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A guy is isekai'ed into a world that superficially resembles a game he played. He's evil. That's about it.

I have no idea what people see in this, unless it really is the case that simply making the lead evil is considered genius by virtually everybody.

There is barely a plot, there is absolutely no character development, what happens is frequently driven by the lead or his minions simply overpowering anything in their path or by his minions figuring things out but assuming that the MC was five steps ahead of them the whole time - a lame plot device that would be funny if deployed sparingly ... but here it gets old really fast through frequent overuse.

The lead is as OP an MC as any, which requires finesse to be interesting, but here he's actually not very bright and so there really is nothing to be interested in, as I say most problems are simply brute-forced through or his minions figure it out for him.

Being evil (Oh, the genius of having an evil MC!) he does some despicable things, committing murder and ordering slavery and a teensy bit of genocide too. Well, clearly, given that he was just some sort of middle manager last week this must call for some serious soul-searching or PTSD or something, right? Nope. He's an evil lich now so all is a-ok, he can simply send his arch-demon #2 off to conduct breeding and torture experiments on thousands of captives and not miss a wink of sleep. Any possibility of serous commentary, character development or storytelling is completely ignored.

In fact any time the MC starts getting emotional, some unknown effect literally kicks in and turns his emotions off. So that a modern guy who is a product of a modern educational and ethical system can go straight back to ordering the deaths of thousands of people without having to ponder for a second if this is the best way of doing things. What fabulous writing.

Let's talk about the supporting cast: they all worship the lead, literally, are completely sycophantic and totally uninteresting. But they're evil, so they must be the best characters ever. No. They're boring as hell.

Let's talk about how and why he was isekai'ed. No let's not, because Overlord doesn't care about that stuff. We're here to be unremittingly evil for no good reason so you should just lap it up.

The character designs are about the only redeeming feature, the CGI is legendarily terrible, everything is grindingly dark and boring. The first season finishes off with the MC having to fight one of his absurdly strong minions himself - we're now in season 4 and we still don't know why this happens other than MC's speculation that a MacGuffin of some kind is responsible. The fight is settled by the MC using other MacGuffins in his possession - and which he owns because as a player he simply purchased them, because the game he was playing was explicitly as pay-to-win as they come (so the whole crappy mess is ironically originating from a crap PTW game).

If you took everything that people think is crap about bland generic isekai - girls who do nothing but fawn over the lead, lack of threat because MC is too overpowering, poor world-building, no elaboration of the 'game' systems, no exploration of why the isekai event happened, no examination of the consequences of actions - this has all of them. But without the fanservice.

Basically, it's rubbish.

A good, rather old fashioned romance, Shirayuki is a well made and beautiful series but ultimately feels a little too simplistic to deserve a really high mark.

MC Shirayuki runs away from her home because some idiot Prince (who only knows her by rumour) has decided the most beautiful girl in the kingdom should be his concubine. She runs straight into another Prince in the next Kingdom and even the dimmest of viewers knows the ultimate ending by the end of episode one.

Shirayuki is a very likeable character who seemed to me to be very carefully written to stay clear of appearing cliched. She is independently ... minded, brave and intelligent, but she is also aware that she has no social standing in the castle beyond her friendship with Prince Zen and the writer/s seem aware that these traits can come across as a little too modern for the setting if you are not careful how you show them.

Hence Shirayuki does not become a Knight, but rather an apprentice herbalist. She stands up for herself through her actions, but she isn't going to have a blazing row with Zen's older brother the Crown prince. She takes risks to her personal safety but she isn't going to be swinging any swords around. When she solves a problem at a fort it is clear that this is down to her professional expertise and not some sort of Mary-Sue writing. There's a well-grounded feel to the situations.

On the down side, there is no real plot and almost every situation comes across as low-stakes. Shirayuki lacks the epic scope of Yona of the Dawn, it doesn't hit the emotional highs and lows of Toradora and it doesn't have a plot holding it together like The Saint's Magic Power is Omnipotent.

It's a nice show with a charming lead and in particular I thought it a good example of how to write a 'modern but medieval' heroine, but I just couldn't justify giving it an 8/10.

I re-watched the whole of Spider prior to writing a review and thoroughly enjoyed the whole 24 episode series in two extended sittings. I highly recommend this show, although it was marred somewhat by production issues.

First let's talk about the setup: our protagonist is reincarnated as a Spider in a fantasy world following an explosion during a classics lesson in her classroom in Japan. Now being reincarnated as a monster of some sort is not exactly Earth-shattering, but the fact that she has been reincarnated specifically as a spider is actually part of the plot, as is the explosion itself. So we're already a couple ... of points up on the standard Isekai trash. The author here actually cares about what is going on and why.

Two of the shows biggest strengths are made very clear from the very first episode - firstly the MC has a HUGE personality and her VA does an outstandingly enthusiastic job of letting us in on Kumoko's hilarious inner monologue. Secondly, the MC is a long way from being OP, in fact she is actually born as the weakest monster type there is - not just a Taratect (spider), not just a lesser Taratect, but a small, lesser Taratect. She is constantly being thrown into life threatening situations in the vast Monster-filled labyrinth she finds herself in (her being here is part of the plot by the way). She can't go so far as to repeatedly experience death, like Subaru in Re-Zero, but her constant scrapes with mortality are genuinely exciting and far better executed than in most other shows of this genre. Kumoko suffers horrific injuries in her fights, losing limbs and eyes, suffering severe burns or being impaled, and is frequently saved by a strange ability she has to instantly regenerate on level-up. And guess what - that's actually a plot point, not just a contrivance.

The game-style level, evolution and skills System come across as very thoroughly worked out, with actual stats being shown on screen as a sort of HUD that Kumoko can browse when she appraises herself or other entities, human or monster, including some very long lists of stat points, skills and titles. And - this is something of a spoiler but, again - this is actually part of the plot.

I hope i'm getting this across, because it is a major part of why this is such a great story: everything about Kumoko's Isekai'ed circumstance and the very make-up of the RPG-style System in this strange world is bound up tightly with the main plot (I must confess to being partly spoiled by the wiki here). This level of coherence and fore-thought in approaching an apparently tropey story and setting is second to none that I know of in Anime.

Spider actually interweaves a second narrative into Kumoko's survival story - it is made explicit very early on that she is not the only person to have been reincarnated, and we follow a secondary protagonist - Shun - as her follows a more standard Isekai Hero's journey parallel to that of our loveable MC. Shun has an antagonist, a group of girls around him and falls foul of political and religious shenanigans. Many viewers have been critical of this second thread, but it actually does almost all the hard work of world building beyond Kumoko's very limited scope.

The human-side narrative also acts as a counterpoint to Kumoko's experiences - it should be very clear to the viewer that our poor, endangered spider is getting considerably more experience than her fellow reincarnations while she fights her way out of the most dangerous place on the planet, than Shun and his friends are coming across training at the academy. And at some point everyone watching realises that there's an additional catch that makes Kumoko's hero's journey far more advanced than poor Shun's.

I'm afraid we have to talk about the CG. Quite a bit of the spider animation looks CG to me, but it is very well done - with the camera smoothly panning around Kumoko as she spiderman's her way around the labyrinth and its denizens. This quality does not last, alas. During the second cour there is a noticeable drop in some of the quality and this becomes positively glaring during some of the human-side story towards the end, particularly when CG models are used for fight & battle animations. They look very clumsy compared to the earlier or more traditional work.

Apparently the production was farmed out and came back at such low quality that much of the CG was re-worked but the time, and presumably budget, available grew less and less as the series came to an end. The final episode itself was actually delayed by a week, but honestly it was worth it, it's a cracker, with a thrilling fight and some key reveals for the future.

I have to dock spider a few marks for the art quality, but in all other respects i'd regard it as a classic in terms of writing, voice-work and direction. You must watch this show. The second OP 'Bursty, greedy Spider' is a classic to boot. Looking forward to a S2.

A lot of people seemed to be hyped up for Tsukimichi, the story that reportedly paved the way for That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime. Unfortunately having watched it, it seems that whatever it was trying to do, Slime, and other shows, have clearly done it better.

The summary is that this is an OP-MC, Civilisation-Builder Isekai, with a sort-of harem and some curveballs for the lead, Makoto. For example, although he is indeed hugely overpowered right from the start the Goddess who seems to be in charge decides he is too ugly to deserve to live with her hyumans (sic) and sends him ... to the middle of nowhere, denying him use of the native human language as added insult.

The supposed ugliness doesn't seem to matter to the non-humans he interacts with and he decides to wear a mask when dealing with humans following his first experience. So much for that. As a problem, this is shallow, and the solution is equally so. If the writer wanted to make some serious commentary here, this was a failure.

That, really, is the theme of the show. Everything has an insubstantial feel to it, as though the writer tried to think of some interesting ideas, but then forgot that they need to be passed around, played with and subjected to some sort of scrutiny for them to be worth anything. None of the gimmicks ever manage to come across as anything other than simple gimmicks.

Apparently the humans are all Nazis or something, despising other races and hating anyone who does not conform to certain standards of beauty *cough* aryan *cough*. Is this supposed to be a comment on the pettiness of Deities? If we are supposed to have a problem with the obnoxious humans of this world, then why does Makoto spend so much time trying to get by in human society, and why are there clearly groups that are supposed to be becoming part of 'his' circle, like the adventuring party that he works with? It's like the humans are the bad guys, but also not the bad guys. Narratively it comes across as confused.

Also missing is the sense of a grand plot. Yes there's the stuff about him not getting along with the Goddess and him trying to find his parents, but at no point in the series does this seem to impact what Makoto is doing, which is meeting people, doing some adventuring and trading that is completely trivial for him and setting up as a merchant in a human city. In terms of story, there is remarkably little going on, so is the show saved by it's character interactions and development?

Nope. There's a small core cast, but their interactions feel shallow or silly for the most part, arguing about who gets to spend time with the Young Master or peruse his precious memories of reading Manga or watching films. Many other characters wander in and out of the show occasionally, but as with everything else, there is no sense of solidity, of really building something for the viewer to get invested in.

There is none of the personality, charm or wit of Spider or Slime here, we don't feel immersed in the world as we do in Mushoku Tensei or Shield Hero. The fights lack a sense of true threat and the magic system doesn't feel like it has much depth.

Production standards are good for this sort of show, and it is at least trying not to pander to every trope going. There aren't any jarring time-skips or moments when the narrative feels like we missed something - it is at least a coherent experience. But I can't honestly be more generous than to give it an overall score of 'above average'.

Nothing about this show really stands out as particularly good or as egregiously bad, with the exception of the fanservice & ecchi - there's just too much of it for the series to be taken particularly seriously. There are, however, several interesting features to Master of Ragnorok that pull the standard up somewhat above the average level of Isekai trash:

The art is pretty run of the mill, character designs are okay, but the backgrounds are sparse for the most part. Fights are not well choreographed, with lots of stills and talking ruining the fun.

The strength is probably the story and set-up. We have an isekaied ... MC, Yuuto, but the setting (the World of Yggdrasil) is a sort of tribal late bronze-age, rather than your standard medieval fantasy world. Unusually Yuuto has no special abilities at all, however certain rare individuals are 'Einherjar' - possessing magical abilities that may have uses in or out of combat. These individuals are typically aristocracy or act as generals if their abilities are useful in combat. Despite this, Yuuto has the task of seeing his tribe beat all comers in a series of battles and other encounters as the series progresses.

Where Yuuto has an advantage is that he brought his (conveniently solar powered) smartphone with him, having been Isekaied through a magic mirror portal from our world to Yggdrasil, which may or may not be the distant past of Earth. Each world has one of these mirrors, and when Yuuto is in close proximity to the mirror in Yggdrasil he can get a signal and use his phone to research useful technologies or strategies to help him out. He also speaks to his childhood friend, who was present when the mirrors Isekaied him and keeps the Earth mirror on her desk.

Having his phone has helped Yuuto immensely, the story actually starts two whole years after he was summoned to Yggdrasil and his historical research and strategising has enabled him to become acknowledged as leader of the Wolf clan, starting from a low point of not even being able to speak the local language (we get a few glimpses of the backstory in flashback throughout the series).

The in-world clan lore seems to be a huge problem for a lot of this show's detractors, the clans have a 'Patriarch' and a ceremonial system in which the members of a clan and others (if there are subordinate clans or certain diplomatic arrangements) are designated as the Patriarch's family members. This being largely a harem, we therefore have half a dozen girls calling the MC 'onii-sama' or even 'otosan' - while literally throwing themselves at him and rubbing their breasts on him. It's worth bearing in mind that none of these girls are remotely related to Yuuto, who is literally from another world, but apparently the mere suggestion of Incest sets off people's panic alarms.

Characters and character development are not one of the show's strong suits, they are little more than cardboard cut-out tropes. Sharing Yuuto's ziggurat we have: the busty blonde girl who summoned Yuuto, the flat warrior (white hair) who is one of wolf clan's two best warriors, the flame-haired Smith who makes the clan's weapons (from iron, thanks to Yuuto, which is what gives the clan their biggest edge), the Pink haired leader of the clan that the wolves defeat in episode 1, a pair of young girls from the claw clan (purple and green hair). All of them are Einherjar, they are all predictably in love with Yuuto. So is his childhood friend incidentally. None of these characters undergoes any real character development during the series, and neither does Yuuto. Really they are not much more than walking flirting machines when the plot is not going on, and there is entirely too much of the flirting and not enough plot to make the series one I could recommend.

On the other hand, there is plot and the story does amble along, so it is not as bad as e.g. Smartphone. Speaking of which this series even does a far better job of implementing the smartphone than Smartphone does - since it is not just a prop for magic that works 'because the Isekai God made it so', but an actual smartphone with recognisable smartphone functions, that can't get signal if it is too far from the magic mirror.

So we have a non-OP MC in an unusual setting, where the Isekai vector actually relates to the plot. All of which makes it more interesting than a number of other shows. On the other hand we have excessive and awkward ecchi / fanserive moments and a near total lack of character development. You might want to check it out for the ideas, but don't be surprised if you are put off by the execution.

A mixed bag this one. The main strong points are an interesting setting, although it doesn't have a noticeable impact on the plot, and a mostly excellent and atmospheric art style. The characters themselves are a major weakness (and i'm talking low-quality Twilight fanfiction), the story is cliched and there really isn't a lot in the way of character development.

That said, I rather liked it.

A lot of the negative attention Assassin's Pride has drawn stems from the age gap between him (Apparently he's 17, although some exposition later on suggests he's actually 19) and her (13 at the start of the story). Personally I find ... it hard to get exercised over a few years and the relationship here is rather sweet and chaste: this is not fan-service central and there is no ecchi.

Another primary issue is with elements of pacing - a particularly jarring example being an episode in which we seem to be coming up to a climactic fight, the MC and a baddie are squaring off, the gloves are off, the combatants glow with mana ... and we skip the fight entirely and just go straight to the point at which the antagonist has lost. I don't recall anything else quite so egregious, but it really was a 'check the timestamps in the video' moment. There are a lot of points during the narrative in which you feel a little rushed through the story and some of the fights are over too quickly, which makes them come across as anti-climactic.

I think where this show shines is with chemistry. There is a primary and secondary pairing of trainee girl & their sensei's who interact with each other from episode 1, joined by a relatively small cast of background characters. The small cast allows the characters time to properly interact where some shows either go haring off after the 'plot' or introduce too many characters for you to become truly invested. I felt that this allowed the rather uninspired story to be more engaging: where in a weaker ensemble it might have induced groans, here I found myself more willing to roll with the cliches.

My willingness to go with it was probably also helped by a more mature approach than you might expect - as mentioned above, there is not much fanservice beyond the oh-so-very-anime school uniform and almost no salacious bouncing oppai action. This keeps you on-track, rather than getting irritated that the director seems to have been a drooling 14 year old.

I guess that sums it up: with weaker art, more focus on juvenile harem tropes and a 'fanservice camera', this could have been extremely irritating. But the writer & director restrain these urges and the result is certainly above average in my view.

A decent enough series. Although the art overall is average, the character designs are nicely distinctive. The chief characteristic of the girls is hair long enough to strategically cover them up in ecchi shots and advantage is frequently taken of this fact. Indeed sometimes the hair is forgone as well and we have e.g. strategically placed chocolate (spelling 'eat me' no less) or oppai that are definitely not H because the nipples have not been drawn.

Music and voice acting is up to usual anime standards, although I did think sometimes that I found it hard to tell which of the girls was talking as they ... are not always on-screen when speaking or shown at a distance.

The story is a super-generic lone-male-at-a-hero-academy-full-of-girls type setup, which could be a complete yawn-fest, however it all holds together surprisingly well. It is definitely a bit juvenile as well as generic as all hell, but all the characters have decent screen time, they have plenty of banter with each other; past relationships, rivalries and backstory are all handled neatly and the plot is paced well with regular fights and a bit of drama.

The fights themselves are a bit of a let-down, there is no sense that there is a well worked out magic or power system, simply this move works because the plot says, that one doesn't because likewise. Plus there is a lot of standing around having a chat in the middle of the fights, even for an anime. It's a bit SAO in this regard, minus the effort that A1 puts into the SAO animations, so nothing really exceptional here.

Only 1 season was made so the plot is not all resolved and not everything is explained, but I did find the season conclusion satisfying, it brings together the squabbling 'party' nicely as well as providing a bit of closure to some of the personal conflicts.

Characterisations are probably the weakest element in the series. Although we do get a lot of interaction etc, there is a clear over-reliance on harem & fanservice behaviour in what is otherwise a fairly solid series. We have just a bit too much ecchi, too much tsundere-ing, too many blushes and too much hapless MC getting into 'misunderstandings' - it brings an otherwise above-average series down a little in my estimation, but overall i'd still say to give it a go if ecchi doesn't put you off.

Addendum - no-one else has mentioned this so i'll show my age a bit:

Terminus Est is from Gene Wolfe's old sci-fi/fantasy tetralogy 'The Book of the New Sun', and is a huge black executioner's greatsword carried by the protagonist, the torturer Severian to Behead people (which is his job, basically). These novels are considered classics of the genre if you want to try them out.

SAO is likely the finest example in anime of presentation pulling bad writing out of the gutter. Production standards are high and the series is more or less built around spectacular set pieces, usually fights, with terrific animation, rousing music and committed voice acting.

But those set pieces are indicative of the fundamental flaw of SAO that has been present in all four series so far, which is that the writing is built around these moments as well and almost all of the scripting and plotting and dialogue that holds them together is poor. Less a polished turd than a turd with gemstones in it.

Time and ... time again when you watch SAO a 'moment' comes up and in the back of your mind there is doubt. Something about the way things came about didn't really make sense, or broke your sense of verisimilitude. A well known example occurs during the first boss fight, when a character dies. Presumably the writer thought it could be a touching and dramatic moment of loss, but for the viewer it is spoiled somewhat by the health potion Kirito tries to give him. As the fan tribute/parody 'SAO Abridged' puts it: "Drink the potion... Drink the goddamn Potion!... WILL YOU JUST DRINK THE POTION ALREADY!"

In-world this character does not need to die. It's a computer game and there's a health potion right there being offered to him and he only dies because he doesn't just drink the damn potion. Was the writer really that committed to the moment that he couldn't think of a better way to do it? All it would take is for there to be no potion, or for someone else to have used the last potion or... something.

Let's take the most basic facts about the plot: 10,000 people are stuck in a new MMO. For two years. Really? A new MMO is stable and online for two whole years. Yeah okay, what's that, you've got a nice bridge to sell me?

Still not lost your willing suspension of disbelief? How is it that no-one can remove a helmet from anyone's head for two years? At least they try to explain that one with 'microwaves will fry your brain', but come on. No one could figure out how to foil a simple booby trap for two whole years? Pull the other one. This show really needs a better sense of realism, a grounding that make better use of the primary conceit. As it is, you are watching with the ever-present sense that it just isn't thought through properly.

Another major problem is characters: the archetypal amine protagonist Kirito isn't really the problem, he's bland, but that may well be the idea, many people think 'self-insert' heroes are spoiled if you give them too much personality, so Kirito's only real personality trait is that he's a loner. The trouble is that he is the only consistently present character for so much of the time. In a show that is known as something of an ensemble and for following harem stereotypes, SAO has a habit of introducing characters only to ignore them.

Klein pops up to say a few sentences about once every five episodes. One girl dies twenty minutes after we meet her. Liz the Blacksmith has a nice moment with Kirito and is then largely forgotten about. Silica is in one episode and then I don't remember seeing her again until arc 2. Only Asuna bucks this trend, but only in arc 1. In arc 2 she is literally locked in a cage for half a dozen episodes.

The problem with the lack of screen time for almost all of Kirito's support is that those little moments of interaction that makes characters interesting or relatable are missing. In some shows that would be fine, but not in one where these people are canonically becoming the MC's best friends for life. These interactions could also help with the bizarre pacing - making new friends and overcoming challenges at low levels is a gaming trope from tabletop RPGs to MMOs, but here Kirito is level 1... level 16... level 42.. level I-don't-know-what but he can just stand there letting half the player-killer guild batter him without his health bar going down and the whole time we are missing out on everything other than those few chosen moments the writer decided would be cool.

Finally (at least for a reasonably short review), there is the manner in which the first arc ends. A satisfying ending feels earned in some way by the efforts of those involved, but this... just ambushes you out of absolutely nowhere, as though the author suddenly got bored one day and thought 'screw this, i'd much rather write about the next arc' (and trust me, you are going to disagree, but let's not go into that in this review). We don't get a build up to a climax even for a few episodes, we are in the middle of business as usual and then "Hey you over there, I deduce that you are actually the final villain!", "Oho you've figured it out have you? Let's duel!", *clashing of swords*, Kirito falls! "Oh no the bad guy beat me, but..." *Cheat mode on*, *You have won the game* ....... WTF???

Seriously? This had the most jarring, unsatisfying, ridiculously airlifted in conclusion imaginable. And the worst thing is? Every time I watch a series of SAO I hope it is going to be different, but it never is. They are all the same.

Are you wondering why a series with so many bad reviews can have such a good rating? Let me try to explain.

Misfit features an OP protagonist dialled up to 12. Because 11 has been done before, you understand. Anos Voldigoad is essentially God in this world and so the writer has wondered what sort of story you can write with a character so ludicrously strong that he can annihilate a supposedly powerful opponent instantly with a click of his fingers, resurrect them with a word, and do it again a bunch more times to hammer the point home to the crowded amphitheatre.

The answer is twofold:

Firstly ... the attitude of the MC contrasts wonderfully with the lunatic scale of his sheer power: Anos plays it absolutely straight, there's not a whiff of ham, there are no sotto voce asides nor any winks to the audience; it's "I'm the greatest and everyone should know it" from the word go. This guy literally told his parents what his name was when he was born, he spins castles (created out of thin air) on his fingers, beats up time itself and taunts people with immortal lines such as "Did you think killing me was enough to make me die?"... all of this delivered as dry as the Sahara on a particularly arid summers day.

Okay, he does try to crack jokes, but he's been dead for 2,000 years and his lines fall flat to his now more discerning audience. One thing that is weird is that the traditional mean and obnoxious half of the Demons at the academy (and their teachers) are determinedly oblivious to the OPness and absolutely will not take the hint that Anos genuinely is far more powerful than anyone they've ever encountered, even when he demonstrates in front of class that not only can he kill any of them effortlessly, he can improve the way the teacher casts spells because some knowledge has been lost in the time since he died. You know when Aslan says "Do not cite the deep magic to me witch, I was there when it was written!", well Anos was the one holding the damn pen.

Secondly is the nature of the story: there is no Demon King to defeat, since Anos literally is the Demon King, and what would be the point anyway if the whole idea is to make the MC more insanely overpowered than any other protagonist.

Well, what there is, is a mystery. You see 2,000 years ago, tired of the endless war between Demonkind and Humans, Anos made a deal with the human champion - the champion would kill Anos and this would enable Anos to erect a barrier between the two worlds so that they could live in peace. However doing this would mean Anos (God, remember) would not be able to reincarnate for 2,000 years (sounds familiar), at which time the barrier would come down and hopefully the two sides would have learned to live in peace.

Unsurprisingly, Anos is disappointed. Someone has been messing around with his plan, to the extent that the Demon Academy is teaching students that the Demon King's name is Avos Dilhevia, for a start. Not only that but this Avos fellow seems to still be around and determined to restart the war, with the help of Anos' former generals.

So there you have it. This is not really a generic power fantasy, but a high-stakes whodunnit where Sherlock is virtually omnipotent but Moriarty has had a 2,000 year head-start. Anos need to figure out who has messed up his schemes and stop them from ruining his vision of a peaceful retirement with a couple of 15 year old girls who are his great-great-great-to-the-somethingth-degree granddaughters (it's perfectly normal in their world i'm sure.) Oh and he'll save the world, of course.

On the subject of the girls, the Necron sisters are well handled, appearing like straight-up Tsundere/Kuudere tropes at first, their relationship turns out to be more tragic and not a little dark. It also makes perfect sense and where many anime would have left them as tropes or fumbled the development, here we get a satisfying bluff and double-bluff, reveal and resolution.

There's also an Anos fangirl club. They sing.

So there you have it. I thought it was clever and funny, but I guess the humour isn't for everyone and not everyone gets the plot. Give it a go.

Possibly the most visually beautiful anime series i've seen, Journeys of Elaina is an unusual piece of work in that it takes an episodic travelogue form. Apart from some recurring characters that Elaina meets on her travels there isn't a single plot, no over-arching story. Rather, Elaina, in her quest to emulate the heroine of a book about a travelling witch, is entirely peripatetic: travelling from place to place just to see the world, rather than to save it.

Elaina is self-interested and perhaps not a little narcissistic. She is reluctant to get involved in the affairs of others unless there is some benefit to ... her, although perhaps she can be forgiven for not wanting to throw herself into danger considering that she is only 16-18 during her travels.

The individual stories and incidents are well done, with some episodes comprising two stories of varying length down to a vignette a few minutes long. The differing tone of the individual stories is noteworthy, with some being moral tales and others more personal for Elaina. Some of them are downright creepy and one in particular suddenly becomes a slasher piece with little warning. I daresay the changing tone puts many off but I approved of the attempt to do something unusual. It is reminiscent of an old TV series like Star Trek, where the episodes would not usually be connected, but character elements would be carried over and some of the individual episodes could be outstanding.

One to watch if you don't mind something with an unusual structure featuring an antihero protagonist.