Anime Spring 2015
And another season of anime has basically wrapped up. Pretty much nothing carried over from last season for me.
Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches — This one suddenly showed up in the middle of the season on Crunchyroll, and has 2014 copyright…. Anyway, this turned out to be my favorite of the season. It’s over after one season, but told a fairly tight story. I think it got a little messy in places, I’m not entirely happy with where it ended up, but it’s what the story needed. Anyway, Yamada is something of a ‘tough guy’ who managed to get into a better high school and is having trouble with the culture shock. And then he discovers a power to swap bodies with a kiss…. (And the voice actors do a very good job of being someone else.) Of course, there’s much more to it than that, and Yamada finds himself getting entangled with more and more people as the show goes on.
Plastic Memories — This was a nice little relationship anime. I wasn’t sure it could really carry for a full season, but it did quite nicely. In the near future, there are fully human-seeming androids; however, after nine years their memory fills up, and the android is recycled…. This is about the department at the company that makes them that retrieves them once the nine years are up.
Food Wars — Because, Japan. More high school antics; but this is at an extremely tough, top-end, culinary academy. There’s cooking, cooking contests (with plenty of Iron Chef references), and… shall we say, orgasmic appreciation of good food. Very silly, but has some good writing. This is continuing, and it’s nice to see the main character starting to realize he’s not quite as good as he had thought….
Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? — Okay, I tried this fully expecting to come out of the first episode going, ‘yep, I can ignore that’, with an outside chance of it being a great farce. Wrong on both counts. It has more than just background elements of harem anime that get in the way, but most of the time, it’s a very good coming of age story. I do hope it returns, there’s obviously more to say.
Amagi Brilliant Park — I only found out about this one late, so I’ve only seen a few episodes so far. Amagi is an amusement park that employs magical creatures from another world (apparently true of most parks in this world), but is run down and hasn’t made a profit in years. They’ve called in high-school student Seiya to run the park in response to a prophesy. So far, he’s scarily competent….
Gunslinger Stratos — This had a good first episode, and then went downhill fast. It looks like it was picking up again mid-season, but I haven’t been bothered to watch any more.
And then on the older series side of things:
Fairy Tail — I’m still enjoying this, but I’ve come up to end of the first series, and I’m waiting for the second series dub to start showing up on the streaming service. Why did they halt in the middle of a plotline?!
Natsume’s Book of Friends — The group of us is still watching this on Anime Night, but that’s slowing down due to scheduling conflicts; we may move Anime Night soon. Anyway, we’ve seen through the first series, and the very beginning of the second series, which is just as good so far.
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