Back to S1apSh0es's Profile S1apSh0es's Profile

Video review for tl;dr purposes:

https://youtu.be/LtcSMP0Ydfg

The Nekopara OVA is nothing short of an absolute kickstarter success story in almost every respect. The initial goal of the campaign, put together by Sekai Project the American publisher, was to put together a 20 minute OVA for a shoe string budget of just $100,000 US. Yes that is considered a tight budget for that kind of project because the average episode of an anime is just as long and can easily cost three times as much. That first goal was met in a matter of hours and before long all of the stretch goals had been ... met except one. The final dollar amount was well over nine times the initial request and the slacker backer campaign ended with over a million dollars raised and the final stretch goal achieved. The magic of cat girls is truly limitless!

So what did we get for our bits? Well the physical goods exceeded expectations but there were some bumps in the road. Tokyo Otaku Mode who supplied the goods shipped everything about a week earlier than they we supposed to which made the OVA launch on Steam four days ahead of scheduled. Not a bad thing in my opinion. And some of the names in the special thanks credits were accidently omitted, but they were put in with an insert and got some extra signed swag for their troubles. Again, very well handled by Sekai Project.

So how about the work itself? Well, the OVA is . . . erm . . . a lot of things. We’re gonna have to really delve deep into this one. The plot feels rushed along quite a bit. I mean, we are trying to cram three visual novel volumes into what is essentially a one hour long movie. Making things seem a little bit more grounded though is the hour long OVA is divided into three distinct twenty minute sections. The first section was the initial kickstarter goal and the other two were set up to be the stretch goals.

Throughout the OVA we follow Chocola and Vanilla as they tag along with Kashou Minaduki, their adoptive father . . . big brother . . . owner. Ehhh . . . it’s kinda weird. Anyway Kashou is opening up his own confection shop and the two cat girls get hired on as staff. Cute cat girl antics ensue. Throughout the process of learning the job MC protag guy constantly says things like “Cat girls can’t do that. Cat girls have to ignore their instincts.” Hell, Chocola and Vanilla can’t even go outside on their own, not until they pass “the bell exam” which means they get and ID saying they can freely travel on their own which is a literal bell around their neck, like cat girls are second class citizens or something. Perhaps I’m just some American PC soy cuck, but just bear in mind that Japan is a defacto Ethno-State so the idea of making foreigners wear some sort of obvious ID around their neck probably sounds really good to most people there.

Anyway, one training montage later, Chocola and Vanilla pass their bell exam despite everyone saying how hard it was and only one in five ever pass, but we literally never get introduced to any other cat girls that haven’t passed the test.

Anyway the show is just really standard slice of life tomfoolery with cat girls from your favorite visual novel brought to life in animation. Not much else to write home about. So what about the fundamentals? The music is good. . . it’s just good . . . it’s fine. The OP is lit and got stuck in my head instantly, but the background score is just passable at best. I should know, I got the OST in the limited edition box. To be fair, the music does a decent job of selling those cheap emotional crits earlier on in the show’s run time.

The art style is gorgeous but that has a lot more to do with really good source material than anything else. The animation, however, is stale. I mean just check out coconut eating this cake, it literally just disappears. For one million dollars you might be expecting more. The average anime is way more fluid, the average anime costs $300k per 20 minutes, this is 60 minutes, so one million more than covers the costs. However, the animation studio was Felix Film who, according to MyAnimeList, only ever worked on A Good Librarian like a Good Shepherd before, so I’m not sure what most people were expecting. Honestly I think this OVA suffers from the same thing Hagania did: beautifully ornate striking character designs that just don’t translate well to animation because you’re just asking too much. That’s not to say that it doesn’t have its moments, because it certainly does, but they’re mostly reserved for comedy and ecchi bits and nothing else.

So, there you have it: The Nekopara OVA was just so-so, and . . . that’s fine. It was serviceable, and it didn’t fuck anything up too badly. By and large, people seem to enjoy the product they got for the money they put up. And that. Is. HUGE. With this much money, this big of an intellectual property, and this many eyes on the situation, it is very important that this OVA turned out all right.

The Nekopara OVA could have the same impact on the anime world as the Little Witch Academia 2 kickstarter project did. Both proved that anime can be crowd-funded and far exceed expectations: if done correctly. So long as studios keep making kickstarter projects and following through with making a decent product, anime is basically assured to continue on forever, regardless of the ever changing landscape of online streaming and TV broadcasts. The Nekopara OVA needed to succeed and it did. It wasn’t a world beater, but it gave people what they wanted, and that’s what counts.

So go forth cute cat girls! Go forth and stand proud for you are the future of anime!!!

Video Review of Black Lagoon as a whole here: https://youtu.be/DS0V83HPIu4

Black Lagoon wrapped up its second season in 2006, but four years down the road they switched to an OVA format for the next arc and over the course of about a year put out five expertly crafted pieces of animation that acted as a brilliant end cap to the franchise.

The family from the Maid to Kill arc of the first season is back and things have gone tits-up back home in Columbia. Vowing revenge for her master’s death, Roberta’s ... on a full-blown suicide mission to take down the elite CIA team that murdered her master. The Lovelace family contracts Black Lagoon (or more specifically, just Rock) to help hunt down their wayward maid servant/ terminator and things get crazy as hell from there. Hotel Moskow gets involved trying to settle a decade old grudge against the United States, Chang and the Triad try to settle everything down, not wanting to fumble the tentative peace and control they have over Roanapur, and all while our once quiet bashful Rock seeks to manipulate every single event from the shadows and play each side off the other.

This is beyond a shadow of a doubt the strongest of the three sections of Black Lagoon and it’s likely because it focuses on just one arc. There’s no bullshit., no filler, just an intricately detailed story with interesting characters all with their own conflicting emotions and motivations. If this arc doesn’t strike you with at least something then I think it’s safe to say that you just don’t have a pulse.

By the end of the second season Rock was starting to go off his rocker, admitting to Balalaika, that he’s just in this to see how much control he can have in a given situation. When the OVA series kicks off he’s full-blown maniacal at this point; pulling all-nighters trying to predict what each faction will do and gambling with the lives of those who trust him and innocent by-standers alike. By the end of the series, he’s a much the bad guy as any of the other shot-callers in Roanapur.

Rock’s transformation from nebbish office worker to callous puppet master is one of the strongest aspects of the entire franchise, and it’s sad that most people completely ignore it. Most people seem to ignore this philosophical and existential aspect of the show in favor of all the shooty-fun-stuff and the gun porn, and don’t get me wrong, there’s good reason too; it’s all top notch, but to see this show often written off as the aforementioned “Wizz-bang-shooty-fun” is doing it a massive disservice.

Ultimately, about Black Lagoon as a whole I would have to say everyone needs to give it a shot; if for no other reason than to just get to this arc. Yeah, it’s kind of niche with its crime/drama action-oriented story, filthy language, gun porn, and dark ominous existentialist philosophy flying around, but it has so many different facets to it that I think most viewers will find something here that they like or outright love. I might even go so far as to call it a cult classic and with the manga now ongoing again, hopefully we haven’t seen the last of this brilliant series that holds nothing back. Fingers crossed for a part four.

This will be a review of all three parts of the series for simplicity's sake. Video review here: https://youtu.be/DS0V83HPIu4

Black Lagoon first saw the light of day as a manga released in 2002. The series went on hiatus in 2010, but was brought back in spring of this year, so what better time to do a retroactive three-part review, amirite?

The anime debuted in the spring season of 2006 and the story starts off with our “main” character, a painfully bland salaryman named Rokuro Okajima, referred to simply as “Rock” for the duration of the show’s run, being abducted while on a business trip by the Lagoon ... Company, a group of mercenary pirates operating the South Pacific. When Rock’s corporate office finds out about this, they leave him for dead and he takes the opportunity to chunk his old life and throw in with the Lagoon Company in possibly the cuckiest, passive aggressive way possible. Wizz-bang-shooty-fun ensues.

The Lagoon Company consists of Revy, the hot headed Chinese-American gun slinger, Dutch, the cool, calm, and collected African-American Vietnam veteran who acts as the CEO of the outfit, Benny, a Jewish American from Florida who is essentially the brains of the operation and seems eerily at-peace with all carnage and killing going on all the time, and the ever trusty Black Lagoon the team’s World War 2 era torpedo boat that is not only their home-away-from home, but their biggest weapon and asset. With so many Americans in the cast it should come as no surprise that there is indeed a dub and it is superb, being one of only half a dozen dubs that I think you’re missing out if you never get around to hearing them. (Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Dragonball Z, Yu Yu Hakusho, Black Lagoon, and Samurai Champloo).

The Lagoon Company operates as a sort dysfunctional family; in particular Rock and Revy are constantly at one another’s throats as Revy is charged by Dutch to protect Rock and make sure he doesn’t stumble into any trouble, which is easy to do in their home base in the lawless city of Roanapur. Although you see this adversarial relationship between the four slowly growing on all of them. They’re all assholse to one another, but they all seem to think deep down yeah but they’re my group of assholes. This show is really good at making you fall for characters that are by all measures total dicks.

And while I’m in the process of mentioning the location from which most of the events unfold from, I’d like to say this: The strongest character in the entire show is the city of Roanapur itself. You get a great sense of personality right as soon as you see the place. Rocka and the others are driving across the bridge into the city in Benny’s pink Pontiac GTO and you just see old nooses littering the bridge; like someone hung a bunch of people there at one point and took the bodies down but didn’t bothered to remove the nooses themselves. That’s Roanapur: a city aware enough to remove the corpses from the streets, but not acclimated enough to normalcy to think to sweep up the bullet casings as well.

The first season of Black Lagoon introduces a litany of important and colorful side-characters, and their motivations over a well paced amount of time, but it’s lacking in depth. You don’t seem to get a strong sense of each character’s place in the world or how they view themselves at least not in this first season anyway. However, in the Eagle Hunting arc (Episodes 4-6) you do get this really deep introspective monologue by Revy while she and Rock are picking through a sunken Nazi sub, as well as another great piece of prose in a flashback where the original Kriegsmarine officer questions the whole point of the war with a radical SS officer. These two moments were possibly the strongest of the entire first season, and there’s even more moments like this in the Second Barrage and Roberta’s Blood Trail, but that’s not what most people praise the show for.

Most people seem to ignore this philosophical and existential aspect of the show in favor of all the shooty-fun-stuff and the gun porn, and don’t get me wrong, there’s good reason too; it’s all top notch, but to see this show often written off as the aforementioned “Wizz-bang-shooty-fun” is doing it a massive disservice.

The first season starts to wind down with the Maid to Kill arc, and in this one you may need to brush up on your geo-politics a bit; we start getting into South American politics, the many drug wars going on there and even the communist group FARC get’s involved. Now me, I fucking love geo-politics, I keep up with it and know all the history, but the show has a tendency to exposition dump a history lesson every once in a while to set up the back story for a new arc. This can turn some people off, but its right up my alley and I can’t get enough of it.

In the Second Barrage, all the aforementioned shortcomings of Black Lagoon melt away and you get a lot of background into the different factions as well as a strong opening arc with the vampire twins and the Russian crime syndicate Hotel Moskow. This where this show gets really dark in some places and it’s far from the last time you’ll get a taste of it in the series. There’s some episodic mid-season fuckery going on after that but once we hit the Fujiyama Gansta Paradise arc, we’re not hitting the ground at any point afterwards. At this point we start to see Rock go down a disturbing path were he doesn’t seem to be trying to fix these problems he sees in the events unfolding before them, but just trying to exert some kind of control over them; almost like he just wants the power to manipulate things to his will. And this reaches its logical extreme when we set out on our third and final leg of this triple play: The five-part OVA series Roberta’s Blood Trail.

The family from the Maid to Kill arc is back and things have gone tits-up back home in Columbia. Vowing revenge for her master’s death, Roberta’s on a full-blown suicide mission to take down the elite CIA team that murdered her master. Hotel Moskow gets involved trying to settle a decade old grudge against the United States, Chang and the Triad try to settle everything down, and all while our once quiet bashful Rock seeks to manipulate every single event from the shadows and play each side off the other. This is beyond a shadow of a doubt the strongest of the three sections of Black Lagoon and it’s likely because it focuses on just one arc. There’s no bullshit. No filler. Just an intricately detailed story with interesting characters all with their own conflicting emotions and motivations. If this arc doesn’t strike you with at least something then I think it’s safe to say that you just don’t have a pulse.

Ultimately, about Black Lagoon as a whole I would have to say everyone needs to give it a shot. Yeah, it’s kind of niche with its crime/drama action-oriented story, filthy language, gun porn, and dark ominous existentialist philosophy flying around, but it has so many different facets to it that I think most viewers will find something here that they like or outright love. I might even go so far as to call it a cult classic and with the manga now ongoing again, hopefully we haven’t seen the last of this brilliant series that holds nothing back.

Lost potential, thy name is Nyaruko-san

A little disclaimer to start: this review will cover both seasons of the Nyaruko-san anime TV series because they are both similar enough to warrant it.

On paper, Nyaruko-san has a lot going for it. It’s got a comedy-harem set up, the girls are all human manifestations of lovecraftian horror monsters, but some girls have the hots more for each other than out lead guy, which is a plus (hey, I’m a simple guy, girl-love is always going to score a few extra points with me). This show should have been a cash cow like Monster Musume before that was even ... a thing. But this show comes up short on its payload at nearly every turn .So, where (and why) did this show miss the mark?

First off, a bit of history. While the true-blue anime series didn’t see the light of day until 2012, this IP began as a light novel series entitled “Haiyore! Nyaruko-san” in October of 2009 and got its “anime” debut as a series of five to ten minute flash shorts from 2010 to 2011, and these shorts are admittedly pretty damn hilarious; I highly recommend you check them out. But what about the main course? Ehh. . . .

The show kicks off with our eponymous silver-haired heroine being introduced by saving the main guy, Mahiro, from some demonic entity and we just kind of go from there with no real explanation of what where when or why; it’s just all there for the sake of being there because, well, we’re marketing this as a character driven show to sell a shit-ton of figurines and other merch for the otakus so who cares about idle details like compelling narrative, or any narrative for that matter.

And that is your first insight into how this anime will go on to conduct itself: just doing so for the sake of doing so. “Forced” does not even begin to describe this show or its humor. So many of the jokes center around just random stuff: like the shoehorned super mega video game console that has too many features and fails or the fact that Mahiro’s main weapons are forks for no discernible reason.

As for the plot, there isn’t one, this show is almost completely an episodic affair. “Oh that’s fine, it worked for Space Dandy, right?” you might say. Well, Space Dandy had some great episodes, some good episodes, some mediocre ones, and a few outright stinkers. It basically just pinballed all over the place. Nyaruko-san? Well, it just flatlines it all the way through. At no point does this show ever get any more interesting or funnier than in its first five minutes. Not only that, but they use up all their jokes in the first half of the first season! We’re six episodes deep into a twenty-four episode run, people, and we just blew our load in the first quarter!?

The jokes are just too fast and too out of left field to work for twenty plus minutes, and then it hit me: Nyaruko-san wasn’t bad in spite of its run time, it was bad because of it. With the five minute long episodes, the showrunners would craft a single joke around an entire episode and it wouldn’t feel forced or too drawn out because it would just hit and roll off so well. Set-up, build up, punchline, laugh, credits roll, watch the next one. It’s a formula that works well for online shorts but falls flat on its face when drug out for nearly half an hour.

The OP and ED are both above average to good for both seasons, but the show really shines in art style and character design. The show is definitely distinctive; you’re not going to mistake it for anything else coming down the pipe during the same time period, but all of this isn’t enough to save the show as a whole.

And don’t get me wrong, there’s potential here, I see it; Fuck yeah, I see it, but it is just poorly executed. Even still, droves of people seem to enjoy both seasons of this anime, and I’m not the type of person to tell them they’re wrong, but this show just isn’t for everybody; go watch the shorts instead if you had to make a choice.

I'll be honest with you: I only picked this one up because the title was fun to say. That, and it was only going to take up five minutes of my time per week (actually closer to four).

Judging by the promo images and such you'd expect this short to be heavy on the ecchi side of things but we don't get that until episode 11 and that one episode where the A/C broke. Other than that this is just standard slice of life/ cute girls doing cute things. No need to go out of your way for this one folks.

Although, I'll make the mostly throwaway ... comment that the ED is actually pretty good. One of the characters is supposedly a manga artist, (although that's just tossed out there once or twice) so the ED consists of pencil sketches of the characters in a carnival that is made up entirely out of drawing utensils set to a really solid and upbeat song just blasting in the background.

Great, but should you watch this just for a pretty good ED? Fuck no. Why are you even still reading this? Go outside and start making better decisions than I have.

Studio Trigger pulled the double this spring season of 2016. Their first show I came a cross this season was the short wild and wacky tour de force of Trigger intellectual properties: Space Patrol Luluco. The other was Kiznaiver, which continues Trigger's trend of producing a respectable number of original works to go along side their adaptations.

Our "main" character Katsuhira has an odd condition in which he cannot feel pain, be it physical or, as it seems, emotional as well. His close childhood friend Chidori protects him from those who would look to take advantage of him, and if you're thinking this is some grade ... A shipping fuel, well you haven't even heard the half of it yet.

I say Katsuhira is a "main" character in quotations because the show quickly introduced a number of other characters who are all far more interesting than the first two I've mentioned. By the end of the first episode all these characters are abducted and given the show's trademark Kizna scars that bind them all together by making them all feel each other's pain. You might be saying at this point "this sounds like a great plot for a suspense/ mystery show", you're right it does. Unfortunately the blue haired Rei Ayanami clone in this show fucks that right up.

Standard creepy blue haired emotionless doll character #241, Sonozaki explains all the details of the Kizna, how it works, what her and her organization hope to accomplish, etc. all in the space of a few minutes. She then explains that the group will have to complete tests together in order to avoid some non-specific penalty (These tests are beamed to the kiznas via hologram).

All of this effectively takes out any suspense or narrative investment right at the knees. However, the worst part of it all is that the show still tries to play it off as though there is still some big mystery when clearly there isn't.

The show would have benefited hugely if Sonozaki weren't introduced at all and the Kizna scars were never explained, only leaving the hologram notes of the tests that were now underway. Now that's a damn suspense/ mystery plot right there. But even then, there are so many group situations and group outings that are done for the sake of narrative convenience that are left poorly explained in every episode that the writers felt there had to be some anchoring point for the show to go from.

Everything else from the show is solid though. The opening is nice, the animation and visuals are top notch even though the semi-futuristic light novel city trope is getting horrendously over used here in the last few seasons, and finally most of the characters do get some good development even though I found it harder to give a shit with each successive episode.

Overall, if you're a Trigger fan like me you'll probably feel compelled to watch the show from flag to flag no matter what I say. As for the passing anime fan: take it or leave it, you're not going to lose sleep either way. Although, if you're willing to put in the time for it, the back half of the show is far stronger than the first.

Don't like reading? Never fear. Video review here: https://youtu.be/tDNdmrXDld0

Have you ever had that one show you sit down to watch and you know, no matter how many check boxes it rattles off on your “should I watch this” checklist, you can never let any of your friends know you’ve watched it, because it’ll be critically terrible, but it’ll be a perfect guilty pleasure show for you, and then it actually turns out to be legitimately good, and now you can never tell anyone because they’re going to think the same negative things you thought about it? Well, Girls und Panzer is that show for ... me.

Girls und Panzer at first glance appears to be some weird moe-blob show with some tanks thrown in to get the militaria geeks’ attention, but this show is actually a tournament sports anime, and if there’s one thing I love in my anime more than tanks, it’s a goddamn tournament. I think the original Dragonball is actually better paced than Z because of the many tournaments in the series, my favorite saga of Yu Yu Hakusho is the Dark Tournament saga, and I prefer the original Yugioh to GX because of . . .well. . . the tournaments. Hell I don’t even give a fuck about basketball, but you will sure as hell find me glued to my TV and filling out a bracket every year when March Madness kicks in.

As per usual for moe shows, Girls und Panzer focuses on one main with her core group of three to five friends, but the tournaments in which they compete are on a platoon level, which means that there are four other tanks, each with their own crew that tag along as well, but unfortunately the show never goes into any depth with most of them. That’s regrettable, because look at the girls behind the sticks of the StuG III. Look at them!

Who are they? Where did they come from? Why are they dressed like that? Why are they always quoting Caesar and other great generals? Not a single one of these questions is answered. Attack on Titan went into depth with their cast, despite how massive it was, and I can still rattle off over a dozen characters from that show right of the top of my head. With Girls und Panzer? Ehhhhh, not so much. Even the name of the main girl escapes me for a while. (It’s Miho, by the way)

So, in the tournament, the school ships pair off in, oh yeah school ships. . . . look at this shit.

That’s . . . that’s just fucking cool. I have nothing else to say about it other than we need a naval-based spin off series of this immediately. So yeah, these school ships pair off in these 5v5-ish battles with each school being populated by walking, talking stereotypes of the countries that they are supposed to represent. The British are fair, chivalrous, and way too preoccupied with not spilling their tea. The Americans are loud assholes who bend the rules to win. The Russians are cold blooded stoics that rely on home-field advantage. And the Germans believe zat zhe best tank is zhe tiger tank and zhe tiger tank alvays vins!

How do these tournament matches go? Well, they’re quite entertaining. They take a number of twists and turns and instead of going down the overused Deus Ex Machina route of total ass pulls, Miho and her gang of motley tankerettes win their battles via cunning strategy and deft tactical judgment. They simply outthink their opponents who see them as mere underdogs who have only gotten as far as they have due to a series of flukes. They even go so far as to use real tactics taken from WW2 historical accounts. I like that. Good on you, show. Treat your audience like adult- . . . well as much of an adult as I can be. I mean, I’m watching a show about highschoolers fighting in school sanctioned tank tournaments.

Also, they’re not using paintball rounds either. This is live ammo people! Hell, one group of girls gets hit, they’re tank is knocked out, and they have to put out a frikkin’ fire inside of it. What the hell? I don’t remember the football team at my school ever having to do something that batshit crazy. Speaking of what-the-fuckery, why are there no males at this school . . . or any of the schools? There’s males in the show, but they are only ever shown once or twice. The schools aren’t girls’ academies. The girls attending these schools always talk about meeting their boyfriends and shit, but where the hell are they? The tankery clubs are all female because the show makes a half assed attempt to explain that girls who practice tankery grow up to be fine and desirable women, but as far as I can see, all the girls who tell their family that they’re in the tankery club get treated like shit because of it.

As visuals go, the level of detail in this show is stunning. All the tanks are rendered in CG so 3D models have to be made for each tank type and they nail them all dead on right down to the fucking rivets. And trust me, I know they got the tanks right, I play World of Tanks, bruh. On top of all that the show has an immense offering of tank facts and trivia that’ll make WW2 geeks like me salivate at the very mention of the phrase, “Eighty-eight millimeter main gun.”

With sound, the opening and ending credits are okay, the Japanese voice cast is alright, but the English actresses just completely phone this one in. It’s really unfortunate because the animators and designers obviously put a lot of hard work and TLC into this project. The music however is on point. The jaunty little military pieces that play during the battles and as such offer a light hearted touch that fits the show perfectly. Unfortunately this is shot down immediately for me, because the best music piece of the whole show, Katyusha, is omitted. Originally sung by soviet soldiers in World War II and later famously performed by the Red Army Choir, it was covered by the Japanee voice cast who sang it, in fucking Russian, and the North American release apparently couldn’t secure the rights to Katyusha, so they replaced it with the fucking Tetris theme.

I’m willing to largely forgive this due to the sound effects they managed to put together for this. Every tank sounds a little bit different and unique in its own right. From the initial rev of the engine to its cruising speed, each group of tanks puts up its own chorus of diesel, oil, and steel. As a guy who grew up on racetracks in the southeast listening to hundreds of different engines rev and pitch, I can really appreciate the commitment that takes.

Overall, Girls und Panzer is a fantastic little show that has an even-handed mix of historically based trivia and narrative pacing that culminates into a show that I honestly think most people will enjoy, whether they be history buffs like me or just the passing anime fan looking for a short and sweet anime to grab their attention. My only complaint is that there hasn’t been that naval spin-off show yet. Oh wait. . .

High School Fleet review incoming. . .