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Ah, ya cack-handed it.

An initially compelling murder mystery involving robots, parts start falling off this chassis the further along it goes. I love Urasawa's style, but this story has the same issue Monster had where he takes an interesting premise and hefty themes to work with then just piles on WAY too many moving parts (characters, subplots) that don't work in harmony, with redundancy and overlap which ultimately lessens the experience. By the end, the viewer is just repeatedly hit with scenes of characters having revelations that we already know, repeating the same lines about memories, hatred, sadness etc ad nauseum, until the wife ... and I were just rolling our eyes at what a cliched overwrought anime melodrama the show had turned into.
The show just seems to have been adapted scene-for-scene from the manga as far as I can tell. The initial robot detective plot is intriguing, but the series abruptly introduces story elements in a way that continually changes the stakes or invalidates previous dramatic tension (the rocketgun, the ability to bring back dead robots, the anti-photon bomb). There's also some anticlimactic/unsatisfying reveals (Pluto's actual appearance, the identity of Abullah etc) and just general pacing issues. Also some laughably weird musical choices for certain scenes.

The more developed characters are likeable, Gesicht is an appealing lead; an advanced robot with a cool exterior and layers of artifice to his personality, haunted by dreams of suppressed/deleted memories. The themes of bigotry and xenophobia are undermined slightly by the fact that she show is pretty inconsistent with exactly how human-like robots are, how advanced artificial intelligence is etc. How are there robot children? Are they created small and then they get placed in increasingly larger bodies as they develop? Do they have child-like minds that eventually mature into adulthood? Are robots programmed to want to have families and live in spacious apartments where they pretend to drink tea? I understand that Tetsuwan Atom was written in the 50s, but Urasawa's Pluto misses a beat by updating the presentation and the tone while not really touching the underlying questions of *why* robots are the way they are.

Some of the robot designs are cool, I like the mix of human-like and Showa-era style robots, but there is a 'child' robot of one of the main characters, that shows up later in the story that is truly just horrifying to look at. It looks like Johnny 5 with a congenital deformity. The viewer is clearly meant to identify this as a precious, innocent child but I could scarcely bear to look at it. Nightmarish.

Visually we have a bright digital look with stylish designs. The art direction is great but the show-runners can't take any credit for using Urasawa's panels largely as-is. I must say I think that the colours are a little oversaturated and things just look too clean; just an old weeaboo complaining that modern digi-paint shows lack a textural, muted visual quality that older shows have, don't mind me.

I can see people liking this but I can't really recommend it. Bit meh ay.

Love the first line in the op being "And you don't seem to understand..."
The first few episodes of this invoke that atmosphere of mystery and discovery that a lot of the best television series have. There is some genuine creepiness and unsettling scenes that sort of precede what made Kairo so effective; that of fading into a digital abyss, of being haunted by a signal seeking connection. The ambient hum of live current carrying disembodied voices suffusing the air.

Lain presents 'the wired' through different lenses. The nature of online existence is intially arcane, an occult mystery that progresses through the series until it reaches a ... state of divinity. The personal/individual view is of a descent into a nightmare of dissociation and identity loss. The base human desire to be in-the-know, to pry, set against the fear consequentially of being yourself viewed and scrutinized. Losing your individuality and self in an endless sea of humanity subject to the same socially conditioned state.

In other words it's the Chiaki J. Konaka special.

Visually I appreciate that there is a cinematic language at work rather than just the rote representational style a lot of anime seems to fall into, some of the images are deeply arresting and well composed. I watched the blu-ray and it looks really great. I'm generally against futzing too much with any piece of art/media under the intent of 'making it look better'; it's a fraught endeavour that misses the point of appreciating art as-is and accepting something on its own terms rather than trying to 'fix' what isn't broken. I know that a lot of changes were made to the effects and basically the whole presentation in the blu-ray release, and while I think the DVDs look fine and are a better reflection of the milieu Lain was originally released in, I can definitely recommend the blu-ray for fist-time viewers.

This kicks arse, essential anime, speaks to a moment we're still living in as far as I'm concerned. A nightmare of fabrication.

Popful Mail as a reverse isekai? Goddamn this is cute, love the song, love the lively 90s Doramaga fantasy pastiche designs. Could see this being spun into some Ozanari Dungeon style OVA jam. Ahh, but it was not to be.

Of course this was a music video so there's no dialogue but you just know Popful called the evil wizard the r-slur before she iced him.

Falcom should have made one of these for Brandish, fuuuuuuck that would rule.

This review needs more information? It's a 5 minute promo video, just watch it and make up your own mind. The game is a fun relic from a bygone ... age, a hack and slash platformer with some light RPG elements.

This is the good stuff

Full BESM-mode pseudo magical girl situation with obtuse tulpa summoning mechanics. There's an intriguing sense of mystery, with all these figures from the magical realm duking it out in a charmingly rendered European town.
Protag bishoujo is not drawn half bad, and she gets her kit off a bit, but she also takes names so it's all good.

The pacing is borked, redditlords will tell you to watch the last two episodes first, but the absolute whiplash of getting 90% of the context after the fact is the only way to experience this dreamy OVA.

It's cool, trust me

A joyful work of fandom. Anno and his Gainax colleagues grew their craft as much through parodic works of high effort amateur animation and tokusatu fan films as through paid animator work, and Gunbuster represents a full realisation of that craft. A loving reflection on formative works, it is to me the apotheosis of 80s anime fandom.

Watching it again this year it exists both as a product, and subject, of nostalgia. The setting provides a balance between scenes of grounded familiarity and the more fantastical mecha/science fiction elements. It feels like an Anno calling card, the alignment of adolescent angst, scenes of comforting domesticity, and ... incomprehensible existential peril. Students do gym class in mecha, tell ghost stories in outer space, sunbathe in artificial light, war with an unknowable enemy and die.

Looks fucking gorgeous like nothing does anymore, film grain and thick lines, big expressive eyes. Spans a satisfying tonal breadth; the warmth of the sun drenched Okinawa scenes, the darkened corridors of the Exelion as it warps through hyperspace, black and white still images representing mankind's last stand at the centre of the galaxy.

The emotional core of the series is Noriko's development, how her relationships shape her growing confidence and path to self actualisation. There are, refreshingly, no human antagonists, the primary conflict playing out something like a disaster movie with escalating scale and stakes but with relatable character driven melodrama anchoring the plot. The scale is at times dizzyingly vast; thousands of years, millions of foes, billions of lightyears. I love the way the time dilation device is used to set Noriko's development as a point of reference against her friends growing old, getting married, having children. Characters age decades before our eyes but Noriko is seemingly suspended in time. Life really is like that though. There is an aching sense of yearning for lost years between reunions.

I love this series too much to really levy any criticism upon it. The ending is always a devastating emotional catharsis. Hard work and guts forever.

I love this OVA but it’s hard to talk about because my attachment to it is more emotional than anything that I could easily articulate.

Everytime I watch it I have been at a different point in my life, but it always invokes the same melancholic helplessness. The sense of being buoyed along in a cruel and senseless journey with some hope, but no expectation, of catharsis or resolution.

When I first saw Cat Soup twenty or so years ago I was fixated on the fact that the original mangaka Nekojiro took her own life. I think I latched onto this as though it lent some kind ... of legitimacy or profundity to the OVA. Since then I have come to see it less as some dark window into a suicidal mind or a cry for help and more an expression of common human emotional experiences filtered through somebody else’s internal symbols and language.

The imagery is so wonderful and inventive, especially the sequence where time breaks down completely and the two cat children skitter about upon a frozen glass ocean. The OVA itself does a similar trick where despite being only 34 minutes long it feels like you’ve grown from a carefree naive youth into a bitter jaded adult while watching it. Maybe that’s just me!

Wife review; it’s good, would recommend, but a bit of a downer.

Absolutely delightful faff, an analog OVA oasis of cheerful 90s character designs, sci fi mecha parody light yuri goodness.

Features giant sweat drops, frequent SD moments, grating high pitched voices, comic exaggeration turned up to ju-ichi.

I'm unfamiliar with the PC engine games so the plot was totally nonsensical, fortunately at two episodes the way the OVA just blows through all these characters and backstory results in a kind of delighted bewilderment. It's so unserious I can't imagine that knowing the deep GFY lore would really have enhanced my experience.

For fans of stuff like Galaxy Angel this is a dai-recommendation desu

Fiending for more MS girl adjacent media.