Summer 2018 Anime

Starlight Revue is by one of Ikuhara’s buddies who also worked on the Takarazuka Revue itself, and it shows. Hell of a premiere.

Edited by Iaculus on Jul 14th 2018 at 11:09:17 AM

Yuragi-sou no Yuuna-san - Feels sort of like poor man's To-Love Ru, but without being as explicit. It has it's charm, undeniably, but everything in it is so generic it doesn't really convince, especially in a season with at least three much better comedies to compete with. It's not bad, just generic. If you want fanservice for the sake of fanservice and a palette swap of stock harem characters, this show fills precisely that spot.

Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight - I am... not sure if this counts as an Idol show or a Magical Girl show. It does look intriguing, however, and as a former actor and dancer myself, I am interested in at least one aspect of this: The theater school sounds really cool, and was very neatly reproduced. Someone did their homework.

Still, talk about a sudden shift in genre (EDIT: Tone. I meant tone.). The first two thirds of the show had almost nothing to do with the last third. Nonetheless, I think the show is worth a watch.

Also, I feel obligated to say this. The show can tell us Hikari is a wonderful star and all that, but her Grand Jêté was awful. The blonde girl earlier in the episode did a much more beautiful one, while Hikari's was ugly and simplistic. Good airtime and height, but horrible form and overall execution.

Edited by TheLovecraftian on Jul 14th 2018 at 9:37:04 AM

Lord of Vermilion: It seems like it's trying to be a fun chuuni watch. But it's ugly and slow and I think it's the single worst thing from this season

Sirius the Jaeger: Good art, good direction. Not sold on the story yet, though— Feels like it's trying to do a bit too much. Still, I'll be watching

Shoujo☆Kageki Revue Starlight: A Love Live clone, but with Ikuhara-style "I'm not sure which parts are a metaphor". It's real good!

Second eps:

Hanebad toned down the drama, but didn't replace it with anything interesting (still has the best action, though). Next episode will be make or break for me

Shichisei no Subaru continues to be a weird mish-mash of AnoHana and .hack. Definitely a "will watch if there's not much else I like" for me

Harukana Receive felt a bit better? No major changes

Satsuriku no Tenshi got a lot more cohesive and the repartee between Zack and Rachel is entertaining. Which brings it up to "decent"

So that's all the premieres I care about. Until Tsukumogami Kashimasu in a bit over a week. And Muhyo & Roji on the 3rd. Not to mention the Last Encore special. Why is this season so spread out?

Edited by Hylarn on Jul 14th 2018 at 5:09:26 AM

What do you mean, nothing to do with the first two thirds? All it was was a literalisation of the self-sacrifice and the vicious conflicts bubbling beneath professional theatre school. They even said as much.

I was referring to the difference in tone, although I can see how I failed to explain that properly. The literalisation itself is amazing, and in fact helps make this one of the strongest opening episodes in the season. I just found the shift to it very sudden, what with the talking giraffe and the Magical Girl-style transformation. But it's still really good, not a negative thing at all.

Revue Starlight 1: Uh, well that stood out. Very stylized, in a good way. The dramatic narration, music, and performance during the opening certainly set the scene. The whole episode was on information overload, with the visuals and dialogue not matching up with each other to create maximum characterization for everyone in a single episode. And when it wasn't giving someone the spotlight they kept up the interesting visuals. Enough to get my attention even before the end, but then it goes all mind-bending whack where the protagonist may or may not know more about what's going on than we do. Really fluid fight animation as well. This jumped from something not even on my radar to need to see the next episode as soon as possible.

Edited by Sterok on Jul 14th 2018 at 8:48:56 AM

Starlight's last third wasn't really that sudden? The very first scene had the same setting and there was a similar dream sequence halfway through

But those were very clearly dream sequences, though. And they weren't so over the top. The last third just very suddenly jumped up and happened. And again, that's not a bad thing, in fact it might be the best thing about the whole episode. It just caught me by surprise.

I'm kind of saddened that Satsuriku no Tenshi isn't getting as welcome of a reception as it was expected to have.

Just something I wanted to point out in response to this post:

The story was never meant to be all that scary, just some suspense and a general dark tone. This is, from what I could tell, shared across all forms of media for this work.

…So is SKRS set to be this season's sleeper hit or what?

Watched Digibro's "anime of the week" video on Summer 2018,and I got into Backstreet Girls on his recommendation.

That show is fucking hilarious. I feel there's not enough love for it on this thread. The voice acting is spot on, and I love how overly exaggerated the still frames are (which are almost the whole show). For a low-budget show, it really plays to its strengths. Hell, the opening is hardly animated at all, the director just did a dance herself using motion capture. This show is not for you if you don't like Black comedy however. This show gets pretty "South Park" sometimes.

"digibro"

Blegh.

I’m not sure that Starlight Revue counts as a sleeper. Pretty much everyone who saw the trailers and checked the staff-list was hyped for it. It’s not, like, Kemono Friends or something.

Edited by Iaculus on Jul 14th 2018 at 2:54:14 PM

Hey, no judgement here on what anime youtuber you watch.

Zoids Wild episode 1: This anime is very cliched, even by kids' anime standards. But precisely because of that, it is fabulous. I really looking forward to it. Having very nice theme songs are a bonus too.

Dissenting opinions are already forming about Lord of Vermilion. Delicious~.

Also Lovecraft, one of ANN's reviewers said the exact same thing about Revue and also use to be a dancer.

Cells at Work (2nd): This...This is gold.

I really hope that once this season is finished, it'll be used by future generations as education material in biology classes. Seriously. I really do.

Will follow.

Well hey, I'm not alone, then. Good to know.

Caught up with Asobi Asobase and Chio-chan no Tsuugakuro today. It was an interesting experience, watching two shows that are basically 'bad people do bad things to other bad people' in a row.

Chio-chan is probably the more light-hearted of the two, largely because Chio seems to actually care about people. Some interesting dynamics here, including how Chio and Manana are both incredibly open about taking advantage of each other; it still somehow feels not quite mean-spirited because it's a sort of 'you lose, then I lose, let's call it even' thing. An interesting show, so we'll see how it progresses.

Asobi Asobase is... still weird. I'm glad they resolved Olivia lying to Kasumi, because the whole 'Kasumi wants to stab Olivia for lying' plotline wasn't super funny, but my biggest problem has to be Hanako. In a show built around three leads, even one where the point is that they don't actually like each other, having a character as downright unpleasant to have on screen as Hanako is a bold choice, and I don't know if it's one I would say is paying off.

Someone should get a Cells at Work forum thread going.

High Score Girl - It comes in late, and it doesn't impress. The romance is sort of there, and it manages to be occasionally cute, but ultimately, the characters aren't that great, the comedy doesn't really hit the mark, and the animation doesn't really compliment it much. It has to be noted, on that last point, that the animation is trying, and for what it's worth, the show being mostly 3d is interesting (plus, it's not all that bad, either), but it just doesn't justify itself. Wouldn't really recommend.

Aguu - Well, at least you tried. Here's another horror anime that fails to comprehend what makes decent horror. The concept sounds interesting, but the execution just does not work. The artstyle is kind of nice, except once in a while it goes horribly janky for no reason (such as the protagonist suddenly going cross-eyed), and the voice acting sometimes sounds very amateurish. Sorry, horror fans, but this isn't really worth it.

As a manga reader, High score girl is kind of a slow burn, with most of the development being in the next arc, so an anime adaption is difficult.

So far this season I'm watching Banana Fish and Cells at Work, but there's a couple more series I was gonna check out. Sirius the Jaeger looks like I'll either love it or it's really not my thing, asobi asobase might be a laugh, and I've heard good things about revue starlight but I'm not sure it's my thing.

If anyone's turned off by people saying banana fish is BL, it's... not exactly BL. It's BL as much as No. 6 is BL, if you've seen that. That is to say, not really BL but we don't have a word for "queer romance that's a big part of genre fiction but the fact that it's queer doesn't massively come into it". If you're turned off by the mentions of sexual assault in the premise... yeah. It's all handled in a really respectful way and nothing's really shown, but it's pretty heavy.

Generally they just happen to have a strong romantic bond with another guy, but being with a girl if they never met is not out of the question, or just plain being uninterested in romance at all.

The demographic for both is boys and girls. Banana Fish even though it was a Shoujo.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on Jul 21st 2018 at 2:07:23 AM

Lord of Vermilion's second episode was strong. Its still chuuni as fuck but its doing a good job of laying the ground work for the show's ongoing plots.