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Gungrave is a show I heard about years ago, it did have a dedicated cult following over the years, but I would I never thought I would enjoy as much as I did, I consider the Gungrave anime to be the greatest adaptation on a game of all time. With so many games getting adaptations now and with me playing the Gungrave games themselves in recent years, I decided to watch the show again for the first time in over a decade and years later, I still think the show is geniunely fantastic.

Before I start describing what makes it so great, I might as ... well address the first episode, it's often said that you shouldn't watch the first episode but I argue on it's own, it really isn't that bad, the first episode sets up the flashback sections and the "genre shift" of sorts the story will take later down the line in a similar way Berserk 1997 does, the only difference is, Gungrave has an actual ending and a great one at that. The problem arises is that this episode eventually gets revisisted with not much changes later in the series, so then the question becomes do skip the first episode or the aforementioned later episode? I'd say watch them both and if you have the option to put the later episode on times 2 speed if you are getting annoyed by the deja vu. It wasn't really an issue for me since I found the show so engrossing but I consider doing this.

Now with that out of the way, after playing the Gungrave game particular the first game from 2002, the more I appreciate the anime more than I already do. The best way of describing Gungrave is that it's the aforementioned Berserk meets the Godfather with designs you might recognize from the Trigun series.

The thing with the Gungrave game is that it's primarily a third person shooter, where all you do is kill things until you fight a boss and you do this for 2 hour until the credits roll, a game like this might not even sound like it would make for a compelling crime drama but the flashback sections is where the show is elevated above many game adaptations back then and even now. Characters like Bear Walken, Ballad Bird Lee, Big Daddy, Bob Poundmax and Harry MacDowel were mostly just bosses you fight in the game, they had cool designs and you kill them. In the anime however, these characters are much more fleshed out especially Bear, Big Daddy and Harry, where they might seem one note in the game, in the anime, you know their relationships, struggles, values and morals. This is what a good game adaptation should do, expand on characters that didn't have much time to develop in the game and flesh them out in a medium where they are able to.

The character of Grave/Brandon Heat himself comes off as somewhat dull silent protagonist, in the anime however, Brandom is the kind of guy who speaks with his actions rather than words.

The flashback sections in the Gungrave anime to me rivals some of the best movies, the episode "Family" in particular is probably one of the greatest standalone episodes I have ever seen in anime if not ever even. The way it makes me sympathize with a respected mobster who chose his son is something I watch and experience media for to begin with, to make me consider and feel things I might not otherwise have felt.

These sections are widely praised and they are no doubt great but something that I hear from some is that the show goes "downhill" after they are done, I personally have to disagree with this, I think the 2nd half isn't all that different from the way Berserk changes post eclipse, a big reason for this is that the characters of Blood War and Dr. Tokioka especially the latter, he is the link that carries the sci fi elements of Gungrave together since he was there since the early episodes and is a reason why the "undead soldiers" even exist at all. These two characters is what prevents the transition from being overly sudden.

Here's the weird thing, the 2nd half is mostly faithful to the Gungrave game. Sure some scenes are expanded upon but the 2nd half mostly follows the same story beats as the game kind of like the Zack Snyder Watchmen movie, and much like that movie, the thing that the anime changes is the ending. In the game, Brandon climbs up a huge tower fighting enemies and then the final boss is Big Daddy's undead corpse. In the anime, the ending is similar to Cowboy Bebop's except much better executed than that since Harry MacDowel and Brandon Heat's dynamic is much more fleshed out than Spike and Vicious's. The ending of Gungrave to me might be one of the greatest ficitional endings ever in how much it wraps up the story in a nice and tidy bow, a very tragic bow.

This is however where this leads me to negatives, the character of Mika is pretty useless and a little on the grating side. The thing you could argue with the Gungrave game is that Grave and Mika's bond is the heart of the story and in the game, Grave lives at the end and Mika becomes a capable character in the sequel to the 2002 game, Overdose, since Grave dies in the anime, Mika kind of serves no purpose and doesn't really do much of anything outside of getting Grave in trouble, she ultimately never really drives the plot forward in any way.

Another issue is Dr. Tokoia who is vital to keeping Gungrave's 2nd half consistent with the 1st just isn't that great of a character in his own right, much of his dialogue consists of saying he doesn't deserve redemption and that he is horrible for what he did and that's about it, his character feels like he was missing a backstory into what lead him to want to experiment on dead people to begin with.

Also, I don't like complaining about "plot holes" per say, but how was Dr. Tokoia was able to procure Brandon's body even though he got shot from a high tower with so many people looking at his corpse? Not a big issue, but it's just weird.

Final issue is that the world building is kind of vague, it takes place in a fictional city yet there is refrences to things like the Iraq war or "orcmen" used in the middle east or how Blood War's backstory is connected to that. The city in Gungrave seems to be like a city in a superhero story at first but then it seems like there is more than just a city and there actually is a bigger world but the story is kind of ambigous about it. It's not a big issue but like the Tokoia plothole, but it's something that just gets me thinking for reasons I doubt the writers intended.

Overall, Gungrave is a great show and to me still the greatest video game adaptation of all time. I don't think anything from here on out will ever really top this series for me. I think the Gungrave game is just "okay" but the anime is one of my favorite anime and TV shows of all time and that is what a story based on any game or medium should do.

Naruto Shippuden as well as Naruto as a franchise is a series I have a complicated relationship with over the years, as a kid I remember liking the story pre timeskip or "Part 1" a lot, even after my brief break with anime from 2008-2012, I did eventually pick up Shippuden and I recall enjoying the story to varying degrees at least the canon stuff up until the War arc. I skipped all the fillers of course, but one major issue with the Shippuden series is that there is A LOT a filler in between major arcs and A LOT of mixed canon filler when ... the major arcs did get adapted and it only got worse when the series went on especially during the War arc, it eventually got to a point where I started to hate the post time skip parts of the series for almost 10 years since I stopped watching the series back in 2014, now I'm watching the series 10 years later and much of my thoughts are the same just that now, it's much easier to watch since all the episodes are avaliable and I can skip all the mixed canon filler. Going to separate this review to 3 sections, "the good", "the bad" and "the ugly".

The Good - The pacing of the major arcs is mostly pretty good. There is going to be mixed canon filler stuff like during the Kazekage Rescue and the battle on the Tenchi Bridge but I have watched stuff like the original 90s anime of Dragon Ball Z, so I'm kind of used to the way some of the longer fights can be especially the battle on the Tenchi Bridge. In spite of all this, Naruto Shippuden up until the War arc managed to avoid something that plagues many long running shows, not just shonen which "arc fatigue". Every section pre War arc never lasted overly long and new story arcs were getting introduced at a reasonable pace. At the very least the staus quo does change by the end of the series and all though characters like Sasuke are problematic, at the very least he doesn't take the entire series to kill Itachi.

The Akatsuki are also pretty good villains, most if not all of them have their own goals and motivations for joining and avoid being the "generic doomday villain" which is stuff you can find with a lot of stories that feature many villains or superhero team up stories where they just write villains for the sake of adding a number so they can challenge more heroes. Pain is also a better villain than I remember him for being too, when I first watched the Pain arc, I found his "pain" monologues to be dull and monotonous but now, it's kind of interesting where he esstentially wants everyone to understand each other by feeling the pain of others and everyone feeling pain. It's more interesting I initally gave him credit for.

Characters like Sakura and Shikimaru are given more to do now especially how Shikimaru is given his own arc now and starts to change and mature as a character, he was already a great character in Part 1 and Part 2 and post timeskips just makes him better. Sakura is also less annoying by comparison to Part 1 and she is even given a major victory and even tries to take matter into her own hands. I wouldn't call her a great character by any means but she does become someone I can sort of respect as opposed to character like Hinata who I already discussed in my Last Naruto movie review.

One final positive is that while characters do get brought back, I admire Naruto for actually killing off it's major character like Jiraiya and outside of say, Orochimaru all the characters are brought back for a temporary time and then are written out of the story. Orochimaru being alive is somewhat understandable since he sort of has immortality to sorts to begin with. Naruto at the very least avoids an issue that plagued a show like Yu Yu Hakusho where that series was just too scared to kill off any of it's major characters and Togashi would often pull punches much of the time. Final positive is that Naruto, while I'm not going to call him a great character due to reasons later on does slowly start to mature and become more tolerable the more the story goes on, even if his "talk no jutsu" requires heavy amounts of suspension of disbelief, I'd take this over keeping villains alive and then having them still remain evil, neither is great, but talk no jutsu is slightly more tolerable. I do commend Naruto to varying degrees that the series' status quo is completely different by the end of the series compared to the start.

The Bad - Shippuden does have a lot of good going for it but there is just one issue that plagues the series that prevents it from being consistently enjoyable and that is both the character of Sasuke Uchiha and his relationship with Naruto. Many of often cited the Chunin Exams of Naruto to be the high point of the series but there is just one big major problem with it, that arc splintered Naruto's audience, there's two kinds of Naruto fans, those who watch it for Naruto and Sasuke's "friendship" and rivalry and those who watch it for the side characters, I'm sort of in the latter but a huge problem that plagued Naruto and Sasuke is the fact that Kishimoto wants you to think Naruto and Sasuke has been together for so long when in reality, they were only together for the Land of the Waves arc all the way to Sasuke's fight with Yaroi. When Sasuke says, "you are the one I want to fight the most" to Naruto. That is the last geniune interaction Naruto and Sasuke even have. After this there is lots of episodes where Naruto and Sasuke don't speak or have interactions with each other, this becomes a problem the more series goes on. The series loves to tell you Sasuke and Naruto have been on tons of life threatning adventures together but that isn't really the entire pre timeskip of Naruto. Technically speaking when only counting canon, Naruto only really spent time with Sasuke during the Land of the Waves and Forest of Death, thats it but Kishimoto will love to act like he's done so much legwork and pats himself on the back for it.

This is pretty much where the problem lies, Naruto in Part 2 spends so much of the series chasing after Sasuke instead of trying to achieve his own goals. The series will bring this up constantly on how Sasuke chose to leave and how Naruto could've gotten "stronger" instead of chasing Sasuke, the self awareness doesn't make Naruto come off less of a creepy yandere. The thing with Naruto is that he CAN be a good character but he shines whenever Sasuke is not around. I kind of get what the series was going for to some degree but Kishimoto loves to think he did the leg work when he didn't. If Naruto and Sasuke didn't have such a lack of screen time gap inbetween Sasuke's fight with Yaroi and when Sasuke left the village and if they had more missions together than MAYBE I would want Naruto to have Sasuke come over to the light side but instead Naruto just comes off as a stalker.

Then there is Sasuke and I will give the series this in that he eventually kills Itachi but for one he was just a dull and one note character who just acts stoic and not much else especially how lacks compassion for so much of Shippuden. After Sasuke kills Itachi, he spends much of the series being a one note revenge driven psycho who wants to destroy the Leaf Village in spite of the fact that if it weren't for a retcon(Sasuke would be dead if it weren't for Tsunade, so Itachi was never really that sympathetic) yet Sasuke believes that Itachi was ultimately good. The funny thing in all this is, that it weren't for the reanimations of Itachi and Hashirama, Sasuke would've never have temporaily turned face during the War arc so Naruto's ploy to bring Sasuke back to the village is rendered that much more rudundant. Sasuke does admittedly became a more interesting character post War arc since he actually has some compassion to show with the stoicism by saving those kids in the fighting arena.

The Ugly - Basically everything War arc related, you can put in the entire arc minus Obito's face turn. I'll be positive for a minute that I think Obito while not being a good villain was the most tolerable part of the arc since he's the only villain that remained a player all the way through rather than eventually getting written out like Mardara and Kabuto were. As for the War arc itself, where do I start, it's full of red herrings and retcons. I'll start with the red herrings, there's many but there's mainly just two, the Kages, the Allied Shinobi Force itself and Madara Uchiha. The first few sections of the arc is painfully boring because they are basically focusing on side character and since I knew how this played out, will eventually get taken out of the story like Choji and Darui. The Allied Shinobi Force basically become one big protect mission for Naruto and eventually Team 7 and the resurrected Shinobi who weren't undone by Itachi and the Kages who basically jump started the arc and had a summit arc dedicated too them ultimately get beaten by Madara off screen and get put in the dream world. All of these are big hyped up parts that lead to nothing.

The retcons are too numerous to count and they aren't even good ones. I can be here all day and this write up has gone on long enough but the biggest ones are the Indra and Ashura and Black Zetsu ones. The former makes Naruto and Sasuke magically connected by destiny and robs them of their agency and the Black Zetsu one writes out the Madara out of the story, a villain they were fighting for episodes on end. They were fighting Madara for so many episodes and they don't even beat him. This makes the War arc look worse in the long run. It makes Kaguya look worse since she was the villain the good guys were able to beat and Madara had to be taken out by someone else.

The War arc wouldn't be so bad but the filler makes it even worse. The pacing makes an arc that was already horrible and slows the pacing down to a crawl. There's filler episodes every few episodes between the canon ones, you can skip those but then there is mixed canon filler which is sometimes hard to tell which is canon or not, it got so bad, that I got the Naruto manga out side by side with the anime and had to look up what parts can be skipped since the most popular anime filler sites don't tell you which parts are supposed to be skipped.

One more thing I will say is that the ending up to episode 500 isn't that great. The last 7 episodes focuses on a wedding, ship and character I already don't care about and it ends on promoting Boruto a show I don't even want to watch. It really does suck for the people who watch Shippuden back in 2007 just to be told, "now the adventures continue in Boruto".

Overall, Naruto especially Shippuden, or Part 2, or post time skip is one of the biggest mixed bags of an anime I have ever watched. There are good parts, there's bad and there's parts that made me wonder what why I was even watching. As it is now, the Naruto Shippuden anime is hard to geniunely reccomend. If you want to watch the Naruto story and not read manga, Naruto Kai might be ideal and the Storm games might also be better than the Shippuden anime especially during the War arc, say what you want about Storm 3's non canon ending but it did make the Kage look more powerful and the anime is full of non canon stuff anyway. It depends on how much you of a gamer you are. As it stands, unless it's been another 10 years or I'm really feeling nostalgic, then I might watch Naruto Shippuden again but hopefully by then, a real Naruto Kai gets made.

I remember watching this movie 10 years ago and strongly disliking it. This was back in a time where I really started to dislike Naruto considering how bad the story was getting and much filler hell the Shippuden anime was going through at the time, it wouldn't even end until 3 years later after this movie came out. Now that I'm kind of softer on Naruto, the original series is really good and have finished Shippuden all the way to the end while skipping as much filler and mixed canon as possible, I still definely think this movie is bad. Expecting great writing out of ... an anime movie based on a TV series is too much, I know but even judging the Last Naruto movie on that standard, it's still awful. I don't like to complain about the anime I watch, I really don't. I would rather talk about anime that I think is really good or at the very least flawed in a stimulating way. The Naruto Shippuden anime is the latter btw. This movie isn't this, I was either bored or zoning out and was just waiting for it to end.

What makes this movie especially grating to watch is the amount of production value that was put into the movie. The animation is quite nice and has clearly more budget put into it and looks better than the anime is based on is. The fights are okay even if it lacks the clear fist fighting choreography that some fights in the anime did. What makes The Last Naruto movie more sad to watch is that unlike say something like Tekken: The Motion Picture, this movie has a budget and a lot of the animators worked hard to make the movie.

To sum up The Last Naruto movie in a few words, it's basically, "Naruto x Hinata" ship the movie. Sure the movie may try to fool you into thinking that it isn't with it's doomsday plot of the world coming to an end but this is very much a romance movie at heart.

Before I get into why the romance doesn't really work for me, if you aren't a Hinata Hyuga fan well guess what? This movie just isn't going to be for you. In many ways, if you aren't a fan of Hinata I struggle to figure out who this movie is even for, if you are a new comer to Naruto and just want to come to this movie for the production values and fights, you won't get that here. If you are a Naruto fan and don't like or care for Hinata, you won't get much out of this all the other characters like Kakashi, Shikimaru, Sai, Rock Lee, Sasuke, and any other character not Naruto and Hinata are basically just side characters with nothing to do. At least stuff like the Dragon Ball Z movies before Battle of Gods took place in their own universe and were all about the fights and Battle of Gods at least had more going on than canonizing the world's most uninteresting ship.

Hinata Hyuga was a character I never once liked. To me she is everything bad about the whole, "hardwork vs natural talent" narrative and dicussion people love to have about Naruto. I really want to say this movie did an incredible job at having her character win me over but it didn't. Hinata is a character that is as bad if not worse than characters like Kaguya and Black Zetsu. At least with them, they get beaten in a few episodes and leave the story after. Hinata on the other hand has this movie and the last 7 episodes of Shippuden dedicated to her and everything post war arc related is the creators really wanting to shove this "ship" down your throat.

Everything about the movie is connected to Hinata and hinges on how much you like her, her sister gets captured, the main villain wants to marry her, the movie makes a big deal about the scarf Hinata makes for Naruto, the Hyuga clan are suddenly important again after hundreds of episodes of being irrelevant. What annoys me about all this is that they had hundreds of chapters and anime episodes to make all this seem important and create possible set up for the movie but instead everything comes out of left field.

With Hinata and the romance itself, everything about it is painfully uninteresting. The character herself becomes a main character out of nowhere without ever earning her keep. This just sums up Hinata in general. When Neji defeated her in the Chunin Exams, the Leaf Jonin came to protect her. What does she do after? Nothing until she confesses her love to Naruto in one of the dumbest ways you can do it, and almost gets killed, then she does absolutely nothing until Neji dies protecting her and Naruto. Does she contribute anything to the War arc? No, she ends up becoming one of the many characters Naruto babysits during that arc and ends up in the dream world Madara created.

Now the movie centered around Hinata should win me over right? Nope, its just her usual character interactions of her being incredibly nervous around Naruto and being incredibly shy and quiet(what riveting character development after hundreds of episodes) and then she surrenders herself to the enemy while Sakura is the one to heal Naruto and Shikimaru is the one talk Naruto out of doubting himself. What did Hinata do? Nothing. The only thing of worth she does in the almost 2 hour movie help Naruto destroy an orb. How impressive. This just sums up her up in general. She becomes an important character without earning any of it. Her character interactions despite confessing her love in the Pain arc, she still can't say how she feels. This might sound ranty, but everything about Hinata I just detest, she's not even clingy character in an interesting way. She was a one note character from the start and she still is with this movie.

Overall, I did want to like the Last Naruto movie and have some enjoyment out of it like I did with Shippuden. The Naruto story post timeskip had many highs and many lows but this movie is nothing but lows. I can't think of many high points and it might've been a mistake watching this movie again at all knowing what it's really all about.

It pains me to write a negative review on any anime series I watch, I geniunely wanted to enjoy Kaiju No. 8 and have a fun time, maybe just have an average mindless "turn your brain off" show but due to the reasons I will explain, I just couldn't stand watching it.

Show is very derivative of Evangelion, Attack on Titan and My Hero Academia. I'm not a big fan of either of these shows but all 3 of them feel more competently written than this series.

Why I watched this show and why it was even on my radar was due to the fact ... that there is a 32 year old protagonist. The protagonist Kafka Hinbino is 32 years old that is struggling to figure out what to do with his life and wonders if he can still amount to something at the age, this is a great premise for a show like this and it's something I geniunely relate to everyday. The thing is, Kafka is a 32 year old in name only, the guy is basically My Hero Academia's Deku in terms of personality and how much he wants to avoid using powers, and how he uses his knowledge and him "studying" the things around him to be effective at anything than outright combat. He cries a lot, is super hyperactive, screams like no tommorrow, and just acts more like a teenager than someone who is 32, he acts so much like a kid half the time, I wonder if he is secretly DC's Captain Marvel in that he is child inside of a man's body. This could've been something that made this series stand out and why I came to this show at all but instead, I just can't help but get super annoyed with most if not all of Kafka's antics. If the guy was a teenager, fine act this way, but what is the point of making what seemingly is a fighting shonen with a protagonist way older than than he is 15-18 when he doesn't act his age? If the other characters didn't constantly call him an "old man", I would never even think that he was a full grown adult.

Never read the manga but there is lots of scenes that seem like they would flesh out the story like how did Kafka control his Kaiju powers for 3 whole months with no one noticing, why did the Kaiju monster inside Kafka took took so long to take him over? The side characters and especially Mina Ashiro who basically the show hypes up as this super awesome action hero and Kafka knew her since childhood but yet not much is actually shown, like what were their childhood like outside of the few seconds flashbacks that were shown? When did Mina and Kafka start to become more distant from each other? How did Mina become the "badass" woman everyone can depend on? All that is ever shown of Mina during flashbacks is her crying as a child, that is not enough for me to believe she would grow up to become capable and dependable. As it stands Mina is barely any different and one note as Mikasa was in season 1 of AoT while having Levi's personality. She also seems to be the only famous soldier in the whole show, aren't there other decorated war heroes besides her? Why does she have that tiger around? The lack of her character being fleshed out makes her so dull to me. Since their might cut manga content, this leads me to my next issue

It never really feels like humanity is really losing, Attack on Titan did this better. At least in that show, a human monster hybrid made some degree of sense since humanity was clearly on the losing side and Eren is given a power to change the tide of the war. In AoT, right from the start, the Titans are made to be powerful threats and they are so powerful that humanity has to be behind a wall to thwart them off, and every time the soliders fight in AoT, they take heavy casualities. In Kaiju No. 8? Most of if not all the Kaiju are pathetically weak and there is still human civiliation at the start of the show even in the first episode, the Kaiju is beaten which already dimishes them as a threat. Then there is weirder inconsistencies like how did the Defense Force get infiltrated and get attacked during training drills despite the fact that they've been training soldiers for years and are so proficient at killing Kaiju? Then Kaiju No. 10 comes so out nowhere into the story with barely any build up or even any hype for his initial appreance that I pretty much didn't care when he was on screen. Where did this dude come from? What is so special about him? I know so little about him and the show barely hyped him up that I was like, "huh?" There was also stuff like how Kaiju have existed in the 1970s, if so, how exactly did the war lasted this long? And so much of the stakes have to be told, like when Kaiju No. 6 showed up he caused a lot of damage, I would sure love to see how Kikarou's mom died. Maybe this gets explained later on but there is such little of anything here that I don't know if I care enough. There is also the fact that AoT takes place in a fantasy where Kajiu No. 8 takes place in modern day and I'm asking questions like, why is Japan the only country that seems to matter in this whole conflict? Even the fight between Kikarou's dad and Kafka feels it's trying too hard to echo the courtroom scene in AoT.

There is a lot of exaggerated expressions and terrible over the top humor especially in the early to middle part of the series. If you wanted me to be turned away from the show right from the offset, you put this stuff in. There's lots of tonal whiplash or "bathos" in this show where something serious would happen followed by something humorous and over the top, it took me out of the show multiple times, for example, early in the show, there is a scene where Kafka saves a little girl from getting eaten by a Kaiju then it's followed up by a couple of seconds of exaggerated expressions and over the top shouting comedy. Kakfa's Deku like personality didn't help and many of the downtime and even serious action scenes are basically this. It was almost Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood levels of obnoxious.

None of the characters really stand out except for maybe Reno Ichikawa. At least he's interesting in that he's trying to prove himself to everyone and kind of feels like an underdog. Kikoru feels like a generic one note female tsundere like Asuka Langely from Evangelion. Kikoru's father appears so late in the series that it's almost impossible for me to get attached to anything he does, he just comes off to me as a typical strict dad who seemingly has compensation issues. A lot of the other characters I can barely recall being anything of note. I might not like Chainsaw Man that much but at least that show had Aki and Kishibe, this show there is no one even gluing me to my screen.

I wanted to like this show, the adult cast and the fact that Production I.G tend to make anime that appeal to me are big reasons as to why but instead I was watching an anime I question why I even bothered getting to the end of. I was either bored or zoning out for much of my watch Kaiju No. 8.

I am going to start off this review by saying that I am not really a fan of the game this anime is based on, I found Automata's story and especially it's characters to be inferior to the first Nier game even though it's been a while since I played the latter. I found the plot of the Automata game to be very barebones in terms of themes and character that I found the idea of beating the game 5 times over 20-30 hours to be a tedious affair that I don't want to go through that again. The story and the combat are both ... too dull for me to want to revisit.

So why I did I watch the anime at all if I never liked the game? I find the belief that you need to be a "fan" of the source material in order to check out and enjoy the adaptation to be a pretty misguided belief. There's a good number of people out there who never read a superhero comic and there are many who are apprehensive about the industry in general but is that going to stop those same people from raving about how much they enjoyed the Sam Raimi Spider-Man and Christopher Nolan Batman movies? No it won't.

To use an anime example, the Gungrave adaptation from the 00s is one my favorite anime of all time and that was based on third person shooters that were just "decent" at best so I'd say it's possible for me to enjoy this adaptation of Nier Automata despite me not liking the game.

Long introductions out of the way, what did I think of this show? I'd say as an adaptation of the Nier Automata game it's really misguided. The best of way of describing the show is that it feels like it was made for people who can't get into video games at all so what the anime creators did was create a 90% faithful adaptation while adding in new scenes that don't develop the two main characters, made changes that don't contribute much, and removed aspects of the game that showed the game's narrative was never that great to begin with.

I'll start with what was already similar, the basic plot of the game is still here and if this was a story and writing I was a fan of I would find this to be okay but watching the anime just reminded me of how much I never liked the game's story to begin with.

2B and 9S are just painfully dull lead characters and it's not because they are androids, it's because their character interactions are just the bare minimum for a character dynamic and most of their interactions revolve around the same thing, 9S gets overly excited and tries to have a fun conversation with 2B and the latter just stoicly dismisses everything 9S throws at her. There are some exceptions like when 2B and 9S discuss what they are going to do together after the war but these are few and far between.

2B doesn't have much going on with her outside of just being stoic and 9S only had two modes, acting casual around the people he works with and getting antagonistic towards "machine life forms".

Maybe if this would be forgiven if there were any backstory reveals or any hints as to why the charactes act the way they do and the anime never shows it much like the game. The characterization of 2B and 9S are in the lore of the Nier Automara game and I thought the anime would incorporate that and it didn't.

For example the reason why 2B acts so stoic in the game and anime is because she is forced to kill 9S and can't bring herself to kill do it which is why she acts dimissive towards 9S. I thought anime being a passive medium might be easier to portray this but they didn't which is such a shame.

Now there are the villains for the season which are Adam and Eve which who are just painfully dull. Most of their interactions consist of Eve wanting to "play" with Adam and the latter being primarily interested in reading books, that what is all consists of. You'd think Adam in the anime and by extension Eve in the game would do some villain things like actively get in the way of the lead characters, do some collateral damage or just do something to make me dislike them or be interesting foils to the leads in some way but they aren't. Eve dies in the anime instead of Adam but the latter goes through the same "character arc" where they both experience loss and then just turn into over the top nilhilists, what was the point of changing who dies if the writing is going to remain the same anyway? Some of the bosses with them are removed and Adam gets beaten with the Hammer of Dawn instead of fighting 2B which makes me question if you can remove key boss fights from the game and mostly have the same story then were the bosses really that important to the story to begin with? This is yet another reason why I am not big on the game.

Then there is the plot which is just super padded. It starts off with 2B and 9S joining up with the resistance, they randomly meet up with Adam and Eve and then a bunch of stuff happens in between that has nothing to with furthering the main characters' goals start happening, they go to an amusement park, they meet up with Pascal do some favors for him and then Adam randomly pops back into the story, the robots go crazy and then Adam does too and barely anything relating to the characters getting closer to their goal was achieved.

Some good things about the anime being faithful to the game is the audio since the english dub actors and the soundtrack both return for the anime and they were the best things about the game and I am glad I get to experience them both without needing to deal with tedious gameplay and beating the game 5 times within the context of the story.

The puppet shows that take place after the end credits are also really fun and enjoyable since they have more personality than the game and anime does, the characters get to more expressive in them.

The main difference is and this is where I get a bit more positive is that there is now a character named Lily and the scenes with her were not in the game and I found thse scenes with her far more interesting than 2B and 9S. Her introduction established both that she spent her whole life being an expendable pawn and that Yorha doesn't treat the earth resistance with much care or respect so in just one scene of the first 10 minutes of the 2nd episode I care about her more than 2B and 9S, and she gets fleshed out more than 2B and 9S ever do throught the game and this part of the anime. She is also a connected to a backstory reveal with A2 that the game never fully shown which already puts the anime slightly above the game, only slightly.

Which starts to make me wonder why not make the whole anime be told from Lily's perspective instead and the audience views 2B and 9S' actions through her. Halo Legends did this with the "Babysitter" short and it could've worked just as well here. Either do this or incorporate the characterization in the lore of the game into the anime.

Overall, I wanted to like this show over the game and in a backhanded way, the fact that the anime is mostly faithful to the game makes it much easier to revisit the story again instead of me beating the game 5 times and doing 30 hours of dull combat and awkward minigames. At the same time, I wanted this series to be more than a mostly faithful adaptation, I wanted it to make geniunely like a story I never liked that much but it ultimately failed in that regard.

The movie surpassed my super low expectations I had for it, the movie isn't geniunely good at all but it's not the garbage I was expecting it to be either. It's middle of the road and I am surprised it accomplished that much.

It establishes itself that it's a dumb action movie from the first 10 minutes with how Leon finds the truck holding a vital character minutes after being told about his relevance to the plot and getting into a dumb motorcycle chase and highway fist fight later, if you can't accept the first 10 minutes of the movie and then you might as well ... shut it off. I can go on about the dumb crap in the movie, and some of it that bugged me was how they established a virus that acts like FOXDIE from MGS and how it's basically kryptonite for RE characters, which is a funny way of creating stakes and tension for the movie since it needs to seperate the team and make sure Rebecca and Jill play their roles in the story somehow.

A big issue however is the that villain is basically Obito Uchiha garbage levels of writing where he wants to destroy the world because he was forced to kill his friend. Give me a fucking break, and so much of his character is expressed through endless amounts of excessive monologuing most of it is during the middle point of the movie. His backstory is just too much of a boring sob story to even make me care and his characterization being expressed through monologuing doesn't help.

Some nitpicks as a "fan" of the games is that it's rather silly to see characters struggle against typical zombies when they have beaten them over 9000 times by now and it's also rather amusing to see Lickers get killed by one shot to the head with no use of a shotgun or high powered weapons considering in REmake 2 they take over 3 shotgun rounds to kill and the REmake games were the ones being refrenced in earlier in the movie.

Good things about the movie is that Jill is handled decently and is the best character in the movie. Her character is decently foreshadowed as being the "underdog" lone wolf of the team is decently contextualized within the first 20 minutes. I also like some of the nods to the games like RE5 and 6 which kind of does a good job at creating some degree of a continuity in a franchise as messy as RE's. Rebecca's role I also kind of liked since it does a good at making her establish her role as the medic of the team and the action was decent and wasn't wannabe John Wick like Vendetta was.

The ending climax with the super sayian hulk wannabe boss fight was hilariously over the top. It's basically an over the top climax boss fight you'd find in an RE game particularly the third person over the shoulder games.

Overall, for an RE movie it wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be especially considering how much RE content has been produced as of late. Still, not "good" but at the very least tolerable.

Hellsing Ultimate was a show I watched almost 10 years ago and it was back in a time where I was waiting for each english dubbed episode to come out since they would take a while for them to release. Watching it again almost 10 years later after the final dubbed episode released and all it really did was confirm my thoughts that Hellsing Ultimate is an average show carried by an amazingly well acted english dub.

If the dub wasn't as over the top and amazingly directed as it was, I probably wouldn't even have made it through the show. While the OVA isn't ... super terrible or overly repulsive, I also think the writing overall is average at best and it also caried by the animation and art direction.

The big issue with the show overall is the character of Alucard and while I do have some entertainment value from watching him primarily due to Crispin Freeman's excellent performance as him, as a character who supposed to be on the side of "good", he is just a character that is just too hard to get behind, Crispin Freeman does a good job at selling me on the material and his character design is pretty good, the first issue is that he basically just a maniac who enjoys killing people and inflicting pain on to other, this wouldn't be too bad if he went through an arc of slowly regretting all that but he doesn't. On top of that, and I don't like saying this crticism towards any character but he is just way too "overpowered". Alexender Anderson early in the series was the only one who managed to provide him with some semblance of challenge, more on that later but everyone else Alucard fights are barely even a threat to him. Luke Valintine and the "Dandy Man" just scratch him a little and then he transforms and then wins and many of the fights ends this way. Anyone who isn't named Alexender Anderson, barely even puts up a decent fight.

The writers know this, so mid way through the series Alucard is literally waiting on a boat while all hell breaks loose around the characters. The episodes with Cerez and the Mercs have a decent amount of stakes and tension because they can't win super easily as Alucard has, the villains are only able to do any damage in this show at all is because Alucard spends so much time on the boat. If he wasn't, the Major and the Arch Bishop probably would've gotten killed extremely easily. This all feels like the kind of writing Superman gets bashed for having but at least he has villains who can hurt him like Parasite, Metallo, General Zod, Braniac, and Mister Mxyzptlk and Darkseid where Alucard only has one which is Alexender Anderson. On top of all this, Alucard isn't going through any existential crisis and making his next plan of attack while waiting on the boat, he is simpily just waiting there with nothing happening which makes me think the writers of the series couldn't figure how to keep around in the series at all times. He is also way too overpowered to do the Dragon Ball Z thing of having the protagonist get taken out of the story for a long period of time.

This is where Alexender Anderson is a rather fascinating character, he feels like the true protagonist of the story. He has a code of honor, needs back up and doesn't kill unless if the people he is killing absolutely deserve it like the Arch Bishop for example. The fact that Anderson needs back up with his Paladins on top of him struggling really badly against his rematch with Alucard and him giving up his humanity in order to beat him makes me think that he was the true protagonist of the story. He is easier to root for than Alucard is. Steven Brand's performance as him is also fantastic much like Crispin Freeman's as Alucard and admittedly their "ham to ham combat" with each other was very entertaining.

Then this leads to the final encounter with Alucard and Walter, the latter's betrayal literally feels like an asspull since the writers needed another opponent who knows how to fight to face Alucard since Anderson died beforehand and it's really poorly written since Walter before this betrayal never seemed like he had any resentment towards Alucard and any signs he was evil. If he was, he would've turned Integra over to the Major the first chance he got as opposed to letting her escape. The fight is basically Alucard mostly winning which is already really dull and of course Walter gets a "hero's death" in spite of all the bad things he did. I started to zone out when I got to this part of the show.

Other parts where I zoned out was during the forced comedic expressions comedy scenes which I never really found funny and it can cause a massive tonal whiplash during the more serious moments. The ending was full of this stuff and it can be jarring since Integra lost someone who was "important" to her. It was 30 years later sure but that is also convient since you would need 30 years to rebuild Britain after all the damage that happened.

I also got sick of the excessive if well acted monologuing by the Major especially. The "War" monologue earlier in the OVA was decent but it really started to get over done and the final episode could be shorted down a great deal if the Major would just shut up and accept his own death instead of talking, talking and talking.

Overall, while I don't dislike Hellsing Ultimate and it was certainly better than the Gonzo show released years prior, the well acted and directed dub is why I reccomend this show at all. The writing overall is average and the animation and art direction also carries it a good deal. It just has too many issues for me to give a high reccomendation.

This show is a weird one, I do enjoy it and it's probably my favorite non Universal Century Gundam show that I have seen. I still kind of feel like I start losing engagement the more I watch it.

First of all, if you are one of those people who thought the Gundam franchise took itself way too seriously, this show might be for you. G Gundam while having the setting, the mechs, and the battles of a Gundam show, it's much more of a traditional fighting shonen, if you have ever seen Saint Seiya, this show feels like it borrows heavily from it. From ... the loudly screamed attack names that are mostly just punches, to the characters of the main cast representing a certain part of the world, and to the characters all having armor that represent their "gimmick". It all feels very familar. Familiar but welcome.

I do like the first half the show even if so many of the moments feels like you got to suspend your disbelief heavily just to go along with it but at the same time that first episode is pretty much make it or break it, the show established how ridiculous it is from the moment Rain makes a shield with her make up accessory, if you can't accept that, then the show is better off being dropped because it only gets more ridiculous from there.

The first half, I liked since it was introducing new fighters and expanding on the world and it's just over the top mech fight after over the top mech fight, plus Domon is just so typical of a shonen protagonist but at the same time so pure about it and never really contradicts himself that much that I can't help but find him delightful.

I did like how it was alluding to the Dark Gundam as this big overarching threat with him hiding but slowly showing his hand in affairs. It also had some solid character building with Domon and Rain while establishing other characters in the main cast with Domon fighting them and then their backstories getting revealed afterwards. The show will remind of their goals constantly to the point where it would be hard to forget even years after you watch the show.

But then the issue I had with the show and where I started to lose engagement with it is when Domon beats the Dark Gundam for the first time. It was way too early to fight him and it should've been saved for the end of the show since when Domon was fighting him, it didn't so much feel like Domon wanted to beat the crap out of him but because Domon was annoyed and wanted him out of the way so he can get to the tournament. It kind of lacked emotional investment by Domon to be engaging. The Dark Gundam also loses two more times and never gets a clean win over Domon so it's even harder to care about his as a villain.

After that it's a tournament arc and it's...okay, not terrible but it Wong and later Wullube are way too dull of villains to carry it. Wong's goal weren't all that interesting nor did he have an interesting enough prescence to make me wish he got beat up and Wullube is just such a generic out of left field and boring villain that I zoned out every time he was on screen. Wong also somehow gets access to the Dark Gundam parts...so the series can still have some overarching plot thread connecting everything. Wullube's redeeming aspect is that he gives all the Gundam fighters an excuse to band together and defeat him which does a good job making the tournament arc feel more than just a generic tournament arc.

Master Asia is a decent villain and a solid rival to Domon and his english voice actor does a good job at giving him a major prescence even if at times, he feels like he is crazy one moment and then rational the next but he is an entertaing character that I kind of let this slide.

Kyoji Kashu feels like a prototype to Itachi Uchiha from Naruto and to Kyoji's credit, he is done better here than Itachi, but I do ask questions why on earth did Neo Germany let Kyoji run around and do want he wanted and didn't question if that was actually their original fighter. He's decent character.

Overall, I do like G Gundam and it is a show worth checking out, but I can't deny that I did start to get slightly bored the more the series went on. It's still watchable but the later parts could've been handled better.

When I was watching this show, one question just came popping in my mind and that was, "who was this show even for?"

Make no mistake about this, it's basically the Studio 4 Degrees Celsius Berserk Golden Age arc movie trilogy that came out a decade ago except now it's in made into an anime series rather than a movie trilogy.

This series has the same issues that those movies have and it makes me bring up the question yet again, "who was this even for?"

If you are a newcomer to the Berserk franchise, you are just going to be asking a bunch of ... questions and wish the context for the emotional scenes were there when they happened or at the very least the good majority of them and if you are a Berserk fan whether it'd be the manga or the 90s anime, you are just going to get irritated by the amount of scenes and context that got cut in this version of the story. I read some of the manga and watched the 90s anime and while I can say thanks to the 90s anime, the scenes that happened in this adaptation still resonated with me due to me remembering the 90s anime, but that's the thing, it's because I enjoyed the 90s anime so much that these moments I still really like. Like Griffth's speech to Charlotte about friendship, Guts' first battle with Zodd the Immortal, the scene where Guts talks about himself and philsophy with Casca at the Campfire and so on. I love these moments because of the 90s anime and I recall it so well but if my memory was hazey and just watched this anime as a refresher, this show would fall flat, the whole anime fells like one of those licensed games or movie tie in game where it expects you to watch the 90s anime and read the manga to get all of it's context and that is a flawed way to make any adaptation since the story does not stand on it's own.

To name some more examples. Remember when Guts assassinated that Nobleman and killed the kid? Show by extension movies removes context. Guts doesn't fight Samson and get his sword damaged and get saved by Zodd establishing that Guts isn't the strongest that even he at times needs help. 2nd episode spoils so much of the story. Remember why that leader of Doldrey wanted to keep Griffth alive even though Basgone wanted to kill him? Show by extension movie removes context. The Minister Foss sub plot is removed entirely. Pipin barely gets any scene or character and the down time is not as prevelant anymore. Timeskips especially early in the show are quite frequent which makes it harder to get attached to the characters since they change so much offscreen.

But to this show's credit, and this is where I start praising it. Episode 9 and onwards isn't that bad, the sex scene where Guts reveals his insecurities about Gambino and his abusive relationship to Casca is geniunely well done since it actually feels like it was kind of built up and it was very emotionally gut wrenching to see Guts a guy who the show portrays and as strong and dependable is breaking down and crying to the woman he has grown fond of. The only person Guts can actually be emotional around.

From here on out the show doesn't time jump nearly as much and you get more character interactions and it feels like you are actually following them through their journey and them falling apart emotionally due to what the Midland Kingdom did to Griffth. This isn't enough to completely save this adaptation but it does at the very least prevent it from me calling it outright bad. The music and the dub are also solid and I will miss Marc Diraison as Guts and this series reminds me why I always found his Guts performance to be endearing.

And to give this show and by extension the movies some more credit, it does have a much better ending than the 90s anime, which was way too anti climatic and ends way too soon. Best thing to do is watch the 90s anime and then jump to the last few minutes of this anime and the 3rd movie to get a better and more cohesive ending to the Golden Age arc in an animated format.

Overall, while I don't dislike this show completely, I still question who it is even for and why it was even made to begin with since it doesn't really improve the GAA movie trilogy by a whole lot. The 90s anime is still the better choice if you want to watch Berserk in an animated format rather than reading the manga.

I am not a big fan of Jojo and while I found Stone Ocean to be decent overall, these last 14 episodes were just a boring and painful slog. You got stand abilites that are nonsensical and are borderline situational at best, like a power where fairy tales comes to life, or the ability to summon snails(who would honestly want these as powers?), and the series just drags on doing it's typical jobber fight after jobber fight much like Part 3-5 and I slowly got bored by the one note formula then the series ends in a climatic showdown that takes forever to end just ... for the series' conclusion to be a time reset where only Emporio remembers everything and all the other memebers of Jolyne's crew doesn't even remember and it's just alternate versions of themselves making the whole series feel like one big waste of time since the main character Jolyne didn't even beat the main villain and it ends with 98% of the cast dying and being alternate universe versions of themselves where they don't even remember anything. From the alternate versions of the cast's point of view Emporio might as well be a crazy drugged up little kid. The whole formula yet again was fighting jobber after jobber and it ending with a boss where the main villain gets a powerful stand ability, I have seen this all before and it's even more nonsensical here since it now involves time travel or multiverses or something. And why the fuck didn't Jotaro ask the Morioh crew for help when the world was ending by the hands of Father Puuchi? I think I might actually like the Jojo Eyes of Heaven video game for the fact that the all the characters in the Jojo Parts back each other up and play a role in the plot instead of just doing nothing while the whole world could end. And why not have Josuke and Koichi pop up when the Stone Ocean already mentioned Rohan? Ugh, this is turning into a rant.

The only thing I kind of liked was Puuci's backstory and motivation but that's not enough to save these episodes for me.

If part 7 and 8 ever get their own anime, I doubt I will watch them in the near future, this series has been diminishing returns after Battle Tendancy for me.