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Everyone puts on a mask to get what you want—to get by through conversations or situations out of your control or that you dislike, to get people to like you—all sorts of masks in fact depending on the person. They all make up facets of who you are, different sides you reveal yourself to others. All the more so in front of the one you like, to hide how you really are.

But you can let yourself loose with them as well at times. Not at all times, everyone has to uphold themselves to some degree, but sometimes. You have to strive for a balance in ... everything that you do.

A romance isn’t something with big grand gestures or illustrious setting or a happily ever after. There are no princes, knights, princesses, or damsels. Just normal people. A lot of love is just to be experienced in the moment, in casual every day life that just continues on. And a romance is one where you let your flaws out in the open and you’re accepted for them.

All of these different sides are what this movie encapsulates. This is what’s behind the mask of Kaguya sama: Love is War. The whole story has been about these individuals who put up an act to hide their insecurities, going a very long roundabout way of trying to make the other fall in love with them because they’re too afraid of showing their weakness and communicating clearly themselves. At the end of S3, none of them had ever actually confronted their problems nor did EITHER OF THEM actually confess with words, that’s what this movie emphasized. That they were still putting up an act and they need to communicate. The average joe who tries to push himself beyond his limit to appear perfect and catch the moon’s reflection, and the haughty Moon princess who only knew how to hurt others and hated herself. Both of their character arcs are wrapped up powerfully in this beautiful tale of self-love in a way that’s just as cathartic as S3’s finale, hence “the first kiss never ends”.

The message is perfect and the story was amazing. The visuals and storyboarding were top notch in different times of the day in-universe (sunset or night), in particular dark rooms & hallways, and ESPECIALLY in depicting the characters’ psychological states. The humor was great, but I do have to admit that both it and the story were shaky in the first half because of the awkward and cold change in attitude one of the characters had suddenly started showing after the heartwarming and joyous climax of S3 (which of course is recontextualized later), which might cause viewers more frustration than comedic levity. It was well animated throughout as well. The soundtrack was masterful.

The only real flaw the movie has is that half of it was just your standard comedic EPISODIC episodes and it doesn’t help that throughout each story, there’s those adapted volume extra segments with random trivia or gags which really breaks the cohesion of the narrative. As such, those parts of the movie were also rather lackluster in visuals at time (not anything bad, just not movie-quality) and didn’t seem different from the anime. TLDR its biggest issue is that it doesn’t feel like a movie as a whole, but that doesn’t bring down my score in the slightest.

After the ULTRA ROMANTIC finale of S3, be sure to witness an ORDINARY closure.

Kakao 79%, referring to a chocolate that is hardly sweet. A fitting name for a story that is so bitter and filled with toxicity.

The storytelling admittedly will draw one in, but it is only towards a downward spiral of drama, one after the other, filled with emotional manipulations and unfairly distributed amounts of blame.

If you are in it for the comedy, it is subpar for the most part, nothing gut wrenching or particularly amusing. Ironically, some moments the story tries to pass off for comedy leaves one very annoyed for ruining the serious tone of the scene or for trying to make a joke out ... of something that actually isn’t morally funny.

If you are in it for romance as I expect most of you to, if you want a romance where the main duo go through the same walls/mental blocks over and over and over again, continuously denying their feelings, pretending to sweep everything under the rug, for 150 chapters for the smallest amount of progress, feel free.

In my honest opinion though, even for those small amounts of progress, it’s not worth it. Not in the sense that, “it’s not cathartic enough”, but in that this couple should honestly not get together. The relationship is largely unhealthy, with the male protagonist being an obsessive jealous stalker who doesn’t care for anything else in the story or ever truly admit to any of his mistakes besides blaming it on the heroine. Not to mention, he never conveys any of his feelings properly (choosing to instead assault her and continually create an uncomfortable atmosphere for everyone numerous times) while putting the heroine into a series of “tests” to make her essentially submit to his masculinity.

It doesn’t help that the story and the entire cast (who are all psychologically manipulative and flawed individuals themselves) mainly puts all the blame on the heroine instead of the male protagonist or on themselves, claiming she’s “too nice” or too dense. Is it a crime for her to want to stay friends? Is it a crime to be nice to someone being bullied? Is she really the one at fault for “not facing up to her feelings” when everyone else gives her the roundabout and makes her into some sort of menace? Is it a crime to be unconscious of your own feelings or the feelings of others? Apparently so. How about pot meet kettle; the heroine is a high school girl experiencing the normal emotions that come with a childhood romance. The one who stirs up trouble for their amusement, the one who keeps thinking they can be indecisive while putting her their tests, the one using another as an object for their own selfish means? They should all look in the mirror as well and stop blaming others, and that includes the author of this story.

With that said, you can already guess that I think the characters have nothing noteworthy to say about themselves. Art can be cute now and then but is largely average or mediocre.

Love may be a multitude of things, much comes with bitterness, but not in this story, it’s more like social coercion.

Returning to the anime community is the king of comedies that tugs on your heart’s strings, Gintama! How fitting is it that after many fake outs, it finally ends with the Semi-Final and not The Final!

Gintama the Semi Final features two fun stories that deliver the full Gintama experience. Tons of laughs, dirty humor, callbacks, poignant conversations, and heartfelt character progression.

The Semi Final adapts chapters 686-698 of the source material and is structured in two parts: the Yorozuya and the Shinsengumi. Considering the amount of character progression & plot developments that occurred in those chapters, not to mention the comedy, it surprisingly adapted a ... lot of it with acceptable pacing in two 20 minute episodes. It would have been better if they had adapted the material chronologically and with 10 extra minutes to each episode, but you can’t win them all.

It did cut out a significant portion of material however as it was only working with two 20 minute episode timeslots and was primarily focused in the development of the Yorozuya and Shinsengumi dynamics respectively. As such, the Semi Final was very devoid of plot and cut out material covering Gintoki, Katsura, and Takasugi. Due to the latter, anime-only fans may think that they had skipped a scene or two when in actuality the events (which happened to be some of the best in the entire series according to general consensus) had either been offscreened and cut out, which is extremely unfortunate.

With that said, it is STRONGLY RECOMMENDED anime only fans should read Gintama chapters 686-698. However, they shouldn’t think that this entry was a bad adaptation either.

Considering the global pandemic going on and the difficult time constraints, which lead to a small team of animators (that haven’t worked on the movie) to deliver us fans this new entry to the franchise, the art was rather polished, more so than it was for Gintama Silver Soul. The animation was minimally done but not in a manner that it was jarring & hindered enjoyment, so it looked good visually! The angles and storyboarding were great, you can tell the team wanted to still put some effort into the two episodes to give the fans a good experience.

Of course, most of that passion is put towards the movie, which covers the pinnacle of the story and closes off one of the most beloved series in the medium beautifully.

All in all, two fun episodes meant to shed light on our Silver Souls yet again after such a long wait for the movie. Does not serve as a substitute for the manga at all though.

Shokugeki no Soma is one of the most popular ongoing shonens in Weekly Shonen Jump. Its anime is rated pretty highly on myanimelist, IMDb, and other media forums. The manga here is rated an 8.36 on MAL. Does this mean you should read it? Absolutely not.

It's unfortunately common for long running series to end unsatisfactorily, whether that's because it's dragged out for too long, author doesn't care anymore, it's cancelled, or other unforeseeable circumstances. Look at Bleach and Fairy Tail. Those two series are infamously regarded as the worst shonen manga to have ever existed, due to how they've fallen in terms of the quality ... of their storyline and conclusions. Shokugeki no Soma? It tops those in terms of how mediocre it is.

I have little to say about the first 264 chapters of this series. Why? Because the final arc of this series DECONSTRUCTS all of which the fans loved about this series.

From the beginning to the end of chapter 264, we had seen the cooking journey of a young diner chef surviving in one of the world's strictest yet most prestigious cooking institution, trying to chase after his father's footsteps in order to inherit his family's diner. Along the way he met a variety of other chefs around his age and experienced their unique lifestyles, cultures, techniques, quirks, and personalities. Training with a master French Chef and losing several competitions, he adapts and strives toward each challenge and grows out his little "Diner world" and realizes he wants to come up with his own brand of cooking and follow his own footsteps. To do that, he must create a dish that his eternal rival, the possessor of the God's Tongue, the talented and beautiful daughter of the Cooking Yakuza (the noble Nakiri Family), Erina, will acknowledge. But said prodigious heroine has her own cooking journey to explore with our male protagonist.

Sounds like a really great story. A little diner chef rose to the top of the cooking world and the rich and talented heroine goes to the bottom to see the little things in cooking to discover her own sense of identity, her own cooking. Well, now lets rinse and repeat all of that, let's ignore the rest of the talented cast that the MC met and have Soma start at level 1 once again. Let's have him be the underdog and prove that diner cooking is the best! How do we do that? Well let's have the heroine be kidnapped by his long lost mafia brother who has superpowers and has defeated who was built up to be the final boss of the series, Soma's father: Joichiro Saiba. What does he want? To marry Erina to make his cooking taste better. How will he do that? By appealing to Erina's horrible mother that abandoned her as a child and has shit taste that can't let her consume anything in this world.

Erina Nakiri becomes an abused doll who can't make a single decision for herself in her life and has no hope of pleasing her mother's shit palette with her prodigious cooking. She has to tell the MC to lose and let her marry the mafia brother so her mother can be happy. SHe went from developing for 264 chapters into a confident young chef who fights for her newfound friends and views cooking as fun to this.

Soma Yukihira had risen to the top of Totsuki academy as the First Seat of the Elite Ten. By the end of the Central arc, he had already created what he referred to as his own specialty. Now? "His cooking style is just addition and substraction. He can't multiply, and he certainly has no super powers! What can he do? No way he can make me strip!" Everything he has learned about cooking has went to 0 and he has to use his DAD's cooking yet again to fend off against the dastardly "Dark Chef's" Wolverine Claws, TNT, and chainsaws.

Repeating Nakiri abusive family drama, replacing the final boss of the series (when the series was all about Soma coming up with his own cooking style to beat his father and inherit his restaurant), NO LONGER EVEN REVIEWING DISHES OR SHOWING THEM BEING MADE (possibly due to the author's fixation on Chunnibyou super powers or because the series's cooking consultant has left), having a battle between light and darkness, showing guns and kidnapping, and worst of all deconstructing the main characters and shafting most of the cast. This series takes it all! Everything that was hyped and built up and somehow made it turn into a worst trash than it was the week before.

The series betrayed its own themes and basically its premise by dragging on way past what it needed to be. It became a battle shonen criminal NTR INCEST soap opera family drama than a cooking manga. The author needed to increase his foodgasms of fanservice to BUILDING-breaking levels (lewding all sorts of girls wasn’t enough, the food has to give buildings orgasms now!) in an attempt to critique the kind of cooking this series has produced now.

Might as well change the name of the series from Shokugeki no Soma to “Keeping up with the Nakiris”.

Overall, I give it a 4/10. 264 chapters of a respectable quality being its crutch, it's an utterly garbage series that destroys all expectations.

Read with caution if you want to stop up to chapter 264 or wish to see a masterpiece of a trainwreck. Otherwise, do not bother with this series.