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The New Gate is a concept I subscribe to; however, its execution leaves one wanting (at times) mediocrity.

For me, there is enough baked into the premise that held my interest. Similar to Sword Art Online, The New Gate has characters trapped in a video game in a life-or-death situation. After the main character beats the final boss - letting everyone leave the game and return to their homes - he is transported hundreds of years into the game's future. Simply put, the initial pitch of episode 1 resolves as "What would happen after SAO if the main character was still stuck in the game."

Fascinating. Intrigued. ... Hopeful.

Sadly, the rest of the show hardly achieves this level of promise.

The first couple of episodes are good. I believe the character introductions are solid and the world-building the main character is slowly uncovering is interesting. He does meet up with past NPC partners in solid emotional reunions, but the series does struggle with side characters after introducing them.

There is a point approaching the halfway mark where it starts to fall back on light novel isekai cliches when arriving in their fantasy world -- like signing up with an adventurer guild and taking your first missions -- that feels reductive to what has already been established. And then after those episodes you start to meet royalty, sort of speedrunning a 'dungeon,' and then you get to the final episode.

I'm not a stickler when it comes to animation. I don't like to be mean to a medium I have no experience in, but my lord the final episode was a disaster. They put so much into it that the character models reminded me of early Dragon Ball Super discourse. It was truly astonishing watching the animation quality change right before my eyes all over the episode. The way they ended the series (I doubt we'll get more after this) made me rethink how much I enjoyed what little I did.

The first season of this show was a massive surprise when I tried it out on a whim. Fun, creative, and good animation. For an isekai enjoyer it felt like a hidden gem.

Season 2 started on an interesting note as the main characters were pushed to the side and we caught up with the Goddess' heroes. This season does a lot to establish where they are and how the Demon's conniving plot drives all the characters together. There's a lot going on this season.

Reading the weekly episode discussions, I was surprised to see so many people calling this season slow or boring. If anything, the ... pacing this season was going by very quickly, and I wished they had more episodes to flesh out some ideas and details. Like Makoto becoming a teacher. That's a cool development, but the anime fast tracks through that part of his life. The season felt like it was going by very fast, but I am so glad that it's 25 episodes -- if it were a normal 12 episode season I would have been massively disappointed. For the most part, everything they set up in the beginning eventually does get touched upon by the end.

I was mostly happy with this season. Even when the spring shows started overlapping with this I still had Tsukimichi as something I looked forward to each week.

My biggest issue was the pacing. Everything seemed fast. I would have been interested to see what this story would have looked like over 50-episodes, but alas I understand that's not feasible in today's age.

Cozy gay goodness.

The series is ultimately a cozy read where there isn't too much to it, nor is it horribly bad, it just exists and that is fine.

If you enjoy adorable ladies being cute and getting sexually closer this is for you!

It, unfortunately, starts off with a trope that I don't like; the questionable consent of a one-night stand with a straight character, however as the story goes on it does keep referencing back to that moment in ways that I found thoughtful.

The characters are adorable. Cute. Cozy. They're a hot chocolate on a snowy eve. I want them to succeed and be cute together ... for all eternity. They're such a fun dynamic.

The series is short and, from the afterword in volume 3, I'm not surprised it was cut short. There is so much story that could have been told and at least three side characters that could have had bigger roles, but that's life. With what we have it's a satisfying story focused on how these two characters feel for each other.

There is sex. There is nudity. It's tasteful. Nothing extravagant, but not ignored.

A solid afternoon.

This has been a wild ride.

While I love romance series, one of my biggest gripes when it comes to romance manga is how they portray the 'harem,' love rivals, whatever you want to call them, because it's almost always obvious that the main guy will end up with the first girl that kicked the story off. And you know what? My favorite aspect of this series is subverting that 'main girl' mentality and making every single girl a viable choice. Even the one person who I was like "He'll never pick her," had a chapter that changed my entire view of the story. I ... am eternally grateful for the author to make the "who's he going to pick" option that makes romance stories so fun not too obvious.

The second aspect that I really love about this series is the characters. I really love the Quintuplets. There were 2 characters I hated, then one of them became my biggest supporter and the other managed to get an "I respect you" moment by the end. While the main goal of the manga is to find out who Futaro marries, I think it was equally as satisfying to watch these girls grow into their own individual selves with important, but different, character arcs.

The story has a solid pace. Feelings developed much more naturally than I would have expected, and I really respect that this series tries to ask the question what love means to different people. Usually romance manga plots will have the guy do one specific thing and then all the girls act the same whenever they're in love. Here, though, it really makes their relationships feel deep and meaningful when they all love the same guy, but that love is showed and expressed in different ways, and ultimately they're trying to figure out if it's platonic or not.

If the series had any faults it happened in the last few volumes. I don't think the series was rushed, however, that last arc had me cock my head a few times because I wasn't expecting two sepcific plot points. The reason I didn't expect these two plot points was because it almost felt beneath the series to bring those tropes out at the end. I identify that it does bring out certain events in interesting ways, but also at this point in the story it didn't need it. Like, without spoilers, one of them is about fatherhood and the way the story was going I didn't think it needed to add that to connect the girls with their father's relationship. That's something you'd do to extend the story, not when it's winding down. The last arc felt like it had quite a few of those little details that didn't need to happen, and inevitably it felt stuffed. Not condensed, because I think it definitely sought out what they were trying to go for, but because these tropes were added it felt like it messed with the plot device of going through the festival through the POV of the quintuplets one at a time, which could give off the feeling of being rushed.

Then there's the one.
The girl that was chosen.

I have stayed in my little bubble trying not to have this reveal spoiled, so I have no idea how other people felt about this. What I can say is how I felt, and it goes like this: Of the five girls I was in love with two of them getting to the end, I was okay with two of them if they were picked, and I would have really hated one of them if she were picked (like if she were picked I would have given this series a 3 or 4). The one that was chosen was neither of the girls I was in love with, but that's okay. I still think it's satisfying and not just a subversion for the sake of storytelling. Because of that choice, I think this may have one of my favorite epilogues in a romance manga, because it didn't just end with that choice, it allowed the characters to live with it and express their thoughts.

I can definitely see people not liking the ending considering at least one of my favorites to win is probably a fan favorite, but again, I think that goes along with the themes of what love means to these characters and I had an emotional blast.

Like many anime, Hanako-Kun is a fun creative tale that piques your interest. Something that has been missing from the last year in anime has been the supernatural shows. Specifically, supernatural shows that are teen-friendly. I know that if I were 14 I would have loved this show, but because of that, I don't think it has the legs it needed to rise above average.

The animation is at times reminiscent of Way of the House Husband but, unlike that series, Hanako-Kun uses it in a way that makes it feel as if this were a fairy tale. There are many recurring shots that will spin ... the yarn to make this feel as if it's a rumor, or a ghost story, something innocent that middle schoolers would be talking about.

However, the second half of the season really made it apparent that there's not much else to it. You tell the story, have a teeny bit of battle, and move on. There was certainly some important subject matter being brought up, but I don't think the writing was mature enough to understand how to utilize what they wanted to talk about.

What surprised me was that the most interesting character, for me, didn't appear until later in the show, and their relationship with a certain exorcist made that particular story so much more impactful than any that have come before even though the main character that should have been affected by this storyline was Nene. When you have two very unique characters in Hanako and Nene but the emotional crux is between two side characters, that felt like a problem in character motivation.

These mismatched character exploits, while interesting, didn't feel like they were going anywhere. You could really feel the episodic nature and I actually took two months off from watching it even though I had 3 or 4 episodes left.

It's fine, but there is no urgency in me wanting to be in this world for this long.

Story: 5/10
Art: 5/10
Sound: 5/10
Character: 5/10
Enjoyment: 5/10
Overall: 5/10

I was very surprised to find that Akira Toriyama did this series after Dragon Ball ended. I'm not saying it's bad, but it's something I would have expected earlier in his career. What we have here is a monster village living with humans. The monsters get sick and they have to team up with a human, who's referred to as a murderer every other page it seems like, to road trip across the country in search of medicine.

I really didn't like this.

What's a shame is that I could totally see myself liking this because Toriyama created a better version of this story early in ... his Dragon Ball run where the main characters were kids and the world was crazy fun. Here, it's just fart jokes and kid rivalries that get on your nerves. I didn't find the art to be interesting, the characters were obnoxious, the jokes weren't even that funny. I understand it's aimed at a younger demographic, but so was early Dragon Ball. What really got me though was that after a few chapters you could tell that Toriyama abandoned the whole slice of life aspect of the story and went full in on the fighting, which felt so... meh. Again, it was fine, but it wasn't needed.

I didn't expect much out of this and it disappointed me even then. It's not terrible, but I'd hardly recommend it to someone older than 8.

Story: 4/10
Art: 3/10
Character: 3/10
Enjoyment: 3/10
Overall: 3/10

Note: A 4 does not mean it was bad, just disappointing.

Hell Warden Higuma is an interesting series. On the surface, it seems very generic. Higuma's clan has been tasked with being wardens of hell as they send escaped convicts that prey on the living back to their fiery afterlife. But after a few chapters, you start to notice how un-generic this series is. For one thing, there is no sexualization of women. Usually, a heroine falls in love with the male protagonist or is at least looked at in sexual situations, but none of those annoying cliches are here. Instead, we have Ayaha who is ... a fairly competent character where she almost stands as equals to the overpowered main protagonist.

Then there's Higuma. When it comes to Shonen Jump protagonists you'll expect loud, obnoxious, dumb, goal-oriented teen, but Higuma is not that. In fact, he's the opposite. He's very quiet, quite calculating, and actually hates what he does. And yet, I also feel like what makes him stand out is also what makes being invested in this series so hard in the beginning.

The first few chapters are okay. You're getting to know the world and the characters, but there seems to be something missing. There's no spark to make you go "oh, I gotta check out the next chapter." After thinking about it for a while, I think it's because of how closed off Higuma is. You don't really get to know him until much later, near the end of this series, when you start going through his families' backstory do you truly finally understand him as a character. And because he's fairly mysterious, you start to question why he's the main character early on. You ask why is he interesting and worth following.

The antagonists are alright. For a SJ series, it's fairly dark. There is a lot of innocent death being hacked between panels. The one that stands out the most is the Kitsune storyline. That was fucked up and the way the story transitions from fairly mundane action to holy shit that spirit just killed a child is sometimes very clashing.

I think this was where the story was going to go, but from what we got it felt like Higuma worked better with not only an ensemble cast, but a cast made up of his family. This is easily a story about familial sin and how they need to stick together to get out of the pits of hell, but so much of the series, in the beginning, was about Higuma being closed off that you, the reader, feel closed off to the story as well with only hints of Ayaha to guide you through it all.

Overall, it had potential, and I wouldn't have minded seeing where it went, but as it is I felt like it struggled to find its footing and it didn't reveal enough interesting information soon enough to keep readers invested. This series is just a step below average for that.

Story: 4/10
Art: 5/10
Character: 4/10
Enjoyment: 4/10
Overall: 4/10

I'm a sucker for lonely robots.

Let me state that I have only read the first few chapters of Dr. Stone. It wasn't for me, but I was curious what this prequel would hold. Turns out, even though it's called Byakuya, Senku's father, he's not the main focus. The first three or four issues are about the international space station crew witnessing the fall of Earth and then figuring out how to get back there to do...something. The rest of the series is about Rei, the cutest most loyalist robot that ever robot.

It's predictable. If you're a fan of Dr. Stone then maybe you'll feel ... more attached to this, but I found it messy if not charming. Rei is a ball of spunk with no common sense towards humans. Rei waits for Byakuya for thousands of years, because Rei doesn't know how long humans live.

The art is amazing at times. I don't care for the humans, but Earth and Rei and space all look delicious. There are some stunning images of space.

I will say that the ending made me want to give Dr. Stone another chance just so that I can see more Rei, but I feel like Rei won't show up until the very end where people populate space again.

Story: 4/10
Art: 8/10
Character: 4/10
Enjoyment: 5/10
Overall: 5/10

Mod Edit: This review was originally posted for Burn the Witch (One-shot) (114700) and has subsequently been merged into Burn the Witch (Manga) (129370).

Well... it's a thing.

I'm really glad Kubo came back with something. Sometimes after a long and popular series authors either retire or their later work isn't recognized enough, but here it was at least popular enough to get the fires burning again for this. At its core, I really enjoyed the world even though the story is pretty poor. Lots of exposition and dialogue that is almost whiplash from Kubo's Bleach series that eventually became minimalist. I really enjoyed Noel. She is ... a mood I subscribe to, and her partner is fine too.

What really brings this series down is Balgo. God, I fucking hate Balgo. What a fucking twat. I understand that Japan has an unhealthy obsession with women's underwear, but Christ was this unbearable. He should have been executed.

I'm interested enough in the world to see where the mini-series goes, but if they still got Balgo I may just end up skipping it.

Fuck Balgo.

Red Sprite had a lot of potential, and sadly it got the ax like so many series all too soon.

What I really enjoyed about Red Sprite was the world. It had a clear steampunk WWII aesthetic going on... or would it be more appropriate to call it electropunk? Anyway, really cool setting where babies are experimented on to be, essentially, human batteries to power weapons. There was a clear and achievable goal from the get-go, which is for the main character, Tatsu, to find his brothers and sisters that were taken from the orphanage. It just so happened that taking down a dictatorship is the ... easiest way to do that.

The characters haven't had much time to grow, but you clearly understand where all of them stand and where they're coming from. Already, I am loving the Red Sprite's crew led by Tatsu. In the few chapters that we got Tatsu had already saved two of his comrades. One of them being the best boy, or girl(?), Mono. Mono is such a sweetheart and I must protect them with all my heart.

I really appreciated that the series didn't end with a quick wrap-up. It got to the point where it was between stories and had a classic cliffhanger. Those are some delicious balls to leave us off on. And to think that they also just introduced these nightmarish enemies who regenerate from the ashes of the dead. Ugh, such potential.

If there was one major weakness this manga has it's in its exposition. Not that there isn't any, quite the opposite. I think the first chapter really soiled a lot of readers because it is one of the heaviest expository chapters I have ever read. What sucks is that it's all necessary, but there's just too much we needed to know in order for the story to kick off. Sadly, the exposition doesn't get any better later on even though there is less of it. Characters will randomly spew science in order for us the reader to understand what is going on. At times I feel like the art conveys a lot of the heavy lifting, and if the author used captions instead of characters it may have felt easier to read.

Story: 6/10
Art: 6/10
Character: 5/10
Enjoyment: 5/10
Overall: 5/10