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In attempting to make a parody of American culture and cartoons, Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt makes an art style completely unto itself. Everything is visually appealing and ironically only gets unpleasant when the show returns to its anime artstyle for the transformation sequences.

And that's only a praise of the art.

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt throws itself heart and soul into kitsch and stays there. Its interpretations of Americana are charmingly off, with bizarre movie references along with its Engrish, and it meshes with its Japanese identity of Japanese anime tropes to make a cocktail that's hilarious to watch. The soundtrack is unforgettable (though the ... episode that focuses entirely on a music video feels a little pointless, and makes you wish that the episode focused on the characters putting on a concert.)

The single gripe I have is with the demon sisters, who are basically the same person and your preference on which one is better is based on whichever one physically appeals to you more. While not bad characters by any stretch of the imagination, it feels like they went in a strange direction by having their personality be exact copies of one another as opposed to exact contrasts to their corresponding angel equivalent.

All these are minute criticisms, and I highly recommend this show. Hell, I think even non-anime fans will love it, though you'd be hard-pressed to get them to watch it based on the title alone.

Vile from start to finish, with the added disgusting dimension of being particularly predatory towards the younger characters and trying to pass it off as cutesy. Any development the main dragon experiences throughout the series is reset to zero to be a caricature of how she was initially in order to maximize fanservice. Only redeeming quality is probably the art. I am once again left wondering who the target audience was and what they could find appealing about this.

That's all I have to say, and that's all there is to say, but the website won't let me post this review unless it is a certain ... length.

The human lead and the small dragon are probably the only interesting characters, with the human lead taking breaks from her interesting half to start spouting otaku crap. The show is at its best when the small one makes an effort to gain the approval of the human lead, which is interestingly justified based on the circumstances the dragon has with its birth parents and how it imprinted onto the human as some kind of surrogate parent.

Sadly, this is not the focus of the show, which instead centers around the human and her titular maid, who is aggravating, loud, ineffectual (though to her credit improves ... as the series goes on) and just a nuisance from start to finish. There is a supporting cast that is introduced, though their personality is painfully one-note. The focus on them is short, to be fair, but it still feels like wasted time. Every single breast jiggles aggressively onscreen for peak fanservice and is annoyingly distracting and reminds you that you're watching a show for the lowest common denominator.

It's saying something to have the last few episodes be an escalation as far as plot but still feel like not a single thing is at stake. This was a chore from start to finish, and its good parts don't justify suffering through the whole.

The show embraces its macabre premise by infusing typical anime humor and lightheartedness, though it doesn't shy away from more emotional or heartfelt episodes dedicated to individual struggles that the members of the pop group may have.The protagonist has an interesting development in the eleventh hour given what her role in the group is until that point, and the lives of the other characters loan themselves to speculation fairly well.

Given the premise of the show, it was very important to have music that was believably pop enough to sell that this group took off. What I was pleasantly surprised by was how much they dabbled ... in different genres. On the subject of sound, there were small details in the sound design that stood out; when zombies turned their necks, for example, there would be small "cricks" that would be audible, and it showed an attentiveness to detail.

No life-changing revelations will likely come out of watching this, though that's not to say this isn't a worthwhile watch. The show is fairly engaging and it does not cater too much to fanservice or anime nonsense.

The only true mark against it are the characters Ai and Junko, whom I really can't differentiate between and forget constantly, mentally cordoning them off as just "those other two" while all the others have a gimmick or distinct personality that sets them apart.

This starts out pretty amazing and I fully get why this had (maybe still has?) such a following. My favorite episodes are the one-offs using the traits of the Romantic hero: the protagonists enter a new locale, they are treated like scum for their reputation or their affiliation with a maligned institution, and they solve the problems of the locale using the values they have learned (various interpretations of the "equivalent exchange" absolute that the protagonists adhere to) while discovering something about themselves in relation to their outstanding goal. The side characters all have a personality, and the military does not feel like a faceless ... cabal of soldiers but individuals with their own stories and hopes, which open themselves up to favoritism that will vary based on the viewer.

By episode 26, they introduce an awful character though, and from that point on, the show descends further and further into chaos. All episodes and plots are completely hit-or-miss, leading to completely fantastic moments/characters (Greed) or just full on awful, unbearable, even (unintentionally) comical nonsense. The good moments are not completely gone, and it makes the second half of the series tricky--something of a "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" situation. It does sour the overall experience of the show, however, and though I liked it immensely as a whole, the complete chaos midway through is heartbreaking given how solid the characters and one-off stories had been until that point.

Not just One Punch Man with a bowl cut as you might be led to believe. One Punch Man was not bad, but it set the precedent to expect a world where side characters and even entire cities didn't matter, whereas even though the episodes have the structure of a villain-of-the-day story, every single character comes back in a later episode and the world feels more authentic for it. Unlike other coming-of-age animé, Mob Psycho 100 actively encourages self-improvement, in stark contrast from often-praised animé which seems to embrace defeatism and decries the world as an insurmountable challenge for which the only solution is surrender ... or suicide. Mob Psycho 100 is joyful, and even its darker characters have dimension and redeeming qualities to them: for (the least dark) example, the instructor is a huckster who exploits his student's talents, but he does it in service of those in need and often offers placebo and doesn't act in a mean-spirited way. The audience likes him, and so when he talks his way out of trouble, it's clear why the people he's duped also seem to like him enough to believe him. When he goes too far, he is either justly punished for it, or he is able to find a bluff or angle that no one considered and get away with it.

Mob, as the name indicates, is the everyman caught in the crowd. His motivations are fairly basic, though it's enough to get the plot rolling. In spite of quite extraordinary talent, he does not view it as something that would set him apart, and his lack of popularity is more the cause of his capacity to be humble and his determination for self-improvement and not coasting on his supernatural talent. Watching Mob succeed is a joy, as is watching the show as a whole.

A continuation of an appalling series that is in every sense a sequel to its predecessors: few good or interesting characters and ideas that get buried in mountains of awful characters and awful execution of those ideas, glazed over with an awful, overcomplicated story.

It is one thing to know the tropes and stereotypes of anime; the kind that people roll their eyes at and just endure until the scene ends. It is another thing entirely to completely mire oneself in them.

The one interesting part that this anime promised was the exploration of the idea of a despair-based ideology. The end of the world is brought ... about by the world becoming collectively frustrated and nihilistic to the point of creating an ideology around it, and destroying the world out of that spite. It also centers around a fashionista who facilitates the destruction, which almost seemed to be some commentary on celebrity worship.

Instead, we are informed that hypnosis was all it took, implanted in the media. Any commentary or speculation on what the philosophy could have been is just replaced with basic "looking at screens made them do it" and the last episode informs us that philosophy, memes, and whatever else will come later. The fashionista herself has multiple personalities comprised of anime stereotypes, and at no point appears to embody despair enough to convincingly trick the globe into following her. Because it's a stereotypical anime too, all action takes place in a high school that somehow affects the entire planet.

Not a single redeeming quality can be found in this show, which swaps from strange slice-of-life episodes to a strange bomb/murder subplot to a secret experiment to disappointing resolution.

A lot of edgier aspects that I know were in the manga that were ultimately taken out, which I'm sure may upset some fans but those aspects were often distracting and did not have much impact on the present circumstances of the characters. In spite of such changes, the story told in this version remains dark, though it is always with the actions that they commit which the audience gets to witness and judge for themselves.

The relationship between the three leads is a slow descent into a toxic love triangle, as the three leads have hopes and desires which differ and come into conflict with ... one another. This comes to a head many times in different dramatic, emotional climaxes for each of the characters, and every time is an extremely memorable exploration in what drives them.

What completely mars and ends up ruining an otherwise fantastic show is the beginning and the end. For whatever reason, fantasy elements are injected in an otherwise realistic medieval story about a mercenary band. It is true that the manga goes this route; in fact, it spends much of its time there. However, the story suffers for it, as a completely out-of-left-field eleventh hour twist that is meant to set up the future of the series. It would have been better off staying concluded somehow, or continuing without fantasy.