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This was a fantastic show that absolutely crapped the bed in the second season. I'd give S1 an 8/10, while S2 deserves no higher than a 4/10.

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So season 1 is very good. The core of the show is a suspense-thriller and it executes this vision very well. There are lots of twists that genuinely got me, e.g. they would be attempting to sniff out a traitor with one obvious candidate and one improbable-seeming candidate. I would guess it would be the improbable candidate, since if the show is leaning so heavily towards the obvious one then I'd expect it to be a red herring. ... Turns out they were *both* wrong, and it was actually a dark-horse third candidate, explained in a way that made a lot of sense after the fact. There's several moments of this type of brilliant misdirection playing on expected tropes. Towards the end of the first season I genuinely couldn't predict where things would go, which is always a good sign in this genre.

There's also quite a bit of nuance which I appreciated. It starts out seeming like it's going to be a 1-dimensional struggle between the adults vs the kids, but it's soon revealed that everyone is playing their own game. The adults are nominally allied to each other, but are really out for themselves, and make alliances with some of the kids. The kids are mostly allied to each other but have their own side deals. It adds a lot of welcome dimensions to the struggle and makes the characters seem like real people rather than simple plot devices. There's also a fair degree of pragmatism in their plans, which I wouldn't normally expect from an anime, where they decide they can't save the youngest kids just yet.

I have a few minor quibbles. First, it's rather ludicrous that 11-year-old children are capable of doing all this, including tons of scheming and even chopping off body parts without much hesitation. I wouldn't have had to hold my suspension of disbelief so rigorously if they just made the characters the standard anime protagonist age of 16-20 years old, and nothing would have had to change that much. For the most part the characters act like this anyways, but in a few scenes the writers use their age to pretend that they're toddlers, which is quite jarring. There's also some pointless fakeout cliffhangers from episode to episode that didn't need to exist, e.g. implying characters are about to get caught where they shouldn't be, but it gets proven to be a false alarm in the first 10 seconds of the subsequent episode. These are silly and I wish they didn't exist.

Overall though, S1 gets a definite thumbs up from me.

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Then season 2 comes and bleeds out unceremoniously on the floor. Almost all of the negative reviews I've seen are mostly upset about the show not covering certain manga arcs. As an anime-only viewer, I'm fine if things need to be cut, but the end product still needs to work well, and this one just doesn't even come close.

Practically every good thing the show did in season 1 crumbles into dust in season 2. The show genre-shifts from a suspense-thriller to a generic action-adventure that's not well executed. The unfamiliar world of this show was tightly bound by the confines of the farm in season 1, which helped establish some parameters for what could reasonably happen, but once they're out in the wild it becomes clear that they're in very strange territory. At that point the suspense-thriller loses its luster because anything weird can plausibly be explained by "it's alien", and moments of tension are defused by "aliens doing alien things" that the writers could just be pulling out of their butts. After this happened a few times my interest rapidly waned.

The show has way too much lore to cram into 11 paltry episodes, and it’s clear that the creators cut far too close to the bone in which stories to keep vs exclude. The helpful aliens, Mujika and Sonju, end up being terrible characters because of this. Their backstory is left almost totally unexplained. Sonju is implied to have quite sinister motives for helping humans, but the show forgets about this and they both agree to help the humans again for no real reason. Then the commonfolk aliens decide to help the humans broadly for reasons that are barely explained, which is particularly ridiculous since it happens right after the humans commit war crimes on them. Alien society and Mujika in particular desperately needed more time to explain things. I don't think that stories need to explain every weird idiosyncracy if they're going to include aliens or demons or whatever, but there needs to be a balance since these ones ended up as little more than walking macguffins.

The nuance is stripped from the show as it becomes a basic story of good-vs-evil. At one point it starts to seem like there will be some internal dissent among the humans about the best course of action, but this is resolved in like 5 minutes. The main villain collapses after barely any resistance, and in his final monologue he implies that he was actually keeping the peace and that if the system was overthrown then bad things would be sure to happen. This is another potentially interesting plotpoint that ends up being sabotaged by time constraints, as it's shown shortly afterwards that nothing bad happened at all, therefore he was just cartoonishly evil and a stupid nihilist.

Finally, I can't really blame the show for this, but one of the major twists in season 2 (that I was already heavily suspecting) was inadvertently spoiled for me by Crunchyroll's thumbnails, so that wasn't great.

A spy, an assassin, and a girl who can read peoples' minds walk into a bar. The result is a somewhat decent sitcom that's fairly funny, as long as you're comparing it to other anime which is grading on an extremely generous curve. There were a few gags that could consistently make me smirk, e.g. the telepath girl's horrified reactions when someone thinks something bad, or her smug face when she comes up with a galaxy-brained plan. But there was certainly still nothing laugh-out-loud funny, and I swear this isn't just me with a stick up my butt. Japanese humor just really doesn't translate well ... at all.

The bigger downside is how corny this show is. It's an anime, so some level of cheesiness is to be expected, and it's a sitcom on top of that, so even more would be expected, but this still takes it up to 11. There's hardly any attempt at all to conceal the plotlines bending over backwards so the show can contort itself into whatever sitcom scenario it wants in any given episode. This corniness nearly pushed me to the breaking point in episode 5, although I eventually decided to stick with the series for at least 12 episodes. I'm not sure I made the right call, because although the rest of what I watched didn't reach that level, it was still a constant feature nevertheless.

It wasn't a total waste of time, but I didn't really want to continue watching after 12 episodes or so.

This is a very solid show that gives me strong vibes similar to Frieren, especially at the start of season 1. The story occurs in a realistic world where bad things happen all the time, but none of the characters seem that perturbed by it. The protagonist is captured and sold off as a slave in the first episode, and her reaction is more of an "ugh what a bother" rather than falling into a huge depression. The show is relatively upbeat, although it does become a bit darker towards the end of S1 as the mysteries unfold.

The mysteries themselves are quite well handled. ... There's several OK-to-good single-episode mysteries that have decent foreshadowing without giving away too much. Then there's the good-to-great meta mysteries that stretch out over the course of several episodes or even entire seasons. These are particularly well done and put the smaller mysteries into context of large plot points.

Like Frieren, this show has a lot of goofy moments, e.g. when the protagonist becomes manic at the sight of potion ingredients or eating poison or whatever. These are pretty cheesy, although they're brief enough that they never overstayed their welcome in ways that many other anime fall into. I generally don't really enjoy these types of things that much, but I didn't mind them in this show since they're well-handled.

One aspect that I didn't enjoy is the romance between the protagonist and the lead supporting character, the purple haired eunuch. This is very much something tailored towards women, and I can viscerally feel that I'm not the target audience here. It's very reminiscent of Twilight or 50 Shades of Gray, where the buff, rich, successful man who is widely beloved by women is only interested in the plain-looking female protagonist. She's not even that interested in him that much, and this just drives him to be even *more* obsessive over her. This preteen romance drama is weird and silly and I just wish it would go away. I imagine this is symmetrical to how women feel when anime has fanservice that's targeted towards heterosexual men.

This show is roughly equal parts 1) mystery, 2) characters acting goofy, and 3) romance. These comprise the majority of the runtime, and then 4) the broader character drama, gets added on top towards the end. I really enjoyed 1 and 4, I was fine with 2, and I didn't like 3. Overall, it's a very decent show.

This is a fairly generic fantasy isekai that has a few interesting ideas in its first season that it doesn't really capitalize on. The start is intriguing enough with the show almost become a revenge story, prompted on by a false rape accusation and the protagonist stooping to magically-enforced slavery. That's fairly edgy stuff for an anime and it piqued my interest at first, but unfortunately it peters out anticlimactically over the course of S1. The slave-girl obviously chooses to side with the protagonists of her own free will after a time, and the false rape accusation is shown to be a sham. There's the ... usual anime problem of the bad guys not really receiving significant punishment for their deeds, although at least this show is funny with one of the antagonists being referred to as "bitch" and "whore" as her penalty.

The action scenes, like in most anime, aren't particularly special. It's goofy to hear characters announce their attacks. Something like RISING MUNGO SLASH -- SUPREME SWORD STRIKE is just silly and makes it hard for me to take any of this seriously.

Raphtalia's character design is fairly boring. It's kind of weird that whoever designed her dropped the ball, as anime is usually good at this type of thing if nothing else. She's pretty plain which makes me care a bit less about the interpersonal dynamics.

There are probably too many characters in this series overall. They're frequently introduced, given a bit of personality, and then mostly forgotten after a few episodes.

The power fantasy isn't done nearly as well here as it is in, say, Solo Levelling.

After season 1, the show doesn't really bother trying to be anything other than a generic isekai, and it's not a particularly well-executed one either. I wasn't utterly bored in the moment-to-moment beats of the story, but it's certainly not memorable. Perhaps its building to something with its overarching conflict, but after 3 seasons I haven't seen much that would persuade me to stick around.

This show has some great moments in terms of worldbuilding and the mysteries involved, but my god does it absolutely WALLOW in annoying anime tropes. Subaru is by far the worst protagonist of any anime I've watched so far, and that's a very, VERY high bar. He whines and cries constantly, he's cripplingly unconfident, he's insufferably cringe when he's trying to be "suave", and he's as dumb as a rock.

First, the crying. This might sound excessively gender-stereotyped or callous, but I have a viscerally negative reaction to seeing grown men cry. It triggers a very similar disgust reflex that I get when I see ... something gross, like e.g. maggots crawling around a rotting animal carcass. I can of course make some allowance for men weeping when something truly terrible happens, like when they lose close family or a best friend. But it seems like Subaru cries almost every other episode in this series, with it oftentimes being exaggerated wailing that verges on goofiness. The obvious retort might be that he's going through a bad situation, dying repeatedly himself and seeing those he cares about die as well, at least temporarily. I'd say most normal men would rapidly become inured to this to a large degree, like Okabe does in Steins;Gate. But this series verges on torture-porn at some points, and crybaby Subaru is never far from turning on the waterworks. When he's not crying, he's usually complaining about how pathetic he is. I wholeheartedly agree, Subaru is absolutely pathetic, but he'd be a little less pathetic if he stopped exclaiming how pathetic he was! His whining gets so bad that there's almost an entire 22-minute episode where he does nothing other than complaining while the blue-haired maid gives him a pep talk. This was the nadir of the show for me, yet shockingly the people who watch anime seemed to like it, as it has the second-highest IMDB rating on ratingraph for season 1.

The suave cringe comes in when Subaru talks to Emilia. This show shows the problem when a romantic relationship is meant to be a focus over a long period of time. Relationships aren't all that complicated, and in the real world people can just ask the other person explicitly if they'd like to date. But that's over far too fast, so these shows find reasons to drag out the process ad infinitum. Subaru is blushy crushy towards Emilia for all of season 1, and finally openly declares his love for her as part of the climax of the season, and yet season 2 sees a regression and repeat of this. It's cringe the entire way through, with Subaru being way too much of a simp for this girl he's only known for a few weeks.

Then there's the idiocy. There's a lot of intrigue going on in this series, but Subaru is painfully incurious about it until it becomes blatantly obvious. There are several points where Puck or Beatrice give VERY VERY strong hints that they're hiding something, but Subaru apparently doesn't care enough to prod on subsequent lives. The best encapsulation of this mindset is when he goes to the Witch of Greed's tea party where she offers to tell him anything he wants to know, and he says "no thanks!" I wanted to punch him in the face at this point.

The mysteries of this world are great and well done, and the arcs of both seasons 1 and 2 are brilliant from that perspective. But I simply hate having to watch this through Subaru's eyes as he's insufferable in every way.

Finally, this might be a cheap shot, but Subaru's name was distracting. It'd be like naming the protagonist "Honda" or "Toyota".

I'm getting extremely strong Steins;Gate vibes from this, which given the release date of the Erased manga, it was almost certainly a main inspiration here. I enjoyed S;G, so this was welcome for me. I think this series actually has a stronger opening than S;G since it paces itself better, although the rest of its execution and especially its ending were less impressive, but I wouldn't call them "bad" per se.

The premise is that the protagonist is stuck in a timeloop that swaps between his current 29-year-old self, and his 10-year-old past where he had a chance to save a girl who was kidnapped. ... He makes a few changes to the past and it changes the present, but he doesn't successfully prevent the murder so he has to go back and keep trying. It's a compelling loop to push the story forward, although the limitations on his time travel power aren't explained. He just time-jumps back at seemingly random points, until eventually he says "this is it" as he arbitrarily intuits that he won't be able to time-jump any more. It's clear the writer did this to add tension, but it's hamhanded almost to the point of breaking the fourth wall. There's also the issue with him randomly being accused of a murder he obviously didn't commit, which was probably added to add more tension, but which strained my credulity.

When the protagonist first jumped back into his 10-year-old body, I immediately became worried that the show would devolve into childish tropes that anime likes to fall back on, but that happily didn't happen. The protagonist still has his 29-year-old mind, many of the other characters are adults, and he has a "smart" friend who acts like an adult as well. This prevents the series from regressing to focusing on nothing but pre-teen angst. That said, the show *does* have a few moments where it focused on the magical, metaphysical power of characters saying "I believe in you!" which caused me to roll my eyes.

The show was brought down somewhat by me correctly guessing the killer/kidnapper in the second episode. I was thereafter on alert for any foreshadowing, and it became very obvious that my guess was correct by the 6th episode. The antagonist's motivations and ending monologue were fairly goofy. It's just pure, irredeemable evil with a side-order of nonsense psychologizing that made him boring. This wasn't a Game of Thrones or Dexter level of quality decline, but it could have been handled better. As a final complaint, the protagonist's mom has weirdly puffy lips that I couldn't stop noticing.

I enjoyed my time with this series despite its shortfalls.

I enjoyed this show quite a lot for reasons I myself don't even quite understand. Most anime action scenes are somewhere between mediocre and garbage given all their tropey nonsense like lengthy mid-combat internal monologues, random debates with opponents, and characters arbitrarily manifesting new powers to defuse tension. While this show isn't particularly excessive by the standards of anime, it definitely has all three of those tropes to a decent degree. Even still, this show overcomes those shortcomings by executing the power really fantasy well. I also think I might have a personal preference for "hero conceals their power level" stories, and there are parallels ... to Frieren: Beyond Journey's End here to that effect.

The start of the show is a bit rough as the main character starts as the typical Joe Average anime protagonist, i.e. he's a whiny useless loser. There's also some painfully obvious riddles in the first dungeon that were a bit goofy. The characters entered a room with a 3-step puzzle that killed people when they failed, and yet they started celebrating once they solved one part of the puzzle, essentially saying "surely that's all there is to it, right?" before getting turned into red mist.

The protagonist's growth arc only really starts in the third episode, which isn't *that* long (it's only about 40 minutes of screentime), but for a 12 episode anime it was probably a higher percentage of the total runtime than it needed to be. On top of that, his "getting stronger" arc proceeds very rapidly to where he's basically already a god by the end of season 1. The series uses typical tier list rankings (E, D, C, B, A, S) for power level, and he's upper A or S tier in the blink of an eye. The show would have been better paced if it only used one episode to tell the background story, and then slowed his growth to where he was only a C tier by the end of the season so his growth could be savored rather than rushed.

But my issues with pacing are mostly just my indirect wish for *more* of this series, and when somebody wants more of something that's usually a good indication that they liked it. I wish I could better explain precisely why I enjoyed this show as much as I did, but since I really can't I'll just plead "vibes" or something and be on my way.

The premise of Death Parade is set out in the first episode, where the characters are being judged on whether their spirit gets reincarnated or cast out into the void. The main focus is on revealing what type of person they are through a simple game, with the game sometimes being manipulated to cause tension and force the players to reveal their secrets. If that sounds intriguing to you, I would agree. I hope I get to watch a show like that some day, because Death Parade quickly forgets about its premise and instead tells a story of people going through emotional turmoil instead. It's ... not altogether terrible, but I think the show would have been better if it focused on the moral judgements and mystery rather than having people cry all the time.

There's a LOT of overdramatic crying in this series. I kept a tally and over half of the 12 episodes feature someone balling their head off, frequently multiple times per episode. I guess it makes sense since they're dead and they're learning the often tragic circumstances of their death, but I'm the type of person who really doesn't like a focus on crying. I'm fine with a little bit to add dramatic flair to a particularly poignant scene, but this show wallows in it in a way that's just excessive. I've never been big on emotional stories, and that's especially true for characters I don't care about. Most characters in this show last for only one episode which isn't nearly enough time for me to care about their problems, so their crying quickly just became annoying.

The moral judgement bit was also somewhat confusing. A lot of the situations ended up seeming like they weren't deserving of moral judgements at all. In one case a girl gets plastic surgery and reunites with her childhood friend, and this somehow ends up being a moral clue that she was deserving to be reincarnated? Another dude doesn't appreciate his stepmother, then commits suicide... and also deserves to reincarnation? There's even one trial where they don't show the results of whether they're reincarnated or cast to the void, which may have been an artistic choice, but it sorta seemed like the show writers either couldn't make up their mind on whether to save or condemn, or simply forgot to pass judgement.

The mysteries were a mixed bag. The trials are set up such that people slowly regain their memories and recall details of their life and how they died, but I figured most of these well before they were revealed. There's also the overarching meta-narrative involving the other characters that has some mystery, but it doesn't really end up mattering all that much. In contrast, the setup of the trials was quite well done in episode 1, where the audience was put in the same boat as the people in the trial. There are red herrings to misdirect people into thinking e.g. whoever wins the game will be sent to heaven. I fell for these hard, and was pleasantly surprised when they were subverted. The show does this at least one more time later in the series.

Also on a more positive note, I liked many of the recurring characters in this series. I enjoyed watching Decim's dispassionate demeanor that reminded me a lot of myself. I also enjoyed watching Nona (the little manager chick) with her quiet confidence. She steals every scene she's in, and I wish her story and its reveals were more important. Finally, I enjoyed how this series was fairly mature overall, barring the excessive crying of course. I've probably been watching too much shonen anime (although I'd argue this is more an issue with anime as a whole), so it was refreshing for me to watch something that wasn't aimed at kids.

I dropped this halfway through as I was really not jiving with it at all. This is the Youtuber Alpharad's favorite anime, and I thought it could be interesting to watch given that it was supposed to be a parody of the genre. Redo of Healer was an inadvertent parody of anime and I enjoyed that a lot, so I figured this could be similarly worthwhile. It turns out that when anime is actively trying to be subversive of itself, it just ends up failing hard.

This show is very trope-filled, presumably for the purpose of satire. The protagonist Ryuko's school uniform is skimpy, and ... it can power-up to grant her special abilities -- and doing so makes it become even more skimpy in the process. This is clearly poking fun at fanservice, but my question is "where's the parody?" It's moderately more over-the-top than fanservice normally is, and it's on the screen almost all the time, but it mostly just fades into the background. Maybe Redo of Healer broke my brain here in terms of how ridiculous these things tend to be, but Ryuko's attire doesn't seem *that* crazy to me by the standard of anime. There's a bunch of further plot details relating to uniforms, but they don't deal with the revealing nature of the clothing that much. The show doesn't do enough to subvert or transcend the tropes, it just sort of winks at the camera and keeps doing them.

While I was fine (or at least neutral) towards the fanservice, the show is also very trope-heavy in its action scenes as well. These are the majority of the show's runtime, and they were boring enough that it killed the series for me. They're very formulaic: 1) Ryuko challenges another a foe to a fight. 2) That foe brutally smacks Ryuko around for a while. 3) Ryuko thinks "oh no, this is going really bad", before finding either a specific enemy weakness or some powerup she didn't know she had. 4) If the foe is important enough, they might reveal a secret power of their own to turn the tides again. 5) Repeat steps 3 and 4 if needed to pad out the runtime. 6) One character arbitrarily becomes the victor.

These fights obviously lack tension, and they don't have much visual spectacle either. Maybe if you like exaggerated anime combat you might think it looks cool, but to me it's very plastic. The fights are also constantly interrupted with the usual anime cliches of characters debating each other, or announcing their new powers like they're reading off a checklist. If this is supposed to be satire, I ask again: "where's the parody?" The show doesn't seem to be subverting the tropes or making fun of them, it just does them with a bit more gusto than usual.

Yawn.

Ghost in the Shell is one of those superclassics that was clearly brilliant for its time, but doesn't really live up to modern expectations. It might be a worthwhile watch for people who are interested in the evolution of anime or film, but I found little in terms of subjective enjoyment here. I was bored enough while watching it that my mind frequently drifted towards other things, and I was somewhat relieved when it was over.

I watched the dub, and there was a very annoying sound difference between characters speaking and the special effects that meant I either couldn't hear what the characters were ... saying, or I'd be deafened whenever something like gunfire happened. I eventually settled on the dub with subtitles from the sub. The differences between the subtitles and the words being spoken was enough to be a nuisance, but at least I could understand what was being said without randomly going deaf.

The film is too short to do all the things it wants. It's only 78 minutes before the credits roll, and it devotes many scenes to long, ponderous views of the cityscape or futuristic tech. If those are subtracted, then that leaves scarcely over an hour to cram several action scenes, a political thriller, and a bunch of existentialist philosophy into.

The action scenes were what I enjoyed the most, although I'm grading on a pretty generous curve here. If you've read any of my other reviews then you'd know I typically don't find the action scenes in anime to be all that engaging, but this film had enough spectacle to at least be somewhat interesting. Some of the "futuristic" special effects look goofily dated, like how people in the 90s expressed "computers" by spamming green numbers on the screen. Otherwise, the effects in the fights were pretty decent. Old Western special effects can often have an uncanny valley problem, but that's less of an issue in anime.

The political thriller is mostly just used as a setting, which is fine. I enjoy political thrillers so I was a bit disappointed that the film didn't go more into that area, but it's OK to just use a thin vertical slice of political machinations as the backdrop for a story. There's a lot of people and departments thrown out that I had some trouble keeping them straight, but it ultimately didn't matter.

The film Waxes a bit excessively philosophical about the difference between a body ("shell") and a person's sense of self or "soul" ("ghost"). The concept of a soul, while powerfully evocative to almost every ancient human society, is known not to exist by modern science. At best, it's just a useful shorthand for how people perceive themselves. Fanciful notions of the self existing beyond the physical confines of a human brain are childish nonsense. It naturally follows that a robot could be just as much as a "real person" as any normal human, assuming the tech was sufficiently advanced. As such, I found most of the philosophical subtext of the film to be akin to a nuanced discussion of whether Santa exists. The answer is already obvious, and any attempts to claim it's non-obvious seem like a tryhard liberal arts undergraduate attempting to be galaxy-brained.

My score of 4/10 reflects my relatively negative subjective enjoyment while watching Ghost in the Shell, while the "mixed feelings" indicates that I can appreciate the film as a historical artifact. I believe the movies it inspired (e.g. the Matrix) did a much better job of capturing its techno-dystopian vision while also being more entertaining to watch.