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May 22, 2021
As you've probably noticed by now, Kaguya-sama: Love is War is not an ecchi show. It's so not an ecchi show that both seasons had a gag involving Ishigami getting beaten up for sexualizing Chika. So, what are we doing here, with voyeuristic shots of things like Chika's breasts bouncing around as she and Kaguya look for some dropped soap in the girl's locker room showers? Well, we're here because fanservice sells and fans don't care.
If you're a fan of this not-ecchi series, then presumably, you like the characters for reasons besides their masturbatory utility. You like them because they're good characters, or in other
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words, because they make convincing imitations of real people. Characterization is, after all, the process by which a person is created inside of a narrative context. They might not actually be real, but they're real inside of the fantasyland the show exists in. The 2D Realm. You might not be able to touch them, but they sure~ can~ touch~ you~, or something like that. Anyways you wouldn't want to see Chika get Robert Sylvester Kelly'd by Papa Shirogane, a gross violation of her autonomy like that would make you upset. So why wouldn't you get upset when the show's creators force you to be the one doing the violating, with intrusive camera angles that place you right up in there between Chika's thighs? There's two answers here. The first, more rebellious one, is that you would be upset, and that I'm dumb for assuming that you wouldn't. Ass out of you and me, and all that. In that case, good on you, you make a good Kaguya fan. The other answer is that you don't care about Chika, and that I'm dumb for assuming that you do. You know fully well that Chika would have no issues bringing out the fan for some higher-dimensional ghosts spying on her in the shower, but you don't care. You're fine with being that ghost. If you don't like the characters that much to begin with, then whatever, it's just some ecchi, uhh, I feel bad calling it fanservice since you're not a fan, but you get the idea. If you ARE a fan, but don't care about Chika, well then you're pretty spooky.
But here is where I have to give credit where credit is due, and let the fans that don't care off the hook just a little bit for being horny. This is a review for a 5, after all, I'm not gonna browbeat the entire time. Anime titties are pretty cool, and how often do you see them animated at such a high quality? You don't. I mean, Chika's boobs alone had more keyframes than the latest episode of The Seven Deadly Sins. This is some seriously impressive ecchi content. So impressive, that it can apparently make fans forget all the characterization that they had subscribed to going into it. As an ecchi short, this might just be a 10/10 for its ability to do that.
But ultimately, this is an addendum to a show called Kaguya-sama: Love is War, which already has established characters, themes, and metanarrative morality. This OVA ignores all of that and prostitutes its cast for a quick buck. It gets points for being visually in the upper crust of the ecchi genre, but OVAs are not standalone, and have to be coherent within the context of their series. This is not.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Sep 23, 2020
The aptly named G-senjou no Higeki is a nine-minute animation by Kuri Yoji, who you might know for the proliferation of his works across MAL's bottom 100. In fact, if you've found this page, the chances are high that you already have an idea of what you're getting into, but courtesy demands I offer an opinion, regardless.
The visuals are standard fare for an indie short with the dementia tag: abstract, chaotic, occasionally vulgar, treading between metaphorical and meaningless, etc. There's room to swing either way on a judgement here, depending on your tastes. The visuals aren't why this short is bad, though.
The defining aspect of
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G-senjou is the horrible and probably unethical slaughtering of the violin that ushers in the musical element. I don't have a hyperbole strong enough to stress how bad it is. It's literally just a complete amateur, probably Kuri, slashing away at a string once they figured out the angle that produces the loudest, harshest, most unpleasant noise possible. This lasts for about three minutes, before the musical focus shifts to using other instruments to produce more disgusting, wholly unenjoyable noises. To this short's credit, they're in synergy with the visuals, but something like that becomes hard to appreciate when annoyance or discomfort is the only thing you can feel while watching.
G-senjou suffers from the same issues a lot of experimental, avant-garde media suffers from, in that it fails to find the balance between being artistically-rich, and being enjoyable enough for someone to even foster an interest in unearthing any meaning. And even if you do decide to dig, there probably won't be much to find anyway. All-in-all, an inefficient use of nine minutes, even for a seasoned fan of anime.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Jun 26, 2020
Zashiki Warashi no Tatami-chan, which shall henceforth receive community-wide officiation to be shortened to Tatami-chan, is a series of short episodes that aim to satirize elements of Tokyo culture, from rowdy festivals to mixer hook-ups. The main character is a sharp-mouthed, country bumpkin ghost, the titular Tatami, who frequently reacts to the culture shocks she experiences in her day-to-day life as a city dweller.
Despite its roots in Japanese culture, none of the jokes or scenarios are particularly hard for a western audience to understand. The comedy is more humorous than it is hilarious. That is to say, you probably won't laugh, but you'll have
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a hard time thinking any of the jokes are terrible, because they're all based in truth. Thankfully, every episode is three minutes long, so it doesn't overstay its welcome.
Tatami-chan's defining characteristic is that it has on average 2-4 frames of animation per character per episode: mouth open, mouth closed, and then maybe some extra expressions to emphasize a punchline, if necessary. While this may work to add to its appeal, it does nothing to add to its quality.
To be honest, I don't see what need anyone would ever have to watch this show post-airing, unless you're fulfilling a quota, or some sort of challenge, but if for whatever reason you're in the market for an obscure, marginally entertaining, poorly produced comedy short, look no further than Tatami-chan.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Jun 26, 2020
Shironeko Project: Zero Chronicle is one of the most entertaining anime of the Spring 2020 season. It's not a good anime, and you'll only be met with disappointment if you expect otherwise. It's a very bad anime, and that's exactly what makes it worth watching. There's plenty of bad anime every season, but what sets this one apart from all of its contemporaries is the massive scope of its narrative, which makes its glorious failure of execution all the more brilliant.
This anime is a prequel to the 2014 mobile game Shironeko Project, hence the "Zero Chronicle", but that's not important. It's an entirely standalone
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story (aside from a flash forward nod to the game in an after-credits cut), and what a story it is. Basically, there's these two kingdoms, the Kingdom of Light and the Kingdom of Darkness, which, surprisingly, don't get along with each other. The protagonist, named The Prince of Darkness, is, surprisingly, the Pr-nah, I won't make that joke. So blah blah a little bit and you get a Shakespearean love tale between The Prince of Darkness and the Iris, the Queen of Light, set to the backdrop of the most Final Fantasy-y Final Fantasy story that never existed. The most notable part of Shironeko's story is the sheer variety of plot events, and the pinball pace with which it moves through all of them. In one episode, the fate of the world will rest on the outcome of an epic battle between godlike entities, and the next, the cast get together to frolic in the woods and pick berries and fall on each other into rivers, only to emerge soaked and embarrassed, as you do. Sections like these occasionally clash with the show's lengthy and poorly animated action sequences, but they do come with the advantage of letting the characters do their thing without any unenthusiastic explosions or cheap looking digital effects to interrupt them.
Which is a good thing because the characters are the highlight of the Shironeko experience. Again, our main character is The Prince of Darkness, The Prince of Darkness. You could call him a kuudere, but really his defining trait is that he's the main character. The highest praise I can give him is that he's not nearly as edgy as his appearance suggests. Iris is the female lead and deuteragonist. Interestingly enough, for being a western-style royal in a shitty anime, she doesn't behave like most of her peers. Honestly, she's really not that awful. She's powerful, she doesn't do anything too annoying, her mannerisms are a little cute in an old-lady-on-the-inside kind of way; all-in-all, she's a serviceable waifu (or that could just be the work of Yui Horie's vocal ASMR hypnosis). What really sold me on finishing this show, however, were the side characters. Groza is a green-haired milf general from the Kingdom of Darkness. I don't know if she's actually a milf or not, if this were any other anime, she'd definitely be a milf though. She has a quintessential fantasy milf design, but it's contrasted by the pure, innocent, almost virginal schoolgirl crush she has on the Prince. She comes with a retinue of bodyguards, and let me tell you, those guys MAKE the show, easily the best characters, they're the biggest reason the story feels so Shakespearean. They're basically Shironeko's version of the comic relief commoners. There's four of them, they all look exactly the same (although one is the leader), and they're the only ones in the show that are intentionally funny, I was shocked that such high quality characters wormed their way into such a low quality work. Not far behind them though is the captain of the Knights of Light, Phallus- or excuse me, Phious. He's great because his voice actor isn't, and when that's partnered with poor voice direction and a character that's written to be a dickhead, you get a convincing performance of a knuckle-dragging nutjob prone to socially-inappropriate outbursts of emotion. Groza's guards aren't around often, so he's the one who carries the show the most. There's also another Kingdom of Light shota who I'm pretty sure goes through a whole character arc across the season, but I just remember him because he's a shota with a male VA who sounds 15, looks 12, and says things a 6 year old would say. There’re a couple others, like Adel the Darkness bro and Sima the fembro, but their abnormality comes from the status quo of the show rather than any qualities or personality traits special to them. One thing I should mention is that the dialogue in this show is so bizarre, or stilted, or otherwise unnatural, that, even though every single character is some sort of trope or archetype, the things they say are so weird that it elevates them to a level of uniqueness you won't find even in some high profile shows, right down to the random sassy street merchants.
And I'd be remiss if I didn't go into detail about the production quality either. As expected, it's not good. Shironeko has a heavy reliance on fights, but none of the animation capability to follow through on that. There is one sakuga sequence in the whole show. It lasts less than two seconds, and the extremely overdone character designs had to be reduced to a composition of simple shapes to enable it. Other noteworthy moments include a sword duel wherein two characters stood still for several seconds in the likeness of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots to bang their swords together like when you played Star Wars with meter sticks in 4th grade, and a scene that obviously took inspiration from the visual genius of Studio Trigger by having a static image of a character dragged across the frame to convey the act of grappling up a cliff. By the end of the season, even continuity was too much to ask for, as characters changed appearance on a cut-by-cut basis.
The only things consistent about Shironeko were my feelings toward as I followed it weekly. I remember watching the first episode as soon as it was released and getting excited because I'd witnessed what I thought would be the worst anime of the season. Listeners snatched that achievement away after a few weeks, but my genuine admiration for Shironeko's entertaining awfulness never faded as I watched more and more of it. When I finished the final episode and witnessed the expectedly terrible ending, I felt a pang of melancholy, more so than I did with Yesterday wo Utatte, Kakushigoto, or any of the other seasonal highlights. I don't know how many of my feelings will be shared by the average viewer, but if you have any interest at all in bad anime, Shironeko Project: Zero Chronicle is a must watch.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Apr 10, 2020
This review contains minor spoilers, wherein I mainly elaborate on aspects of the story covered by the synopsis.
Simply put, Hello World is garbage. I could go into an endless stream of comical hyperbole in order to detail this, but I won't waste any time. If you're already familiar with how bad a Mado Nozaki story can be from Babylon or Seikaisuru Kado, don't be. This is much, much worse.
Hello World attempts to be a sci-fi romance flick, but unfortunately fails at the latter, and stumbles all over the former. The romance in this film is supposed to be assumed as true, both because our protagonist,
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Naomi Katagaki, gets roped into having a girlfriend by his future self, and also because it isn't actually developed in any real way aside from a montage of uninteresting events set to a forgettable J-pop song, sandwiched by scenes of cliched romantic tiptoeing. Right after confessing to his future self's girlfriend, Ruri Ichigyou, all romantic development stops and the rest of the film is fully dedicated to the sci-fi aspects of the story, which are just as bad. I'll avoid spoilers, but basically the worldbuilding is conveyed either through long, awkward, and cumbersome scenes of expository dialogue, or through vague, confusing, and contradictory "no actually" moments. This, I assume, is Nozaki's attempts at writing a clever narrative, but instead comes across as two stoner tabletop game DMs having an imagination battle. None of it is truly creative or original, it's just a collision of tropes established by other stories.
The characters are bland, trite, and have characteristics that are in opposition of each other. Naomi is introduced as the quiet, meek bookworm, but these aspects of his personality are quickly thrown away because they would hinder the plot progression, and he becomes able to process and adapt to reality shattering events with the same mental fortitude of an Elder Scrolls protagonist, and it's waved away because he's "familiar with sci-fi books", which should again clue you in on how creative the sci-fi aspects of this movie actually are. Ruri is introduced as the quiet, assertive bookworm. This is the part where I'd talk about her, but she actually doesn't do anything. She's like the flag in a game of Capture the Flag, she's an objective, not really a character. If I were to write out all of the dialogue she's given in the film, it probably wouldn't even fill up two pages. This is the main love interest in a romance movie. Future Naomi is introduced as the reliable chad doing everything for his love, but he spends the entire movie getting cucked, sometimes of his own volition, which is quite unfortunate, but also a little funny, because I don't think Nozaki was intentionally going for that. There's no particular reason to subject him to that, he's written to be a sympathetic character, so I can only assume it turned out that way as a result of incompetence.
I should also address the visuals. They're not good. The models are pre-shaded CG, meaning the shadows cast on them in scenes don't change naturally. A character will look out of a window and his face will be illuminated by the light streaming in from outside. Whether or not he is properly illuminated in this initial position is a different story, but the real disaster comes when he turns his head away from the window and his face remains fully illuminated. Only when his head is a full 180° away from the window do the shadows awkwardly pop in. This isn't something everyone will notice on a first watch, but once you do notice it, it becomes impossible to not notice, and remains distracting throughout the whole film. Aside from the shading issues, the CG models sometimes use the emotive faces found in a lot of 2D anime, and it always looks strange when they do. There's also various visual design choices which look absolutely hideous. For example, Naomi gets a glove that's an ultra-shiny teal. It looks absolutely disgusting because it has no visual cohesion with anything else in the entire movie, which mainly employs warm tones and then later an unsaturated aesthetic, and it's distracting in every scene that it's in. There's also lots of things with thin, rainbow colored stripes which look equally awful.
In summation, this movie is head-to-toe awful (with the exception of sound direction, which was unremarkable), and is a generally terrible experience, far beyond the acceptable range of bad in the phrase, "so bad it's entertaining". Watch at your own peril.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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