Summer 2019 anime

Airdates for everything except Try Knights. Which also lacks a PV and any listed staff. I don't think it's been delayed, but this is pretty unusual. Might be late in the season?

Other promotional oddities:

• Machikado Mazoku is marginally better in that they at least announced the airtimes and some staff, but it doesn't even have character visuals. Pretty much doing the bare minimum. This is somewhat concerning, yes
• Astra's only PV is ludicrously misleading. Like, someone who's seen it will know less about the show than someone who's never heard of it before
• The milf isekai is, unsurprisingly, being heavily promoted. But they're largely promoting it as waifu series instead of a comedy for some reason? There is a PV that shows it's true nature, so I guess this is just the suits not realizing what they're working with?
• Granbelm's PR has been over-active and releasing more PVs than seems necessary or useful. The size of a PR campaign tends to be based on the producers' confidence in it, so I guess this is a good sign?

Edited by Hylarn on Jun 13th 2019 at 8:54:24 AM

If you want to discuss Arifureta, there's also a thread for it:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=15467933060A07830400&page=1#13

I also created a thread for Granbelm so no issue here

Two more weeks till case files. I hope all the characters from the novels being skipped get at least a cameo. Also going to check out Astra lost in space now, I was curious about it but the art just kind of drew me in.

Out of all of these, Astra Lost in Space is the only one I'm looking forward to. Having read the manga in its entirety, I can't wait to see how it looks in animated form! I only hope they don't mess up my favorite character, Luca. He is the best boy.

Btw... Tell me if the Random Curiosity website got updated.

Oh hey, Astra has a fairly accurate commercial now. ...And another PV trying to sell it as a serious sci-fi survival story. Seriously, who the hell is making these things and why?

And the Kirara show finally got a CM out, so it's just down to Try Knights (which I'm pretty certain is going to start in August)

Edited by Hylarn on Jun 21st 2019 at 2:28:45 AM

Crunchyroll is getting Symphogear XV and will upload AXZ, too. About damn time.

Random Curiosity finally got their preview out for the season

Kengan Ashura has released PV’s, both the same but one’s in Japanese & the other’s English so Netflix will have it dubbed immediately when it’s officially out. The official premiere on Netflix is July 31st.

I think the animation looks somewhat decent, though that could just be me rewatching the trailer several times to get a hang of it. Looks like Japan really is getting the hang of CG a bit better in general each year. From what I hear they improved the frame-rate so it might avert CG anime having terrible frame-rate.

The models though...... Christ the fighters all look like they are on crack. That close-up of Kure Rain (snarling guy at the 0:58 mark) looks ridiculous.

Edited by slimcoder on Jun 28th 2019 at 6:09:46 AM

Let's open the new season with To The Abandoned Sacred Beasts, which asks an important question: What if The American Civil War, but Animorphs?

Man, this gave me some strong Fairy Gone vibes, in a very bad sense. Lots of jargon, uninteresting character and monster design, a setting that's quickly becoming overused... I suppose anyone who liked Fairy Gone might want to take a look at this, but I think I'll pass this one. It doesn't look bad, it just doesn't look interesting. Be warned, though, it comes with some weird tone issues and the most obvious villain on the face of the planet. Seriously, the guy's name is Cain Madhouse, he has red eyes, long hair, is the protagonist's childhood friend and the third wheel in his relationship with the lvoe interest. Couldn't be a more obvious villain if he tried.

That sounds like a horrible idea.

Okay, starting off with Katsu-Kami. ...The entire first episode is anime-original and includes a lot of information that was originally doled out much more slowly. The weird tone issues and questionable subtext are straight from the manga, though. Might give it another episode to see if it improves when actually adapting the source material, but I wasn't especially fond of the manga and nothing about the execution here is amazing, either. Depends on how the next week goes, I guess

Edited by Hylarn on Jul 1st 2019 at 8:12:41 AM

I actually found this first episode much more effective than Fairy Gone's. Less exposition, more human elements, and some pretty touching scenes.

…And then Cain burst out into an Evil Laugh. Why, series? You started out so well. =[

Interestingly, the manga didn't start with a flashback but directly after the war… I prefer it the way the anime did it though.

I find them both equally disappointing, just in different ways.

Two short shows today:

Magical Sempai - I remember reading the manga for this a year or two back, and getting bored very quickly, with it's humour and it's fanservice. This one lasted about as quick. It's biggest sin is bad pacing, in that it just immediately throws you into some quick gags that are more cringy than anything else, and get tired quickly, but don't stop being repeated. It shows it's roots as 4-koma, but doesn't do much else.

Are You Lost? - I wanted to say this fared better, but it doesn't. First it went for a pantyshot, quite an explicit one at that, right in the first ten seconds, and then it just continued descending. The opening looks like it's pitching "What if Love Live, but on a deserted island?" and the show itself goes from weird, to gross, to tasteless, but never inches into good. Or decent. As with Magical Sempai, pacing is not an art that was appreciated here. Really, just pass this one. It's not worth it.

so, the anime i'm gonna watch this summer are Danmachi S2, Accelerator, Granbelm and Maou-sama, Retry.

Danmachi because i saw season 1, Granbelm because it's by the team behind Re:Zero, Accelerator because i'm interested in the Raildex verse (and because of battleboards) and Maou-sama, Retry because of blonde Rem:

and after checking out the first episode of Sounan Desu Ka?, i'm gonna keep watching that too

Astra: Lost In Space - ...has a 45-minute long introductory episode. It's lucky I like the author (well, I like Sket Dance, at any rate).

Honestly, this show really annoyed me. I don't know if this is just me being particularly nitpicky towards this first episode, but I couldn't go two minutes without writing something down that I had an issue with.

To start with, the animation and direction are really shoddy. Not incredibly so, but enough to be bothersome on occasion. Pretty much all of the characters annoy me. I genuinely like none of them. They range from uninteresting to grating, to that goddamn pink-haired protagonist who can't seem to decide what her "cute" traits are supposed to be and just keeps being annoyingly optimistic and overly friendly the entire episode. The other characters aren't much better, having mostly one-dimensional cookie-cutter personalities and spending most of the episode reacting to everything with the same shocked expressions and complaints, and occasional lampshades that don't distract from the fact that the plot's cribbing almost every cliché in the book.

The show runs on nonsense logic. Characters say obviously wrong things and then half the cast agrees with them blindly, while the other half rudely points out they're wrong ("Maybe the school endangered us on purpose!" "Yeah, that could be it!" "No, the school wouldn't endanger us on purpose, you idiot!"). Decisions are made in order to advance the plot, be it because or in spite of whatever information they have to aid in those decisions (the characters have a wire they're using as a tether to go into space. When one character, who has let go of the tether, is about to miss the ship and drift endlessly into space, instead of another character grabbing the tether and going out to catch them, all of the characters perform a human chain, for the sake of the show's message about friendship and cooperation). Contrivance solves almost every problem that's not solved by a big motivational speech, and the male main character can't seem to let go of his one flashback to an incident he had as a child (where his voice was already the one of his adult self). It's also got pacing issues, making it appear like 45 minutes was simultaneously too much and not enough time for this pilot.

Also, what's with all the comedy sound effects? They make the jokes fall flat. Well, more flat. It could also afford to stop forcing a joke every two or three lines of dialogue. I'm pretty sure this wasn't a 4koma. This even extends to an issue in tone, where sometimes during what should be a serious scene a character just breaks into sillyness or hysterics. You'd think the guy that wrote Sket Dance would make better comedy than that.

Lastly, and this is an issue that might be answered later, whose bright idea was it to send a bunch of teens and a ten-year old to a planet and just leave them there unattended for a few days? Is that something the manga actually explains, or is it just the most lawsuit-prone decision ever made by a school?

Sorry, had to get all that out of my system. Look, all in all, it's a serviceable, watchable show. It's far from the worst thing I've ever seen from the anime industry. But I find it infuriating, and I'm not going to go anywhere near it again.

Edited by TheLovecraftian on Jul 3rd 2019 at 3:51:39 PM

Dumbbell nan Kilo Moteru - Honestly, I expected much worse. Unhealthy beliefs about body image aside, this was actually a funny romp. The gags were mostly spot-on (only one of them gets overused, and it's one relateed to the body image issues the show has), the fanservice was tamer than what I expected from a show about working out, and the secondary protagonist is an incredibly amusing take on the old archetype of the graceful rich girl with a weird personality. I don't think I'll keep watching this, because exercise trivia and body image obsession isn't my thing, but it's actually worth a look for anybody who might be looking for a fun, fanservice-y comedy. My only real complaint is with this apparently rising trend in anime of having characters lampshade the stuff that's wrong or bad with the writing as if that excuses it for being "self-aware", but it's not a dealbreaker.

Maou-Sama Retry - Isekai. Overpowered "evil" Demon Lord protagonist. Cute loli. Bunch of beautiful women running around the protagonist. Waves of generic fantasy characters in the OP. Decent animation. Might be worth the time if that's your kind of thing. At least it doesn't waste your time with preamble before getting down into the swing of things. Still didn't hold my attention for the whole episode, though.

Dumbbell—Decent enough. Good number of the jokes land. They added in a bunch of more SoL/CGDCT bits compared to the manga, and toned down the fanservice. I'm not super taken by it, but may follow if I'm short on comedies for the season

...2 days until the shows I'm looking forward begin to start...

Edited by Hylarn on Jul 3rd 2019 at 9:19:42 AM

The thing that still strikes me the most about Dumbbell is that it’s in the same universe as Kengan Ashura.

Asta sounds disappointing. I wasn't going to watch it myself but from all the hype I've seen for it I was hoping it'd be good at least. Sucks that that's apparently not the case.

I'm surprised that the main character of that hasn't made a cameo to work out at the gym the girls are working out at.

Symphogear Hype!

Edited by Demongodofchaos2 on Jul 3rd 2019 at 11:02:53 AM

Well that be kinda hard with happened to him. Even then he’s out really the gym type guy.

Other characters from Asura guest star in Dumbells I recall.

Edited by slimcoder on Jul 3rd 2019 at 9:11:26 AM

Asta sounds disappointing. I wasn't going to watch it myself but from all the hype I've seen for it I was hoping it'd be good at least. Sucks that that's apparently not the case.

I've been seeing a lot of positive reviews for, it, actually. TheLovecraftian is an outlier

That is true. From most of the reviewers I follow, the lowest review I've seen was "fun, but with some flaws". I seem to have been a rare case, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

ARGH! I have to face this season sooner or never!

(Raging madly while recalling the lack of shows I watched last season.)

HEAD ON today!

Astra Episode 1: Why do I have the feeling that this is supposed to be part parody? Couldn't take the characters that seriously even if the setting is good, don't feeling the pull, might not watch.

Sacred Beasts: Yes. This I definitely like, getting great claymore-feels from the setting and have always been weak to monsters with humanity within as characters. Will give 3E-rule a go for this one.

There, two settled, will follow Jojo: Golden Wind and Demon Slayer from last season as well... But for now, will try and give some more a go...