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As is the standard at the moment, my anime watching is lagging behind a bit, but this post is probably lagging behind more. My general weekly watching for the last few months:

Sword Art Online: Alicization — So… second season, second half of the story, right? Of course right. Except it’s not. It does actually go through and have the climatic showdown you know has to happen. And the entire sequence for that was very good. Really, I tend to get tired of the ‘series of fights with climbing levels of bossiness’ trope, but this season did it well, and I enjoyed it the entire way (with the exception of recap episode). But then we get a cliffhanger for a new problem, and the series… stops. So, I might recommend not going for this until it returns, but overall Alicization is the best SAO has been since first season.

Land of Lustrous — I just got to watching this a month ago or so. The bad news: it stops partway through the full story, and needs another season. However, the good news is that it stops at a good, and fairly satisfying point, and is a very good series overall.

Fairy Tail — Continuing to be good with moments of great. The fact that they’re on course for an ‘end’ that’s already out in the manga I think helps a lot, as the writing is staying reasonably tight. The fighting is sprawling out all over the place, but it’s not feeling drawn out with too many ‘and now our 5 minutes with this character’.

Pokemon Sun & Moon Ultra Adventures — Sometimes you’d think that the entire franchise would just be tired after this long. And… sometimes it does feel like it (really, Team Rocket doesn’t need to be in every episode, though this series is being better about that), and sometimes it doesn’t. The main thing I think I can say is that I want to see more of the Masked Royal, the episodes dealing with Kakui’s double life have been hilarious.

A Certain Magical Index III — Not a bad wrap up, and this season was definitely the story they were rushing through everything else to get at. If anyone else has seen it, you want to try explaining it? We’ve got a lot plots and magical MacGuffins running around, and I don’t think the creator really has a handle on it all, so it just dissolves into nearly-random events.

Baron and Dave occasionally watch with us, and here’s what they just caught up on:

Ancient Magus Bride — You know, the second time around, I like first season even more than I did the first time. I think not watching the excellent OAVs beforehand helped, since those are very good, and the series suffered a little in comparison. Also, second season did a bit better for seeing it faster than one episode a week. Anyway, we watched everything (OAVs last), and they were happy with it, and I really want to see a third season now.

Also, Smudge and I caught the two ‘reboot’ movies for Pokemon recently:

Pokemon: I Choose You — This was disappointing. Part of it was, I was expecting a buddy movie of Ash and Pikachu concentrating on the original first couple of episodes. I think that would have been better than a completely alternate version of… probably about the entire Kanto adventures. The two new characters were there to externalize Ash a bit, but that also left him feeling a bit flat.

Pokemon: The Power of Us — On the other hand, this is one of the best Pokemon movies there’s been. The plot has a difficult job, as there’s five primary characters, and the movie follows them all about equally. However, the various threads cross frequently, and naturally, and overall its a very strong plot. Better yet, there’s no Team Rocket (really, they don’t need to be there every time). There are complaints that Ash isn’t the primary focus, which is true, but he is still what ties major parts of the movie together. And I’m fine with seeing people other than Ash on center stage.