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Oct 27, 2024
Welcome to the fifth season of DanMachi, also known as "The Harem Must Grow". It is the veritable Manifest Destiny of harem animes. The protagonist Bell-kun is divinely ordained to make every female cast member fall in love with him despite being a childlike Gary Stu. More seasons will follow until every single inhabitant of Orario without a Y chromosome is first rescued, and then neatly friend-zoned by him. Except, of course, for Ais Wallenstein, whose primary defining characteristic is being even more oblivious than Bell when it comes to romance. Truly, one of the harem animes of all time.
Having summarized all past, present, and
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future seasons of DanMachi, here's what you need to know about Season 5:
1) The new friend-zone candidate is stronger than previous ones, so the damsel-in-distress schtick has even less stakes than usual.
2) Even though the efforts to rob Bell-kun of his virginity reach new heights, he is as determined as ever to remain faithful to his oblivious crush.
3) The dungeon is just an afterthought. Think more cringy rom-com/slice-of-life and less combat. This could change, of course, but it seems like a definite downgrade compared to the last season, which, despite all the other shortcomings of the series, I had come to enjoy.
All in all, yet another season of the same. At this point, the rescue-then-friend-zone routine is getting so repetitive and the suspension of disbelief is so precarious that the anime feels more like a deconstruction of the harem genre. But I can assure you that was not the intention of the author.
To end the review on a positive (well, neutral) note: DanMachi Season 5 is exactly what it says on the tin. No better or worse than the the average season of DanMachi. If you watched the previous seasons, you know exactly what to expect. Caveat emptor.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Jan 21, 2024
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the second season of Shin no Nakama! Perhaps you thought this would be a formulaic continuation of the rather mediocre power fantasy isekai/slice of life the first season was. Little did you know that the showmakers decided to pander to a different market segment altogether. Yes, this show is now officially an ecchi harem isekai. Bring out the champagne!
Well, that wasn't totally fair. It is not just an ecchi harem isekai. It also has elements of (explicitly acknowledged) incest, polygamy, and sexualization of underage girls. Your FBI agent will definitely shake his head. That much, I can guarantee.
I can hear
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you say: "Surely, you're joking, Mr. Zolmir! You must be mistaking siscon/brocon for incest, right? They surely wouldn't go that far!" Alas, my friends, I kid you not. Ruti, our protagonist's little sister explicitly acknowledges that:
(1) she is OK with her brother marrying Rit because she herself cannot marry him (pesky social norms),
(2) despite not being able to marry him, she can still be his lover,
(3) this is OK because her brother can "handle two partners with ease", and ergo
(4) Rit can be the number one wife and Ruti can be the number one lover.
This is followed by Ruti joining the main couple (and the elven side chick) in a hot bath while totally naked. I rest my case, dear reader.
As for the sexualization of underage girls, just watch the opening. The main couple are nowhere to be seen, and we are treated to several half- and fully-naked scenes with Ruti (officially "17") and Tisse (looks 11 to me, but what do I know.)
Now that we have satisfactorily established the genre, the question becomes: "Is it a good ecchi harem isekai? What about the plot? I-I mean the actual plot!"
In terms of the actual plot, it is your run-of-the-mill slice of life isekai with sub-standard writing. In the span of three episodes, we have not one but *two* naked bath scenes (one hot spring, one bathhouse), one town festival, one outdoors trip/picnic, one "misunderstanding" battle, and one actual battle. Unfortunately, the battles have zero stakes. Since our protagonist's sister is the Hero with a capital H, they just auto-resolve battles, to put it mildly.
The dialogues are sleep-inducing and I am not even sure if they contribute anything to the show. In fact, you might want to seriously consider turning off the subtitles, because I am quite confident what you imagine the characters are saying to each other is bound to be more interesting than what the writers actually came up with.
What about the characters? As was the case in season 1, they are all cardboard cutouts. I mean that figuratively, of course. In reality, all our harem members (with the exception of Tisse) boast very respectable cup-sizes. And there is something for everyone! All cup-sizes are represented. Since it is their most distinguishing character trait, I am going to list our harem members sorted by descending cup-size:
1) Rit: Rit is the fiancée and prospective wife of our protagonist. She sports the biggest hooters of them all. Hence, it makes sense that she is going to be the official wife, and the primus-inter-pares of the harem. She is the girl-next-door and the faithful waifu.
2) Yarandrala: Yarandrala is the now-stereotypical libertine elf. In terms of rack size, she comes second to Rit, but she makes up for it by being completely unbound by human social norms, because... she is an elf, duh! (RIP, Tolkien...) She is brazen enough to join Red in the hot springs while totally naked.
3) Ruti: Ruti is the little sister of our protagonist, and she has a crush on him as previously discussed. She looks and sounds like a middle schooler, but she is officially 17, which checks out if you are a staunch believer of 500-year-old dragon lolis. Her cup-size is just above-average, which means almost flat by anime standards. Her existence is summarized by being the Hero and a brocon.
4) Tisse: Tisse is Ruti's sidekick. Her distinguishing features are being shy, being even younger than Ruti, and owning a cute spider familiar whom she has named as if she was a kindergartner. She looks and sounds like a grade schooler, so I guess that makes her a middle schooler? Her cup-size is below-average, and she is the only member of the harem who doesn't explicitly have a crush on Red... yet! Or perhaps she is afraid Ruti would murder her.
What about the protagonist? He is the stock-standard self-insert male anime protagonist: honest, hardworking, has black hair, and is admired by every female in existence.
To sum it up, the show is exactly what it says on the tin. If you are an enthusiast of ecchi harem isekais, you'd probably rate it at 6/10. To me, it is barely a 4 if I am being generous, and an easy drop...
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Jan 21, 2023
*If you watched the original Trigun (1998)*: Please save yourself the suffering and skip this one. I wish I did. Unfortunately, besides the retention of some characters and setting from the original, it is not only a completely different story, but different in terms of genre, presentation, pacing, characterization, the atmosphere... Pretty much everything, to be honest. So much so that I wonder why they bought the IP instead of making their own original show, because their vision is simply incompatible with what Trigun sought to be.
*If you did not watch the original*: I strongly recommend you to watch the original instead, it is a
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classic for good reason. But, if you never intended to watch the original, you may wonder if Trigun Stampede is still good enough to watch on its own. Sadly, my answer to that question is still negative. I'll briefly explain why.
For starters, although the anime bears so little resemblance to the original, it is written in a way that expects you to be familiar with the characters and the setting. There is little to no explanation about the characters and their motives. Instead, the writers presume you watched the original to the end, are familiar with the revelations that came at the last few episodes, and now ready to digest their fanfiction. Who is Vash? What is happening in the first scene with the spaceship? Why does he have the reputation he has? None of these questions are answered, and neither would the viewer be able to figure them out from the context.
There is a significant amount of (indirect) information dump in the first few episodes, but not in a way that would give you a coherent picture, and too early to fully appreciate. You feel as if you are watching the second season of an anime, but it isn't a sequel; it is an alternative version. This identity crisis alone would make watching Trigun Stampede as a standalone product pretty grating.
But the real killing blow is the pacing and the focus on mindless action scenes that come one after another without rhyme or reason. To be honest, if I had to classify it, I think it would fit the definition of a Western cartoon or action flick better than a Japanese anime. Without spoiling the events too much, the episodes are like a disconnected string of random encounters, and the moment one is resolved, the other one kicks in without sufficient downtime to digest what has happened.
For one thing, this forces the characters to completely overhaul their personality and goals every five minutes, with no coherence. For the other, it is downright improbable for these events to follow each other with so little time in-between without prior coordination (which is not the case). Therefore, it feels like the writers completely dropped any pretense of realism so that they can keep the audience "interested" with more of their mindless action scenes, as if they are kids with ADHD. Or I guess they didn't want their huge animation budget to go to waste?
Frankly, I believe text prediction AIs like ChatGPT could write a more coherent and enjoyable adaptation if you trained them on the original material. If you just want some action scenes and do not care much about consistent writing, I guess Trigun Stampede is still watchable. If it were a standalone anime and the original did not exist, I would likely give it a 5. The context being what it is, it gets a 3. I pity the artists whose hard work and dedication were ruined by the director and the script writers.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Jul 27, 2022
This anime's protagonist is probably the most despicable protagonist you can find in any anime perhaps barring hentai. He meets a slave trader, and is offered to buy a pretty slave girl for a large sum of money under a time limit. He wants to buy her, not even under a pretext of saving her or anything, but explicitly because she has big hooters and he is a horny Japanese high schooler.
He risks his life many times in a dungeon to raise enough money, but it isn't enough. So he starts stalking and murdering criminals in their sleep to claim their bounties. He doesn't
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even bother to check if they have bounties, or what their crimes were - if their status reads "bandit", they are fair game for some night-time murder.
He gets extremely stressed about not being able to raise enough money in time and being deprived of the slavegirl he wants to have sex with, thinking nothing of the lives he takes to do so. After buying the said slave, he awkwardly forces himself on her despite the obvious signs that she is not doing it willingly, but only because she is a slave and he is her master. All in all, a true "gentleman".
Given that the protagonist is a Japanese high schooler raised with modern values and ethics, I think his actions are even worse than the revenge-rape hero from Redo of Healer. At least, the protagonist there had some brutal background story, was clinically insane, grew up in a dark fantasy world, and had some contrived justifications for what he did. The protagonist here is just a petty guy who loses all morality the moment modern laws stop applying to him.
In conclusion, I congratulate the author. I didn't think the anime industry would out-do Redo of Healer this soon, but they certainly exceeded my expectations. I tip my hat.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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Jan 24, 2022
This anime is the answer to the question: "What would you get if you let a high schooler who read Machiavelli's Il Principe for the first time in his life write an uninspired harem isekai that is peppered with banal Japanese nationalism and an inexplicable adulation of bureaucrats?"
Just like the first season of the show, "How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom" has little to do with realism or Machiavelli's work that it so frequently and cringefully cites. It is a generic harem isekai, where our protagonist's superpower is to be a high schooler from Japan who read Il Principe. He dazzles everyone in the
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setting by fixing the lack of common sense in this fantasy world, which exists only due to writer fiat.
For instance, he teaches the people in this fantasy world -- who are supposed to be starving -- to try out eating animals and plants which were previously not considered. One would surmise starvation would be a particularly strong motivator for people to have done this on their own, but we are expected to believe that only our protagonist could share this deep insight and fix centuries of thickheadedness, all thanks to his superpower of having received high school education in Japan.
The "realism" references are equally cringeworthy. From the title, one would guess that the anime would be full of intrigue and political backstabbing; backroom deals and alliances of convenience. Nah, nearly every person of power in the setting adores (literally, in the case of females) our hero, and provide their unquestioning and complete support and loyalty in return for a pat on the head, and a chance to join the ever-expanding harem. These are not self-interested agents playing politics, mindful of some balance of power, trying to retain and extend their influence. They are unquestioning members of the harem. Even the top leadership of the setting's superpower fall immediately in love with the despot of the weak country which stands against their national interests (an all-female team, obviously). An offer of marriage is voiced upon the first meeting, foreshadowing an international, all-encompassing harem. The only characters that seem to directly oppose the protagonist are thickheaded males who did not fall under the influence of our hero's virility. Truly, this must be what peak realism looks like.
The sound and art are serviceable. Nothing to write home about.
I would recommend this anime only to those who want to watch a harem isekai and can tolerate the cringy scenes where the author goes out of his way to drop Machiavelli quotes while the plot betrays zero understanding of the referenced work. I cannot even call it pretentious, given how blatant the plot makes this. I would also recommend it to fellow train-wreck enthusiasts who just enjoy watching shows that are "so bad it's good". It isn't really good, but it sure is a train-wreck.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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