Back to TheBellman's Profile TheBellman's Profile

I am always desperate for good anime gunfighting content and my desperation has brought me to Lycoris Recoil

The action itself is kindof mid so far. It very much leans on the fantastical "gun-fu" side of things with bullets being dodged at close range and impossible marksmanship, and not in a way that feels like it really has stakes. To the series' credit, there is some acknowledgement of how unexpected the gun-kata shit is, and there have been a couple sequences so far where our main girl Chisato applies some tactics and tradecraft that actually make her credible as the most dangerous person in ... the setting. I will always enjoy sequences where experienced characters detect traps and nimbly navigate. But it's unclear if those are going to be thin on the ground as things go on, the trend has been downwards across these first three episodes.

The story thus far has been not been particularly interesting. This really does not come across as a story which actually takes it's own mechanics or the violence the characters experience seriously. The characters much more conform to moe tropes than to the world around them and what they supposedly do everyday for a living.

The wrapping for the action is decent. The show goes for a highly post-processed "store brand Makoto Shinkai" or "discount Pixiv" aesthetic which is pleasant if unremarkable, and the character design is generally cute and easy on the eyes. There is just enough character animation and visual flair going on in most dialogue scenes to keep me awake in my seat.

Thanks to this the moment to moment non-action experience of the show can be described as tolerable. The voice performances from many of the seiyuu, especially Chisato -very compelling as the mysterious genki girl- are excellent and can drive any scene they are in. The archetypal characters with their barely plausible motivations and their barely plausible body types don't grate in any way even if I have seen it all before. Perhaps being set partially in a cafe disguises the blatant (perhaps not blatant enough) coffee undertones.

If you come to this series for the light distraction that it is, tea and teacakes, you won't go home disappointed. Don't come in making comparisons to works that take their characters and action more seriously, like a certain counter-terrorism series set in Italy. But by that same token, I can't really hold that comparison against Lycoris Recoil. There are definitely worse things I have watched in the pursuit of anything that's Girls with Guns.

For now, this is the best that manga has to offer in terms of a story about war in the 20th century.

I came to this series through wanting semi-realistic tactical action with guns and ammo. Series like Jormungand and Gunslinger Girl scratch the itch but they have run their course. I even suffered through the hentai plots of things like Gunsmith Cats and Mezzo Forte.

With nobody talking about the Manga at all despite over a decade of publication, I had assumed that Groundless was going to be the absolute depths of desperation in this search. But the series impressed me from a ... pretty early stage.

Context is the word with Groundless. In the early chapters the series spends as much time setting up the conflict, a miasma of economic, ethnic, and national interests boiling over into a chaotic civil war (the inspiration seems to be Spain in the 1930s); as it does the tragic backstory to our main character's murderous vengeance.

While Sophia herself is not always well defined beyond her cold fury and roiling angst, the worldbuilding puts her in a meaningful context, like it does many of the other characters. She is a mixed race woman unwelcome to the colonials, but betrayed by the revolutionaries who might claim to take her cause. She joins the local militia, which has not yet chosen a side, to try to fight for something.

It also puts her in a perfect position to shoot a lot of people.

Sophia is a sniper, but Groundless understands that doesn't always mean making insane trickshots, because while she is an improbably skilled markswoman Sophia also needs to be, unseen, in the right place at the right time. While we start with her mowing down a horde of enemy partisans and then eliminating the hated enemy commander, the series as has been translated thus far has continued to find interesting ways for her to turn the tides of battle with her skills.

The highlight has been a night battle where she and her squad contrive it that a much larger Liberation Army force finds itself stuck under the streetlights that they themselves had set as a trap. This is also where we start to see the story and our characters at their most merciless, as starry eyed cute girl revolutionaries who are just trying to impress onii chan get their brains splattered just the same.

One thing that does concern me about this series is that it's not clear what some of the edge of the story is going to be in service of, both in terms of the development of the characters and the political direction. I can agree thus far with the characters choice of a third path in the conflict, and the depiction of revolutionaries as ruthless and disagreeable as they are idealistic, but it is not hard to see how that could go in stupid or even unsavory directions.

The depiction and description of racism and ethnic strife in the story is very much that of someone who has never witnessed such things, as you would expect from Japan. But to me it at least feels like the understanding of someone who has read some actual good history books and has seriously considered the subject, which is more than can be said than a lot of genre fiction authors from other countries who should know better.

Another element that could be divisive is how much the presentation of Groundless relies on the use of semi-abstract tactical maps, which become increasingly complex and important to mind as the combat zones become chaotic and full of unexpected shifts and reversals. A similar portion of panels are devoted to maps as they would be in Kingdom, with similar results. At least the art is fairly pleasant, what it might lack in detail and spectacle is made up for by the lovely character art and design, which somehow feels at home in the setting despite some of it's exaggerated pop and cuteness.


I don't know where the story is going, and I'm even well behind what has been written thanks to the slow (but as of writing, ongoing) scanslation efforts. But every chapter of Groundless thus far has been a joy, and I have become very invested in where it is going. I came just to see some gun porn and cool shooting art, and I found one of the more unique, sophisticated manga which is currently publishing.


Edit: I just read Golden Kamuy and it scratched a lot of the itches this manga did but better. Does not change what I said here though

In a season where even most of the good shows consist largely of static shots of characters standing around talking, Vlad Love is a breath of fresh air. This anime overflows with exuberant, horny energy in a way that few series since Kill la Kill have. Jokes fly constantly and even if one doesn't stick (which is likely, as many are very Japanese) the next one will be along in just a second.

There isn't constant animation but all the shot composition is world class and what animation there is is high effort, the quirky mixed media presentation with live music clips in the ... OP and drone footage for interstitial shots is nothing but charming. The story is fundamentally a basic magical girlfriend plot but they simultaneously do not give a shit and have a lot to say about the harmful repercussions of being a simp for anime girls, giving up your blood for a fickle vampire who never actually reciprocates. For a minute at a time every few episodes the show will suddenly become Patlabor again, with random government agents having tense political arguments in front of radar screens as the jets move to intercept.

Is this actually going anywhere? Who cares! The moment to moment experience is a blast.

This show definitely falls on a small oval on the venn diagram between "enjoys Mamoru Oshii anime" and "enjoys demented shitpost anime" but it will absolutely satisfy you if you fit into it.

If you're the sort of person who will call an anime a masterpiece because it makes you cry, "Saikano" might work for you.

This show will make you feel absolutely miserable. The story is an emotional rollercoaster that only goes down, with increasing drama and darkness as it continues. The setting only makes one major divergence from reality (the "Ultimate Weapon" of the title) which allows for a believably bleak narrative about how apocalyptic warfare can be even without nuclear weaponry.

That last part is what sticks with me. It's a good old fashioned "homefront war narrative" but turned up to 11 ... and with the stakes escalated through both the realities of modern warfare and the grotesque sci-fi.

The problem is that the show is also miserable to watch in a bunch of unintentional ways that don't exactly help it. The character designs are ugly, the animation and direction are unimpressive, and the central relationship drags on in a way which *could* easily be believable for a pair of young people in this bizarre and horrifying scenario but is not properly reflected in their dialogue or their actions.

Now and Then, Here and There managed to make something nearly as dramatic and miserable while also making a product that didn't frustrate or offend your eyes and ears. This show might be worth a shot if you're into "cry porn" and the premise sounds interesting but I wouldn't prioritize it.

This series is not for everyone. But it might be for YOU, so don't be repelled by the low overall ratings.

What this show does really, *really* well is the prop-plane dogfighting. There are some truly breathtaking moments in choreography and sound design (episodes 6 and 12 have some fabulous extended POV shots) which are really quite suspenseful. And every episode brings at least one protracted fight, which usually has at least a couple fun maneuvers or a gimmick. It's not exactly "realistic", while some of the flying comes straight out of period dog-fighting manuals there are many occasions where planes fly ... far beyond their capbility, and fuel and ammo are rarely a concern. But it totally sells you on the drama of the encounters and the appeal of flying, like all good action should.

I'll also give a note to the worldbuilding and plot, which has more going on than you would initially assume and is interesting in it's own right, even if it ultimately doesn't amount to much.

If you want to see some cool but semi-realistic plane flying action and you've exhausted the short list of big anime for that like The Princess and the Pilot, The Sky Crawlers, and what have you, this is the show for you, as it was for me. Every episode is at least 25% flying and fighting, most of it interesting, and there aren't really any glaring issues with the rest of the show that drag it down, unless you just have a CGI allergy.

If you're just looking for some "cute girls doing some kind of action" show to put on and you don't think you'll get invested in the plane flying this is probably not for you. The character art is mediocre at best, and the characters are acceptable but nothing you haven't seen before with constant quippy dialogue and upbeat manner. The show itself is generally upbeat, and very few characters die, which has a charm but does detract from the drama in the late stage.

Addendum: They do(thankfully) stop mixing 2d and 3d characters in such an ugly manner for the most part after the opening episodes, and I would like to put the notion to rest that doing so "makes no sense" as some people believe.

"CG" does not necessarily equal "cheap" in the way that people seem to assume in the anime community. While CG animation can be much easier in the long run as models can be easily puppetted around, making models for characters takes a lot of time, and in plenty of cases with characters(or costumes) that appear only briefly or don't move around very much it would be much faster or cheaper to draw a handful of 2d frames than give them a whole model, especially in Japan where mediocre 2d animators are readily available for small jobs. So when this show occasionally does 2d animation, it's either a sign of them trying to cut costs on characters or costumes that appear on briefly or haven't been modeled yet early in the production. As this show goes on they use 2d animation less and less.

Really well executed time travel narrative. Probably one of the best I've ever seen. It isn't perfect(there are some logical inconsistencies) but I think it captures the emotions well. I also like quite a few of the characters and the art is very attractive.

But as someone with a strong aversion to cringe (especially chuunibyou) and delusional conspiracy theorist pandering I found Okabe insufferable and the second quarter of the series distasteful (in that order), which dragged down on my enjoyment of it.

This series is quite good and I did enjoy watching it despite that, but it definitely isn't for me, ... it was carried by the 2chan and 4chan demographic. So while there's all the makings of a truly great(10/10) show, for me it's merely "good".