion, so it's going to be stuck in convention a bit more.


On what I'm watching this season, at current:

- Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita
- Tari Tari
- Joshiraku
- Muv-Luv
- Eureka 7 AO (carry over)
- Dog Days 2
- Rinne no Lagrange 2
- Binbogami ga!
- Campione!
- Natsuyuki Rendezvous
- Kono Naka ni Hitori, Imouto ga Iru!
- Moyashimon Returns
- Accel World (carry over)
- Hyouka (carry over)
- Horizon
- Koi to Senkyou to Chocolate

Now, unless a series really doesn't catch me at all or insults my intelligence badly, I'll generally give it 3-5 episodes.  I more tend to drop stuff around ep 6, if I watch ep 2.

In other news, I have a high capacity to watch mediocre series, haha.  (And a lot of free time at the moment)

Posted by: sqa at July 17, 2012 06:56 PM (5/dUV)

14 Since I am into MMORPGs (though not as much as I used to be), I was initially intrigued by .hack//Sign, especially how they referred to different play-styles, the overlap of player's real-lives with their game time, etc  However, although they raised some interesting plot threads, they never resolved them.

Posted by: Siergen at July 18, 2012 03:27 PM (PuIGa)

15

Here's my review.

The reason the show doesn't resolve anything is that it's a prequel for the first game. It ends where the first game begins.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at July 18, 2012 03:35 PM (+rSRq)

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