Anime… First Half of 2016
I try to mention what I’ve been watching after every Japanese quarter-year season of anime. However, events in March conspired to interrupt easy anime watching, and I missed half of the Winter 2016 season and all of the Spring 2016 season. Smudge has been diving in again recently, and now I’ve finally caught up on anime watching for the last half-year.
Erased — This instantly became the hit of the Winter season for me. Satoru Fujinuma occasionally involuntarily goes back in time a minute or so to ‘fix’ something that just went wrong, and then ends up going back eighteen years to his own childhood. Kind of a mix between Quantum Leap and Detective Conan, it didn’t quite go where I was expecting (I was expecting a back-and-forth pattern to emerge). The ending was weakened a lot by being fairly sudden, with no real foreshadowing of who the villain was. Which is a shame because it was excellent in every other way, and I do still recommend it.
Konosuba — This is also from the Winter 2016 season, but Smudge only discovered it a couple weeks back. Our Hero is an otaku who dies and is given a chance to be reborn into a different world with his memories intact, and a single item of power. He chooses to take the goddess giving him the offer, and he finds himself in a RPG-like fantasy realm (with quests and everything). There’s a lot of fanservice in this one, but it seems that this is supposed to be part of the series’ parody of fantasy RPGs. Like a harem anime, he gets three attractive girls around him… and they’re all nearly useless. It sounds like we’ll get another season in a bit, which is good, as the plot is still just getting going, but the humor has been good.
The Heroic Tale of Arslan — I’ve finally just caught up to the previous seasons of of this. A new season’s just started, but since I’ve been watching it dubbed, I may wait for that to come out. At any rate, it continues to be a very strong fantasy story with a lot of historical flavor.
Haikyu — This was actually the first thing I ended up getting caught up on. It continues to do well with not bogging down into single games not stretching across more than a couple episodes, and the continued evolution of the team and primary characters. Now that the initial stuff is over, it’s not quite as fun, but I continue to enjoy it.
Utawarerumono: The False Faces — This… could have been a great series. A lot of the elements that made the original work are here. But it needed a smaller cast harem, more time on the political side… and a different ending.
The big ones to me were:
Please tell me, Galko-Chan – funny slice of life shorts based on a web comic that tries to show your typical high school stereotypes in a more thoughtful rounded kinda way.
Osomatsu-San – Absurdist/Surrealist humor focused on sextuplets played by some big name comedians.
Flying Witch – Slice of life about a teenage witch. Very gentle and relaxing, so it’s funny that it was one of the shows that I found myself the most excited for each release.
Upcoming, I’m excited about:
Amanchu – Just started, Kozue Amano’s successor to Aria, which was basically Healing: the anime, and this seems similar.
Thunderbolt Fantasy – Just kicked off, it’s a combination of high quality marionettes from Taiwan I believe, and acting talent from Japan with a wuxia story that is impressing my tail off.
Liked Underwater Ray Romano 2 also, and *tolerated* Konosuba. Winter-Summer 2016 has been pretty subpar for me, but it looks like we might have pretty different tastes.
I really liked Aria (though I never got to see all of it), so I’ll have to keep an eye out for Amanchu.
Just saw episode 2 of Thunderbolt Fantasy yesterday. Smudge and I are happy something like this is being done, though Smudge is having trouble with the action sequences. I’m convinced they’re using puppets because they can’t get Toshiro Mifune. ~_^ The plot is feeling way too stereotyped so far.
The only current thing I’m watching so far is Food Wars, which is managing to be a lot of fun even when they go way too over the top for me.