Back to Setrin's Profile Setrin's Profile

This show is self care for the soul.

There's not any real overarching plot or tension or anything like that; just a bunch of cute wholesome episodic events taking place at an inn for mystical creatures. The central focus of the show is the Konohanatei inn itself and the attendants that work at it. A basic understanding of classical Japanese mythology seriously helps with understanding the context and lore behind the various entities and deities that show up at the inn and live in the surrounding towns, but isn't necessary to appreciate the show. With a few exceptions, most of the episodes have two mini-arcs focusing ... on a guest and often one or two of the attendants. The main character, Yuzu, is the focus attendant in most of these but in truth this is an ensemble cast and everyone gets good screen time and character building. The inn does have a hot spring bath and there's a few bathing scenes with the cast, but none of it is played for fanservice, which is something I give the show points for.

The animation and sound is nothing special with most of the art direction simply doing its job. This may be a turnoff for people with high animation standards but I got used to it quickly. There's a few cuts to a simpler chibi-fox art style at various points but they don't take away from the overall feel of the show like I've seen with other works.

The primary draw of the show, to me, was just how gentle and relaxing the experience was. I left every episode feeling relaxed and happy like I had visited the inn myself. It's just a cute and fun show with a mostly emotional enjoyment level and I love it for that. It's all it is and it's all it needs to be.

It's hard to really find something that hasn't already been said about this show and it's remarkably hard to explain this show as a whole to someone who hasn't seen it or already doesn't have some familiarity with the memes or fanatical fanbase.

In short, JJBA is one of those shows that's just unique in everything it does. There's never been anything else truly like it, at least later. I personally JoJos doesn't come into its own until Part 3 where now it feels like yet another shonen battle show. Being an older one, it doesn't suffer a lot of modern cliches like tournament arcs or ... a broody protagonist. This one of the hot-blooded muscle-bound 80s punch-fests of yesteryear. What this show has more than others, however, is an unapologetic ownership of everything it wants to be and does so in a way that feels endearing.

This section of the show covers parts one and two of the JJBA series: Phantom Blood and Battle Tendency. Each can be taken as a story in their own right but really work as a pair and serve as a foundation for a large majority of the rest of the series, where things really jump off. Despite the name, this show has an easy to comprehend if dynamic power system that allows for a lot, but doesn't really go for the "lol random" style of bizarre you'd see in other shows self-styled as such.

It's hard to really explain what makes this such a good show on its own. However, the writing, story flow, character development, and willingness to be as over the top as it wants without any breaks or apology to me is what does it. There's nothing I would call a genuine flaw in the show outside of this part's somewhat annoying tendency to over-explain some characters' maneuvers and plans, something that mercifully gets better after this installment. This does mean a lot of dialogue however. I highly recommend the dub to people who have trouble with subtitles with this one.

If you're even remotely curious, give it a whirl. Just be prepared that if you continue, we're hitting Stand territory in Part 3 onward and that's when "Bizarre" really starts happening.

This is another of those "cute girls doing cute things" shows. By itself that's not really a problem. The characters are just fleshed out enough to not feel like cutouts and the framing is done decently; however, there's really not a lot going on at the end of the day.

This is basically a slice-of-life show with a fantasy coat of paint with a dash of magical girls thrown in for good measure. The first few episodes do the framing fine, but once that's set up nothing is expanded on. This is an excuse plot through and through and used to set up silly scenarios. I ... would liken this show to Konosuba in that regard, but that show had its own glorious level of intentional awfulness with its protagonists and I simply can't find this group's quirks or antics nearly as funny.

I also had a few issues with the art. Characters always had some kind of blush no matter situation. Blush stickers, blush lines, luminescent blush, drunk blush- it all all there and sometimes it was stacked which just looked weird. I didn't find any of the designs or art particularly interesting which really made the already mediocre cute things going on only mildly enjoyable.

I wouldn't say no to this show being put on the TV as background noise, but it's not really anything worth putting any investment in.

I wound up watching this on the behest of a friend on the promise of how hilarious this was.

I am very glad to announce he was very very right.

Cromartie High School is a zany off-the-rails fever dream of a show wearing the skin of an episodic slice-of-life comedy set in a delinquent school. I'm normally not a big fan of what I like to call "drug trip comedy" where things just make no sense and gags will come out of nowhere, but CHS pulls it off every freaking time. Don't expect a lot of substance or a plotline. It's just weird adventure after weird adventure ... with little breathing room as everything just builds up on top of itself. The characters themselves are just fleshed out enough to be distinct and be a little more than stacked tropes, but not so complex that any wacky things they do feel out of character for any reason. It's just enough that it works with what the show wants to be.

This is one of those shows that works better the more you just go along with the ride and accept how utterly weird everything is. The comedy writing is wonderful and full of blink-and-you'll-miss-it gags in some of the best rapid-fire comedy I've seen in a long time. I highly recommend that, due to the hyper-accelerated pace the show takes, that you watch the English dub of the show, and not just for the slow readers who could get lost. The voice acting is great even if the voices themselves are rather generic, and you can tell the VAs are having the time of their lives.

You don't have to watch this show all at once, but I wound up doing so anyway.

I got about halfway through this before I had to bail.

REVIEW NOTE: I only remember the name of our first main character, Kyousuke and didn't really bother to go back and look the rest up. I may edit this review to reflect that later.

The show starts off really interesting, with one of our main characters being chased down by the military and taking down troops, tanks, and helicopters by himself with a barrage of psychic powers. This showed off the show's one truly great aspect- the animation good and the actions scenes are kickass. However, then this same guy turns himself in to a prison ... specifically for psychics for reasons I don't even remember, and winds up recruiting our duertagonist of the series along the way- who reveals that he had PLANNED for this to happen as part of an infiltration of their organization. All before the end of the first episode.

I literally shouted "Bullshit!" at my screen. This sadly happens a few more times when watching this show.

I've seen the "undercover cop infiltrates a criminal organization" plot before, but the way this one was set up was bizarre, inconsistent, left me with a lot of questions, and it didn't even have the decency to own how crazy and improbable the events of the first episode were- you're expected to take this completely seriously.

Thankfully this is (mostly) the weirdest it gets plot-wise and most of the rest of the show up until the point I stopped watching is an interesting but somewhat weird show about a group of criminals who fight for the rights of oppressed psychics. Then the plot showed up and I spent the rest of the ride lost and confused and my issues with this show became a bit less annoying and more problematic:

1) The actual plot apparently involves our two main characters nominally on opposite ends of a plot to raise the status of psychic people. I say nominally because they're rarely in actual conflict. Kyosuke's plan is to put in place a new world ruler with his chosen "Queen" being someone who wants absolutely nothing to do with this plan and how he plans to ensure her compliance is never explained at least as far as I watched. Anyone who's seen the show in full and knows details I don't is free to clarify this.

2) The psychic powers this series revolves around aren't really well explained. The show does a great job worldbuilding and we see what a society with people with weird-ass psychic powers is like (X-Men comes to mind here) however we don't know why they exist, the details of how they work, or why Kyousuke and a few other characters are so much stronger than everyone else. There's limiters that exist to help psychics dampen their powers but they don't seem NECESSARY as the only characters who use them have very solid control over their powers already. The only time we see them in action is when Kyousuke wants to show he's being serious and gets a "power up" animation for very little adequate reason.

3) This is probably the worst one for me. There's a small girl on the team (Somewhere around six or seven) with uncontrollable powers. She doesn't get a limiter despite the cast making it a huge deal about having them and how important they are. The majority of her screen time is split two ways between being an adorable child that exists to make sure the viewer knows these are, in fact, the good guys and being placed in mildly compromising situations so the show can crassly make loli jokes at the duertagonist's expense purely for the sake of it.

Taken individually, these three things were annoying and distracting, but not show-breaking. Together, I couldn't really sit around and finish it.

This show is really good when it's consistent. The problem is it isn't always.

Let's get the good parts out of the way:
The actual plot is complex enough to be engaging but simple enough to follow fully on a first watch through. There's nothing really breaking or any holes in the story. However there are a few confusing twists that take a while to get a grasp on. This is a plot that gets revealed over the course of the series, with details cropping up in every single episode- even the last one.

The characters are well drawn with a lot of nice small details. The animation ... is wild and just exaggerated enough to be kind of creepy when it wants to be. Do note this is one of those "everyone has several gallons of high pressure blood" series that doesn't shy away from a lot of intense violence.

The art style is also my biggest major hangup with the series. Sometimes the show just doesn't care about its tone or consistency. There are times where the show goes into a super-cartoony SD-style sketch for some reason or another or have a small scene that serves nothing. The show wants to be funny, but doesn't know how to actually put it into the otherwise dark and serious show properly. It always just felt distracting or pointless when such scenes were put in.

This might just be the fact that I watch anime through my smart TV and VRV account with no sound bar but I had serious issues with the sound quality. Volume range was far too different between loud action scenes and dialogue. I don't know why dialogue is so quiet in this show and it made it difficult to listen to. (So of COURSE I have this problem with a show I decide to watch the dub with.)

The actual writing of the show is pretty decent and the characters all have good motives around why they do what they do. Even the completely silent "Captain" has a lot of his character showcased during his fight scene. Even minor bit-parts have casual dialogue that felt like something a real person would say in their situation, if a bit hammy. Alucard was the exception to this for a while and can come off stereotypical and boorishly mysterious at first. (It takes FAR too long for major aspects of his character to surface in my opinion.)

I will also mention this: A lot of people have started to get into this series again via Team Four Star's Hellsing Abridged. Unlike their Dragonball counterpart, this one changes several characters and motivations so do not consider that Abridged series to be an accurate shortening of the plot like DBZA has done. DO watch this if you want the source material. You will get a very different experience.

My opinion of Konosuba remains much the same as the first season. The bottom line is, if you like Konosuba's first season, this is going to bring you more of the same. If you weren't entirely sold on it before, this isn't going to improve anything.

Very little actually changes for better and worse. So a lot of what I said in my review of the first season holds true here as well. The characters remain just fleshed out enough to service as the main cast and their interactions, bizarre quirks and bad habits remain a constant source of their own trouble. Character development is non-existent ... and the format remains entirely episodic with nothing truly meaningful happening in the long run.

Then again, Konosuba is still one of those shows that really isn't trying for anything majorly deep or impactful. It sets out to be a funny show and it succeeds at that. I had just as many laughs in this season as I did last with one exception.

The final four episodes are the show's first attempt at an actual arc, all taking place in a different city and can't be taken on their own like other episodes can. There weren't as many jokes as the entire plot feels stretched thin with far too much being placed on repeating the same gag over and over again. This is something the show is already known for with a few character tendencies forming the basis of the comedy but without us being attached to the characters involved the repetition grew thin (a solid fifteen minutes of the same joke on repeat, taking up most of one of the four episodes) and I felt that this really should have been condensed into a single episode and it would have been better off as well as fitting well with the rest of the show.

I still enjoyed it, however. If you liked the first one check it out, but the first season I think is better entirely because of the failed arc.

It's no shock to anyone that a comedy series is going to live or die on how funny it is. For me, I found it pretty darn funny. Do note that as of the writing of this I've only seen the first season.

This is yet another Isekai show with a few twists. First off, this isn't a "trapped in a video game" scenario. Kazuma has died and is given a second chance at life in a fantasy world where he is allowed to bring any one thing with him. He chooses the goddess that offers him the choice in lieu of all the busted shit ... he could have taken with him- and purely to spite her. Thus our premise and main character establish themselves all at once. We meet the other two core cast members each with an episode to establish themselves and carve their way into the dynamic.

If you're reading this to know if you'll like the show, I recommend you watch up to this point to determine if Konosuba is going to be worth your time because the writing and comedy are going to be fairly consistent throughout. It's the character dynamic that's going to be the crux of it all. It's best to think of this show like a sitcom and as a result the characters have a handful of dominant personality traits to create a dynamic but little beyond that and there's less in the way of personal development for any of them. Thankfully that's not what we're here for.

This is an episodic fantasy sitcom at its core with reasonable writing and joke delivery that always feels on point for all but very few exceptions. (The ninth episode did have a few moments I felt were more uncomfortable than amused.) Fanservice is used purely for comedy here but the show does lean heavily on it. If that isn't your cup of tea then you may want to try something else. It should be noted as well that due to this being a comedy there is no real tension or even a plot to speak of. The premise, setting, and a sort of end goal are established but no real plot progression is ever made. We are definitely dealing with an excuse plot so far- but I find the show entertaining enough to forgive it. The adventure of the week setup works and for what this show wants to be that's all that matters.

The actual animation and design is fairly standard for an Isekai show but nothing is particularly noteworthy artistic-wise. I enjoyed how the world they found themselves in quite literally operates on video game logic at times with in-universe class levels and skills that everyone just treats as normal. This all gets introduced early on and is simple enough to follow. It was probably one of the most interesting things about the show that we see just enough of to have it not become tedious or boring and strangely doesn't feel out of place at all. However nothing else about the actual setting or story are truly standout.

If you're watching this for anything other than its characters getting up to wacky adventures, I'd argue you need to watch something different. Me? I enjoyed myself with plenty of laugh-worthy moments and will likely continue to do so once I hit Season 2.

Overlord was recommended to me by several friends but it took me a while to get around to finishing it. While I did enjoy the series, it's got a few issues that held it back from being genuinely good.

Let's start with the premise. This one's a mixed bag. It's your standard Isekai light novel adaptation where someone is trapped in a popular MMO with a few key differences. First, the main protagonist, Ains, is a gigantic lich who was the head of a monster-themed guild. The second is that he's the only one that was trapped in the game and seemingly entirely on accident. The ... big problem here is that it's never adequately explained how or why this happened. The first episode starts of pretty strong with its premise with the NPCs suddenly becoming way more lifelike and the world around Ains gets a lot more dynamic depth to it all of the sudden. The first few episodes do a wonderful job of setting up the main dilemma, introducing the main character as well as several secondaries.


This would have been nice if it were consistent. A major complaint about the setting I had was that while the first half of the series tries to make a real fantasy world that explains weird parts of MMO logic but then mid-way through seems to forget that and we soon get characters talking about HP and MP pools, abilities, items, and the like as if they all suddenly remembered they used to be a video game. It was frankly jarring and while it's assumed that Ains trusted his monster lieutenants that he was part of a guild that created and programmed them as part of a video game AND that they both understood and believed him, it's never hinted at and we're just left to assume that it had to have happened because it was the only thing that made sense. It was bluntly absolutely jarring.

Ains himself will make or break the show depending on how you view him. He's another Isekai overpowered character but I felt he was an OP character done right. As a max-level player who's been playing the game at the head of a highly-successful and dedicated guild for years, he was one of the game's big shots and had a huge amount of power, wealth, resources and fun magic items at his disposal. This at least makes Ains a believable OP character as we can clearly understand why he's as powerful as he is in a way that makes sense in the context of the story. However his personality and motivations are vague and hard to follow. His lieutenants had far more actual personality than he did and none of them got enough limelight to really shine in any meaningful way. They're introduced in the second episode and feel like they're going to be important but wind up fucking about sitting in the castle while Ains does stuff with less interesting characters for most of the show.

What saved me from giving up on this series was mostly how much I enjoyed WATCHING it. The visuals are great with very nice and interesting character designs that were just distinct enough to be cool but not elaborate enough to be gaudy. The visuals and magic effects in this show are great and the fight scenes are really fun to watch. Overall I enjoyed Overlord and I wouldn't dissuade someone who was interested from giving it a shot purely on that reason. But the story falling on its face half the time might be a problem for people with less patience.

Unfortunately the biggest issue I had is that things take a nose-dive story wise. There is never any concrete goal for the main character other than to gather information and he chooses to go about it in increasingly complicated ways for no discernible reason. It's JJBA levels of overplanning without the explosive payoff most of the time. The other big issue is that while the first few episodes do a great job of establishing the world we're watching, nothing really truly progresses past that. Several episode-long mini-arcs feel like they could have been compressed into single episodes or even parts of them. Too many characters and factions are introduced with the expectation of them being critical to the plot only to have things fall flat and have them be forgotten. This leaves several unanswered questions that never get adequate time to be explained. Every single story thread in this series was left unresolved by the end... Every. Single. One. It feels like the entire plodding first season was a prelude to a much larger story the show wants to tell but didn't have the time or budget to try and get going, but this leaves the show as it stands feeling like little more than a lengthy introduction.

The show did get greenlit for a second season. I'm hoping it picks things up. I really want to give this another chance.

This show was introduced to me via a drinking game. It's one of THOSE shows.

Basically imagine if Tenchi Muyo and Zombieland got their storyboards shuffled together.

High School of the Dead is not a deep show nor is it particularly unique. It's just meant to be a sit down and enjoy fun time and it accomplishes being exactly what it wants to be and doesn't bother trying to be more. It's your run of the mill zombie apocalypse shoot-em-up romp heaped up with fanservice and runs with it shamelessly all the way through.

As you might expect out of any zombie show worth its salt made in ... the last ten years, the actual people, how they're coping with their situation, and their changing dynamics are the focus over the zombies itself. The zombies are not a threat. They are something that the main characters get to badass their way through in a way that feels surprisingly plausible given the context of the setting. These are untrained high school students really unprepared for what's going on and yet their antics didn't feel separated from the show's tone.

The other notable thing is the utterly shameless levels of fanservice that are tossed about on a whim. While it'll become commonplace quickly enough, it it only really goes full into harem comedy territory for an episode or two purely because it wants to and moves on. I'm still pretty sure Episode 5 is 90% responsible for the show's ecchi-level nudity. (I remember it was episode five because my friends and I had to replace our drinks twice that episode.)

The show as a whole is memorable for the amusement it'll provide on a watch through but don't expect any of your favorite characters or moments in anime to come out of this show. But it sure as hell made for a great drinking game.

OUR RULES (edit at will):
1 drink for every boob jiggle.
1 drink for every panty shot
1 drink for every time a zombie is killed with a headshot
2 drinks every time someone gets eaten by a zombie on screen