Here’s a little fun fact for you. This volume has a Question Corner at the end of chapter 54. Oda answers a question about a door being fixed when it should be broken in volume 1. He chalks it up to Mr. Minatomo, the carpenter. There’s even a small illustration of the guy. Now why does this guy look so familiar? Oh that’s right, he’s a legendary Carpenter from Wano, who doesn’t show up in the actual story until Chapter 909. Sometimes you have a character in mind and have to wait two decades to actually put them into your story. Oda-sensei, are you okay? Looking into this character a little bit, they’re apparently not the same character, but they’re related to each other. I wonder where Oda addresses this, because I can guarantee you someone has asked him that question before. And that’s how a joke character you have to make up to hide your own mistake for a quick joke becomes part of the lore.
So this next one is a pretty well-known change between the anime and the manga. In the anime we have Sanji’s flashback where Zeff jumps into the water to save him after he gets washed overboard. His leg gets stuck on a chain and he has to cut it off to be able to escape from drowning. That’s pretty hardcore already but it’s a change from the manga where he literally cuts off his own leg for food. I can imagine you might not want to show that in a children’s cartoon. So it’s an understandable change, but it does take away a little bit from Zeff’s coolness. It’s also even more sad looking back at this arc knowing the rest of Sanji’s story. Without going into spoilers, his story does get explored later in the manga, and this is only just the beginning to Sanji’s tale. Fortunately they somehow manage to pull through here.
Now back to a reality check. In the next Question Corner someone complains that the manga volumes are too expensive at 410 yen a piece. I did some quick math comparing it to our currency (which at the time this came out was still the Gulden and not yet the Euro, that feels like it was forever ago) and it was around 3 euros (at today’s conversion rate). Now it’s around 14 euros. Minimum wage has only gone up by about 70% since then while this manga is almost five times as expensive. Crazy stuff.
Gin and Pearl are the two main underlings in this arc. Gin being the terrible bloodlust murderer who is on the verge of starting his redemption arc. He started this problem but after the kindness that Sanji showed him is struggling to end the problem. Pearl on the other hand is just a ridiculous character. He apparently grew up in the jungle, which I initially mistook for a PTSD joke when they said “you’re not in the jungle anymore.” I thought it might be referring to the Vietnam war, but it was nothing so dark. Pearl gets taken out by Gin who gets taken out by Don Krieg. Perhaps the moral of the story here is that if you only work with terrible people, they will eventually let you down and betray you.
We wrap up volume 7 with the fight between Luffy and Krieg still in full effect. It’s honestly a pretty decent volume but it feels a bit less good than the two that came before. I said this in a previous post as well but I just don’t really like Don Krieg as a villain. He’s just a bad man for the sake of being a bad man. It’s for good reason that a lot of the villains from East Blue Saga are never seen again in the future. The only ones that come back in the story are Buggy and the upcoming villain from the next arc. And even he only gets mentioned and doesn’t actually appear. But both Don Krieg’s and Captain Kuro’s crews are not interesting at all.
We also wrap up Buggy’s side of the aftermath in this volume with the cover stories and move to the other half of this tale, where his remaining crew needs to navigate without their captain. They decide who becomes their new captain while Buggy is absent and of course the lion wins, because why wouldn’t he. We’ll get to see more of them in the next volume where this arc wraps up and we dive into the next one. I’m excited for it, I hope you are too. As always, thanks for reading.
When the Eminence in Shadow started airing I almost didn’t watch it. An edgy isekai show with an overpowered main character who has a harem of girls fawning over him. I’ve seen that too many times for it to still be interesting. But something about the first episode kept me interested. Cid as a character seemed fairly cool so I figured I could keep watching it. It’s a good thing I did because this show is hilarious. Let’s have a look at Shadow Garden and the chaos that it’s sparking in multiple nations in this strange world.
Not going to lie, Cid was kind of insane even in his previous life on earth.
The story follows Cid Kagenou, a guy who was trying to be a hero in his old life on earth by helping people out like a batman type vigilante guy. Unfortunately he dies young and reincarnates in a fantasy world. There he quickly realizes he’s got the potential to be extremely powerful and spends his time training and getting stronger. He meets a young elven girl who he helps out and names Alpha. Now Cid isn’t a normal boy, he’s a massive Chuuni. Someone who loves to pretend to be cool and in this world he’s chosen to pretend there’s an evil cult out there that he’s fighting. This is where we start to realize how silly this show is because it turns out that the cult he made up for his pretend villains is actually real. Not only that, the girls he saves as time goes on create the powerful organization Shadow Garden whose goal is to fight against this Diablos Cult. All of this happens while Cid pretends to be a normal high school kid and only his alter ego Shadow gets all the action. He spends time setting up the mood when he meets with his underlings so he looks as cool as possible and the way he spends his free time thinking of witty one-liners really sells his character.
The A-team, the most competent people in this organization, their boss must be extremely cunning.Nevermind, I take it all back.
A show like Eminence in Shadow doesn’t work if it’s not self-aware enough. Because of how silly of a character Cid ends up being, it gets pretty hype whenever he turns things up to eleven and starts slicing fools left and right. Cid is probably one of the most powerful beings in this fantasy world and he loves showing it off under his alias of Shadow. There’s lots of subplots going on about former heroes and cultists and intrigue between kingdoms and all alongside this Cid has to balance two lives. It’s like Hannah Montana but for edgy sword fighters. That’s scarily accurate.
Let’s talk about the characters in the show. We’ve talked enough about Cid to know what kind of character he is. The rest of the characters in this show are almost all women. It’s a harem anime after all. Having said that, it’s not a bad thing in this case. These are actual characters and not eye candy like some other harem characters can tend to be. Rose, Iris and several of the members of Shadow Garden have interesting stories to them, especially Alpha and her presumed connection to a character that shows up in the second half. It also helps that Cid seems to have very little interest in romance. He’d probably only consider it if it made his made up stories cooler but not for any other reason. I particularly enjoyed the trio of Rose, Alexia and Beta and their complicated friendship.
Alpha, you’re scaring the kids.
As for the animation and the artstyle, there’s not much to say here. It’s never bad, at least not that I’ve noticed. I also wasn’t ever blown away by how the show looked. It did its job but didn’t go overboards in doing so. All things considered this was a highly enjoyable show and I’m curious where things will go from here if there ends up being a second season. I’ve heard it’s been quite popular so there’s a decent chance. If you haven’t watched this show yet and you like action comedies with a dumb plot that don’t waste your time, then this show is definitely for you. Thanks for reading.
Look at it, it’s an actual physical book now! I was so excited when I found out and I’ve already read it twice now. Hopefully they don’t take too long adapting more of it, I’d love to at least have part 1 complete at some point. I think that won’t be much more than 3-4 volumes though, so that should be fine.
I’ve gotten into talking about Tower of God a long time ago, back when I had single digit followers on this blog. The posts weren’t popular at all and they were a lot of work, so I stopped doing them. As time went on, I’ve felt the urge to get back to talking about this series. Mainly because I think it’s such a fantastic story. One of the richest worlds I’ve ever read about and easily in my top 5 manga/webtoons/manwha. So you can imagine my glee when I found out that Webtoon is releasing a physical edition of Tower of God in a format they’re calling Webtoon Unscrolled. As some of you might know, Webtoons are a format of comics that’s designed to be read on a phone or other screen. Instead of having pages, it has one long page worth of comics that just keeps going until the chapter ends. This allows for almost endless scrolling and works really well for something to read during a commute. Out of all the webtoons I’ve read, Tower of God was the first and best one. A little while ago the first volume arrived and I’ve since read it. Let’s take a moment to talk about it.
Some of you might be wondering; what is ‘Tower of God’ about? Excellent question. Tower of God tells the story of the 25th Bam. The anime called him Yoru, since his name refers to night, but that sounded really weird. Bam grew up in a strange dark place all alone until a girl called Rachel showed up one day. Rachel taught him letters and all sorts of things, but one day she decided to abandon him to climb the tower. It is said that those who climb the tower get what they desire. Let’s say it’s a little bit more complicated than that. Rachel disappears and Bam is heartbroken. He desperately chases after her and then a door opens and he finds himself inside the tower. Now this is a problem. Normally the tower chooses people, but Bam came through the door by himself. Not only that, he came from a place outside of the tower. That makes him an irregular. And in the past any irregular that entered the tower has caused big waves. But Bam doesn’t seem to have much talent. He just wants to get his friend back.
Princess Yuri? What happened to your face? What did SIU do to you?
To go up the tower, you need to pass tests to ascend. Bam has appeared on Headon’s floor, a strange creature that gives him a test he needs to pass to keep climbing after Rachel. The test is ridiculously difficult though and it turns out Headon is a bit of a dickhead. Fortunately for Bam, there’s someone else in the area that noticed his arrival. One of the princesses of Jahad (Zahad? Zahard?) called Yuri is near the test floors. She’s familiar with irregulars and her interest is piqued. She journeys down to where Bam is and lends him the Black March, an incredibly powerful weapon of a weapon type only a dozen exist. The weapon takes an interest in Bam and he quickly passes the test by showing zero regard for his own safety. He’s sent on to Evankhell’s hell, the next round of tests. Yuri now needs to get her weapon back.
I won’t talk too much about what happens in the early stages of the test floor, since you can read this webtoon for free online, or buy the physical edition (I recommend the digital version, unless you’re already a huge fan like I am), but I’ll go through it quickly. Bam meets Khun Aguero Agnes, named after an Argentinian soccer player, who notices something is interesting about Bam and teams up with him, also recruiting everyone’s favorite crocodile; Rak Wraithraiser, to their trio. They learn about Shinsu, which is this world’s magic and there’s some exposition about how the tower works. We meet a ranker, who is someone that reached the top of the tower once, and we’re introduced to some of the characters that we’ll see a lot of throughout.
Now, with this synopsis out of the way let’s look at the quality of this volume. It’s pretty large for a manga, it sticks out above every other manga volume I own. That makes sense, because you’d want to have a good amount of content on each page. It read alright so far. It feels like a normal manga but in color. Having said that, I’m completely up to date on the webtoon, which is currently on hiatus, and I worry that later on the big fights won’t look all that good in that format. Having said that, the print looks good and the only downside to the art is, well, the art. For those unfamiliar with SIU’s art, it starts out pretty rough. Some of the faces are so bad it’s funny. This improves very quickly though and nowadays I’d say some of his chapters look above average in quality. But keep that in mind when you read Tower of God.
It’s crazy going back to scenes like this and knowing where the story is at right now. Shibisu is definitely a very fun character, so is everyone else in this picture, in their own ways.
Last but not least, I’d like to quickly talk about Tower of God as a whole. The story follows Bam through several stages of climbing the tower and now that there are hundreds of chapters out this is something that needs to be understood. The first part is kind of like a prologue to the rest of the story. This is a bit of a spoiler I suppose, but this also is a clarification. It’s good on its own, but I think it really shines with the later parts added to it. Only later on in the story do some of the secrets of the tower start to become more clear and even writing about it now makes me want to go back into the Webtoon and read it all over again. This is a big endorsement for what is already a highly popular series. Please, please do yourself a favor and read it. Dip your toes into the anime if you want a sneak peek but keep in mind that the source material is a lot better. The anime is a great start, but it covers so little that it feels kind of unfinished. If you have read Tower of God, or this post convinced you to start it, please let me know in the comments down below. Tell me who your favorite character is as well. Mine is probably Endorsi. Either way, thanks for reading.
Our second volume of One Piece covers a large chunk of the Buggy fight. As the series has grown, I found myself finding some of these earlier arcs a little bit boring. Not until Arlong Park do things really start to pick up steam, and with Arlong Park also being my favorite story arc of the entire series, it’s hard to not feel like the parts before it are a bit weak. Nonetheless, knowing that the arc was written more than two decades ago and is still an enjoyable read to this day, after I’ve consumed it a handful of times already, it’s not bad.
Oda is slowly starting to find his pace here, introducing another big pirate in the East Blue saga by the name Buggy the Clown. We get to see him a lot more often throughout this series and his story is pretty interesting in and of itself but as of right now he’s a clown pirate with a big red nose. His crew is supposed to represent a circus with several members looking like clowns and his first and second mate being a lion tamer and an acrobat respectively. The lion tamer, Mohji, gets into a fight with the dog that’s protecting a pet store. This volume really narrows in on treasure and how different things are important to different people. Luffy gets the most angry when someone damages his friends or his treasure. Second to that is the anger he displays when someone else’s treasure gets needlessly damaged. In this case that’s the pet store that Mohji and his lion Richie destroy. He quickly deals with them and later adds insult to injury by referring to Mohji as a “Fuzzy.” I’m pretty sure they’re called furries.
Buggy’s second mate, Cabaji, is not really an interesting character at all. He’s a mean person who uses acrobat tricks and plays dirty to win fights. In actual fights between pirates I think fighting dirty is probably encouraged but in a world like One Piece’s you want to root for the good guys and not the backstabbers. Luckily, Zoro is in a league of his own and has no problem defeating Cabaji even while he himself is pretty badly wounded. The real big fight is going to have to wait until the next volume though.
I did laugh a little bit at Nami’s introduction. “I hate pirates. I love money and tangerines. I only date guys who are over 6 feet tall.” Alright I might have added the last bit myself, but it really read like some sort of social media platform. Oda gets better at show, don’t tell later on in the manga, but I thought this was done so blatantly that it was actually funny. It helps that Luffy at this point couldn’t care less to the point where he thinks Buggy’s name is Nami and vice versa. They do strike a deal and work together against Buggy, but as we all likely know, that won’t go super smoothly. The three end up with only Buggy remaining as their enemy, but as the only one they’ve encountered so far with a devil fruit power, aside from Luffy, he’s definitely a serious threat.
There’s probably not a whole lot I’ll have to say about some of these earlier volumes. The cover pages of each chapter are still just pictures of Zoro and Luffy hanging out, which is nice, because these pages are always a nice display of the crew’s solidarity, but later on we get more interesting stuff on the cover pages that’s worth talking about a lot more, especially since a lot of it never gets covered in the anime. For now, I’ll leave you all with this, and I hope you’re enjoying the manga so far. I’ll hopefully see you all again here next week for Volume 3. Thanks for reading!
Very few shows I’ve seen will stick with me as much as Spy x Family has. It’s not the best show I watched last year, simply because I think there were some areas where it didn’t quite hit the mark for me. What makes this show so special in my opinion is that the points where it does hit the mark, it absolutely nails it. From soundtrack to art to animation to voice acting. There’s so much polish on this show it almost shines too brightly for me to even see it. So with that endorsement out of the way, let’s dive into one of 2022’s biggest hit anime, based on a shonen jump manga by Tatsuya Endo.
That smile. That darned smile.
One little fun fact is that the mangaka has gone on record saying he doesn’t feel particularly attached to the characters from his own manga. Spy x Family isn’t the story that he wanted to tell so he feels no real attachment to the Forger family. That’s got to be hard on your mental health after a while. I guess it’s more important to write what sells than to write what you want if you want to make it in an industry as brutal as the manga industry. Makes me wonder what a manga he does want to write will look like. Perhaps we get to see this once Spy x Family ends and he has enough recognition to take a little bit more risk. But putting aside whether the author likes the characters or not, he definitely has a knack for creating a fun story, so let’s dive into the story proper then.
I think I might be obsessed with this opening theme. It’s gorgeous and just sounds so pleasant.
Contrary to the author, I do feel a level of attachment to these characters. Loid Forger is the fake name for a spy going by the name Twilight (Tasogare). He is infiltrating the neighboring country that they have a cold war with. There is no active fighting going on, but things aren’t exactly great either. This is basically a reflection of post world war 2 Germany. The east and the west are represented and there’s tensions yet life has to go on. His target is a member of the government. To get closer to his target and find a way to convince him to broker peace between the two nations proves to be nearly impossible. Thus WISE, the spy organization he works for, devises a plan. He needs to have a child get close to Desmond’s (the target) child, so they can talk to the man through that connection. The problem is, Twilight doesn’t have any children. So he does what any reasonable spy does; he adopts an orphaned child. The child he settles on is the star of this show. Anya is adorable in everything she does. Not only that, she has a secret super power. She can hear other people’s thoughts. She uses this power to get Loid to adopt her and later on in several other situations. With his new daughter, Loid sets out to apply to Eden College, the prestigious school where his target’s son will soon enroll. But things aren’t quite in the clear yet, as the process of enrollment requires the presence of Anya’s parents. Plural. With this problem, Anya and Loid need to quickly find someone who can play the role of Loid’s wife.
What an elegant way of sitting in the tram, Mr. Forger.
This is where my favorite character, Yor, comes into play. Yor is an assassin called The Thorn Princess (Ibari Hime). She’s nearing her thirties and is still single. In a world like this one, that’s rather suspicious. She is thus on the lookout for a partner so no one will interfere with her work. Basically, Loid and Yor are perfect for eachother in that sense. They get married in the middle of a crazy action scene and neither of them figure out the other is a spy or assassin. This is where we get into the suspension of disbelief portion of the show. Because we need a bit of that. It’s really hard to believe that one of the most talented spies in the world and one of the most feared assassins are somehow completely oblivious to the other’s work and talents while living in the same house.
You can do it Anya, protect the peace in your new home by…. studying I guess?
But this is shonen anime, not a thesis on the believability of your plot. Sometimes things need to be a little bit crazy and unbelievable to make for a fun story and one thing Spy x Family always delivers on is fun. I do think that if future arcs create suspicion between the characters it would make for some more interesting story telling than just keeping them as the densest two masses in the universe for the entirety of the story. The rest of the cast of this show is pretty decent too. Damian is a great foil for Anya who is about as likable as an annoying brat will ever be. His father is rich and important so he is a bit taken aback when some people don’t immediately suck up to him. The head teacher is a great caricature of an old stuck-up gentleman with his “elegant” obsessions. Becky is a bit annoying at times and I’m not a whole fan of the “this prepubescent child is somehow madly in love with an adult man.” It just feels weird to me. Franky is an informant is great too, especially how he sort of turns into Anya’s fun uncle as time passes by.
Call it like it is, Anya.
Before I give my final verdict, there’s two things I want to talk about; music and production quality. First up; the music. The first opening and both endings are solid, fun to listen to but not amazing and unforgettable. The second opening however, is an absolute banger. Bump of Chicken has been one of my favorite bands ever since I first saw their opening Hello World play at the start of Kekkai Sensen. I’ve liked many of their songs on Spotify and they’re just so relaxing to listen to. Souvenir is the song used for the opening here and I don’t know if I can put into words how gorgeous this opening is. It sounds amazing by being upbeat yet melancholic at times as well. It perfectly fits with the top tier animation used for the opening credits. I think it’s close to being the perfect opening sequence and I can’t think of many openings that will top it that aren’t also by Bump of Chicken. It’s near the very apex of anime music for me, together with greats like Kenshi Yonezu, Aimer and LiSA. Moving on to animation and art. This also looks great throughout the show, even peaking at certain moments. Nothing that’ll absolutely blow your mind during most episodes, but it always felt fluid and fun to watch. It’s not quite on the level of something like Chainsaw Man though, but for the kind of show it is, it really doesn’t have to be.
It’s a good thing he decided to punch the table because Yor was about to murder everyone in this room without an ounce of mercy.
That brings me to my final verdict. Spy x Family is a great concept that’s not at all believable but still really fun to watch once you accept how ridiculous it is. The production is high quality and the characters are a lot of fun. I wonder how good the story is going to be at keeping its ridiculousness fun, but for these first two seasons it passes with flying colors. It made it into my top 10 shows of the year with ease and the only thing that doesn’t put it higher is the fact that the story itself has not been super intriguing so far. But with all that it has to offer, it doesn’t have to be and with the success it’s had I’m sure we’ll delve deeper into the story with future seasons. But that’s me and my opinion, now I’m curious what you think of the first two seasons of Spy x Family. Please let me know in the comments down below and as always, thanks for reading.
Spy x Family isn’t on this list because it needs its own dedicated post. The second opening ‘Souvenir’ by Bump of Chicken is easily my most listened anime song of the season. They nailed it, like they always do!
Happy New Year everyone! I know this post only goes up on the second of January, but it’s the first one I’m actually writing in 2023. It is currently 10 AM on January first and I’m going to be in that optimistic phase for a little while so I might as well make the best out of it and do a lot of writing early on. I took December off from writing, only writing a couple things here and there. So now it’s time to get back into it. Other seasons I would split my quick reviews up into a few different posts but I’ve decided to just start making one post for them each season. Part of it is because I have a lot I want to write about and I don’t want twelve Mondays out of a year to be quick reviews and another part of it is that I didn’t watch that many interesting shows this past season, so it’d be one or two posts at best anyway. Putting all of that aside, let’s dive into the anime of fall 2022 together. As usual, none of these will contain big spoilers for the shows themselves, so feel free to browse through the posts.
Bibliophile Princess
Watching the prince enjoy chatting with another woman from behind a window. Poor Eli. She doesn’t have the social skills to figure out what’s really going on.
Coming out of the gate swinging, Bibliophile Princess has comfortably made its way into my top 10 anime of the year and will be featured in that list later this month. It tells the story of Eliana Bernstein, a nobleman’s daughter who loves books. She’s been engaged to the crown prince for a couple of years in a sort of sham engagement where she gets to read the books in the royal library while he gets to fend off other suitors that he’s not interested in with a good excuse. A few years have now passed and Eliana sees the crown prince getting friendly with another girl in the palace courtyard. She laments the fact that her access to the royal library might soon disappear as the prince might find a replacement for her. To her own surprise she’s more sad about this than she expected. The story follows Eli and Prince Christopher as their romance slowly grows. Misunderstandings and intrigue never outstay their welcome and as the show continues our main characters get more depth to them. If you’re a sucker for sappy love stories that really don’t have too much substance to them, then this is the show for you. It was definitely a guilty pleasure for me this past season and it’s a shame that it’s not rated higher than it currently is.
Bocchi the Rock!
Embodying the true introvert, the idea of doing some activity every single day sounds absolutely awful.
I’m not going to be the biggest advocate for this show. Hitori (Bocchi) is a young girl with pretty solid guitar playing skills. She’d love to join a band and perform with them one day but she has the social skills of an anxious worm. She almost accidentally finds herself joining a local band and the story follows her shenanigans with her new friends. Bocchi has severe social anxiety. The show does a really good job of portraying this, both in storytelling as well as in using wacky animation to really emphasize certain situations. By all accounts, Bocchi the Rock is a good slice of life show. But I couldn’t really enjoy the show. For starters; Bocchi’s anxiety is so well done that it sometimes started to give me flashbacks to my own past. My social anxiety isn’t terrible these days, but it used to be really, really bad. It probably wasn’t too far off of what Bocchi is like in the show. That’s not an enjoyable experience to relive. At other times I also felt like the show was moving too slow and in the busy November and December months I found myself playing some of the episodes at 1.5 speed, which is something that is normally only reserved for One Piece. For those unfamiliar with the One Piece anime, it often feels like a 24 minute episode covers about seven pages from the manga and realistically, that’s not even that far off. If you like good slice of life anime, then Bocchi will probably fit your taste. I didn’t really like it the same way I didn’t really like The IT crowd. I recognize its merits, it’s just not made for me.
I’m the villainess, so I’m taming the final boss
Aileen is definitely nailing the look of villainess, I love those colors and the design of her dress here.
We’ve had a couple of Isekai anime where a girl gets transported into a visual novel and has to change the outcome of the story now and it’s a genre that’s very hit or miss for me. A great example is “My life as a villainess” which I really enjoyed until the second season started and I was just kind of bored. I think the problem with this genre is that the initial problem can be very engaging and well written, only for the story to devolve into something much more generic that feels on par with mediocre Isekai shows. This time around, I’m the villainess manages to evoke that same feeling in me in less than a season. I enjoyed the first few episodes quite a lot. Aileen has to prevent the demon lord, who is the current prince’s half-brother, from going berserk. She works together with humans and demons to try and figure out this delicate situation. After the strong start, the following arc was incredibly boring. I just couldn’t find myself caring about the characters involved most of the time and honestly the only reason I remember the characters’ names at all is because of how generic they are. It picks up a little bit towards the end but I found that at that point I’d mostly lost interest.
Reincarnated as a sword
If a strange sword starts talking to you in the woods, it might be trying to get you to join a cult. I’m just saying, you have to be wary in these situations. This particular sword is fine though, it’s just a middle aged bloke from earth.
Maybe I’m not a good judge of what anime I should be watching, but this season has been a nice big pile of mediocre shows for me. Of course I also watched a bunch of the exciting sequels, but we’re not here to talk about those. Reincarnated as a sword follows a man who, well, reincarnates as a sword. He turns into an excalibur-esque sword that’s stuck in the ground somewhere in the middle of nowhere. As he’s hoping to find a wielder, a young catfolk girl named Fran finds him and the two start traveling together. Fran’s goal is to evolve, which is something that catfolk rarely get to do. My main gripe with this story is that early on it seems slavery is a common thing but as soon as we get to the cities we see no slaves. There is no real elaboration of this system and it kind of feels like a plot device. Fran is a fine character, so is the sword itself, and the story never get particularly dull, but it also never gets particularly exciting. If you like generic Isekai stories with a twist you could consider this one, but if not, just skip it.
Shinobi no Ittoki
I wish we could have seen more of her story, she was definitely one of the more interesting characters in the show. but with a one-cour runtime, we had to mostly stick to the kids’ story
I was debating if I should talk about this show, but I decided to give it a quick mention in the end, before closing off this post. Shinobi no Ittoki follows a high school student who finds out that ninja’s are not only a real part of society, but his mother is the leader of a large ninja clan called the Iga clan. Iga has beef with the Koga clan and the story follows Ittoki and his friends as they get embroiled in a clan war between the two clans. The story has an interesting premise but pretty quickly lost me on its execution. It has some interesting characters but then there’s also some really annoying characters who picked their motivation one day and then just stopped to think about it. There’s a traitor whose betrayal is never quite explained well, there’s some strange things behind the scenes that seem to just be there to move the plot ahead and Ittoki just isn’t a very good character. All things considered, this is probably a show you should avoid. It’s interesting how polarizing this studio is. Studio Troyca, the studio that made this show, is also responsible for bangers like Re:Creators and Aldnoah Zero. On the flip side it’s also responsible for the second season of Aldnoah Zero and now this show. It seems like they have the winning formula, just only sometimes they make a show.
Just watch Chainsaw Man. And remember, it’s the quiet moments that make a loud show shine.
And that brings us to the final roundup of shows that didn’t make the list. Putting sequels aside, there’s a few shows I haven’t talked about yet. Beast Tamer was too bland to talk about. I didn’t hate it, but I’m fairly certain I’ll have forgotten it by early February. Chainsaw Man was very good, but everyone is already aware of this and if you really want to find out more about it I suggest you check out Gigguk’s latest video on the subject. Lastly there’s Isekai Ojisan, which was plagued by delays and has yet to finish. I believe we have one episode left and I will probably do an individual review on the show when it finishes, since I quite enjoyed it. Oh, and I will be talking about Spy x Family on its own later this month. There you have it. Let me know if there’s any shows I missed out on in my list that I should really check out, or if you disagree strongly with any of my opinions. But for now, I have a lot of writing to do as well as catch up on some older anime – I’m currently watching Record of Ragnarok – so I’ll leave it at this. Thanks for reading and leave a like or comment to make my day!
We’re starting off strong. Kyoraku has been named the next Captain Commander after Yamamoto’s passing. Unsurprisingly, he’s not happy about this. He has a meeting with Central 46 who are still as useless and annoying as ever. I wonder if they’re modeled after the US Senate. His plan is to make Zaraki Kenpachi learn Zanjutsu, basically making him unreasonably powerful. And he’s picked someone to do this for him. Captain Unohana from squad four; The first Kenpachi. This reveal was crazy.
I’m avoiding having the preview picture be a spoiler, so have this guy for starters.
After healing in the bath, Ichigo and Renji move on to the next island. I know some people were complaining that last week we didn’t get to see buff Kon, but luckily they didn’t forget about him. After a good bath it’s time for some food. Itadakimasu! Bleach is now Shokugeki no Soma. Hikifune Kirio explains that they’re getting ready for the upcoming three rituals. Next up: The man who created Zanpakuto. How long have these people been a part of squad zero?
I want her secret to losing weight
We jump back to Soul Society itself, to the lowest level of the underground prison where Zaraki Kenpachi is getting ready to face Unohana Yachiru. Kenpachi vs. Kenpachi. Unohana without her iconic braid looks terrifying. I remember seeing this in the manga as well, she’s way more intense than Zaraki. It also turns out the braid was hiding a scar that Zaraki once gave her. She in turn is responsible for the scar on Zaraki’s face. Kyoraku laments that one of the two will have to die in a clash between Kenpachis. Both lieutenants have been handed a will of sorts and are now awaiting the return of their captains.
I don’t know who’s scarier, Äs Nödt or Unohana
For a moment they’re evenly matched and they cross blades, even though Zaraki is definitely on the defensive, he’s holding on pretty well. For a moment, that is. Unohana very quickly has the upper hand. She disarms Zaraki and puts her blade to his throat and tells him he’s gotten weaker. Without mercy, Unohana cuts his throat. When he blinks for a moment, he’s suddenly back, without a cut throat. The fight continues. Unohana is absolutely merciless and will heal him whenever he’s about to die in an attempt to make him stronger.
Lambs to the slaughter, what you’re gonna do when there’s blood in the water.
All in all, not a whole lot happened in this episode. At least it feels like that. We have a new Captain Commander, two captains are fighting to the death and it is more or less revealed that all the people thought dead (Byakuya, Zaraki, Renji and maybe Rukia) are perfectly fine either last or this episode. At this point I started getting confused about what Kubo wanted to do with this arc. It felt like he was going to start slaughtering named characters but then immediately reeled it back in. It felt a bit weird at the time and that sentiment hasn’t changed. Having said all that, I’m still excited to see more Bleach every week.
Poor Isane, I wonder if she knew this day would come.
Official anime streaming websites have historically been sparse in my country. Even with the rise of Crunchyroll there were always large amounts of episodes missing. To give an example, I got an account there once to watch One Piece again, only to realize the middle 70% or so of episodes were unavailable. Because of this, I’ve had a long history of watching my anime basically wherever I can find them. I will be quick to defend this, as I would gladly pay for my anime if they were reasonably available. This is what I do with manga for example, which is why my room is slowly looking like that of a hoarder. Debating morality aside, this explains why I watched Summertime Rendering on a weekly basis while a lot of people might not have. It’s been stuck in Disney jail for a while and although it could be out by now, it wasn’t airing weekly in the west. This is a real shame because it’s a very good show. So without going into any major spoilers, in case readers of this post haven’t had the chance to watch it yet, let’s talk about Summertime Rendering today. There will be spoilers for the first two or three episodes, but nothing past that.
And so it begins
Name: Summertime Rendering
Manga by: Yasuki Tanaka
Studio: OLM
Runtime: April 2022 – September 2022 (25 Episodes) Genre: Mystery, Time Travel, Thriller, Action
Our protagonist, Shinpei, returns to his home on Hitogashima Island. He is there for the funeral of his childhood friend, Ushio. He left the island to move to the big city and she unfortunately drowned trying to save a young girl from drowning. The girl survived but seems emotionally unwell. Even before he gets to the island, things are strange. He has a weird dream where he hears his childhood friend plead for him to find her. When he wakes up he jumps forward landing face first in the bosom of Hizuru, another passenger on this boat and an important character in this story. He gets promptly slapped in the face for his unintended assault and arrives on the island proper.
And so the mystery starts
While Shinpei is on the island, things slowly start getting more and more strange. Ushio’s neck shows strangle marks and it’s not long before he figures out that she was murdered. Not only was Ushio murdered, something supernatural might be going on. Soon after, Shinpei finds out, through going through the motions of it, that he has some sort of time travel ability. Think Re:zero but slightly different. With this power and limited knowledge, Shinpei and his friends slowly try to uncover what is actually happening on this island and how to save as many people as possible before it’s too late.
Something, Katy Perry song, Something
Summertime Rendering is a neat package that fulfills on all the basic promises of a good anime. The artstyle is solid, nothing mind blowing but definitely above average. Same can be said for the animation. The action scenes are amazing when they want to be and the animation throughout is always solid enough that I never noticed any problems with it. The characters in this show are very fun and well written, to the point that we find more depth in them as the show goes on. As someone who doesn’t like time travel in general, I found myself not bothered by it at all in this show. Hizuru is one of my favorite characters and I also appreciate that the cast is more diverse than just a bunch of teenagers. If you like a good mystery show that has the full package, then I highly, highly recommend this show. It’s great right from the start and as the season continues it just gets better and better. The ending is satisfying and although it’s not particularly important to the review, the first opening absolutely slaps. You won’t want to miss this show, so if you can find it anywhere, definitely give it a watch. I’ll be trying to find a good place to buy the manga, because I can definitely see myself wanting to experience this story again. Thanks for reading.
Edit: These shows need to stop having names the size of that one Welsh town, because putting three of them in one title is barely possible at this point.
The summer season had a lot of shows that I have a strong opinion about. For that reason, I only ended up with about three shows for quick reviews. The rest I either don’t want to talk about at all or want to devote a full post to. Before I dive into this, I quickly want to mention some of the sequels I watched this season, in case anyone is still on the fence about those.
Firstly, Danmachi season 4 was very solid. Just like every season before it, it doesn’t overstay its welcome and because of the long break they even did a neat recap.
Overlord on the other hand did not do a proper recap and I found myself kind of confused about what’s going on for the first few episodes. Besides that I never managed to care about the characters much for this season and I don’t know if I even would watch season 5 at this point. Then we get to the big one; The Devil is a part-timer. I look back on the first season of this show extremely fondly. Which makes it all more of a shame that when I started watching this season I found myself uninterested. I didn’t remember the cast beyond the main four and this part of the story was incredibly boring to me. I hate to say it, but this was not a great season in my opinion. Maybe it’s the long time between seasons or maybe it’s because it feels like this season didn’t conclude anything properly, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Now with that out of the way, let’s dive into three shows I want to look at specifically.
The Yakuza’s guide to babysitting
Kirishima is a violent member of the yakuza. He works for the powerful Sakuragi family and is fairly high up its rankings even. He’s doing a lot of hard work, but he often goes too far in his violence and has always been kind of a wildcard. When he crosses the line one too many times, he’s basically put on leave. But not by sitting at home twiddling his thumbs. Instead of that, he’s put in charge of babysitting the boss’s daughter, Yaeka. Yaeka’s mother got into an accident when Yaeka was very young and because her father is very busy leading a family of Yakuza, she’s been a bit neglected at times. Having a proper babysitter would be good for her, but Kirishima isn’t exactly the type of person that’s perfect for this job. Or is he?
Poor Yaeka, she is around a lot of very eccentric folks.
The story watches as the two slowly grow closer while problems do arise here and there, but Kirishima really starts caring for the young girl. The joy of this series is in their interactions and we get more than enough of those. None of the side characters overstay their welcome and this show really makes it feel like a close family of people. I’m sure real life mafia people are also super nice and caring people. It is interesting to see the duality in Kirishima slowly fade as he becomes a kinder person overall. I found myself enjoying this show a lot more than I expected and if you like a good slice of life with a bit of drama mixed in then I’d highly recommend you give this show a watch. It’s short and sweet and bundles everything together nicely at the end.
My stepmom’s daughter is my ex
Because of course she is. In defense of this show, it is a lot more tasteful than a lot of other shows that thrive off of the thrill of incest. It’s still crazy to me how this genre got so popular both in anime and… other media. Yume and Mizuto’s parents remarry to each other. This makes Yume and Mizuto siblings. What neither parent knows, for some reason, is that their children used to date each other, before they were a family at all. They broke up at some point but never quite really forgot about each other and now they suddenly have to live in the same house. The story revolves around their relationship as siblings and former boyfriend/girlfriend, and how they often fail to thread that line. The two still deeply care about each other and the show explores those feelings throughout. I enjoyed this show more than I expected to, which I feel like I end up saying about a lot of the shows I watch on a whim, but I don’t think it was worth watching unless you’re really into high school drama. The production was pretty nice on this show and it had a good atmosphere throughout. I also think, for what it’s worth, that it has a fairly realistic take on this kind of situation. Obviously I have no way of knowing what a realistic take on this situation would look like, but it never feels like the show does anything weird and the characters are very aware of the strange predicament they’ve found themselves in.
neeeeeeeeeeeerds
Harem in the labyrinth of another world
This show could have been something great. It’s bordering on being a hentai and every scene has been animated amazingly. But why does every single ecchi Isekai show insists on glamorizing slavery? It irked me in Shield Hero, it’s irked me in several shows since then and I believe after all this time this show is the worst offender. The slaves basically immediately fall for their owner, which is just the most messed up message to send into the world. I think there’s a tasteful way to go about slavery in a fantasy setting, a way in which the person buying slaves can still be a good person doing a terrible thing. There’s always a hint of grey in any story you write, but to just take slavery and make it so that if the master doesn’t treat their slaves horrendously it’s automatically something good leaves an awful taste in my mouth. On top of that does the opening show a whole bunch of the girls that don’t show up until literally the last five minutes. Nothing happens in this show. I’m serious. There is absolutely zero substance. This could have been a hentai if it had actual nudity and it would have probably been pretty great. But now you just have an ecchi show with well animated sex scenes where none of the characters are likeable, no one is a good person, nothing actually happens and there’s no real plot progression at all. It’s just a blatant advertisement for the source material that adds absolutely no value. It’s probably the worst anime I’ve seen in a very long time that I didn’t outright drop. If you like well animated sex scenes and do not care that this is the only thing the show has to offer then I suppose you could give it a watch but honestly you’re better off watching a compilation of it somewhere and skipping this colossal waste of time.
I found the one frame I could still post here with a clear consciousnes
There are a bunch more shows that came out this season that I want to talk about so I’ll be doing that over the next month or two. A lot of these shows I have more to say about than I could possibly cram into one large paragraph so they’ll each get their own post. For now, I hope I cleared up a bit about these three shows and you can decide for yourself if you want to watch them or not. In summary; watch the Yakuza babysitter, skip the rest. Thanks for reading!
I say I’m looking back, but it’s obviously not done yet. Before I even consider approaching any publisher at all I need to edit and proofread a bunch of stuff. Having said that, I don’t think there are going to be any massive differences between this version and whatever a final version will look like. Main things on my mind currently are characters referring to things too vaguely because I hadn’t fully developed those ideas at the time of writing them. So changing “the kingdom up north” to what it’s actually called because the characters would know their names.
But once all of that is done, which I’m putting off because I’ve deserved a short break from this story, I hope to get it published somewhere. I’d love to have physical copies of a book I’ve written someday, that’s been a lifelong dream of mine. I don’t even care if they don’t sell, I hope they do, but I’m writing this story as an outlet for me and as a hobby. If other people like it, that’s just a bonus.
Today I’m not going into plot points per se, I did that in the first draft of this post and I realized halfway through that I’d written four full pages of ramblings, so let’s spread this out and milk it a bit. (because I really don’t have anything else to fill Fridays with for blog posts). I first got this idea maybe around April of 2021. I’d been playing with an Isekai story in my head for a while, but after watching the spin-off season of Tensura I really started honing in on the kind of story I wanted to write. Now anyone who’s seen that spin-off and read my story will realize that they’re not alike at all and that’s true. But the pacing of that show is what inspired me. I wanted to write an interesting story that felt calm and never rushed. I hope I somewhat succeeded at that.
I started writing some concepts on paper in October of 2021, in preparation for NaNoWriMo. This is a yearly writing challenge where you try to write 50.000 words in the span of a single month. I chose this story for that challenge since it was the one I had the best idea of what I wanted to do with. It ended up being a success, to my surprise. I finished the entire draft for this story, at 50.009 words total. I still have the draft version separate from the updated story. I was technically slightly short when I wrote the final sentence, so I had to find a spot in the story where I could add a couple of words, which I did.
Then when January of this year came around, I started editing the story, one chapter a week. Most of the early chapters were pretty good and didn’t change much except for filling in the story and the world a little bit with more context and more life. As the story progressed, I realized the original draft lacked a throughline and an ending. I’d written the magical circles into the story with the idea of bringing them back in the second volume, but it felt pointless. I wouldn’t care about this storyhook if it took too long to return either, so that’s why I had to change it and bring it back towards the end of this volume.
Speaking of which, almost every chapter after the crew got settled in Dionil’s house has been completely rewritten compared to the original. There’s a high chance I might change some things here and there. The council’s personas were very spur of the moment and I might go back and adjust them a little bit, to make them feel more like real people. But overall I’m pretty happy with how everything turned out. After a bit of a break from this story I’m going back in to fix some things up. I also still need to think of a throughline for the continuation, which I’m hoping to write this November and then post weekly in the new year. But obviously I’m not promising anything about that, because I’m very good at breaking my promises. Either way, I hope you enjoyed this story, I sure did. If you have any feedback or constructive criticism I am very much open to it. I’m only one person and I tend to think what I write to be pretty good because I wrote it, that’s kind of how our brains work, right? It’s the reason why you have someone else proofread your texts since they pick up on mistakes we don’t. Either way, a massive thank you to all of those who read this story, or even just a little bit of it. It means the world to me if I could just entertain even one or two people with the things that bring me so much joy!
Opal Kaharis 