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This review contains spoilers for Back Arrow. If upon reading that you thought to yourself “I guess I shouldn’t read because I don’t want to get spoiled”, be honest with yourself. You weren’t going to watch Back Arrow. It has a score of 5.68 on MAL at time of writing. It is only marginally ahead of the 5.51 Fart Gorou, the 3 minute short anime about a talking fart.

I love Back Arrow. I desperately want someone, anyone, to join me in my love of Back Arrow. The best way, and indeed the only way, I could think to get you to watch Back Arrow ... is to describe the glorious nonsense that is this anime’s story in the vain attempt that you will get through this review and say to yourself “ok now I HAVE to watch Back Arrow to make sure Scamp isn’t just making this all up”. So here is the entire story of Back Arrow.

In the fantasy world of Lingalind, there lie two dominant nations: The Fancy Tight-Wearing European Nobility Nation, and the Warlike Feudal Tiny-Hat Wearing China Nation. There are a bunch of smaller nations that don’t matter, except for the Autonomous Mountainous Colourful Swiss Cowboys. All their clothes are designed by the single tailor in town, and he’s a massive knob so they all dress like idiots.

One day a naked guy in a shooting star crash lands in their village. They start to cook him alive, but he asks them to stop so the leader of the village gives him her grandad’s family heirloom – a pair of tight black underwear. He saves the village in his gratitude from some roving bandits who want to take the contents of the shooting star for themselves. Oh, his name is now Back Arrow. He didn’t know what his real name was, but someone called him an idiot, aka a bakayaro, so rolls with it. You see it? Bakayaro. Bak-yaro. Back Arrow! Yes the show is literally called “stupid”. I love this show.

Both Tiny Hat China and Imperial Tights Europe are interested in the contents of this falling star so have sent out some scouts. One of them is this fella, Shu Bi. He’s a lot like the vape wizard from Thunderbolt Fantasy if you’ve ever seen that show. Shu Bi is in a loving relationship with his pet himbo back in Feudal China. However he gets one look at Arrow and says “lol fuck this I want to know more about this hunka meat”. He’s especially interested because Arrow says he wants to destroy the wall. Wait, I haven’t mentioned the wall. You know how Attack on Titan has a wall surrounding the land they all live in? Imagine that but around an entire continent. They have no idea what is beyond the wall, and the very idea of destroying the wall is like someone falling from the heavens and announcing they are going to break the sky.

Word of Back Arrow has also gotten back to the people in Noble Arsehole Europe and they want to find this guy too. They send some folks to grab Back Arrow because he has the magical power to pilot a giant robot without killing the people in other robots. Oh yeah, this is a mecha anime. You power them by putting on a special bracelet called a Bind Warper, which manifests a robot via whatever your strongest thought is. It could be something like “I must protect people” or “I must murder kittens” or “boy I sure would like some fried chicken” and however strongly you feel is how powerful your robot is. Yeah it’s robots powered by FEELINGS! Except for Back Arrow, who has no thoughts in his dumb head so his robot is effectively invincible.

The Poorly Dressed Swiss Cowboys are betrayed by their tailor, but then they uncover a giant flying cruiser the size of a small city, so the tailor decides he’s going back to them and they just all accept it. This giant battleship, called Granedger, is their new home so they decide to fly towards the wall and punch it. Shu Bi, the comes back and joins the ship because he’s a giant troll and just wants to see the wall knocked down for the lulz. Shu Bi’s boyfriend gets jealous and tries to get Shu Bi back but Back Arrow kicks his butt so he goes back and sits under 50 rocks as a form of self-flagellation for letting his boyfriend leave him. Meanwhile Shu Bi makes the tailor the admiral of Granedger for shits and giggles.

Granedger reaches the wall and Back Arrow punches it. The entire world collapses in on itself and everyone dies. Just kidding, absolutely nothing happens. In steps the Imperial Europeans and invites Granedger to their land and their princess negotiates a peace treaty by getting naked with the village leader and her girlfriend/Granedger pilot and washing each other (something to do with seeing each other as equals when they’re all naked).

This peace treaty doesn’t even last until sunrise because the princess has a split personality and the second half is a homicidal maniac who traps Back Arrow in her murder dungeon with a mad scientist who starts electrocuting Back Arrow while his personal choir sings about torture. They are re-occurring characters. They also sing about the end of the world, war, and more about murder. Did I mention I love this show?

Thankfully Back Arrow is saved by…well, this will take a bit of explaining. First there’s the doctor from the Cowboy Swiss Nation, who is secretly the brother of the princess but one day shot her down while she was paragliding because he thought she was a bird and ya know fuck birds. He was so distraught by his actions he escaped into the mountains to become a Swiss Cowboy. Their escape is almost foiled by his older sister, who is basically just Oscar from Rose of Versailles. But they are helped by a magical erotic fat bloke.

He lives in a castle made up entirely of splayed legs ready to fuck. He sits on a throne of naked bodies who are also the past rulers of the Imperial Europeans. He’s apparently so powerful that if he ever got worked up about anything he would destroy the entire world, so he spends his days living in decadence, drinking wine and getting morbidly obese. He was the one who created the murderous split personality in the princess by giving her a piece of his body when she nearly died from being shot down by her brother who, let us remember, thought she was a bird. And fuck birds.

All this is suddenly brought to a halt as Feudal China is bored of crushing peasants and their absurdly overpowered emperor has announced he’s going to declare war on Imperial Europe because tiny hats > multicoloured tights. The princess was originally going to say “please no” but her evil side takes over during the negotiations, so instead says “fuck yeah I love murder go choke on a goats cock you shit-eating cunt” then grabs her own tit menacingly. Grabbing your own tit is a social faux pas in tiny hat culture, so world war breaks out. The Princess tells the lady who drives Granedger to fight on her side or she’ll murder everyone. Then when she agrees, the Princess says she’s murder everyone anyway, but the good side takes over and traps evil princess in a Bind Warper which will definitely not come back again.

War ain’t looking so good for the Fancy Europeans. Yeah Granedger is strong and the Europeans have more advanced mechs, but the Fuedal Chinese have stronger belief, which we all know is what makes a robot truly powerful, and are led by the jealous ex-boyfriend. That is until the Princess decides to put on the bind warper! Oh shit, she’s going to turn evil again! Wait no, she doesn’t. She just wins the war by herself because she believes so strongly in love. Wow, that’s great!

But wait, the emperor on the tiny hat wearing side goes “hur hur, omoshiroi” and puts like 10 bind warpers on at once and becomes even more stupidly overpowered than the princess. He’s too powerful even for the bind warpers, which shatter as he laughs going “hur hur omoshiroi”. He’s so powerful that the princess can’t contain her evil side and it comes out in a battle to the death with the emperor. It’s a bit of a stalemate so some magical bullshit happens, Back Arrow fires a giant cannon from Granedger that ends all the fighting and war is over.

Except there is a slight problem. Remember the fat bloke? The fella who sat around drinking wine all day? He projected the fight on giant TV screens in the sky because he can just do that I guess for all the dirty peasants in Imperial Europe to see, which meant they all saw Evil Princess. Grabbing your tit is also a social faux pas in Imperial Europe, so Viva la Resistance and they overthrow the monarchy. Or overthrow the princess and her family at least. Which they don’t even do a good job of as she escapes onto Granedger. They did get her brother, although not before it was revealed to him that the magical fat bloke was the person who made him think his handgliding sister was a bird. RIP to the Swiss Cowboy Doctor who hated birds.

With war out of the way, Granedger officially declares itself its own nation. They are going to be a representative democracy with devolved power and its own constitution, but the leader goes “fuck y’all, I’m queen now” and she is sleeping with the ship’s pilot so there’s not much the villagers can do about it. Things remain peaceful for now, with Shu Bi and Back Arrow planning their second assault on the wall, but then the magical fat bloke comes in again. He’s transformed into a sexy bloke who regularly injects wine bottles into his forceps. He’s given both global superpowers their own giant battleships because apparently they were hidden underneath both capitals all this time. Also he tells Back Arrow the wall isn’t actually real.

Yeah. The wall ain’t real. So they go up to the wall in Granedger and just sail right through it. Behind it are towers of petrified faces of the dead. However they are chased down by one of the battleships. A magical power erupts out of Back Arrow and he kills the fella piloting the battleship. Back Arrow cannot handle the guilt of having killed this one pilot. Yeah he’s been an active participant in an actual war, but since he had the magical power to not kill someone when he beat up their mech, he likes to pretend this means nobody has died by his hand, but still. This has broken Back Arrow. It’s revealed to him that he is actually an Angel of Death sent to destroy the world and it looks like everyone is completely fucked.

What happens after that? Who knows! That’s as far as I’ve gotten. If you want to find out what happens in the end, I guess you’ll have to watch it yourself! You’ve read this 2,000 word post explaining the plot so far, you might as well go watch the entire anime now.

::NOTE:: This is a review of the entire of Ghost in the Shell Arise because splitting them up is only done by dumb people and MAL admins. So basically just dumb people.

Ghost in the Shell has gone through a few hands in its life. From the cyberpunk manga origins by Shirow Masamune, before he turned into a weirdo who only drew calendars full of pictures of impossibly proportioned naked girls covered in machine oil, it then went to Oshi. There it had its most visually striking entrant with a gorgeously directed movie, albeit one lacking a little in character. Then he made a second movie ... which we should all probably not talk about. Then it was handed over to Kenji Kamiyama and was allowed to spread its wings a little in two full length TV series. With this space it was able to explore a wide range of typical cyberpunk topics with frightening levels of depth in what I consider to be the strongest the franchise has ever been.

The latest instalment sees it placed into the hands of Tow Ubukata as the chief writer and I will admit I was a little bit worried. This is the man whose most famous previous work was Mardock Scramble, a novel series that certainly had its interesting ideas but sorta lost track of them around about the time Norio Wakamoto was being eaten by flying homosexual sharks. Actually I think it was the dolphin that was homosexual…anyway, gay marine animals aside, it was a huge mess. So I tuned into Ghost in the Shell Arise with my expectations tempered significantly.

So, Arise. It’s a prequel-of-sorts to Stand Alone Complex (apart from the fact characters’ backstories have changed so it’s not actually a prequel at all but it hardly matters) featuring a younger Major Kusanagi leaving her old military unit to form Section 9 on behest of a boring old man called Aramaki. Despite the backstories changing and therefore COMPLETELY RUINING the franchise, each character introduced feels like slipping back into comfortable old shoes. The Major is still her headstrong self with that self-doubt and temper hiding beneath. Batou is still the cyborg dudebro with a kind heart. Togusa is still that intelligent family man. The rest of the crew whose names you can never remember are still hanging around in the background being not as interesting.

The story for Arise over its 4 episodes is about the nature of memories and how can you trust your cyborg brain when it can be hacked and change you as a person. Things you considered vital parts of your psyche could be lies and you doubt your own humanity when you can be so easily rewired. Who do you let past those defences you have built up in your fear that you may become something you are not. Who are you really and can you trust your body to represent you. Are you defined by your memories? Pretty standard stuff if you’ve ever experienced any previous iteration of Ghost in the Shell, but it hasn’t stopped being a fascinating subject in that time.

Arise focuses on memories most of all and builds on this theme in some really quite excellent ways that aren’t immediately apparent from the start. Part of this is because the show is so bloody difficult to follow. Episode 1 is the worst in this regards. Being incredibly complicated to the point that you can feel your brain slowly dribble out your ears through exertion is again something very common to Ghost in the Shell. Making a Ghost in the Shell not complex would be like making a Gundam anime without robots. But when you start throwing in an unreliable narrator created by false memories altering what it is she sees to the point that you question whether anything you saw previously is true, that’s when you’re just being mean. The show is complicated enough as it is without making us doubt everything we’ve seen.

Thankfully it improves immensely after that. Episode 2 is a perfect example of how to do it and should be a good outline for how to do every Ghost in the Shell episode. It’s about a military unit who have been put on a show trial for war crimes they didn’t commit so their boss shuts down the city by hacking into its traffic computers, so the Major and her team have to track the perpetrators down through both an epic car chase and hacking battle. It’s an episode that’s simple enough to wrap your head around with understandable motivations but still with the depth to the conflict that makes it interesting. It even has a twist involving the false memories that works because it’s only a single change that you can instantly understand the implications of and even throws in some character depth and themes of how our memories can define us.

It also has a kick-ass car chase involving Arise’s versions of Tachikoma doing their best Attack on Titan’s Survey Corps impressions, swinging through the cyberpunk city with their absurdly cute high pitched cheers. For as much as I like to talk about all the depth and complexity of Ghost in the Shell, I also want to see the Major punch someone in the face so hard her own cyborg arm is crushed. The production values here are about equal to that of Stand Alone Complex, which is a little disappointing in that we haven’t progressed that much in the 10+ years since then but since Stand Alone Complex still looks fantastic today that’s not as negative a point as it sounds. Fights feel impactful and I even like the Major’s character design revamp (it’s about time she put on some bloody clothes).

Where is has really upgraded is the CG. Where Stand Alone Complex CG cars look awful, Arise looks a lot better and even exciting. That car chase wouldn’t have looked anything like as good had Stand Alone Complex tried it with its CG. It can admittedly jump back and forth in quality though. Arise uses a hell of a lot of CG animation and it can be jarring when a character changes from one scene in CG to the second in hand-drawn, and it still lacks that all important weight that CG seems to be permanently saddled with. But it didn’t make me go “ewwww CG” which is an improvement in almost all other CG. On a cinematography standpoint though I feel Arise is the weakest in the franchise. The best it gets comes in the fourth episode when it makes some very deliberate call-backs to the movie.

In the end I came away feeling quite positive about the whole experience. It definitely has its weaker points. It can’t match the movies visual flair nor have the space to recapture the depth and character of Stand Alone Complex, but it does get somewhere in between the two. The most positive thing I can say about it, as a huge fan of this franchise, is it definitely feels like Ghost in the Shell. Its characters, themes, writing and even general flow feel like Ghost in the Shell. It doesn’t come across as bad fanfiction tacked onto the franchise or anything like that (which this same author seems to be doing with whatever the fuck he’s done to Psycho Pass). It has all the things I love about the Ghost in the Shell franchise. Not any more than that, but not any less either.

- This Review Contains Spoilers -

I'm not entirely sure why I watched all of Mahouka. At some point it was a scholarly interest in why this was the latest hottest thing in light novels. It might have been because people said it gets better in the novels later and I wondered at what stage that would be. At another point it was purely to see if I could finish it as a personal challenge. If I could keep watching I might be able to find something good about this anime. Something that at the end of the day I could say "sure it was mostly ... bad, but there was this one thing about the show that was enjoyable".

I never found that thing. I can find nothing to recommend about Mahouka. It is bad on pretty much every level.

The first point it fails at, and the main point that drags down the entire show, is the main character. Tatsuya Shiba is a highly talented magician who has been placed in the crappy kids class. He's there because he is bad at pushing a square inch wooden block across a floor with his mind. This is the only thing he is bad at in the world of magic. He is a master magician who can cancel out other magicians magic. He's baffling intelligent to the point that he can calculate mind-bogglingly complex magical problems in milliseconds. In his spare time he's the world's greatest engineer, fronting as the mysterious Silver creating the best magical equipment in the world. He solves magical problems that the rest of the world have been struggling with for years. He creates the power of flight on a whim. He can see through walls. He can take down an entire platoon of terrorists by himself. He can detonate the power equivalent of an atomic bomb over anywhere in the world. He can heal all wounds instantly. He can raise the dead. But he is not very good at pushing a square inch block across a floor so clearly he's a flawed character.

When your main character is as perfect as this, there is no tension. There is no struggle. Any problem presented to Tatsuya can be solved with no issue. Yet the show likes to pretend he genuinely has factors against him. It's purely lipservice though that has no practical limitations on his capability to do literally anything. Whenever the show tries to make me feel like Tatsuya is inconvenienced, it ends up flipping around and making me feel like I should be on the side of the people against Tatsuya. It got to the point that for long periods of the show I found it easier to treat Tatsuya like he was the villain.

You know that big Darwinian speech given by Charles Vi Brittania from Code Geass where he goes on about how the strong will destroy and subjugate the weak and that's why everyone will bow down to Brittania and all hail Brrrrrrrrritannia? That's Tatsuya's, and by extension the author's outlook on life. Except when Charles delivers his speech about the myth of equality, it's by Norio Wakamoto hamming it up to 11 as the most evil character in the world. In Mahouka it's Tatsuya delivering the speech about how equality is a bad thing and we should destroy those who seek to change that, and we're supposed to agree with his outlook.

The weird thing is, Tatsuya would make a pretty great supervillain. His calm attitude and dangerous intelligence is perfect Bond villain material. He's a cold-blooded killer who wipes out several thousand people without remorse during the show. You can totally do villain as protagonist thing. Light Yagami did a pretty good job of it as a similar smart person with dangerous beliefs and phenomenal power. Tatsuya though is always presented as the hero. All the villains are terrorists, more terrorists, and the Chinese, none of whom are presented as anything other than cardboard cutouts of villains. The first episode shows that the school has a dumb system where less magically talented kids are treated like shit by the upper class of magical students. But instead of coming to the conclusion that the whole system is dumb because it creates a class system, the show comes to the conclusion that the system is bad because it didn't rate Tatsuya highly.

So we have unstable foundations from which to build this show on, but what about the more superficial presentation angle. Are the magical fights fun? No.

Technobabble. Magical sequences in the show are interrupted by long explanations of the magical theory behind them. Characters would sit in the cafe and discuss magic. Tatsuya would move a block across a room then launch into a lengthy explanation why this was difficult for him. Tatsuya would explain why wizards flying is really difficult for most of an episode and then proceed to solve it a minute later accompanied by another explanation. I got a pretty good grasp on the world's magic system by the end of the show, but these scenes are all excruciatingly boring even with that knowledge. Eyes glaze over as they talk about oscillating magical frequencies and squiddidly heebijeebies and whatnot. What was even more frustrating is you could use none of this knowledge to enjoy the show more. None of the explanations helped the viewer understanding what was going on in a battle better or let you work out what was going on yourself. Even with the knowledge of magic I gained, it never became useful to know for anything else. It wasn't building lore either since it felt mostly like reading from a highly boring textbook. So what was the point of these lengthy magical explanations?

The explanation is pretty easy really. You know in Kill la Kill one of the characters would have an explanation as to why Matoi Ryuko gained this incredible power of hers, delving into theories about life fibres and so on, until Mako would burst in and yell "so what you're saying is Ryuko has awesome powers", turning the entire previous conversation into a hilarious joke that outlined that none of it was really important? That's Mahouka's magical explanations except it's explaining why Tatsuya is totally awesome. Also it's not played as a joke.

What these magical explanations also do is make Mahouka very dull to look at. The vast majority of the show is talking heads with no artistry put into their presentation. The magical fights are equally pretty dull with no interesting fight choreography. In general Mahouka is pretty bland visually and doesn't have great animation either. The music, since I'm on the subject of production values, is also pretty bland. A bunch of generic jpop for OP/ED and insert songs is the most it can muster. The pacing is also awful, in particular during the middle and boringest arc, and again I can attribute this mostly to these Tatsuya-appealing sessions of lengthy magical explanations that ultimately lead to no conclusion beyond Mako yelling "so what you're saying is Tatsuya is totally awesome right".

There's also a whole load of nitpicky problems. One that bugged me was the show's weirdly conservative treatment of women. Tatsuya's sister is madly in love with him, but oddly that didn't bother me too much because it's just another method the show uses to appeal to Tatsuya. No what I'm referring to is the weird way anytime a woman would wear something other than the most skin-covering clothing, a character would comment on how they should cover up and stop being such a dirty whore. Usually by Tatsuya, because he's a gentleman *tips fedora*. All while the camera pans lovingly up the underdressed woman's skin and makes their boobs really shiny. It's a small thing, but it compounds with lots of other little things that make me really start to resent the author.

I really tried scraping through my memory banks to find something I liked about the show, but I could come up with nothing. I mostly just found more and more nitpicky problems the further I probed. The character designs are bland to the point that I kept mixing up characters. It has too many characters in general and there were a large chunk of them for whom I didn't understand their purpose. That one episode where the student council leader gave a speech during a debate that solved nothing but somehow their opposition thought they were defeated by this incredibly speech. How boring the presentation of the magical sports were and how bloody long they kept showing them. Perhaps the closest I can think of as a good thing about Mahouka is how, by the end, Tatsuya's power goes beyond the point of even self-parody. So what, one wry smile from the whole show, and even that is an ironic one?

Here's a suggestion for you if you're thinking of watching Mahouka. Puff your cheeks out. Now stick your tongue out slightly. Now blow air out of your mouth so it escapes under your tongue. This should cause your tongue to make a rasping noise, not dissimilar to that of a fart. Congratulations. You have now done something more fun that watching Mahouka with about as much artistic merit.

Returning to Eden of the East was a little scary, as it always is to return to old favourites you’re not sure will still hold up. A year or two later after the TV series proved to be favourites amongst critics and fans, two sequel movies came out. They were originally intended to be part of the original airing run but had to be cut out to fit into the TV airing. Those movies were not so well received. They’re not actively bad per se. In fact I’d call the second one actually quite good. But almost everyone was so lukewarm on the movies that ... Eden of the East, so highly regarded a year previously, suddenly dropped off everyone’s radars and I barely see it talked about today. So much of Eden is its potential. With the knowledge that it doesn’t deliver, I was not sure whether it would hold up at all.

Turns out it totally does hold up. The story of a man randomly showing up in front of the White House naked with nothing but a gun and a phone with 8 billion yen on it is still as brilliant an opening gambit as ever. That whole opening scene is still right up there as one of my all time favourites. A frustrated college graduate travels to the White House to throw pennies at it, trying to get into the fountain but can’t reach, while also feeling a little unimpressed now that she’s there and it seems much smaller. An underlying frustration on the part of the youths of Japan and trying to find the centre of where that all comes from leads to her throwing pennies at the White House. It’s clever, it’s funny, and it says a lot about what the show is trying to do right there (also random other note: I just visited the White House last week so of course I threw a penny at it. Surreptitiously of course so I didn’t need a random naked dude to rescue me).

Eden of the East is centrally about frustrated college graduates stuck without a job and wondering who to blame or what they can do. How the baby boomers fucked up the country but young adults today are not sure whether there’s more they should be doing. It’s fitting then that the main character is some vintage jeans, overcoat wearing hipster. What’s more remarkable is how well they pull him off as a genuine human being while also being something close to a saviour. I didn’t remember how much the show leaned on Takizawa Akira being modern day hipster Moses, saving the NEETs by transporting them all naked on giant freighters to Dubai. If done badly Takizawa could have come off like Tatsuya from Mahouka: A smug, self-important godlike character the writers spend the whole show sucking his dick. Takizawa instead feels like a human who had the messiah label thrown upon him unwillingly. He’s incredibly angry at the whole Noblisse Oblige shtick he’s been given and wants nothing more than to punch the person who gave him that role in the face.

I don’t think there’s an area Eden of the East is weak on. The animation and directing is fantastic. Despite its very heavy, deep themes, it never loses its sense of humour. It’s an actively very witty show with fun characters. It never stops being a cartoon with its goofy reactions. The humour doesn’t detract from its messages and story, which shows the general strength of the writing. The characters all feel suitably human and unique. No Yuji Everylead the Bland in sight and they all serve their own purpose in the story. The music is great, OP ED and insert music. It’s also generally cool with Takizawa sporting a black turtleneck sweater with trenchcoat and actually making it work. With its random references to Taxi Driver and Jason Bourne, it’s something you could quite happily show to a Normal and say “look at this hot cool anime stuff” without having to explain away anime bullshit.

Not everything works as well as it wants. The whole Johnny snipper arc is a little haphazard. But it attempts much more than 99% of anime that I can forgive the small problem for a much more fascinating broader picture. And as I said earlier, there’s no one area that keeps cropping up as a problem in a directing/animation/overall production point. The only real issue is it doesn’t end completely with the TV series and you’re left with the movies. But upon finishing my rewatch of the TV series, I came totally to terms with that. I don’t need the movies. I don’t need to see the end. The first Matrix movie isn’t ruined as a spectacle by itself because the sequels exist. You don’t feel angry because it didn’t finish its story. That’s how I feel about Eden of the East.

There's a scene in the first episode of Kaiba where our main character sits in the main foyer of this small community, watching as various bits of human drama happens around him. This scene is a lesson in introductory worldbuilding. Kaiba is an extraordinarily complicated science fiction world in which bodies are disposable and one can acquire a new body by transporting your mind from one to another. You infer all of that from a series of scenes in which some people are trying to work out which person's mind is installed on each of these new memory chips. Other people walk past complaining they ... their friend has changed since getting their new body, while another family moans and complains that they've got to share this cheap, immobile body because they're too poor to afford better ones. It's a brilliant piece of writing and directing that manages to divulge the information you need to understand the world while telling small individual funny stories in the process. It's the massively preferable alternative to the infodump many other shows choose.

That scene in the opening episode sets up largely what Kaiba is about. This is a world in which both bodies and memories can be bought and sold and what sort of scenarios would happen if that was the case. A young girl sells her body to a rich collector with her mind being put temporarily in storage so her family can feed themselves. A very strange person sticks her mind into another body so she can have sex with her own body. As our amnesiac main character travels from planet to planet with only a very vague goal in mind (with half of that time in the body of a mute inflatable hippo) we see this vast universe and what weird ways society reacts when these scientific advances occur. It is science fiction at its absolute best in that regard. With these scientific advances it shows how it changes the world, from the rich to the poor, from the old to the young, from the charitable to the selfish, from love to hate.

The best episode of Kaiba is where he visits the super rich planet where people are buying and disposing of bodies within weeks as the newest ones come into fashion. The streets are lined with advertisements for the latest bodies of varying ridiculousness and impracticality. People strut down catwalks with their new five-limbed, three-headed bodies. The latest and hippest body fashion trend is decided by Patch, a genius artist who designs bodies for a living. However when our main character visits Patch, it turns out he is a mad old creature cut off from the world. He hates the rampant spending of the upper class and he tries to punish them by designing increasingly impractical and stupid looking bodies. As soon as those bodies are put into mass production though, advertising immediately sells them as the next big thing and we see people walking the streets with those very bodies Patch just described as horribly impractical and stupid.

It's an absolutely genius episode in so many ways. Like the best science fiction it shows that as much as science might change, society will still act in pretty similar ways. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Patch's creation of impractical bodies mocking the upper class who then proceed to buy them anyway without understanding the irony reminds me of rich people spending millions on Banksy art pieces. A bunch of those are specifically targeting the follies of the upper class and their wasteful approach towards spending money on the impractical, yet there they are buying those exact street scrawled art pieces. There are other little pieces of genius in that episode, such as the fact people live by eating the processed scraps of old discarded bodies, or that one of the more popular designed bodies is based on an attractive terrorist that has been on the news lately, or that Patch has a little dog he cobbled together from bits of thrown out older dogs "because they want foreign dogs that look better than the local ones". The levels of social commentary Kaiba creates from its science fiction is masterful.

Unfortunately Kaiba has an overarching story and that's where it all starts to fall apart a little. The story in concept is pretty good actually, because it draws from the same "what if" scenario the rest of the small stories draw from. It's basically a love story in which two Romeo and Juliet styled characters from different societies fall in love and somehow stay in love even when they change bodies, have both their minds altered and are told to kill each other. It's a touching story about the POWAH OF LURVE that Kaiba manages to do an excellent job of exploring for the first two thirds of the series, but really starts to fuck it up towards the end. It starts to introduce too many characters with their own little desires and stories who start to take up more screentime. Some of these stories are interesting but they try to cram in too much into too small a time. There's only 12 episodes in Kaiba and the first 8 episodes of this are individual episodic stories. There are only 3 characters that truly matter and if they could cut out all the ancillary bullshit we would have had a much better and more satisfying conclusion that I would have been able to follow.

The last two episodes in particular are pretty awful. Kaiba basically turns into End of Evangelion. No really, when I say End of Eva I really mean it. One character wants the world to become one mind so they stop feeling pain anymore and then a whole load of imagery happens that's impossible to follow and then at the end everyone ends up on a beach looking confused. It's way more hopeful and positive than End of Eva's tirade of hate and self-loathing. Instead of feeling confused and dirty like you've just swam through a sewage infested river like End of Eva, at the end of Kaiba you feel confused but mildly content like you've just been swimming through a sea of dandelion seeds. I saw Kaiba back in 2008 when it first came out and I remembered the ending being a letdown, but rewatching it really brought into stark relief what an awful ending it has. It's a shame because the rest of the show is one of the best implementations of science fiction in any piece of fiction ever. I would still highly recommend people watch it. Just be prepared for a confusing and unsatisfying ending.

Blazing Transfer Student originally caught my eye because it was brought up a lot by People In The Know as something Kill la Kill was heavily inspired by. It’s an old Gainax OVA from 1991 in which a mysterious transfer student arrives at his new school and immediately gets into battles with the leaders at the school. The school runs entirely on student power and whoever beats someone else in a fight can claim whatever the loser owned. The influence is fairly clear, albeit made stranger by the fact the original Blazing Transfer Student manga was itself intended as a parody of old 70s fighting ... manga like Tomorrow’s Joe. We’ve human centipeded our way through anime history where nothing is original anymore and parodies are turned straight.

The story is all very flimsy in Blazing Transfer Student. This punk ass dude has ‘won’ a girl from another guy and now she’s forced to be his girlfriend. But then in comes our transfer student bent on rescuing the girl because if he does she will totally put out and this is oh so romantic. The two of them get into a hastily constructed boxing ring on the school grounds and fight for her heart, with the fights being decided largely by who can say the name of their death-punch faster. Well that, and a pair of vultures who land on the person they deem to be worthy of laying a nest on. Since it’s a mock-up of 70s manga it follows the same aesthetic with big thick lines and poofy hairdos. I’d heard a bit of fuss made over the animation since it was the Project A-Ko team together. It’s generally pretty well animated and dynamically presented by early 90s OVA standards, but it did remind me how glad I am we have moved past the period where much of the episode is repeated animation.

It’s largely all gags, which is why it’s a little disappointing that many of the gags miss rather than hit. Pulling perv faces, yelling loudly or hitting someone make up many of the gags. Thankfully there’s enough good ones to make it worthwhile. The original back and forth of rhetorical warfare when the transfer student enters the school originally is brilliant, and the whole layer of self-parody makes it funny. On some level I would have preferred it be much wilder, but that may have been me spoiled by Kill la Kill and its giant flying speakers shooting recorder missiles, and it wouldn’t necessarily fit with the tone it was going for. It treads close enough to the real thing that it’s extra funny when battles are decided by someone saying the name of their death punch faster. It’s fun, but a total trifle that you’ll forget the exact details of a week later.

Bear with me, I’ll get my head around this story. So there was this Indian bloke caught in a car crash. The doctor’s hand slipped while fixing him and accidentally turned him into a cyborg with missles in his shoulders. Meanwhile a terrorist organisation called the Telephone Poll Group turn up promising….errr, nothing in particular. A prefectural earth defence force is drawn up from the local prefectural school (because where else would you get a prefectural earth defence force, it stands to reason) to combat the new terrorist group and their leader with her sexushii bodii and giant Dirty Pair pink hair. The two groups ... try to hire the cyborg Indian for their respective teams but the Indian gets really mad after being turned into a cyborg and blows both parties up. And then he goes to school. And then gets turned into a lady and we see his/her boobs. Because this is an 80s OVA and the Japanese Government required animation companies by law to have at least one boob shot in their OVAs.

The whole thing is very silly indeed. It reminds me of the old Yatterman/Time Bokan series with its ineffectual super villains and silly heroes where they break the fourth wall and generally completely fail at being threatening. The only reason you know they’re evil is because they have a load of minions at their disposal, and only villains have minions. We know they’re minions because they all have ‘minion’ written across their face. The minions are probably my favourite part because they like to jump around in the background when the villains are talking going “hi mum look at me I’m on TV” and being very unprofessional. There are a few other really clever gags too, like the boss of the villains spending most of his time giving interviews to journalists about his plan for world domination and how he loves to drink milk in the morning. But these yet again can often fall back to the usual unfunny routines of perv faces, shouting loudly and hitting people for humour.

The animation is shockingly good for an 80s OVA. Like really excellent with great swooping action scenes with a lot of things going on. Shame the sound design doesn’t always keep up. I don’t think this was a problem with my file either. Character’s reactions and explosions wouldn’t necessarily mesh with what’s going on screen, so I think it was a real design choice. I’m going to put that down to age though, since I have seen that before in other older anime and it might just be something I gotta get used to. It’s fun but forgettable. Got some great moments during its 40 minute run, like the politician receiving a list of banned lewd dojinshi, but then lots of people yelling and hitting things for humour. It’s a shame that the best jokes in this highly kinetic and well animated OVA were all from the writing rather than physical.

There are two kinds of anime movies from existing franchises. The first is made because the creators wanted to continue the story in movie format. The second is made because the original TV series gave them a lot of money and they didn't want to waste the brand. Steins;Gate is the second type. Of that second type there are three further types. The first is the rarely used complete rewrite where the creators decided to fuck the original story and make up an entirely new ones because they've got so much creative juices they can't be bound by canon. This was not the Steins;Gate movie, ... although I wish that is what they did do. The second type is the movie set randomly somewhere within the established canon where nothing of consequence ultimately happens and everything returns to the status quo at the end apart from the one character they introduced for that movie along. This is what Shounen Jump movies usually do. This was not the Steins;Gate movie, although it would have been preferable because at least then it tells a self-contained story.

The third type is movie hastily bolted onto the end of a story that was already completely wrapped up and the writers were just desperately trying to force some kind of conflict that tampers with the original ending and makes the whole thing feel pointless and silly. This is the Steins;Gate movie. Funnily enough, it wasn't very good.

The movie plays out in a very similar fashion to the Steins;Gate TV series, complete with the same animation quality as the TV series which was a little disappointing. I would have liked improved animation since they had the time and money for it, but whatever. I like the directing style in Steins;Gate enough to get a kick out of seeing it again, and there's a limited amount you can do with its grey muted tones by throwing money at it. Watching Okarin flail about like the nutter he is, interacting with Kurisu and Daru and co has all the same charm as it always did.

Due to the limited time it does have the problem franchise movies often have where they have to hastily reintroduce all the old characters and make them do their one character quirk before disappearing again. Not that I had any affection whatsoever for the stupid cat maid or the trap, but the scenes did feel rather forced. The earlier scenes between Okarin and Kurisu though do no feel forced. They work great and are ultimately the highlight of the movie. For all the dramatics and long monologues and time travelling that happen later on, the best part of this movie will always be Kurisu rubbing her face against Okarin's cheek.

Then, much like the TV series, after a period of characters mucking about and little weird things happen, time travel goes crazy and Okarin disappears. Sort of. I won't spoil why or how, but the upshot of this is that Kurisu ends up taking the reign as main character, which ultimately ends up being the downfall for the movie. I love Steins;Gate because of Okarin. It's his interaction with characters and his view of the world that makes this tale exciting. How his delusions turn to reality and the shift is his character from that. Strip that out and you have a decent time travel story that moves a little too slowly. And that's the main series. The time travel story in this one is even more nonsense than the original and doesn't have time to play around with the possibilities that made the slow pace interesting from the original.

I like Kurisu a lot, don't get me wrong on this one. Having a movie from her perspective sounds like a great idea. Turns out that's not the case. Living in Kurisu's head is boring as fuck. The back third of the movie is spent listening to Kurisu monologuing incredibly boringly about how she's kinda sad. There's no dressing to this narration. It's just a bland boring monologue. Combine this with the grey artstyle and I honestly started to drift off during the movie. The oppressive grey art style only worked because it was combined with Okarin believing conspiracy theories. From the mind of Kurisu and her more sane view of the world, it just makes Akihabara look like the dullest place on the planet.

Finally, and arguably even more damningly than making Kurisu the main character, you can't help shake the feeling that this was just tacked on at the end because they needed to extend this series further. The entire central plot and what's happening to Okarin was clearly created long after the original script for Steins;Gate was written. I know this is all franchise movies ultimately, but there are ones that do it well without feeling like I've been suckered. Trigun did this really well with Badlands Rumble. Steins;Gate not so much. I do love me some Steins;Gate, but I would recommend just sticking to that original series.

Kanon is the the last of the Kyoto Animation animated Key visual novels that I had to see. Somehow I'd managed to watch all of Clannad, Clannad After Story and Air. While writing staff and directing staff differ slightly with each iteration, there's an incredibly clear singular style between each anime. It's a style that with each series of theirs I watch, and those inspired by its nakige formula such as Ano Hana, I can increasingly see the strings for. Strings that are made from the bloodied remains of mentally deficient little girls killed mercilessly and dangled limply from the fingers of Key writer Jun ... Maeda as he coos "who's now the perfect image of a woman, yes you are, yes you are".

Here is the general outline for a Key story arc. First you introduce a little girl. She is supposedly a teenager the same age as our asshole lead male character. However at every single turn we are establishing how childlike they are. They look 6 years old, they act like they’re 6 years old, the male lead constantly treats them like they’re 6 years old and outright tells them they might as well be 6 years old. Each girl has their own little quip that in one girl’s case might as well be her saying “goo goo”.

They are also depicted as fragile and weak and needing your attention. A bunch of them are in the slow process of dying, either through poorly explained illnesses or magical illnesses. They’re emotionally fragile and with each arc fall apart in their own ways. One girl in particular has her own rotary functions and general maturity, what little of it there was, stripped away from her. The reasons for this shift usually comes straight out of the writer’s backsides, such as a character’s mum getting randomly hit by a car because we needed little girls to be more emotionally unstable.

Their emotional instability and life view all appears to come from when the girls were 6 years old (as in actually on this planet for 6 years, not just emotionally 6 years old). The childhood promise is the most powerful force in the world of Kanon, capable of raising the dead and conjuring ghosts. According to the world of Kanon, all relationships are born from before the age of 6 and everyone you meet since then might as well not exist. Nearly all the girls in Kanon are desperately trying to get back to the relationship they had with the male character from when they were 6.

You get the uncomfortable feeling that the writers believe that the 6 year old mindframe for women is the ideal. Not just so you can comfort them as they slowly die, but from a romantic standpoint too, and whenever you try to strip them off this childlike state the show punishes them for it. Kanon operates on horror movie logic where as soon as a girl displays anything resembling romantic feelings it gets stripped from them. Even if their romantic feelings come from a desire to just be together with someone because they’re lonely, as soon as anything resembling romance happens is when the show starts killing them.

That is this nakige formula. Key aren't the only people who do it, but they’re certainly the most famous. Bring in a female character. Make the male lead belittle her in s’life segments for her immaturity so he can establish his place as above her. Reveal that she may have romantic feelings for her. Then strip the girl of any independence either physically or emotionally and then usually kill her.

Normally a reviewer will say that the worst thing a piece of entertainment’s can do is be boring, but that’s not Kanon’s problem. Certainly it is mind-blowingly boring since practically all the humour and conversations consist of a girl with no mental capacity being told by the main character how stupid she is. But the real reason I hate Kanon so much is the bits after that. The rinse and repeat of taking a little girl, stripping her of all agency and then killing her in order to draw tears from the audience, who invariably fall for it each and every time.

Not that I blame you. The same way I don’t blame people for clicking on buzzfeed clickbait articles on web advertising. They are designed in that insidious way to get you to click on them, and its only once you realise that do you stop supporting this “You Won’t Believe These 8 Ways Miley Cyrus Hates Minecraft Pokemon” headlines by not clicking on them. I know you think Kanon, Clannad and Air are emotional because they made you cry, but punching you in the face and breaking your nose would probably make you cry too. That doesn’t make the punch a 10/10 emotional piece of high entertainment. All they are doing are taking weak creatures and killing them to draw a reaction from you. Stop falling for it. Please.

Last Exile is a big classic adventure anime featuring a heavy steampunk aesthetic and dodgy early 00’s Gonzo CGI. It tells the story of Klaus and Lavie, two pilots of little messenger aircraft-type things called Vanships. They take over a mission to deliver a little girl called Alvis to a renegade sky ship called the Silvana. The story has a very natural progression in the classic adventure story fashion, to the point that you can practically plot its path exactly the same as the Lord of the Rings. First two episodes give you a broader understanding of the world and the scale the battles can ... be. Then we cut to the sleepy little town where the main characters are given a Powerful Artefact which they have to deliver to a council of colourful characters while being chased by what might as well be Black Riders. The scale keeps getting bigger and bigger as the story goes on until everyone is involved in this big battle for the entire planet. Also one of the characters they meet turns out to be the Future Queen.

The characters all have their own dreams and fears. They all go through their own fully functioning character arcs with a beginning, middle and end for each of them. For example, Lavie is an orphan girl living in poverty with a desire to fly through the Grand Stream in her father’s vanship, but when the going gets tough and she realises there’s things she doesn’t want to do to achieve this goal, she finds her own way. Through a little soul-searching she finds her own place amongst the engineering team. Mullen meanwhile is a lowly musketeer desperate to get away from his dangerous and pointless job. After he goes through his stint on the Silvana he finds what it is he wants to do and how he can help the people around him.

I’ve picked out Lavie and Mullen in particular because they are two of the best characters and offer clear examples of this narrative arc, but even very minor characters going through this arc. When Klaus and Lavie meet their rival vanship pilots from their home town some 20 episodes after being originally introduced, they have been recruited as part of the war effort and all look like it was decisions they made on their own. Their town had been destroyed and they felt this was how they could help. Or the noble’s wishy washy daughter who we don’t see for like 24 episodes after her original introduction until right near the end where we see her working as a nurse in an army hospital, professing how she had found how she can help. Each character goes through a finding their part in the world and fulfilling their potential.

What’s great is each character’s arc and story is integrated perfectly. The best example of this is during episodes around 10 and 11 where the crew on the Silvana all get together for an endurance race that’s actually a front for an underground auction to steal some relic. Through this race format we see what each character is thinking and where they are in their respective arcs. Lavie is trying to redeem herself after blacking out during the flight earlier as she interacts with the engineering crew who are teasing the newbie Mullen who is finding his feet after deciding he wants to stop being a musketeer and wants freedom, who in turn is trying to be useful to Tatiana, the uptight lady pilot, who is busy getting annoyed by everyone around her being tardy while the little girl Alvis is helping the engineering crew and coming out of her shell. It’s seamlessly worked together and fits with the adventurous tone.

The characters are generally pretty great with the unfortunate exception of the main character. Klaus is Blandy McNoPersonality for the vast majority of the show. For the first half he just wanders blindly forward into everything and you don’t get the feeling he made these decisions with any goal in mind. Thankfully in the second half of the show he improves and gets some motivation of his own. Last Exile seems to realise that Klaus isn’t the most interesting character anyway and likes to let other characters do most of the talking. The engineering crew in particular are an eternal source of entertainment because there’s a great jokey camaraderie between them. It’s exactly like you would imagine an engineering crew to act, between all the light ribbing and bullying the new kid and showing off to girls and then all snapping to attention and looking a little embarrassed when one of their superiors walks in on them.

I particularly liked the one bald gay guy on the crew with his fashionable black turtle-neck. I liked him because his gay-ness was never a joke, nor was it ever explicitly drawn attention to, nor did he ever act camp or any of the usual stereotypes you see with gay dudes in anime. It was just part of him. The other engineering crew members made fun of him for liking one of the other guys, but it was part of their usual banter and was definitely nowhere near the jostling they gave the new kid Mullen for fancying their captain Tatiana. The show did have another character in Dio who did some of the things you might associate with vaguely offensive depictions of gay dudes in anime, but they were just presented as being creepy because he was invading personal space, not because it was gay.

This being my second time watching Last Exile and knowing the giant reveal about the nature of the world they live in, I was able to follow the politics and over-arching story way better this time around. I’m a little amazed at how much thought went into this world they created. Most of the world building is completely in the background which nobody ever stands back and explains it all to you. What’s great is you don’t have to be able to follow how the world operates to enjoy the character stories. This means you neither get bored by lengthy monologues explaining how the world works before you can even start understanding the story, nor do you feel confused and frustrated by how little a grasp you have on events. It took me until right towards the end of the show before I realised the reason the Guild controlled the skies in that world is because they provide the engine cores to each nation for their giant sky-ships. This is central to the entire conflict in Last Exile, yet I was never particularly bothered that I never quite understood this. Admittedly that might say more about me than Last Exile, so if you’re really anal about details perhaps this will annoy you.

All this gushing aside from one second, because I have to mention this one episode that almost single handedly undermines the entire fucking show. Klaus has basically no personality but everyone around him seems to think he’s amazing. He gets marooned with the tough captain Tatiana and when they finally get back to the Silvana it is heavily implied that she now has the hots for Klaus. This makes Lavie mad because she has the hots for Klaus. Then Klaus meets with the vice-captain who is about to leave the ship, who then gives Klaus a passionate kiss. Klaus is about 14-15 years old. He’s got Lavie in love with him, who is about the same age. He’s got Tatiana, who is a recent college graduate so early 20’s. He’s now got the vice captain, who judging by the age of her dad is in her early 30’s. Throw in Dio, a 15 year old albino dude, and the gay engineer, who is also implied to have a thing for him, and Klaus suddenly has the biggest harem seemingly out of nowhere without doing anything. What’s worse is it makes all these otherwise independent and incredibly well-rounded female characters act incredibly stupid because they’ve all fallen for this fucking teenager. And then in the next episode they forget about all of that and it never becomes relevant again and you wonder what the hell the point in it all was. Incredibly stupid episode. Also while I’m bitching, the final villain Maestro Delphine is too overdone to the point that I just rolled my eyes whenever she started talking.

Those problems aside, Last Exile is one of the best and most complete adventure anime around. It’s paced perfectly, scaling with each episode and getting gradually more interesting and complex while never losing sight of its core cast of characters. They’re all developed really well and go through interesting arcs with beginnings, middles and ends which mirror the events going on in the world around them. It has a genuinely thrilling ending with a final reveal that is still one of the best in anime. Even its dodgy CGI vanships and sky battles hold up surprisingly well and work within the design of the rest of the show. I didn’t expect Last Exile to hold up because my memory of it faded to the point that I couldn’t remember specific moments from the show that stood out. But it totally did hold up. It turns out that what it does well is just being consistently good in every single area.