Back to BLP_'s Profile BLP_'s Profile

In episode 7, the reincarnated middle-aged man is sharing a bed with two children for some reason - one is a busty childhood friend/servant he once saved from animals and the other is a former captive of a sex-trafficking ring posing as his sister - when they wake in the morning, the two girls smell the MC's ejaculate (yes, they smell it) after he has had a wet dream and the two girls offer to take care of it for him next time, lest he become too "pent-up". In a following episode, the girls have told the mother about this for some reason. She then ... enters her teenage sons bedroom early in the morning because she wants to see it, and alludes that she is disappointed that it hasn't happened again. Yes, the boys mom wants to see her son erect, with a mess of semen on his bedsheets. This anime...is absolute f*****g dog-shit.

There are two reasons I open with this. Firstly, is because this is the caliber of writing you should expect should you choose to watch this show, and a strong indicator of the quality. And secondly it also happens to be a good analogy for the anime itself in that it is clearly written as some middle-aged mans gross wet dream of being young, capable, over-powered and surrounded by a harem of well-endowed underage girls. I enjoy isekai as a genre, I'm sure most of us can think of examples we enjoy, and I'm equally sure we can all think of examples of trashy, generic, poorly written, dime-a-dozen isekai that are responsible for the bad reputation that the genre attracts and this one would be an example of the latter.

The MC is a cardboard cutout, no personality, no jokes, no flaws or limitations, he's great at everything all the time always, and everything always works with little or no effort and always with a perfect understanding of every new thing he tries. He's not fazed by his death, speaking with a goddess, reincarnation or the properties of magic. All the girls he meets join his harem because he's a perfect genius. His reincarnation, mission and how he interacts with this new world is the same as every other isekai ever. I don't dislike the OP character trope but you need to give them something to make them interesting and there is nothing here. The harem girls, similarly, are just blank and paper thin personality wise and their only role appears to be as harem girls doing harem things.

Other reviews seem to indicate that being an assassin is somehow a twist on the genre, but I fail to see how that is so. The beginning of the anime has the MC and his harem foiling a group that are selling sex slaves, and then later he saves another young girl to add to the harem, and then dismantles another sex trafficking organisation saving more girls a few episodes later. The writing seems to want to paint the picture of this character being some kind of anti-hero, but as far as the plot is concerned, he's just a regular OP hero/savior like any other generic isekai. So I fail to see where there is any semblance of originality or spin on the genre. The skills/magic "system" is video-gamey too, just like any and every other isekai.

The writer here seems to think that throwing in some rapers or torture will create tension or high stakes, but when everything is so tropey and predictable, it just doesn't work. It's also hard to be invested in a tragic, abusive back story when an episode or two later that same character is a jizz-sniffing nympho.
There's no fun to be had because the MC doesn't have any fun or reaction to the world and plot around him, there's no excitement to be had because there's no stakes, or surprises in store. And there's no enjoyment to be had because it's all so bland and lacking in any kind of developing plot. Forgettable, trashy, low effort stuff.

As a concept, a death-game has wonderful potential for great story telling. Imagine the incredible tension, high stakes and character building that could be experienced in a series of back-to-back life or death situations. The fear, anxiety and adrenaline knowing your life was on the line. The guilt, horror and exhilaration of taking another life. Perhaps characters could meet and connect under a strained encounter and deign to overcome their circumstance in the face a common enemy. Well, Darwin's Game ultimately decides to leave out all that good stuff and instead of getting a tense, thrilling, survival game we get safe, slow Darwin's Game brought ... to you by Hasbro.

Ultimately the plot and story doesn't amount to much. The show pulls its punches so much that most of the episodes are uneventful filler. There are indeed deaths in this death game, but for much of the series these are things happening off screen or when we do see some kind of killing it's happening to nameless fodder, while the main characters run about achieving not much of anything with no goal, or direction in sight. There is no build up or tension here, any time there are fights or action scenes, none of it feels like it matters. The particularly bland animation and music do nothing to uplift any of the scenes either.

The characters themselves are blank, cardboard cut-outs. They have zero personality for me to even dissect. They barely react to the world around them, and when they do it's not helped by weak dialogue that is almost always expository. No one here has a sense of humor, no one struggles with the morale ambiguity of their situation. When characters are explaining their sad story they're telling it like they're reading from a cereal box. There's even a scene where someone loses actual limbs, and there is no blood, they're not in pain, they don't despair at being one more slice away from being a quadriplegic.

That is Darwin's Game in a nutshell - A show of bland, boring, uninteresting vegetable people aimlessly lumbering around not reacting to anything or having interesting interaction with anyone they meet or anything they do, lead by a spineless personality-void of a MC.


Darwins Game overall is an especially dull affair. The story is weak and uneventful. the characters are bland and uninteresting. Absolutely nothing about the art-style, animation, music or voice performances stand out. There's nothing here to enjoy or to sink my teeth into. There's no plot twists, intelligence or character arcs in its writing and the death game premise is wasted on a limp, watered-down mess of a show.

Sekai Seifuku is an interesting one. The middling score I'm giving it isn't a reflection of the number of things I dislike about the anime, but instead, comes down to the things I did like about it just not being substantial enough for me to properly sink my teeth into it.

The show is about a ragtag band of misfits and their attempts on conquering the world, lead by a young girl and helped by a runaway boy who gets more than he bargained for when he joins their organisation. The characters are eccentric and the premise is an immediate winner. Which brings me to my ... one main all-encompassing criticism - there's just not enough of either of these things.

I really enjoyed the various characters, they're all very unique, well designed and fun to watch, but sadly they don't get enough attention. A lot of time is spent on the comparatively more normal and less interesting main character, while the other small cast of characters are in the side-lines. When these other characters are given their moments, they're often very brief, or sometimes snippets of backstory that feel a little out of context and not very fulfilling. They're interesting enough to catch your attention but not fleshed out enough to keep hold of it.

Similarly, for a show about conquering the world, there's just not enough conquering going on. The characters are often decent and passive, with no real criminal behavior for much of the series. Almost all episodes focus in on fairly banal and pedestrian plots that don't deliver on the much grander premise. I really don't need to see these characters idling, going to school, having dinner or going to spa's so often, when what they should be involved in is action, fights and subjugating the human race. As a result, many of the episodes feel inconsequential and meandering.

All in all, I just would have liked more. Of everything. More plot progression, more conquering and more reason to care about these characters. Unfortunately it feels like another case of wasted potential. A grand plot with wacky characters gives you a lot of creative freedom to take a story in a variety of directions but sadly it's squandered here and the series as a whole is all too mundane.

If anime was made in a factory, Princess Connect is the kind of product that would roll off the assembly line. The show is well presented and packaged very nicely, it has some excellent visuals, character designs and some flashy moments here and there to draw you in, but if you strip away the surface then you're left with something quite bland.

Princess Connect is entering into the saturated market of fantasy-comedy anime without trying to do anything new. The plot and the comedy are all a bit safe, repetitive and dull. There's only so many times a stomach can rumble at an inopportune time ... before the joke is no longer amusing. There is zero plot or interesting character moments, and instead they seem to be placing all their bets on minor, episodic, comedic skits. Unfortunately the especially weak "comedy" and lack of good characters or plot to fall back on, result in a bland and boring show. The characters are designed well and everything is pretty to look at but no one is particularly interesting to watch.

If anime was conceptualized at a corporate level using graphs and spreadsheets, by men and women with no interest in the art-form - they might ask for; a comedy anime, in a fantasy setting, with a conveyor belt of forgettable waifu bait each episode. Throw in some cat-ears, some meme-able faces and a handful of overused character archetypes. They would then pass it down the line, and their factory would churn it out. It would be efficient, inoffensive and pass quality control, but there would be no heart in it. And that's kind of what we have here.


It's a real shame. The animation is great and there's obviously some very talented animators that have worked on Princess Connect. I wanted to enjoy this one, even as some harmless seasonal fluff. Unfortunately, everything else is all too boring and predictable. The comedy is often repetitive and falls flat, and the overall experience isn't at all enjoyable.

Dagashi Kashi is the unholy combination of annoying characters, poor humor, boring plot/dialogue and crappy predictable ecchi.

It's set in a Japanese candy-store where young boy and cute girl blah blah blah...yada yada. Anyway, none of that matters, because it's a pointless show.

If the reason you watch anime is to hear lengthy descriptions of various candy including it's origin story, ingredients list and physical dimensions then this is a show for you.

If the prospect of teen boys messing their pants because a girl eats a pot-noodle seems like good entertainment then this is a show for you.

If not...then probably give this one a miss.

I made an earlier review of this show after 7-8 episodes where I explained that there were several things I liked including the art, stylisation and early character exploration. However it needed a good kick up the ass to get things moving because the characters went on endless monologues, over-complicating uncomplicated ideas and had little to no natural interaction with each other. I gave the show a 6 and hoped for the best.

After watching the 12th and final episode I can say...It never did get the kick up the ass that it needed.

Several episodes of tedious, pretentious, try-hard pseudo-intellectual nonsense. Characters stood in place endlessly ... talking in circles, often repeating themselves. If the mysteries and theories explored were smart, interesting or well crafted then it could have had the makings of fantastic supernatural detective/mystery show. Instead we're presented with mind-blowing murder theories like..."killed by a brick on a string". The show tries to be almost Sherlockian in its structure, attempting to dissect minute details and clues, without the intelligence, wit or story crafting to do so.

Koisuru Asteroid is a fairly by-the-numbers entry to the "cute girls doing cute things" genre. This time it's centered around a schools natural science club, and follows a group of friends - including two girls that have reconnected years later, after a chance meeting where they have made a promise to discover and name an asteroid together.

The art style is nice, the characters are cute and the episodes are pretty chill, as is par for the course for this type of anime.

What else is there to say though... Well, for people who enjoy this kind of anime it's serviceable enough and fans of K-On! or ... Non Non Biyori for example, might find more enjoyment here than I did. In my own experience though I found it lacking. It covers a lot of the same ground that shows like those did, but lacks the dry humor of Non Non Biyori, or the character depth and musical hook of K-On to keep me interested. It's talked about, but there's not a lot of emphasis on exploring the science side of things, nor the romantic undertones that are hinted at early on.

The show is just kind of...forgettable. And even now I'm finding it hard to remember any of the character names or anything that happened in the episodes. Not the worst thing I've ever watched, but could have used an injection of comedy, romance or more in-depth use of the natural science plot to make it stand out a little more.

Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Nake de is a decent show, that seems to have an identity crisis.

Episode 1 as the shows title suggests, introduces super-powers to a group of high-school kids, where one might ask, what would a bunch of teenagers do with such power? Would they delight, despair, use them for fun and practical jokes or perhaps the power would go to their head?

Well forget all that, we're in episodes 2-5 now, where it's bog-standard slice-of-life school comedy. The whole super-power thing is pushed aside, and personal problems and club-room activities take center-stage. They mention their powers from time to time, one of ... the girls states that its a burden, but we never see why she thinks this way. They don't do anything with their powers and nothing even remotely suggests why they would see them as a burden. As rarely as they're used, they can use them with ease, with no resource-cost or risk. They have no struggles to deal with, no accidents, no adversaries to face. Its also almost certainly not how any regular person would react to being gifted incredible power, but all doubt is resolved in the matter of a single scene anyway so it doesn't matter.

Anyway, forget all that, we're on episode 6 now, lets introduce a bunch of characters we've never seen before and won't see again. Oh and also there's a committee of fairies that have humans fight each other for amusement in an ongoing fairy war...For some reason.

...But forget all that! it's episode 7 now, and from here on it's a harem show - studying in the club room, going to the pool and spending the day at the beach. Everyone is now suddenly completely in love with the clueless MC, including a child, the child's friend and a girl none of whom have ever indicated any romantic feelings up until this point. No mention of powers, the fairy stuff, or the other characters until the final episode - episode 12. But only for the first 10 minutes.


It's not that any of this stuff is terrible, or abrasive. It doesn't annoy, bore or insult intelligence the way worse anime might. But it doesn't gel together very well either. Plot threads are introduced and dropped very quickly, and overall seem to lack direction, focus and narrative flow.

The better parts of the show are actually the more mundane, romantic drama parts, which makes me think this would have been a better anime had they cut out the other stuff altogether. A couple of the characters are great though, and there's moments of exceptional voice acting, especially from a best-girl that by herself, makes this a show worth at least trying out.

Bokutachi wa Benkyou ga Dekinai is about as shallow as an anime can be.

It's a school harem...and...well...that's about it. It follows a MC as he tutors three girls. The MC himself, is good at studying, shy and blushes at everything. Girl #1 is cute and shy and blushes at everything, girl #2 is cute and shy and blushes at everything, oh and girl #3 is cute and shy and blushes at everything. And just to change things up, his young teacher also makes an appearance, she's cute and shy and blushes at everything.

The shows entire driving force is to move between one misconception to ... another for them all to overreact to - girl moves, MC has accidental boob touch - girl falls, MC touches hands - someone changing, MC walks in - girls talk about bra size, everyone blushes - MC says something, girl thinks he's talking about something else, blushing - MC has indirect kiss, more blushing. So on and so forth ad-nauseum.

Each episode inches along only as a vehicle to set up another moronic reason for them to freak out, go red and embarrassed.

The show is nonsense. It has no plot, none of the characters have any personality. The overreactions are mindless and the coincidences incredible.

If the art style or jokes were better then it might have made some kind of difference, but as it stands, Bokutachi wa Benkyou ga Dekinai is a low point of the genre.