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The one new series I was watching this time finished up a few weeks ago, so that means it’s past time to sum up what I watched over the last three months.

Megalobox — Smudge really enjoyed this when it came out; I resisted because it seemed a bit too intense. But it’s now come up in the Thursday night rotation for the four of us, and is being very good. It’s odd to celebrate the 50th anniversary of a straight boxing story with a SF (boxing) story, but it’s very well written and produced. They’re going down the ‘retro’ route with making it look more like an ’80s anime, and doing very well there as well.

My Hero Academia — Funimation was having some sort of error in their system, at least they were on our Roku, so we didn’t start watching this until fairly recently, and are just finishing up the ‘tournament arc’ of the season. It’s well handled, and feels just a bit padded, but the series continues to deliver.

Astra: Lost in Space — After seeing the first episode, I nominated this for watching with the guys, and we’re now most of the way through, and everyone’s been enjoying it. We’re still at the ending couple of episodes, and answers to a lot of questions have been coming thick and fast.

World Trigger — Smudge started me on this a bit ago, and I’m now a ways in. At first, I wasn’t really impressed by the ‘magical boy show’, but as it’s gone on, it’s shown, and concentrated on, the internal politics of Border, a group is basically holding shut the door from extradimensional invasion. That has made it unique and more and more worth watching.

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime — I think we’re a little behind on this still, but I’m still in catchup mode after just starting earlier this year. The OAVs between series were good (though… the sumo one was… yeah), and we’re now fairly early in the current series. The series is always solidly in E. Doc Smith-land with power levels ratcheting way up, and of course the time-honored way to deal with that is to de-power everyone… which it looks like we’re going to be dealing with.

Demon Slayers: Mugen Train — I just saw the movie recently, and overall, it’s extremely good. Highest points for introducing everything a new watcher is going to need to know, and not recapping the series in the process. On the other hand, it’s basically two nearly full-length plots joined together. I think making the movie as a whole more about Rengoku would have helped, when as it is you start wondering ‘wait, it’s still going?’, and the characters are also asking (without any answer) why the second villain is there.

Infini-T Force — We recently started showing this to the guys on Thursdays, and they seem to be liking it well enough. They’re not really familiar with the properties crossed over except Gatchaman, but that puts them ahead of me. It does have its limitations, mostly in animation, but at the same time, the writing is good enough.

Dr. Stone — And I am now caught up on this. On the one hand, it keeps breezing over engineering challenges that should stop Senku in his tracks. On the the other, the character side has been good and largely getting better, and the obvious answers are often not where the plot goes. There’s a too-sudden flip with Tsukasa, that needed more build up/better foreshadowing, but was otherwise well handled.

Dragon Goes House Hunting — This is the only new series I ended up watching this season, and I had to wrestle Smudge into trying it. On one hand, it isn’t all that great, with so-so animation, the thickest neck ever seen on a dragon, and writing that feels very random. On the other hand, it kept doing better than my modest expectations for it, and kept managing to be laugh-out-loud funny.

Pokemon Journeys — This has finally started showing up on the Pokemon Network app, so me and Smudge are watching it. After the 6th and 7th gen series, this is a let down. I’m kind of guessing that Netflix (which helped fund it) wanted a bit of a cleaner start under the assumption they’d get more first-time viewers than normal. But the writing and animation seem to have taken a step down, and there’s not much in a noticeable overarching plot. Worse, I’ve stated before that the series is at it’s best when there’s a good number of continuing characters to work with, and here we’re down to Ash and Goh with some very secondary characters. Worst, Ash is feeling like a non-entity. His personality has shifted from series to series, but he’s always had a noticeable personality, but here he just feels flat.