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"Another mixed bag isekai"

Of course, even knowing with certainty that that's what this was going to be at best, I still ended up watching it to completion out of sheer boredom. Perhaps it was because I wanted something to fill the void left by a lack of Konosuba in my life... (Not that Konosuba is all that great to begin with, but don't kill me). Whatever the case, if you just happen to be the cynical type and also happen to have a bad habit of giving more than just a cursory glance well, this is one of those anime whose first episode serves ... as an accurate representation of the show as a whole. That should tell you all you need to know to save your time.

Yes, it is immediately apparent what Cautious Hero's main influence is but, despite its largely comical structure the sheer volume of expression displayed by Blond-Aqua still manages to fall flat on its face (hu hi ha-ha-ha), and is moderately overblown aesthetically even when it's purpose is to contrast with Cautious-plank-kuns's unrelenting stoicism. She's overreacting a lot is what I'm saying. Anyhow, speaking of, though Cautious-kun's role as a protagonist might be a relieving and welcomed change of pace from the whimpy norm, his personality is still too one-note and his stoicism too goofy in nature for him to be likable either. But before I go further, I guess one thing I should note is about Blond-Aqua's seiyuu, Toyosaki, Aki. If you can get past the lackluster script you can clearly see she has incredible range but, unfortunately no amount of star power could possibly save this show from it being so formulaic or monotonous. And I guess to a degree, from the very beginning, the author realized the story couldn't simply be carried along by Blond-aqua's antics as well, and to mitigate that he scrambled something up for the story at the last minute and also added two more party members to spice up the character dynamics. And their addition, however, still ended up sticking out like a sore thumb, as though their very existence was there for little more than for the sake of having moved a plot point forward. The whole show is this sluggish and boring, actually.

And while we're at it, even if what you were looking for wasn't an action packed adventure you're perhaps going to be finding yourself irritated as this show frequently takes itself seriously, and then abruptly does away with action sequences in favor of quickly returning to sporting its character's, surely by then already, tired wordy antics. And those action scenes that do bother to sludge their way through by the demands of the plot are, of course... going to be below your expectations, even assuming you have any degree of cynicism. Yeah.

Aside from maybe bothering to mention a thing or two about how sound design and production values are acceptable and whatnot, at this point there really isn't all that much more worth to add, so I'll just be leaving it there. ...Wait, did I forget to mention that this show is now the second isekai after Overlord whose raunchiest service comes in the form of a furry? Haha, well, isn't that just a sure sign of fine literature, am I right, guys?

Admittedly, Cautious Hero is initially another, perhaps even more than merely, tolerable anime with the expected minor hiccups. But, predictably as it progresses it's creative bankruptcy becomes more apparent, its characters antics increasingly trite from repetition, and its tonal-shifts eye-rolling and jarring. The latter point to which it eventually falls off the rails into self youtube parody, and thus placing it's rank firmly below the average. You know the anime industry must be in quite a dark place when this show, out of the lot that is in this genre anyway, is one that for others comes as a recommendation.

The author should have just made a commitment to a pure comedy rather than make this entirely pointless and ham-fisted attempt at storytelling.

What's that? Were you expecting some kind of third rate show? Perhaps something poorly animated? Or something that's outright crude? Well, surprise!

Homing butt missiles, speed boosting wedgies, Unlimited Butt Works, and asses made hard like steel!

Keijo!! plays less like a sports anime and more like a traditional battle shounen... only with butts being the weapon of choice, of course. A spunky main protagonist with promising talent is dead set on being the best of the best. They enter some sort of training ground and are swiftly enough dealt with by a stronger opponent that remind them where their place lies. Instead of being disheartened by ... defeat, they get back up and train harder for the next encounter. They then continue pushing themselves to their limits and prepare themselves for the upcoming presumed tournament. A straight forward and simple setup, just like what you've seen before from the genre (tropes included). But what makes Keijo!! notable and quite sharply separates it from the rest of the usual schlock, is not necessarily what it does well, butt simply what it doesn't do wrong.

There is no bait and switch tactic, no grandiose pretentious speeches to mask the lack of a substantive narrative, no infantilizing melodrama, ect. Certainly, the otherwise eye-rolling yet attention grabbing premise has the more cartoony aspect of it put to full use and steadily ramps up it's absurdity with each episode. All, surprisingly enough, with good pacing and a lack of streamlining of it's ideas. It does away with all the unnecessary contrivances precisely by sticking to a simple plot structure and thus creating a strong foundation. And while it pulls it's absurdity with a straight face, Keijo!! as a whole is not at all serious. Much like it's characters, it strays away from being mean in spirit. After the battles the characters all prove themselves to be amiable, always coming back to show their enjoyment of the sport. Along with it's outlandish butt and breast slapping glory, it is also splurged with ridiculous but totally engaging dialog. It maintains a consistent level of quality uncommon in shows within it's own genre. Plenty of episodes end on a perfect note, too, sincerely keeping you craving for more. This is indeed something even your average anime routinely fails to achieve. That aside, there a few dips in the quality of the animation itself, and the characters are largely animated with thin to thick sketchy outlines. Obviously, the limits of it's budget are in display, butt it more than makes up for it with the occasional savory anatomical precision of the gluteus maximus!

Speaking of which, quite contrary to expectations, should you be an ecchi enthusiast, you might actually be disappointed to know that Keijo!! does not offer the kind of service you've become accustomed to. It's fanservice is still ubiquitous, but quite tame especially when compared to it's lewder counterparts. In fact, it seems like the kind of show that should've aired at least half a decade ago. And even back then we had shows like Queen's Blade, Panty & Stocking with Garter-belt, as well as another show by the same studio like To Love-Ru, ect. All of which are raunchy-er than keijo!!! by several magnitudes.

But Keijo!! doesn't care to fulfill your gratuitous-nipple quota, it launches it's menacing butts in your general direction with the sole intention to obliterate everything in it's path! Keijo!! is not fool's gold, it is a shining example of how ecchi should be done. If more ecchi followed Keijo!!'s example, perhaps the genre as a whole would at least receive less negative reception and not be treated with little more than passing apathy. You don't have to be an ecchi fan to submerge yourself in Keijo!!, it should prove itself to be a refreshing endeavor with the usual elements working harmoniously for once.

It might just be an ever so small gem, but it is to be cherished. One cannot simply deny that Keijo!! is both sexy, and awesome!

Not unless, of course, you happen to be a... dishonest cretin.

"I can't abandon a girl when people are after her life just because she's the previous demon lord's daughter. I'm going to protect her! But... Am I allowed to have only one precious thing to me? Must I limit myself to one?"

No, that's not me pretentiously attempting to attach some meaning or something -- Those are a few lines of dialog that summarize Shinmai Maou no Testament. It's all you need to know about the show, as it is about just as much as the show cares to let us know.

So yeah, Shinmai Maou no Testament is another harem whose sole purpose for ... existing is to fill out a time-slot. A show that makes you wonder if the people behind the scenes are engaging in copyright wars from making such an uninspired amalgamation of several elements from other shows put together to make the same harem you've seen a dozen times over. It's so lacking in creativity that it uses the "I accidentally walked into you when you're undressed" cliché four or five times. -- said shows that come to mind are: Inuyasha, Bleach, Highschool DxD, and perhaps Tokyo Ghoul for Takigawa, Yahiro and it's EDGE.

"Basacchi". Oh lord, pls no.

Basara is your typical self-righteous "hero" devoid of personality; an indecisive, apologetic asshat, whom let's himself go wild on the girl's tits when he damn well pleases. When his sexuality reaches points where it can be brought under question, he gives in to his urges then he seeks to be comforted by said tits from having gone too far with his manhandling. By the shows end he's only a few notches away from being another despicable Itou, Makoto. If only. If only that would have actually been the case, at least he would have been less forgettable. All the girls in the show line up to feed the ego of whomever uses Basara as their surrogate. They exist just to get their breasts fondled or consistently refer to him as "onii-chan" or "B-baka".

A little too delusional, but not to the point of aggravation.

Most of the ecchi is constricted to a single gimmick — the partner binding spell crap — the rest pretty much revolves around it. The art design is easy on the eyes, yes, but still quite forgettable. And while surely not tame, the ecchi is presented in a very boring fashion. Though it may "look" nice, it still might as well be some dude in an ad testing Tenga products. Or perhaps sadder still, are the junkies who will rush in to buy the blue-rays.

As for the sound or even action? Nothing stands out, everything about this show just screams "routine". ...You might be familiar with a seiyuu who I believe goes by the name of Nomura, Kenji. You know, in bleach, that hot headed bulky bald bitch of a subordinate that follows Ulquiura? Well, Kenji plays that same bulky bald bitch here, same powers and everything, except skin tone. He suddenly appears out of nowhere for a fight and is just as briefly tossed aside so that Basara and galls can go back to breast fondling. *sarcastic cheerful claps* He stacks up a grand total of 5 seconds of screen time. Talk about pointlessly anti-climatic.

Initially tolerable even with the rather harmless tonal shifts, but then it becomes increasingly irritable as the series progresses from schizophrenic harem to obnoxious shounen.

Perhaps a thing of note is that Blade and Soul does not look nor feel like a video game (as one might have expected), just your standard fantasy fare with the magics, totally not loli/shota/furries and stuffs. Blade and Soul is essentially another Queen's Blade... You know, as in, lots of sword wielding thots and... stuffs. Though, it's nowhere near as sexually rampant as Queen's Blade. Instead, in it's place, Blade and Soul can manage to be more retarded. Whatever semblance of an actual story there may have been has surely been bastardized; but to what extent has it been butchered I wouldn't know. And ... it seems like I will never know for certain either since NCsoft will never make an English release of the damn game. In any case, what we have here are heavy handed conflict and resolutions, and a plethora of awkward brief as well as irrelevant flashbacks (except perhaps the flashbacks we see between Alka and her master) that happen for something the show is entirely alien to. A thing called "emotion".

But that's not to say that Blade and Soul is particularly painful to watch. No, you'll be able to marathon this with relative ease. You will at least not feel like your mind is being relentlessly cut to tiny pieces by an utterly shat-upon pacing and heaps and mountains of contrivances. It still pretty much has every other problem that typically plagues a video-game anime-adaption, though.

Which now brings us to the characters. One loli, three or four shotas, a wannabee cutesy stubborn drunk girl who suddenly turns to psycho bitch and back, a lady bar owner whose not afraid to get her hands dirty and is supposed to play the wise old hag yet is nothing of the sort.... Ugh, why am I even trying? One of the bad guys is a muscle bound oaf that does nothing but grunt! Everyone here changes whatever semblance of a personality they have as the plot demands it, particularly in the case of the obnoxious drunk girl and bar owner to jarring effect. And especially in the case with our dear lead Alka, she plays the role of the done-to-death assassin. One whose apparently supposed to be cool precisely because she's humorless and cold to the point where she might as well be holding a giant poster sign saying, "Please ask me the following question: 'are you even human?', thanks!". Only in her case, someone else would clearly have to write even THAT for her. She may be likable only in the sense that she might one day stop injecting herself with fifteen-hundred different tranquilizers on a daily basis.

The only real positive thing that came out of this mess was the ending theme. Which, curiously enough, is in stark contrast to the content of the show. That is to say, it has a lot of flow and emotion to it. Whatever the story was aiming for at the end of each episode, "RAINBOW" by LEGO BIG MORL took that trash and turned it into something that might make you think you're actually getting emotionally invested in.

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Not recommended. Unless you're in the mood to see nothing more than some boobs along with some silly sword action.

"Onii-sama", these words are the very heights of the human spirit, they are the essence of a male soul. It is the light that will guide a man during his darkest hour. Make your imouto recite these holy words exactly 167 times over the span of 10 hours and you will be granted what your heart truly desires, my child.

Mahouka is like solidifying the shit your dog left on your mattress with liquid nitrogen then dipping it into gold and expecting people to buy it just because it's shiny. And well, people buy it. Apparently. ...Well, actually, that's not quite the case. Mahouka should have ... been just another forgettable fighting magic school themed story adapted from a novel, except for some inexplicable reason, it gets popular. Mahouka is really just boring op-magic-imouto-harem garbage that adopts a not-quite-so-distasteful complexity within it's written dialog. About the only positive thing that I can really say in it's defense is that it somehow manages not to be torture. — Ah, yes! This is proof that the otaku culture is truly a bliss!

Every damn magic spell is accompanied by long winded explanations and technobabble. None of which is used for world building, characterization, or whatever else that it could possibly be used for. Zip, zero, nada. The "intelligence" in the script is just there for the author to stroke himself — or I should say Tatsuya Stuba's dick, technically?— Perhaps it's actually an abstract form of fanservice, it follows this sort of mentality of "the more complicated the vocabulary the more depth the character has", uguu! It's similar to the intelligence-fetihization of a loli in the whatever plethora of lolicon tittles I couldn't be bothered to mention. Hey, I would even go as far as to say that the whole series was built around this technobabble. I mean, if you're going for needless complexity in such volumes, why not go all the way and write a pseudo-political thriller a la Code Geass instead? We already have Spinzaku here, and Tatsuya is pretty much scumbag Jesus anyway. At least that would have been more eventful than all of the nothing that happens in the twenty-six episode run of this anime. Something else I should mention, they try to incorporate this idea of discrimination but they don't do anything with it. They had actually tried to justify the puerility of these teenagers pretending to be mature just to rather quickly brush it off with an empty speech. Funny because, this whole issue of "labels" could have stopped Mahouka's script from further plunging itself down the drain. The script is actually pretty terrible whenever you aren't being bombarded by technobabble. It's either harem garbage, hue hue not-really-incest heh heh heh heh, or indirectly stroking Tatsuya's dick. The action scenes can also reach irksome levels, almost as bad as what you see in hollywood movies. The Incompetence displayed by the terrorists can be described as simply sad. You would think that being equipped with sub-machine guns and RPGs one could be able to at the very least kill one person in a considerably populated school.

"There's no one who can possibly defeat my brother." - Miyuki.

Repeat the above piece of dialog thirty-or-so times with slightly different variations and you can begin to see the quality of writing in Mahouka, if you haven't already. Also, yup, what Tatsuya has isn't just any piece of armor, what he has is reinforced plot armor that's heavier and thicker than a whales hide.

Suffering several bone fractures, damaged organs and massive hemorrhaging? Not a problem, he'll just magically restore himself back to perfect health. Getting shot through the heart? Barely so much as tips him off balance a bit. Catching bullets with his bare hands? You betcha~ — There's absolutely no tension when a character is this powerful. And that isn't even the worst of it, the biggest offender of all happens in the last episode. It speaks for itself really.

No, better still is his ability to make girls drop their panties faster than you can say "bullshit". He does this in his usual inhumanly calm demeanor without so much as lifting a finger. No, he doesn't even flirt with the girls, the reason for this being because imouto pussy is best pussy. Just about every female subconsciously gravitates towards him and instinctively want to have his babies because they just know that he has superior mating capabilities.

No, wait, wait, wait, wait!! Tatsuya is a deconstruction of the Gary Stu archetype as he's actually a pathetic fatass okatu in a show that's actually a clever self parody.— Just an instance of Mahouka's brilliant comedy, when a high-school girl whose been hiding behind a tree gets her position compromised, she escapes her pursuers in the most dramatic way possible: by getting on a cheap looking scooter that actually takes off with two jet engines. You just have to see it for yourself, I'm clearly not writing it down correctly.— Tatsuya may not look like a fatass with an imouto fetish... but that's because you're already under his spell, see? Yeah, it's a spell of his that affects all your senses so you can't tell. When Miyuki asks if she looks weird in the new apron she bought for him to see her in, he replies with "You look lovely. So much so that I want to secretly display you in a glass case just for me." See? This is proof that he's a fatass basement dweller. It simply won't do you any good to deny facts.

Oh, wait, how could I forget? Whenever these two say anything incestuous it's just a joke.

Final verdict: 0/10 Nowhere near racist enough, needs more propaganda.

Yes! Yeeees! Oh, let me taste your tears, Asuna!
Mm, your tears are so yummy and sweet!
Oh, the tears of unfathomable sadness! Yummy~

In a world where series' like Harry Potter, or other real abhorrent fanfiction tittles the likes of Twilight sells well enough for multiple sequels, it shouldn't be a surprise then, Sword Art Online's popularity skyrocketing that is. Pretty posters, familiarity, perhaps male power fantasies and the like, etc. There are numerous factors that play a part in a works' popularity; but it's hard to pin-point just what exactly got SAO such hype. Especially since it becomes apparent that it was already losing it's ... focus just after the third episode. In a similar vein to SAO's sister in terms of popularity still that very same year, Guilty Crown also had an (ostensibly) enormous fanbase even before it aired. It's a mystery really.

SAO is a clear indication that it's target audience are easy to profit from. Which is exactly why it makes it just the kind of anime that makes you wonder about where the anime industry could be heading. It is not a positive influence. And unfortunately for the supporters, SAO does provide with more than enough empirical evidence to tell them that it is garbage but, that would be unfair as there actually is entertainment value to be had here.

In the visual department SAO definitely excels, maybe not enough to make a graphic artist have wet dreams over, though. From the character designs to the very world which they reside in, it is all aesthetically pleasing. And while consistent and fluid in it's animation, it's a little rough around the edges during the fight scenes. There's an abuse of stills to express 'action', and distorted facial expressions used in an otherwise uneventful location (was that actually intended to be used for comedic effect? Welp). Of course, this alone wouldn't damper the experience. If everything else were intact, this would remain relatively unnoticed.

An interesting concept? A Charismatic main character? world building? SAO had just about everything working in it's favor to make it anime of that year. But even with the few legitimate merits it has it does away with them in favor of, well, to make our hero The Black Swor- wait, no one actually confuses to whom that tittle belongs to, right..? - Kirito, more of a flawless gary stu.

All complete with enough deus ex-machinas to make you puke.

Thousands of players dying? All off-screen and no one gives a crap about statistics. Boss fights? Essentially, a grand total of three and they don't re-spawn.You never really get a sense of dread in the world of SAO. Even the very first death was due to a player refusing to take a life potion. And that's all in the first half of the series. The second half? Not even going to touch it. Unless, of course, we're talking about Suguha's sugus here.

And as you can imagine, with it taking itself so seriously already, when it come to the uh... romance the end result is laughable. Later on, at one point Asuna said something around the lines of, "Kirito has changed me, everything I am as it is now is because of him". I started to cringe at that point, none of what she said happened. The characterization suffers almost as much as the writing; or vice versa. Every villain is cartoonishly evil and every supporting character doesn't fair any better either. All of the 'character development' happens during the constant time skips, successfully nullifying it and making for a heavily disjointed pacing. And It doesn't help that the script is akin to that of an eroge. Meaning: A) relationships take on a surrealistic fast pace. B) can't hear a confession a foot away from you. C) Being nice is enough to attract females from all corners of the land, etc.

SAO could very well be suggesting you to be a Infidelity-committing, sister-fornicating, misogynistic pedophile who loves rape as fanservice. Topped only by those slimy tentacles everyone likes. -- It doesn't encourage anything positive, it's too delusional to do so. All the gamer pandering, multiple relationships, etc. It only serves to further take away any sense of realism it might have had, including it's potential to construct a society within a virtual world; firmly planting it into wish-fulfillment territory.

Splendorous action - this is the only reason I can think of as to why I would recommend this show. And yet, despite all that, knowing that it falls off the rails, crashes and burns; it get's back on the tracks again, and again only to end up crashing.

It's fun, if only to mock it.