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Honestly, this is the weakest part of the Hibike! Euphonium series. I won't go into spoilers, but they rushed this season and it seems like they just wanted to wrap up the project ASAP. Hibike has always had a lot of high school drama, but that's all the third season was. The first two seasons and the movies had a lot more music playing, but most of that was skipped here. It's a pity because the art is beautiful and I've always loved the music, which is one of the major reasons I stuck with the series, and one of two things that made ... it special was mostly tossed aside. I feel like things ended on a rather low note and I know there's nothing more to come, so I'm disappointed.

I wanted to leave my own review for this anime because I was conflicted about it. 100 Girlfriends is cute, it has great and consistent art, but I feel like the gags drag on way too long. I was watching this for the comedy, but they dedicate way too much time on one thing when they need to move onto the next joke. I like romcoms just fine, but when they drag out a "kiss zombie" cure mission for an ENTIRE episode? Yikes. You just have Rentaro running around the school for 20 minutes to take care of something that could have been done in ... 5. I don't know if they were just stretching out the story so that things would end with a certain girl on episode 12, or if the source material is the same way, but unless you have the patience to sit through one or possibly two ENTIRE episodes for a comedy route, pass this one up.

Have you ever watched an anime knowing that it will be a hot, steaming pile of turd, just because you hate yourself? Have you ever watched an anime because you are, ever so slightly, a masochist who loves to torture yourself by watching anime that you KNOW will be utterly horrible? If not, I’m glad. If so, you know where I’m coming from.

I started watching this anime knowing it would horrible. These imouto-obsessed incest anime are always terrible. Even if an anime uses that trope (?) and doesn’t have the little sister/big brother relationship as its focus usually end up being terrible. This anime is ... no exception, I just had no idea exactly HOW terrible it was actually going to be.

My Sister, My Writer has the label “comedy” on it and I, for one, never laughed a single time. For some reason, I suppose, having your little sister force you to find your feelings for her might be funny. Or perhaps a large-breasted gal with an obsession of fantasizing about rape is supposed to be funny. I don’t understand it, personally. Maybe the poor art was supposed to tickle me a little? Nope.

That’s another thing that really stinks about this anime-- the art. I read in someone’s comment somewhere that the company had to outsource several episodes because they didn’t have a decent budget to work with. This anime was only 10 episodes long, not the usual 12 for a season and they STILL had to do that, and you can tell. Everything from the faces to the hands of the characters were drawn terribly for the majority of the anime. Maybe 3 or 4 episodes of the season had decent art out of the 10 eps-- that’s not even 50% of the anime.

As far as the story goes… this is your typical imouto/oniichan anime. The brother character wants to be an author, but his writing sucks. In comes the little sister who entered a contest and wrote this AMAZING incest story that captured the hearts of SO MANY WOMEN. She decides she doesn’t want the fame, and passes the credit off to her older brother who then becomes the object of the obsession of these women who have read the incest story. Cue the little sister’s jealousy as all these women flock to attempt to start a harem with the big brother. The little sister, of course, has to get her brother to understand what there is to like about little sisters and choose her over all these other women. That’s basically the summary of the entire anime for you.

This review is all over the place, but TLDR:
The animation was terrible, the story was terrible, the characters were terrible, the music was the same few forgettable songs, and the voice acting wasn’t anything amazing.

As someone who has been watching anime for the majority of their life I decided to sporadically hit up old anime from the 90s and earlier that I have never watched, but heard mentioned repeatedly. I recently attempted to watch the original Macross and dropped it after 4 episodes. It didn't age well. Yes, I know this is supposed to be a review for Macross II, but I'm going to give you my angle as someone who immediately watched this after finishing Macross: Do You Remember Love?

The first Macross movie was great. It aged better than the original anime and I loved it. That's why ... I didn't rate Macross II very well. Overall and enjoyment was a 6 for me while the characters and story are a 5 and 4 respectively. If you watched the original Macross or its movie, then you know what will happen here. You have the basic formula of an attacking alien species, songs that will eventually lead to a peace pact, a hot-headed main character who might fall for the slightly younger singer, but instead falls for the slightly older, mature female of the show. It's so predictable that I'm hoping some of the other Macross are a bit more original.

It's hard to judge things from the 80s to standards that we have now. Sound doesn't age well. It does, however, have some nice songs, bringing me to a 7. It's probably unfair for me to compare this to the Macross movie, but I felt like the music there was better and I definitely did go to find it on Youtube by the time I finished.

Art styles over the years have changed for anime, but the art of Macross II is decent. The animation is done well and it's pretty consistent. I enjoyed the designs of the songstresses a lot and decided on another 7/10 here.

TLDR: Macross II is very similar to the original/its movie and doesn't bring much to the table. It was very forgettable.

This is a spoiler-free review!

Lost Song has to be one of the best anime I have watched in a long while. It started off slow and, unfortunately, I dropped it in the middle of the third episode. I did, however, decide to pick it up the day before the final episode aired and I'm glad that I went back to it.

First off, as I said, the anime started off slow. If you're thinking of watching it, hang in there until episode 7. If you finish 7 and still think it's not worth your time, then go ahead and drop it. With episodes 7 and ... 8 your understanding of how things were happening is turned on its head. For that alone I loved it and, in the end, I decided to give the story a 10. It's not super unique, but unique enough that I think it stands out and I highly recommend it, even to people who aren't anime fans.

The art is 9/10 for me. The animation is very clean for the most part, but there's small inconsistencies from time to time. The character designs are rather simple, but I think that it helps add charm to the anime in its own way. The lighting is done well and the 3D that is here and there meshes very well with the 2D The backgrounds are beautiful and the animation for the opening and ending songs are great. The ending even has subtle changes in it if you pay close attention!

For the sound I give this anime a solid 10. This anime isn't a "musical" exactly, but it does have singing tied into it, obviously. There's a song sung about once or twice per episode, but nothing too overwhelming. The music and singing in this anime are top-notch-- even the minor characters that only join in on singing a few times have nice voices! If we manage to get the boxed set of Lost Song overseas with the OST, I'm more than willing to spring for it.

Characters I give a 9/10. They do typical tropes very well, but Finis was a great character and she's stuck with me as being rather unique. Some of the minor characters are even fun-- like an old man inventor with a parrot in a cage on his large backpack and a croissant on his walking cane that he randomly takes a bite off of while sitting in on a conversation.

Enjoyment of this anime and overall, my score is definitely 10/10. I loved this anime so much and I hope that it gains popularity in the West so that we can see it released on BD/DVD. Everything meshes together so well and the plot twist that I didn't expect made me glad that I decided to go back and pick up the anime rather than dropping it altogether.

TLDR: Give Lost Song a chance! Try to stick it through until the end of episode 7 and you'll be rewarded!

Please note that I am writing this review as someone who hasn't read the light novel. This is purely coming from my experience as an anime-only watcher. BE WARNED! THERE ARE SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING OF THE SERIES AHEAD!

Shichisei no Subaru caught my attention first and foremost for one thing-- being an anime about an MMORPG and having a character who died in game and, as a result, also passed away in real life. My first thought was of my favourite anime, .hack, but I wasn't expecting a clone of it or anything. It's hard to come up with something original in this day and ... age. SnS managed to put an interesting twist on this now commonly used plot-device with the motives of the antagonist group-- to use the powers from the online games Union and RE:Union in the real world. Unfortunately, this isn't brought up until about mid-season and we go through too much drama to get to that point.

This brings me to my first score, the story, which I give a 5/10. There was an original enough spin on the stuck in an MMORPG to get me to finish the series and also hope for a localization of the light novels so I can see how things end. The bad part of things is the romantic drama. There isn't a love triangle in this anime-- it's much worse. There's five different characters and a lot of unrequited love and jealousy and it drags on and on. I'm not sure if this is true to the original LNs or if it was just to prolong the story enough to go through 12 episodes without making an original ending since the novels are still ongoing. There were too many fights and misunderstandings between the group of friends until they were all brought back together on the FINAL EPISODE. Yikes.

Next is the art. I rated it a 7/10 because it was decent. I think they kept up the production values and I don't remember any parts where I was brought out of the anime because the art had taken a sudden turn for the worse. The character designs are rather simple and generic, but they're nice on the eyes and they easy to tell apart.

I gave the sound a 6/10. It was nothing remarkable nor was it horrible. I don't recall anything sounding off. There's clashing of swords, casting of magic, etc. and it all sounded how I would expect it to sound.

Rating the characters in this anime was hard for me. I know that this isn't an original, but an adaption from a light novel, so I'm just grading from how the characters were presented here with a 7/10. Haruto, the main character, seems to be your generic self-insert character with next to no personality. The main girl, Asahi, was your typical happy-go-lucky young girl and didn't leave much of an impression on me. All of the characters seem to come from very common tropes. The only reason I'm not giving this anime a lower score is because of Takanori. He started off as a cold jerk who was constantly fighting with Haruto over Asahi because he also loved her. This was very irritating because it took up the majority of the time in the anime, but by the end his personality changed. He went from only thinking about his own feelings to being able to consider those of not only Asahi, but his other friends as well and became a better person for it.

Enjoyment for this series I gave a 6/10. There was enough action between the drama to keep me watching the series to the end. I think if things had been a little different, I would have enjoyed it a bit more.

Overall I think this anime is settling at a "fair" here on MAL with a 6/10. I don't think that this is something I'd go back to watch again, but if there was a second season I'd be more than willing to give it a shot. There were a lot of things left unexplained since things stopped, perhaps having caught up with the light novels, but I feel like this could be the start of something very interesting if it is written right.