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Shikizakura is, at heart, a kind of cheesy and overall optimistic heroic action show. It wears its genre openly and proudly, and goes ahead and takes the cliches it thinks it can use.

All the same, this show is weirdly charming. Sometimes, when something is very much in its genre comfort zone, you get the feeling like it's lazy, or on autopilot. At least after the first couple episodes when you don't necessarily know what to expect from it, Shikizakura isn't like that. It's an extremely earnest show, in a sense, and there's a passion in it to capture the great feeling ... of heroic media, which ultimately means playing many of the conventions quite straight.

I do, in particular, have to give praise to the small moments. A lot of the broader strokes of the show are things you've seen before, so that once you identify which set of conventions you're looking at, you kind of know what to expect. But, in defiance of that, the characters are at least a bit nuanced. The leads (Kakeru and Oka) have good chemistry that's built up over time and through grace notes in a lot of scenes. The supporting cast have their own issues, and while they do talk about them as well, they also show what they're feeling through smaller cues, which is something that it takes skill above and beyond the call of schlock duty to accomplish.

That, in particular, makes Shikizakura more memorable and fills it with more personality than might be anticipated. It plays things safer and more standard than perhaps it could have, but the characters at least do have their own identities and... there's nothing wrong with being straightforward sometimes. It's, in a sense, something I think would make a good comfort food show, the kind of thing you watch when you've had it up to your ears with dark, depressing, and grim fare and just want a story where you can lose yourself in something that's brighter and more approachable without going so far as to be cloying or pandering. There's enough conflict and darkness in here that the show does have meat to it, even if the tone and feel tell you fairly clearly that you're not watching a tragedy this time.

It's not a masterpiece but it's got some good action, some good characters, and enough story and technical competence to hold it all together. If you can accept it for what it is, you'll probably have a good time with this show, and I find myself having rather warm thoughts for the whole thing despite its flaws.

The Quintessential Quintuplets looks at first glance like something that should be built almost totally on formula. The basic setup is the harem subgenre in its purest essence, promising that the important part of the show is that a number of cute girls (five, in this case) will have various and sundry relationships with the male lead. Over the course of the show their individual bonds could strengthen or degenerate (with an overall upward trend) and eventually the boy would pick one of the girls and live happily ever after. This kind of thing practically writes itself if you let it. ... Of course, automatic writing usually produces schlock, so if you want quality you have to put in the effort to get it there.

So, here's the test the quintuplets really have to pass: does that show? Can we recognize the effort that needed to go into this show to make it something worth the time, or is it just a quintet of cute redheads doing cute things (not that doesn't have some viewing value...) without enough hard work behind them to muster a passing grade?

If you sit down to watch the show, it gets two ticks against in fairly short order. First, the show actually starts by showing us the future wedding of MC and Unknown Redhead. Admittedly, you kind of assume that's the postscript any high school harem is on autopilot for, but when “this story has a happy ending” is flaunted so flagrantly as it is here, you would tend to think “that's going to kill some drama going forward.” I'm not sure why the creators chose to lead with the wedding, though I have some suspicion it might be the fact that they could show practically the whole thing without actually spoiling the winner so why not, but it doesn't feel like the best foot they could have put forward.

The intro song follows, and... In most shows, the intro is where they try the hardest. Anime as a whole is really good about this, the creators know that good animation and a catchy tune will go a long way to holding a viewer's attention, and the best intros positively sear themselves into your memory. The intro for the Quintessential Quintuplets feels like it was tacked on at the last minute. Some of that is probably intentional; it does have a style, at least... but the bad lip synch in the bits where the characters are actually supposed to be singing along is distracting – and that's not usually an element I focus on. Right off the bat, we have two suggestions that the quints are going to fail, that there isn't effort or thought here where there needed to be.

But, the show continues.

The first episode is actually rather nice. It lets our main character meet the Nakano quintuplets in an at least slightly organic way, and does a good job of introducing their main quirks. Right off the bat the quintuplets take loudly different attitudes from one another, cementing their identities. Itsuki is the 'true' tsundere, Yotsuba is the genki girl, Miku is the shy one, Ichika is kind of shameless and kind of a slob, and Nino dials up the bitterness and harshness to eleven. Most of these traits are fairly consistent throughout the show (though we don't see much of “lazy slob” Ichika after the start). The easy route would be to stop there; that's all you need to make the girls different from one another, so people can pick their favorites already.

And, in its first real show of effort, Quintessential Quintuplets decides to go beyond the call of duty and actually give its leading ladies some depth and complexity.

In this season (and with a second already announced as of this writing, it's no secret that we don't resolve everything by the end) most of that depth and complexity is handed to Miku and Ichika – Itsuki and Nino have their moments as well even if those can be fewer and farther between, but Yotsuba is mostly left flat for the time being.

Even accepting that what we have right now is essentially partial, the development could have been better... but it also could have been a lot worse. And, I think, for a twelve episode series being what it is, the show picks if not “the right tactic” than at least “a right tactic”. It was totally possible, in the time given, to grant depth and complexity to five whole characters; other shows have done at least as much. But, on the other hand, Quintessential Quintuplets uses its screen time in an effective manner. The 'lesser' members of the quintuplets aren't lesser because the show tried and failed, they're lesser because the show was clearly not concerned with them. Yet.

This brings me to a thought – there are two ways to look at The Quintessential Quintuplets. One is as a contained twelve episode anime, which is what we technically have. For that point of view the development of the characters is OK at best and more likely a problem, and I would have liked more time devoted to Itsuki, Nino, and Yotsuba... but it's not criminal because at least Itsuki and Nino do get some time and Yotsuba is not presented really as a 'romantic' option. The leading ladies aren't all given the same weight, but if you look at this season in isolation you probably consider that they don't need to be given the same weight, since you want to come out of the show with a sense of who the 'winner' will be. On the other hand, you could look at it as a first part, which it also is, in which case the development is fine. The show's not done yet, and while Miku and Ichika do get way more interest and focus right now, the other sisters are either pleasant or compelling enough that you probably want to see more of them.

From that second view point, which is the one I kind of prefer even if it is more generous, the Quintessential Quintuplets has a very interesting note in that it's a harem without a shoe-in winner. Because, let's face it, in most shows with 'harem' elements (the MC guy and large assortment of girls he runs into who are probably interested in him) there is one and only one girl who has a fighting chance. Everybody else is just window dressing, and even if they're engaging characters in their own rights you're kidding yourself if you think they could 'win'. In shows like Aria the Scarlet Ammo or Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai the other girls we meet more or less transparently can't hold a candle to the heroine whom the title refers to. Even shows that don't have an “Interface Spoiler” like that usually sprout a frontrunner who can't be dethroned in short order. Steins;Gate is blatantly more concerned with one of its heroines than any of the others, but being self-knowledgeable of that builds powerful chemistry between the real romantic leads; DanMachi on the other hand is similarly transparent but forgets to make its chosen winner interesting or charming.

Quintessential Quintuplets, viewed by the second model, is very rare in that it doesn't have a pre-decided winner. Having watched what's currently available I have my preferences and could probably rank the quintuplets in order of present likelihood to be the Bride, but I can't say it's sewn up so the #1 leader must or even will retain her spot. Especially with more characters waiting to get their development arcs than not, it truly is anybody's game. And that, at least, is a little refreshing.

There is, however, a degree on which I do have to judge what we have as its own thing, which is to say how the show holds up as just a show. And on that score, I do have to admit that the show has its weaknesses. The colors are nice but the expressions are only okay and sometimes the animation goes off model. The writing is also alright; some individual scenes can be dynamite, but others fall flat. The show flirts with routines that would max out my shame and awkwardness, but mostly actually dodges them being as horribly awkward as they could be. For the most part its tame and inoffensive.

This doesn't have a big impact on final rating, but there are two things that kind of bother me in the show as-of present. The first is that Nino's hostility comes off as fairly excessive. She drugs the MC, levels heavy accusations, and is all in all uncompromising in her apparent hatred... so when she turns around and does something nice for a split-second, it actually can feel unearned. I know she's supposed to be a tsundere, but this show already has Itsuki. Itsuki is a good tsundere; she's harsh, even hostile towards the main character, but she doesn't go too overboard, and she shows time and again that she's a reasonable person with issues that cause her to lash out. Nino gets an excuse for her behavior, but never really an explanation.

The second is that I'm not quite sure how the quintuplets are failing as badly as they're supposed to be, and they have to be for the plot. OK, Yotsuba seems like a natural fool so I can believe she'd have trouble in her schoolwork, and Ichika has some legitimate issues, but the other three? Maybe they're not top-of-the-class material, but they seem to have decent heads on their shoulders and no reason to not be able to hop over the very low bar they're set. Beyond even that Miku is a trivia sponge – with a single area of expertise, but that shows she can absorb information – and Itsuki is notably studious. It's hard to swallow that they're dropout-level bad. In Assassination Classroom, some of the 3-E students are legitimately bright and talented, but they all have well developed reasons regarding how they got to their poor situation, and flaws that are holding them back from reaching their potential. Three, arguably four, of the five failing Nakano Quintuplets forget to show us their flaws. They tell us the flaws, but they don't show it or sell it. As I said before this really is a minor quibble, in that it's something I only really noticed after the fact, but I think things would be better if we learned more about how and why they got to their sorry position, rather than just being told “They're all idiots” and then not writing them like idiots.

I just hope the second season has more of the development and drama that the first season largely just teased.

SCORE BREAKDOWN
Story: 6
Character: 7
Art: 7
Sound: 7
Enjoyment: 6
Total 7 (6.6)

VERDICT: If five cute redheads being cute while they try to dodge studying at the behest of their classmate/tutor sounds like a premise that would passably hold your interest, it probably will. There's more smart stuff in the show than on the exams of its titular characters, so I have to give them a passing grade.

To all the budding writers and screenwriters out there, I say this: there are a lot of models of what to do. No doubt you know them, stories you've watched or read that moved you, made you feel, or made you think. But if you ever need a sample of what not to do, or how to put things together wrong, I have good news! You've got Shangri-la.

In some ways, this is a hard one for me, because when I review something, even something bad, I'd rather be sparing with the vitriol. There are plenty of reviewers who curse a lot, ... or even come up with good creative smackdowns, so I try to keep a somewhat more academic tone. But there are only so many times I can say “That didn't work.” “Why was that here?” “That was pointless.” or other such critiques before the litany becomes nothing more than conceptual noise. I suppose that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, however, as 'Conceptual Noise' is a fair descriptor for Shangri-la.

In that vein, let me introduce you to a concept you may have heard of, but probably not in the context of reviewing an anime: Signal-to-Noise Ratio. Basically, it's the ratio of what you actually want (Signal) compared to the meaningless garbage that does nothing but waste your time and effort picking through it (Noise). Shangri-la's Signal-to-Noise Ratio is terrible. I think this is the biggest problem of the show – screen time is constantly wasted on themes, ideas, characters, and plot arcs that go nowhere and ultimately add nothing to the core of the show. They exist, they waste your time, and if you cut them out entirely you would find you missed out on surprisingly little. Here's a quick list of the characters who were utterly worthless: Kunihito (a theoretically main character), Yuri, Souichirou, Nagiko, Leon, Shion, Kanaria, Shougo, Takehiko, Tarsian, and Tomoko (though at least she was briefly entertaining). More characters like Karin (along with her supporting cast of Klaris, Zhang, and Medusa. More on them later.) and Mikuni (along with her supporting cast of Sayoko and Mi-ko) failed to amount to anything in the grand scheme of things, but don't really count as completely wasted because at least they provided some material of intrinsic value in the middle.

Some of this is down to the fact that the actual conflict in the climax comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere. I'm not opposed to twists, not by a long shot. But to do a twist well – and this can surprise amateur writers – it needs to be set up, and still flow from what came before. When the truth is revealed in the movie Psycho, it's entirely consistent with what you've seen up until that point, even if it is surprising for the unspoiled. Just because something couldn't be predicted doesn't make it a good twist. I wouldn't have predicted it if after 22 episodes of Shangri-la everybody was eaten by Titans in 23 only for Eren Jaeger to show up in 24... but that wouldn't have made it a good twist or a good climax. Shangri-la doesn't quite do that, but it gets about as close to an unintentional Outside Context scenario as a real narrative, even a poorly-constructed one, could be expected to come.

The thing is, it's not just the climax. The climax is the worst about it by far, but the whole show establishes and sheds elements, clearly not caring about how its universe ties together, disregarding any concept of thematic consistency. Its structure is a wreck, a decaying Frankenstein's Monster made of pieces cobbled together and not caring when one happens to fall off. The show starts with an environmental message that's about as subtle as a brick... but that falls by the wayside pretty quickly. There's a major plot about market manipulation, but while that's setup for more of the show, it really isn't supported as a theme itself. Even Kuniko's revolution isn't the point in the end; at about the two-thirds mark it falls by the wayside, never to return to focus. Instead we get new, different arcs, that are often not really predicated on what came before, and many of which don't bear on what comes after.

As a result, the story is a wreck. It's a rare failure in that any given component part could be at least decent in isolation, or if supported by a different plot or setting but here's the thing... Lego bricks are fine in isolation. They're great toys that can be used to build up any number of creative constructions. But if you take a bunch of Legos, put them in a bag, squirt in superglue, and shake until the glue dries, the mass of plastic waste you'll dump out won't have any of the good qualities it could have had despite the quality of the parts. Shangri-la is like that, and the more you stick with it and realize that, the more painful it becomes to watch.

Even the characters, while better constructed than the plot, suffer the same problem of adapting to serve the flavor of the moment, disregarding logic, consistency, and their own potential. For instance, when we're first introduced to Mikuni, we see her use her psychic powers to kill a retainer who lied to her. Over time, her habit of asking tough questions to those who see her is referred to as a “test”. She seems unrepentant, even pleased with such an outcome, and I labored on the mistaken assumption that her abilities were mind-reading and psychokinesis until at least halfway through the show and that she deliberately killed liars. Only towards the end are we supposed to believe that the painful death is out of her control and not something she likes to see happen. It doesn't add up. There are a lot of other reveals like that; some of them aren't set up or given the time they need to have an impact, while others feel like they downright contradict themselves.

The flaws, though, do extend all the way down. They're more glaring and terrible when the show has built up, but from very early on you can start to recognize something wrong: the show doesn't have consistency in its theme. Far be it from me to say something like “You can't have a setting with both cyberpunk and magic”. Because that's blatantly false. A ton of good pieces of media can have very unique settings that include both a scientific understanding of the world and a mystical one, advanced technology right alongside arcane sorcery. There is, however, a right way and a wrong way to create a setting like that, and the hallmark of the right way is going to be that the disparate elements feel like they're parts of the same whole.

In the RPG Shadowrun, you can have elves and trolls and shamans alongside megacorps and hackers and techno-future cityscapes because the trolls can be hackers, or the elves might be executives in a megacorp, or the shamans cast their rituals in the dingy alley of the futuristic city. In Shangri-la, the themes it juggles spend a lot of time compartmentalized. When we check up with Mikuni, she doesn't feel like she belongs in Atlas, or the world that Atlas exists in: her palace of perpetual moonlight, for most of the show, could be an entirely separate dimension from the one in which Kuniko and her Metal Age friends live. If it weren't for the occasional character visiting the 'other world' you wouldn't even know you were in the same show. Karin and Kuniko aren't quite as far from each other as either of them is from Mikuni, but they still represent fairly divorced ideas from one another.

Kuniko is, at least in her pitch, a rebel. The story she wants to engage in, that her existence naturally gravitates towards, is a story about the struggle of have-nots against oppressive elites. Karin, at the same basic level, is a white-collar criminal. A likable one, perhaps, but that's what she is. Her “natural” story is much more of a high-concept thriller, about the nature of AI or attempting to get ahead within a broken system. They're both cyberpunk stories (more or less) but they're so different that they shouldn't intersect. These characters shouldn't be in the same narrative with the emotional weights and investment they're given. Kuniko's character type doesn't exist in Karin's story, and Karin's is a villain in Kuniko's sort of story, which isn't how she's portrayed.

It seems like that was probably deliberate, but it wasn't a good choice. With a lot of skill and effort, some writers might have been able to pull it off, to have these characters from different sub-genres or even genres meet and interact and make it interesting and consistent, but that's not what the writers behind Shangri-la do. And it gets dramatically harder to pull off when there are at least three 'worlds' rather than just two. And the narrative capable of pulling off the X meets Y meets Z scenario would know how Outside Context Problems work, and how to make them compelling for the viewer. It could be interesting to have a Mikuni-type character living in this strange bubble world-within-a-world have to go out and encounter a whole new genre, but to do that, and to get the emotions of the viewer on the same page with the emotions of the character, you'd want them to explicitly have an initial separation. Mikuni both exists in Atlas and in her own little world. Kuniko both follows her own story, the arguable main plot, and gracelessly intrudes on Karin's. This is a case where the writers tried to have their cake and eat it too, and it just doesn't go as is.

And... I've talked about the climax already, and how a show with an already cracked foundation falls apart, but I think it's worth the time to say: it's worse than that. The downfall of Shangri-la isn't just that the core problems add up and cascade into major issues. Which they do, but it goes beyond. The skill showed in setting up Shangri-la, or the lack thereof, continues throughout and frankly gets worse in the story's final act. Multiple times in the last third, increasing into the final few episodes, my train of thought came to a screeching halt to demand “Why?!”. Reveals are made that are utterly nonsensical. Why? Characters drop in and out of the story in a continuous roulette wheel of appearing to die only to show up fine. Why? Entire new plot elements emerge that belong to nothing before and sometimes have no effect on anything that comes after. Why? We waste tons of time on lame exposition telling us things that had already been explained in fewer words, with no emotional investment in the new explanation and no reason to do it with soulless narration when it could have been effective with either real scenes or visual storytelling. Why? The vast majority of everything done by every character over the course of the show has absolutely no bearing on the final act, which has different stakes and different conflict from anything that was set up before. Why? Why any of this? Why did we even bother with the vast majority of the show?

The answer is that the writing is just that bad. If the writers knew what they wanted to do they didn't know how to do it, and I'm not sure they even knew what they wanted.

The closest thing we get to a good story is the story of Karin and Medusa. Barring the episode with Kanaria, which comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere the show couldn't have gone without it, her story is internally consistent and has some good emotional notes. If you just threw the main plot in the trash, and many of the other side plots, Karin's storyline at least resembles the skeleton of a good story, rather than jumbled pieces. It has a beginning, middle, and end that go together alright; I felt like I understood her character and her struggles; her chain of events was logically consistent; she had a solid and consistent theme; and I even felt something from the climax of her arc – which is more than I can say for the main plot or any of the other side stories that Shangri-la throws away.

There are aspects of Shangri-la that aren't bad: the technical aspects. The art looks pretty decent, and while you should tone your expectations way down from the opening (this isn't an action show, and the action scenes there are run the gamut from alright to actually kind of bad) I can't say it's actually terrible. At least there's some flow, some good backgrounds, and the characters do move when they're supposed to be moving, which is more than I could say for some other shows where the writing is as bad as Shangri-la's. The sound too, is... fine I guess? The music is inoffensive and usually fits the scene, and the character voices usually sell what they are pretty well. There can be times when a performance is just a bit annoying or a delivery sounds forced, but I'm not sure what actors could make some of the lines they're given sound natural. Some, particularly Nagiko and Tarsian, could have done better about not sounding like they were reading off a script they didn't really care about, but even if they didn't give 100% they gave more than the writers.

Shangri-la is a disappointment. A huge disappointment. It didn't start strong, but even with that being the case it just got weaker and weaker as it progressed. Sometimes Karin or Kuniko approached at least decent writing, but Shangri-la as a whole utterly fails to accomplish any level of quality.

SCORE BREAKDOWN
Story: 2 (and one of those points is just for Karin and MEDUSA in isolation.)
Art: 6
Sound: 6
Character: 3
Enjoyment: 2
Total: 3 (3.8)

Verdict: Unless you want to spend about twelve hours getting an object lesson on how NOT to create speculative fiction, skip Shangri-la and try to forget you ever looked its way.

Kaguya-sama: Love is War is an interesting piece. It's a very small story, in an objective sense, but its style makes it feel very big. All the same, it's easy to connect to the characters, like them, and enjoy them for what they are.

The story is simple: Kaguya Shinomiya and Miyuki Shirogane, the President and Vice-President of the Student Council, have fallen for each other... but are both too proud to confess first. 'Geniuses', they each hit upon the idea of using various 'clever' ploys to make the other confess his/her feelings. Making matters complicated are the other members of the ... student council: Chika Fujiwara and Yuu Ishigami, who they'll occasionally have to plan around (or have their plans interrupted by). Each episode will consist of (on average) three vignettes depicting a 'battle' between our leads as they attempt to mentally outmaneuver their crush/rival. Most of these events are, in real space, just conversations taking place within the Student Council room. Sometimes we'll glimpse another environment, but since the Student Council is why our leads are usually together, it forms the most natural frame for their interactions.

If this sounds kind of dull and liable to be repetitive, that's because it would be... if the writing and production weren't smart. Which they are. The show doesn't just portray disconnected events, it actually does build up over time. And each individual 'battle' isn't necessarily about the endgame (confession), but about some topic which is close to the hearts of our leads. That helps prevent repetition not only because it means there's some variance in the 'game' afoot, but also because the characters can succeed or fail in the immediate even if you know they have to maintain the larger status quo. There is some repetitive humor in here, but most of the running jokes are welcome, and don't feel like a waste.

The characters are also pretty simple... at first. And some of them stay that way. Fujiwara and Ishigami aren't the most fleshed-out or developed characters. However, the purpose of their existence is to be foils for our leads. The leads are better studied, but the show does it in a slow burn sort of way. We gradually learn about Shirogane and especially Kaguya, and develop them bit by bit. Some of the development may seem like it's hamfisted (the narrator will just tell you things) but it doesn't matter if you tell if you show as well... and this show does. Some of the best parts are in the last few episodes, when it knows that the games would be a little old if there was no variation, and so we delve deeper into Kaguya's situation and psyche.

The real star, though, is the art. What makes Kaguya-sama interesting is the fact that the mental battles, taking place are represented with elaborate fantasy sequences, melodramatic lighting, and so on – dramatizing the events without claiming something objectively dramatic is literally going on. The art knows what it wants to accomplish, and it achieves its goals in a clever manner. The blending of literal, semi-literal, and non-literal imagery works to the show's advantage in a big way, and every layer has a lot going on, with good (if occasionally excessive) use of lighting and color.

The opening song is unreasonably catchy, and the voice actors do knock it out of the park in the end. Like the characters, it takes a while for them to come into their own, but I think the winners there are Fujiwara and Kaguya – the former for expressing a loud character in exactly the right way so she's not annoying (more than she's supposed to be in moments here or there) and the latter for having a much wider range while remaining 'in character'.

I wish there were more to say about this one, but ultimately I think it just is what it is: a good show. Even if you're not normally into romantic comedies, Kaguya-sama is worth the watch for its clever visual storytelling and ultimately its character study of its lead. I'd happily recommend it.

SCORE BREAKDOWN
Story: 7
Art: 9
Sound: 8
Character: 8
Enjoyment: 8
Total: 8

VERDICT: Kaguya wins this round thanks to good cinematography and surprising depth.

First thing's first: I know this show is based on a game, but I've never played the game, so I'm just going to judge this as its own thing. Which I think is important... a show needs to stand on its own. How does Granblue Fantasy hold up?

Honestly? This is probably the most generic Fantasy story I've seen. I really struggle to find even one unique thing about this show. Its story is old and tired, its visual style is inoffensive and forgettable, its action is utterly standard, its characters are bland, its setting... little better but it's still been ... done.

Let's start with the story: a mysterious waif appears in front of a callow youth from a rural out-of-the-way place and together with a stern but kind mentor, they need to undertake a long journey and resist an evil empire. That's our story here! It's also the story of hundreds of other novels, serials, TV shows, films, and video games over the course of the last century or two, but most of those cases had some variation. Granblue Fantasy feels like it doesn't just not innovate, it actively wanted to avoid innovating. Maybe there's something to that: a game wants to have a broad appeal after all. The problem is that even a game (and especially a show) needs to have appeal to have broad appeal. And Granblue Fantasy is so generic that it risks failing that mark. It's almost like the platonic ideal of a Fantasy story. By that token I can't really hate it. I mean, it doesn't do anything wrong, but it doesn't do anything wrong because it doesn't try anything. The setting, as I mentioned before, is a slight bit more creative, a world of islands in an endless sky? OK, point for visual wonder but it ends up being basically the same as an Age of Sail setup (at least as far as Granblue uses it) and just reminds me of better takes on the idea (particularly the game Skies of Arcadia). There's nothing here that's really out there or creative, so it still doesn't really establish much of an identity.

The characters, as you might expect, are basically walking archetypes. To Granblue Fantasy's little credit they do have a note or two that weren't strictly required by their roles. The voice acting helps a lot, they're all pretty well done... but they are still pretty clearly ticking basic boxes. Gran is the nice young swordsman, Lyria is the hopelessly kind mysterious waif, Katalina... OK I'll kind of give Granblue that her first role usually isn't filled by a lady (it's more an old man kind of job) and she kind of fills two (being an imperial defector as well) but she still doesn't innovate a lot. Vyrn is the useless cute mascot who never says or does anything of value, though, and Rackam is the gruff guy who pretends to not want to help but really has a heart of gold in his arc. Let's face it, you've seen all these characters before. I may not have played Granblue Fantasy, but I took to calling these folks by the names of any other character of their type (particularly their more colorful and interesting counterparts in the video game Skies of Arcadia, which shares a lot of setting details) because the characters her do so little to stand out from the pack.

The art is... well, it's pretty enough, I guess. It doesn't really go off-model or do anything wrong, per say... but it also doesn't do a lot right. The designs of most of the main characters are clean but also extremely basic (less so the extras and latecomers, who are a bit colorful) and the action is OK but also not exactly good. By in large it's slow and basic – you can see everything that's happening, but there's not a lot of wonder to it, and fight scenes will screech to a halt to let characters talk. Once or twice you'll see a cool stunt but most of the time it's all just the sort of stuff that would be background filler in a show with better choreography. All the same, I've seen a lot worse; compared to something like Fate/Stay Night or Shakugan no Shana the action here would be absolutely embarrassing, but on its own I guess it passed muster.

On sound, I've already touched on the fact that the voice acting is actually surprisingly good. True, these characters are tropes, but the actors all sell them pretty well. I wasn't pulled out of the moment listening to Gran, Lyria, or Katalina thinking “Someone in a recording studio was sure paid to say that”, they spoke their overused paint-by-numbers dialogue with conviction. The rest of the sound is a total nothing. Again, there are no huge glaring faults like bad mixing or excessive sfx, it does fit the moment, but there wasn't any care given to the sound design. The music, even the opening and ending, are like nothing you would ever remember in your life. I'd say that's fitting for a video game adaptation, since video games often have fairly simple background tracks that only exist to fill dead air so you're not listening to an uncomfortable void of silence, but really most of the video games I can think of at least have a few memorable tracks, whether title music or boss themes or what have you, into which at least a little effort was put. And the good ones can use music to great effect, setting the mood for different areas in a powerful and memorable way. Granblue Fantasy (the Animation, no idea about the game as I've said before) does none of that, it's all totally forgettable. I can kind of remember a little of what the opening sounds like (and it didn't get me pumped, excited, or interested like so many good openings do), but nothing else. I know there was music but... yeah. It's that bland.

And that's the takeaway from the show as a whole. It's bland, it's forgettable, it's inoffensive. Nothing about it is memorable. Nothing about it takes any risks. Nothing about it has any sort of identity. It's all so dull that for episode 13 we're treated to an AU of the story where Gran is replaced by a girl named Djeeta and there are probably as many original ideas in the recap section of the comedy beach episode as we got in the 12 episodes of actual plot.

But... that's not a crime, really.

Granblue Fantasy the Animation can probably be summed up as “Mostly Harmless”. There's nothing bad or insulting about it at any point, it just does its thing exactly to formula and lets you go about your business. I have seen shows that have tried less and failed spectacularly for it. True, I'll probably remember those shows longer, but when all those memories are negative, I think I'd prefer Granblue. I won't recommend it, really, but I won't advise against it, and I could see the show having value as 'comfort food' for the fantasy fan. It does nothing daring or creative, but sometimes you might just want to wash the taste of anything else out of your mouth, and Granblue Fantasy will probably do that, acting as a creative palate cleanser.

SCORE BREAKDOWN
Story: 5
Art: 6
Sound: 7
Character: 6
Enjoyment: 6
Total: 6

VERDICT: Mostly Harmless. Mostly Pointless. Easily Forgotten. Utterly Inoffensive. Watch if you want the world's most basic competent Fantasy story. Otherwise, do something more worthwhile with your time.

I did not sign up for this feels trip!

I mean, I liked it, but I didn't sign up for it. This show has a bad (or possibly brilliant) case of misleading advertising: I expected a zany and possibly slightly raunchy, mostly comedic sort of adventure – You know, the kind of show that you would think would get its leading lady into a bunny girl costume over quasi-supernatural occurrences. And at first, that looked like the show I was going to get. The initial Bunny Girl encounter was maybe a little more low key than I might have thought, but the surreal ... tone and muted but gorgeous art still supported something of a “Haruhi Suzumiya meets Flying Witch” sort of affair.

That was not the show I got. What this is, is significantly more heavy and also significantly more heartfelt, more of a romantic drama with some comedic possibilities than a romantic comedy. And it works really well as what it is.

About the story; Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai is organized as a series of arcs. The characters move forward over time so I can't say they're disconnected, but in general one plot will end and another will pick right up. Each of those plots involves our main character, Sakuta, encountering a girl afflicted with Puberty Syndrome/Adolescence Syndrome and helping her resolve her issues and recover from the condition. What is Puberty Syndrome? Well, as much as I understand, it seems to be a condition where an adolescent's psychological issues (whether internal or cultural) bloom via an unknown mind-over-matter mechanism into a paranormal affliction that's unique to the sufferer's psychological/emotional turmoil. A victim of bullying may find that the very idea of interacting with society and even modern telecommunication causes physical injury, while a student who gets ignored thanks to a bad debut leaving her out of every clique can begin to vanish from the world, forgotten and unseen by all. All in all, five cases of Puberty Syndrome get addressed and (for the most part) resolved in a satisfactory manner over the course of the show.

When you get down to it, the story of Puberty Syndrome and the girls that suffer from it isn't a lot. This show is not plot driven, the plot is really just there as a mechanism to move the emotional struggles of Sakuta, Mai, and to a lesser extent their friends forward. However, it does its job well enough in providing interesting scenarios that I can't begrudge it too much, and it doesn't really feel forced. There are hints of a deeper plot, involving Sakuta's own Puberty Syndrome (maybe) and a mysterious sixth girl, Shouko that are raised and ultimately left unanswered, though. Unless I'm deeply mistaken there's a movie that's supposed to tie all of that together, but I'm here to judge the series on its own merits, and... you know what, I'm not sure I for one would need a movie of answers. I'm kind of fine, given the atmosphere that's built up over the course of the show, both everyday and incredibly strange at the same time, with having Shouko be a mystery – a big question mark that nobody has all the pieces to formulate an answer to. For the show we get, it serves its purpose.

What the show is really about are the characters and their relationships. Not all the characters are real wonders of writing (though I quite like Mai and don't think anyone is poorly written) but the way they go together is nothing short of wonderful. If you have a budding screenwriter who doesn't quite know how to build chemistry between characters, sit them down in front of Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai and say, “Watch the masters at work.” I am dead serious, this is some of the best I've seen. Because unlike a lot of good teams and couples, the chemistry between the cast of this show feels totally organic. You can see, and even feel, how their opinions shift, and how their personalities end up playing off one another. The interactions between Sakuta and Tomoe, for instance, are pretty similar to the interactions between Sakuta and Mai sometimes. The big details are fairly similar, with how Sakuta teases his conversation partner, and some of how she might react. In the fine details, though, the relationships end up being worlds apart. The same words, in different contexts and/or with different deliveries can have meanings entirely divorced from one another. It's true in real life and it's true in this show.

While the writing is, of course, a huge part of making that work, I also have to hand it to the voice actors. Sakuta, for instance, has a lot of deadpan deliveries, but it's easy to know what he means with each one, and when he breaks out of that to get loud for a moment, when he has to scream or cry in a big way, you believe every second of it. It's not just him – nearly every character has a person's full range of expression, not a flat character's couple of modes. It's good writing, good directing, and darn good acting.

If there's a weakness in the show, it's that the quality level isn't universal. Far more effort was put into Sakuta, Mai, and Tomoe than was really put into Rio, Kaede, or even Nodoka, who can sometimes feel more like stereotypes than people. They're not bad, and if you transplanted any one of their performances into a show with less 'real' characters they'd be the impressively deep ones, but they don't quite reach the level of the first three characters we really get to explore.

On the other hand, Mai and Sakuta have enough material to have a romance on slow burn for basically the whole thirteen episodes of the show and not have it fall flat at any point. They have real, organic issues, and they work through them like real, reasonable, and surprisingly mature people rather than as perfectly understanding saints or willfully blind screechers. When a rift comes between them for a time, you can honestly believe that someone's feelings were hurt and their reactions totally sell the degree and nature of the conflict more than any amount of hammy yelling ever could. And when they talk things out and reconcile or overcome a problem, they do so as invested individuals, people who have something that matters to them, something they want to preserve and nurture, but are also fallible individuals who can't just shrug off everything. Their love is strong, but it's not invincible or unconditional... and it's really well done. I feel kind of privileged to see it come into being and move steadily forward, through all the insanity surrounding their lives and trials both mundane and supernatural.

And that there is the strongest reason to watch the show: it's one of the best romances I've seen in anime, and it IS the focus of the material, getting all the time and focus it needs over the course of the show in order to earn that near superlative.

SCORE BREAKDOWN
Story: 6 (Counting the “main plot” of the Puberty Syndrome cases)
Character: 9 (Counting the Romance Plot here)
Art: 8
Sound: 9
Enjoyment: 8
Total: 8

Verdict: Just be aware that this is a moderately heavy show. It's not without humor, but it doesn't shy away from giving its characters very real and difficult problems, and there are probably as many points that threaten to start the waterworks as points where you actually laugh out loud. That said, it's a really great romance with amazing chemistry, told around some creative ways to deal with the supernatural manifestations of very real problems. I'd strongly recommend it.

Geez, Noein was a strange one.

And that is even by my standards. I'm the kind of person who's sunk pretty deeply into speculative fiction. I'm no stranger to esoteric visuals or allegedly 'mind-bending' concepts about quantum realities or multiple timelines. But Noein blends so much of it so constantly that even having reached the end I'm not totally sure I know what was accomplished or why. The brilliant part of the show is that it doesn't actually matter how weird it is, or how many questions you have, because the writing keeps you invested in what's right in front of you; ... as long as you care about the characters and their struggles and whether they succeed or fail, the show's in a good place.

As such, I'd like to address this show in ascending order of strangeness and import (the two are fairly closely linked). That means starting with the sound. The music is forgettable and the SFX are... competent. The voice acting is also mostly good, but there I do have a quibble: there are points throughout the show where the script breaks down into moderately long stretches where the characters don't do much except call each other's names (particularly “Haruka!” with the occassional “Karasu” or “Yuu”) and... it's hard to make a conversation out of that material sound good and so there's not really any shame that the VAs don't exactly manage, but now and again there are moments where the cheesy nature of those lines isn't helped by the acting. Some of the characters also have trouble spending a LOT of their time with only a single inflection. I don't really mean Karasu's growl (that's just a particular characterization choice), but Haruka's timid whine and Yuu's somewhat nasal petulant grumpy tone can get old and feel overused. Characters in other shows can be grumps or whiners but have more of a vocal range that they use in other scenarios. Oddly enough the side characters actually seem to have this down, but the leads needed better direction. As-is they aren't terrible, but I've heard better.

The art is where things start to get weird. The general style of Noein is... idiosyncratic. The characters aren't drawn quite like other anime characters. Noein is hardly the only show to have a unique and particular style to its character designs, but it doesn't end there. There are, of course, the designs of the 'aliens and monsters' (so to speak: there are no literal extraterrestrials. I think.) which are pretty unique., creative, and usually twisted – including both the ornate pearl and gold Shangri-la machines and the visceral, used organic and mechanical elements of the Dragon Cavalry. It's more than that, though. The show pretty heavily uses CGI, and it's fairly conspicuous in its use... but I think it's supposed to be conspicuous and jarring, since the biggest use of CGI is for effects that could at least be termed 'magic'. It has an otherworldly feel to it, when a lot of the show is supposed to be otherworldly, so as jarring as it might appear I can't really fault it. Then, on the other side, there are the times when the show swerves hard the other way, going into sketch work with very exaggerated distortions. It's so strange and stylistic that I'm not sure if it's an artistic representation of the feelings in the scenes in question, literally what you would see if you were there including the changes in texture and massive deformation in motion, or if the animators just ran out of budget and resorted to animating the storyboards for a couple scenes. I don't know whether that's brilliant, insane, or both.

The characters do contain something of our callback to reality. The “Normal world” Timespace characters, particularly the kids, are mostly fairly normal. You understand their wishes and desires and their motivations for doing what they do, and the show takes its time building them up, including characters that other shows might get away with leaving flat (like Yuu's mom). Mercifully, despite developing a huge cast, it doesn't distract the show from moving forward. The characters from other timespaces, though, La'cryma and Shangri'la? They're a little more troubling. We aren't privileged to fully understand their struggles, at least not until we're pretty darn deep in the show, and they're subject to Rules of the Universe that we also don't fully understand, meaning that there are degrees to which we can't understand their motivations. Their histories can also be issues. Even though many of the alternate-time characters are the future versions of the kids we know, we aren't privy to what shaped them in the intervening fifteen years between the 'normal world' and La'cryma except by vague and sometimes misleading implications. Add in that there are plenty of La'cryma characters who we don't have past-time analogs for and they're a hard bunch to get a read on. Shangri'la is even worse... I've finished the show and I'm not totally sure what's up with just about anything Shangri'la. To an extent though... does it matter? The struggles of Haruka are well enough explored to carry the show, to an extent everything else is just kind of window dressing.

Which brings us to the plot. The plot is a mixed bag within itself. On one hand, it's a brilliant exploration – in some ways it's the very definition of an epic, a harrowing series of events that fundamentally changes everyone involved by the end, so we can see the journey of the characters as well as the journey of their world. On the other hand... there's some pretty basic, even annoyingly basic, stuff in here. An average arc is that somebody is menacing Haruka and somebody else doesn't want that person to get their way and moves to stop them. Salt with weird stuff happening thanks to Haruka without her understanding or controlling this. My biggest problem with the plot of Noein is that our real main characters, the ones in which the show tries hardest to build emotional stakes, Yuu and Haruka, have frustratingly little agency. Yuu does pretty much nothing except grump and brood until the last act; in my opinion, he needed to be a little more useful, at least in spirit, earlier in the show, and maybe have his personal growth acknowledged better and sooner. Haruka also doesn't do a lot on her own. As the Dragon Torque she has phenomenal cosmic power... but said power didn't come with a manual, so she can only use it as she's mentored to or does on instinct or by accident. And, especially earlier on, there's not enough mentoring and way too much blind accident. In almost every arc, Haruka is dragged along as an object. She is, in a sense, a living McGuffin, despite the fact that the Dragon Torque is ultimately well enough defined that such a label really shouldn't apply to it. I wanted to see Haruka reach for something of her own free will, to act rather than to react... and she kind of didn't.

And yet... I enjoyed this show, particularly its plot and writing, immensely. I think it's down to the pacing. While, looking back it, Noein probably dragged in places in a technical sense, and while I certainly felt it was dragging its heels about a few topics (especially Haruka/The Dragon Torque), it never really felt like it was getting bogged down. Even the longwinded discussions of applied quantum physics were interesting, engaging, and internally well-paced. The action is strong, and a lot of that is down to pitch-perfect build up in the writing. Whenever characters fight in Noein, you feel something about it. Sometimes, especially in the first couple conflicts, your perspective is more that of the frightened kids caught in the crossfire, but by the time the show has reached its midgame the stakes are always there. And I mean, real emotional stakes that viewers can connect with; the show has a lot of “Or it's the end of the world” scenarios but it knows better than to lean on the scope of a devastation that we don't or won't see to provide drama, instead reaching for drama through investment (and frequently putting the fairly likeable Haruka in mortal danger. That helps too.)

The emotional arcs are the strongest part. You feel what the characters feel in Noein, their joy, their pain, and their desperation... even if sometimes you don't really comprehend why. In the end, I think that emotional investment is what holds Noein together and makes sure it works despite everything else being all over the place.

SCORE BREAKDOWN
Story: 7 (a very conflicted 7)
Art: 7
Sound: 6
Character: 8
Enjoyment: 9
Total: 8 (7.4)

VERDICT: If you want to watch Noein, strap yourself in: it's a chaotic roller-coaster in both its content and in some areas its quality. But, rough patches and all, I think it's well worth the ride.

Arpeggio of Blue Steel is a hard one to review, in part because it weighs out to being a fairly average series. It doesn't have a ton of strengths, nor does it have any really notable failure. It shows up, does its thing, and then departs, so it's really more a question of whether or not that 'thing' will be up your alley.

I can say, in that, it was a good deal better than it had to be, or even then it might have appeared to be. This show really could have coasted with some CG action and cute ship girls and ... found an audience, it didn't really need to reach for anything resembling quality. But it did. The writers took it seriously and for that at least I must give the show my respect.

The story is, in a sense, fairly basic. The entire running time is dedicated to a single mission (albeit a very harrowing one with a lot of roadblocks along the way): In a world where the seas have been taken over by hyper-advanced AI entities based on the templates of WWII warships (just go with it) called the Fleet of Fog, Japan needs to send the prototype of a new weapon that could change humanity's fortunes in the ongoing conflict across the Pacific to America, since the Japanese don't have the industrial capacity to mass-produce it. The team that will be pulling this massive blockade run has a very singular advantage: Iona, aka I-401, a submarine who has defected from the Fog to serve a particular human (just go with that too, it's never explained).

The human characters are also pretty bare bones. I-401's crew has some distinctive visual designs, but one personality trait each at best and no real characterization. Aside from Gunzo, the male lead, I don't know what they like or dislike or what really motivates them as people. They're just there to crew the ship and look kind of cool doing it. Honestly, given Iona's own capabilities I'm not sure they couldn't have been cut entirely from the story without losing anything.

The ship characters, on the other hand, are pretty interesting and well studied. Each of them has at least one good note of personality and a distinct identity, while they also grapple to lesser or greater degrees with the nonhuman nature of their psychology, an issue that actually gets addressed with far more grace than I would have expected.

Because, when you get down to it, the conflict that carries Arpeggio of Blue Steel, that makes the show worth watching rather than automatically worth forgetting, is not the conflict between landlocked humanity and the Fleet of Fog – it's the conflict of the members of the Fleet of Fog against their own changing natures. We understand, fairly shortly into the show, that the Fog ships used to just be ships, operating under the poorly defined Admiralty Code that dictated their actions. However, something in the fog acknowledged their weakness – an inability to innovate, especially tactically, the way humans do – and some Fog ships spawned human avatars and more individual consciousnesses in order to hopefully gain that. But, in becoming more like humans, they've also increasingly become prey to human foibles, things that didn't affect them or cloud their judgment before they began their evolution.

Every Fog character reacts differently to the, for lack of a better word, humanity growing in them and the other members of the Fog. Iona, Takao, Haruna, Kirishima, Hyuuga, Kongou, I-400, and I-402 all have responses that differ on fundamental levels, and what they choose to do with their possibly free will as opposed to the dictates of the Admiralty Code is a nearly constant question.

For a sci-fi nerd, the questions that Arpeggio raises on the growth and evolution of intellect and ego make the show more than worth its running time, especially since they're handled in a subtle way without a hamfisted answer being rammed down the viewer's throat. More casual viewers will also probably appreciate the fact that Arpeggio doesn't make this theme and a resolution to it blindingly obvious from frame 1, because let's face it, nobody likes it when we get dull message fiction.

And no matter what side of that divide you come down on, it helps that the show is held together with some straightforward goals and, frequently, some good action. For the most part, the ship battles in this show are great, displays of both visual wonder as ultra-tech weaponry fires everywhere and cat-and-mouse games as Gunzo and his opponents attempt to outmaneuver each other. It's not exactly realistic, so hardcore military buffs could be put off, but for most viewers that's not going to matter when it's all presented and sold well.

The show also has some occasional moments of goofy comedy (especially once Hyuuga enters the picture) and they're pretty welcome. This isn't an all serious all the time sort of work with a dark tone or oppressive atmosphere, it's mostly optimistic and adventurous. And when it does go for a serious moment, it's given the buildup and payoff that's needed, so neither comedy nor tragedy spoil each other in this one.

That said, keeping a middle-of-the-road stand may ensure that Arpeggio remains watchable for everybody, but it is also probably what keeps the show from hitting true greatness. Like I said at the start, it's not amazingly memorable. For me, at least, Arpeggio of Blue Steel passed through without leaving much of an impact, despite both its strengths and its faults. It does cut corners in a lot of areas, like the overarching plot or the human characters, and it doesn't exactly go all the way with either the craziness of its theme or the high concept of its ideas... it strives to maintain a broad appeal, and I think it does, but it does it at least somewhat at the cost of depth.


SCORE BREAKDOWN

Story: 6
Character: 8
Art: 7
Sound: 7
Enjoyment: 8
Total: 7 (7.2)

Verdict: If you want some naval/sci-fi action with themes that are far smarter in concept and more intelligently addressed than they have any right to be, Arpeggio of Blue Steel is the show for you. Just don't expect it to do more than entertain you for its running time, because while it will pass that bar, it won't do so by a whole lot.

Occult Academy is a show that ultimately doesn't work, but at the same time manages to be kind of fascinating in its failure. It's not down to any single factor why Occult Academy doesn't work, and it has its share of strengths, though to be fair there are plenty of weaknesses to pick on. However, the way all the pieces go together makes the show overall one I can't recommend.

With the exceptions of the two leads, the characters are essentially one note each... but they play their notes well enough that I don't really hold it against them. A season of anime ... doesn't have all the time in the world, and the secondary character tier in this one is big enough that trying to give them all independent growth arcs just would have made the whole thing muddy and drowned out the plot. It still would have been nice if we got a little more out of the friends themselves, or especially the Vice Principal character, but of the show's sins, this is really the least.

The leads are another story. Maya is one of the high points of the show. She has a very well-defined character and a strong arc. She's not amazing, though – many shows as have been saved by getting a truly jaw-dropping character or two, but Occult Academy is not among them. I dare say, despite being pretty good, she could have been a lot smarter in a stronger production. More on the vast depths of 'could have been' later. Bunmei, on the other hand, is one of the weakest parts of the show for most of its run. I get that he's kind of like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, the random dude thrown into mysterious nonsense who is possibly rightly terrified of everything, but Shaggy (in most incarnations at least) may be a coward, but he's not a blowhard or otherwise unpleasant. Bunmei, straight out, doesn't come off as a very good person in the first half of the show. And even later, when he has one or two redeeming scenes to put him in a better place for the climax, he's still not very fun to watch.

I find myself somewhat disappointed as well that the show doesn't really look like anything. It's got a great theme for visual wonder – the Occult! This is begging for a lot of dark shadows and tricks of cinematography to create a pervasive mood in the scenes, and really bring out the mystery and fear. Or if you want to see things clearly, it practically demands some creative design for creatures and effects. Occult Academy never does any of this. The designs aren't utterly uncreative, but they don't have any touches to make them memorable or distinctive in any way. For a subject that should be trivial to make memorable, I think I'm pretty much going to forget all of it, and that's just sad. The overall style, too, isn't very distinct. Most of the scenes, this could be just about any show. Except where the characters slip off-model and end up not looking very good, there's nothing that would make this stand out from any other show with a more every-day sort of setting and theme. It doesn't leave a mark, doesn't make an impression, and a lot of the time doesn't really look good either.

With the sound, there's nothing wrong with it, but there's nothing right either. Everything is either bog standard or easily forgotten. The voice actors didn't fail to sell their characters, but didn't really leave an impression either.

Then we come to the biggest stumbling block, the story line. The plot of this show is all over the place. Few are the shows that can work in Aliens, Time Travelers, Psychic Powers, Ghosts, Cryptids, Demons... yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on, and it's painfully not consistent. And you might ask yourself “Why should it be? The theme here is 'the occult' not a subset of it!”. And you'd be right, but that doesn't mean it's good. And it kind of highlights what I think is behind most of the elements of Occult Academy that don't work.

Put simply, the creators behind Occult Academy had some ideas about what they wanted in their show, and what they wanted their show to be, and they went for all of those without taking a moment to understand what it would all mean for the big picture. For instance, the creators decided they wanted this to include everything and the kitchen sink – an approach that might have worked in an X-Files sort of “monster of the week” setup, but which doesn't pay off when there's a time limit and climax, and an overriding goal that our heroes should be paying attention to. And there's a moment, towards the end of the show, where we get the big “Future refused to change” moment. And it's a good moment, but it's not in a scenario where it really makes sense. The reveal of the villain is in a similar space: I get what they were going for, and why someone would have said in abstract “I want this to happen”, but there wasn't enough care taken to actually have the moment land; it was both too easy to guess because huge amounts of run time would have failed to be germane to anything otherwise, and impossible because there were no in-character hints or clues as to the outcome of the mystery. There's yet another scene in the final sequence, and it's supposed to be a touching scene, but it falls flat because the character involved never got enough earnest development, they were treated as a joke so when they try to get used for heavy drama it doesn't land. The climax as well is a good sequence, probably one of only two action sequences in the show (along with the fake-out climax) to be worth watching even if it still wasn't amazing in the pantheon of anime as a whole, but it happens so quickly that you can't really enjoy it. When a big, climactic fight comes out in a show like Shakugan no Shana, or even a generally weak show that knows a little better about what to do here like Star Driver, the show works to get you excited for the action, building up what's coming before actually delivering. Occult Academy just throws you what it has cold, because someone really wanted that moment, or that scene, or that theme, and didn't care how it went together.

As a result, the pacing of the show is terrible, even if the pacing of scenes or sometimes even episodes is good. How and when major parts of the show are addressed or, more often, not addressed is just plain wrong. Even if all the parts were good (and most are just serviceable, really) the result would still be bad just because of the incompetent assembly.

There is a part of me that wanted to like Occult Academy, and gave it more than a fair chance. I love the subject matter (though it doesn't go into it much after the very start). I like the fact that it's original, when so many shows are adaptions. But none of that saves it from a presentation that really needed a round or two of rewrites, at multiple stages in the creation process, before reaching the viewer at last. With more effort, it could have been a good show. But it needed to either be a kitchen sink affair with no harsh deadline or obvious end, or else it needed to tighten its focus and tie things into the main threat. It needed to either tell a better mystery with clues and suspense as well as an unsurprising surprise, or it needed to drop the forced twist and tell a more straightforward story. No show can be all things to all people, and, as a writer, if a scene or a moment or even a theme doesn't work, you cut it out for the good of the whole. Nobody went back and edited Occult Academy, and that is why it failed.


SCORE BREAKDOWN
Story: 3
Art: 5
Sound: 6
Character: 5
Enjoyment: 3
Total: 5 (4.4)

Final Verdict: Even for a real nut who'll get all the little references to occult phenomena, this show just isn't worth it. The good ideas that are in there needed to be in a production with a lot more polish, down to the basic level, in order to show any strength.

Every once in a while you get a work that's legitimately transformative, taking a stale, stagnant, or just under-explored genre and bringing it to a state that's truly new and different. Magical Girl Spec-Ops Asuka is not that show. It wants to be, but it isn't. That doesn't mean it's a bad show, but if the show were a rocket it would aim for the moon and hit an urban center with a payload of nerve gas. Did that comparison seem disturbingly excessive? If so, it's the right one for this show.

Because what needs to be gotten out of the ... way first is that the exploitation value in this show is above and beyond. Or at least beyond, I'm not sure you can call something like that 'above'. And really, it comes off as desperate. The show wants you to feel something, anything, and it doesn't really care what that is, as long as it can trick you into thinking it's saying more than it actually is, or doing something with more substance than it's actually doing. Every episode, close to every shot, pushes some kind of intense or extreme imagery in your face. Focused titilation, cold-blooded torture, and some truly gruesome (as well as bloody) violence and gore are the order of the day. Often, they even do this at the same time. There are a few too many scenes of a pretty girl stripped to her underwear and subjected to horrific pain, when one of those scenes would probably be too much for some viewers. Is it supposed to be titillating or stomach churning? I'm not sure, and I'm not sure the show cares. It wants you to remember it more than it wants to be remembered for anything in particular.

So, from that alone, if this show isn't up your alley, you can probably tell. I guess I do have to give the show some little credit that at least it does go all the way with being an Exploitation piece and doesn't half-ass the lurid content, but at the same time, when the reasoning is so transparent, I'm not sure that's worthwhile on its own. Plenty of anime shows have lurid content, and plenty of them use it better. If you watch Mirai Nikki or Brynhildr in the Darkness you'll get doses, and potentially heavy doses at that, of sex, violence, torture, and gore... but with those other shows, you'll get it in a package that mostly feels organic. The exploitative content isn't just presented to exploit you, it does help tell the story and establish the world. If you took that content away from one of those, the show would lose something meaningful and worthwhile beyond just a hook for animal cravings. In Asuka, I feel like you could radically tone down the exploitation, and it wouldn't have any effect on the core of the show. We don't need the focus on the ample bottoms and bosoms of the characters. We don't need the most reprehensible ends of the violent content. And while we might keep a nonzero number, we don't need all the torture scenes either. In fact, I might argue that some of those scenes would be more effective if there were fewer, because it would make each one stand out more, and have more of an impact.

It's actually a little sad that the exploitation is so omnipresent and distracting, because there are things the show does well, and that are worth watching it for. When it breaks out, for a moment, from the “More Terrible = More Real” paradigm, the show is actually kind of good at depicting a “real” world and conflict that happens to involve magic. The best scenes in the show are the action scenes, because the magical action is mostly fast, punchy, and well-choreographed while the action involving soldiers and “mundane” Spec-Ops is down to earth, making awesome tactics that you could see actually being applied in the word rather than just in the world of Hollywood. This is a setting where a possible response to a giant murderous people-eating teddy bear could be a sniper on the rooftop, actually at reasonable sniping range, and soldiers actually know (at least in some scenes) to shoot in semiautomatic bursts rather than a continuous hail of full auto fire that would never actually happen

And, when the characters that have been through terrible things are actually explored, there are some good portrayals of PTSD, and bad coping mechanisms making for interestingly conflicted characters. But then the show goes too far, or more often doesn't quite decide whether it wants to go all the way or not, and tries to have it both ways. For instance, the character of Kurumi is played both as a dangerously obsessive psychopath, and as a just slightly clingy/jealous would-be girlfriend and they don't fit together. They could have fit together if enough time was devoted to the character and enough care was taken; other shows have done Yandere types well in that manner, but it's not consistent here; there's not enough undertone of menace in her sweet moments, and there's not enough acknowledgment of her normal personality when she goes scary. It works in a couple scenes, but it fails in more.

I also do appreciate that, while showing us the darkest stuff the show can, it also does show us a few non-tainted moments of goodness. This seems to be one of the major themes of the show, that for everything horrible that may occur, there's still a ray of light out there somewhere, and that's worth going for. And I guess that one idea, the show does express well. It would have been better with less sadistic fanservice to confuse the dark stuff for the audience, but it does work as-is.

The story is also in a complicated place. This is an adaptation, and an adaptation of a source material with a longer run than could be completely adapted, leaving it in an awkward place. At 12 episodes, the story is blatantly unfinished. What we have of it, though is... it's good. Not great, but good. We have reason to believe that the magical terrorists of the Babel Brigade have a plan that's both competent (seeing their overall strategic operations) and threatening, and that the world is moving forward. But we've only been through act one. There was an alright climax, but there really wasn't a conclusion. The show tries to play this off with an “It never ends” parting sentiment, bit it rings as hollow when a lot of stuff is set up that doesn't pay off. The final episode, especially, is transparent setup for a season 2 (or “read the source material to find out!” if there isn't one) and it's somewhat grating. Other adaptations leave the door open while still feeling like an actual arc, and not just part of an arc, was sewn up. The worst part is Asuka might have done that if it just stopped an episode earlier, rather than burning one on denouement that does the opposite of what denouement is supposed to do.

By in large, the best stuff in the show is centered around two particular characters: Asuka and Chisato. Asuka is the main character, and her struggle with what it means to fight and what it means to be a magical girl is actually well-presented, and I think if the show focused more on her psychology than on her chest, it would be stronger for it. Chisato, by contrast, is interesting because her presentation is something of a more complete story. For Rapture, War Nurse, and the rest of the Magical Five, we're seeing their second story. We don't know, except by implication, what turned them into the people they are now. We find out some, through flashbacks, and it's god to do so, but all the same we open in media res. For Chisato, we get to see how and why she becomes a Magical Girl, aligns herself, and starts to fight. You understand her more completely than you do the leads despite her late introduction and brief screen time, and while her material does still suffer the fanservice-versus-gore conflict in places, it does manage better depicting the dichotomy of hope and hopelessness than most of the show's run does.

SCORE BREAKDOWN
Story: 5 (Incomplete, and often lost in the moment. Maybe this is as it should be, but right now it's a weakness)
Art: 8 (Effective, but largely misused)
Sound: 7 (Fine)
Character: 5 (Very variable and somewhat scattered)
Enjoyment: 5 (The exploitation was excessive, but there were gems hidden in there to be found)
Total: 6

FINAL VERDICT: In the end, I can't say I would really recommend the show, but I wouldn't strictly say to avoid it either. If you're still interested, knowing what you're getting into, go for it. I do give it credit for what it does well, and for being a dark and gritty Magical Girl show that does do things that are new and different rather than just attempting to imitate Madoka Magica... it just doesn't do those things very well all the time.