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The anime drops its "crazy edgelord chuuni MC who wants to kill everyone" act, the entire gimmick of the series, about 5 minutes into the first episode. From then on, it's just a straightforward story about a niceguy protagonist who totally knows what's best for the hot girl in his class that he's stalking, as she slowly falls in love with him because he's so fucking nice and caring.

It's pretty gross honestly, the show is constantly glorifying creepy, niceguy behavior like obsessing over pretty girls you've never spoken to and deciding to "protect" them from a distance, even if it means secretly following ... them around all day (aka stalking). Other men are aggressive chad normies who don't respect women like you do, and you must protect her from them.

There's just this really creepy, consent-ignoring aspect to the show, where the main character is constantly learning things about his crush and catching peeks of her, without her ever knowing about it. Almost every example of him making progress in their relationship is a result of him stalking her, like when he helps her with her work after watching her from behind a bookshelf, or when he's following her home and attempts to assault a boy that's hitting on her. It's either that, or some act of martyrdom where he makes some big sacrifice in front of everyone just to help her in some small way - except, he's always IMMEDIATELY rewarded for it because she instantly recognizes that he's doing it for her and he doesn't end up having to sacrificing anything anyway.

Just wish-fulfillment for the "nice guys" of the world who think they know what's best for women and who want to get a pretty girlfriend without actually just talking to them like a normal person. Do not get your dating advice from this show: following girls around and looking for opportunities to "help" them, making big sacrifices to help them when they didn't ask for it, and generally obsessing over them is not going to make them like you. It's going to make them get a restraining order

Now, it COULD redeem itself if it actually holds its protagonist to task for ANY of this. Like, make the girl realize he's been stalking her for weeks and get creeped out, break her trust in him and force him to earn it back honestly. Redeem the normie chad characters who are douchebags to women. Give Anna some actual standards instead of just falling for the only guy who's remotely nice to her. But my expectations are pretty low at this point

Forget this show exists, and imagine I'm pitching you a new story I want to write:

"A heartwarming comedy about a low-confidence student who befriends his classmate with crippling social anxiety. Everyone thinks they're just unfriendly or quiet, but really they're incredibly anxious but desperately want to make friends. Slowly he helps them come out of their shell and learn to socialize"

Now you're thinking, maybe it's this nerdy guy who gets bullied, or a chubby person who's extremely self-conscious about their weight. It's a wholesome story where they help each other develop confidence and integrate into normal social life.

Now I give you the final detail: it's ... an anime. Now it all falls into place. The awkward classmate? Big boobs, hottest girl in school. The main character? Completely generic self-insert male. Does she actually end up making friends? Maybe like two, but it's a gay guy or something (anime still does not understand trans people), and some social outcast girl, so we don't actually have to worry that Komi-san will outgrow the main character.

That's the problem I have with this show: it presents itself as this wholesome story about helping a poor girl who just wants to make friends, while it actually has no intentions of making her any less reliant on Tadano's support. Because it's really a self-insert fantasy about taking care of a helpless, beautiful girl. If she actually made progress and learned how to talk to people, she wouldn't need Tadano (our self-insert) anymore.

When you look at it this way, all the contrivances become impossible to ignore. How is that Komi-san has gone ~16 years of her life without ANYONE noticing her anxiety, even though Tadano figured it out in 5 minutes? Because we're supposed to feel special when we project ourselves onto Tadano: only a down-to-earth guy who doesn't care about popularity (just like you!) would be able to see her as a person. Somehow Tadano is the only decent human being in the entire school, and the anime expects us not to question that, because that's how it assumes we think about ourselves.

Literally everyone else in the school, even the teachers, have to act like they're from another planet in order to maintain this fantasy. Every guy is so obsessed with Komi that they won't let each other interact with her, every girl worships Komi so much that they don't feel worthy to speak to her, and even the adults rationalize her antisocial behavior as some kind of enlightened nobility.

Now, I know what you might be thinking, "but that's the joke! It's ironic that everyone thinks she's perfect!" And yes, it is humorous for a bit, but the joke overstays its welcome. Why keep doing the exact same joke episode after episode, stretching its believability way beyond the breaking point, when all it does it prevent the story from making any progress? Why not let Komi break out of her shell, let the students realize she's not some superhuman goddess, and let her actually start speaking to her classmates and making friends?

Because, that would ruin the fantasy. If Komi-san learns to speak, suddenly she doesn't need Tadano anymore. She's the most desired girl in school, she'll have a hundred friends instantly. She'll have a dozen boys trying to date her. Tadano won't be able to maintain his monopoly over her, because his entire character is that he's a mediocre guy. The anime is forced to keep Komi isolated, only give her one or two friends who are carefully established to be incapable as romantic rivals, so that we can keep her to ourselves.

That's why I don't like Komi-san (the show). The need to maintain a wish fulfillment, self-insert, power fantasy poisons every joke, every interaction. The humor is alright, the characters are cute, it's an exciting premise, but because its priorities are so clear, any hope of it turning into a genuinely heartwarming story are gone. And just to prove my point MINOR SPOILER: I skimmed ahead to chapter 200 of the manga and Komi-san is still not speaking, while Tadano has to supervise all of her social interaction.

Blue Period feels like a battle shonen in disguise, with a lot of yaoi-bait. Sort of. We have Yatora, the generic main character, who's an underdog, badass, sexy, edgy boy who is also wicked smaht at the top of his class, but doesn't have any passions, until he discovers art and instantly devotes his entire life to it without a second thought. He then accumulates a ragtag team of other fighter-AHEM artists, each with their own set of abilities, and starts levelling up his art and competing in competitions.

I think why Blue Period feels so unengaging to me, and why the battle shonen format ... feels so inappropriate here, is that "Art" as a concept is presented so arbitrarily. We don't see Yatora making clear progress, as he goes from stick figures, to crappy cartoons, all the way to advanced-looking art. He just leaps immediately to seemingly professional-level art and just tells us that the composition is apparently bad or something. As someone with zero knowledge of art, it feels totally arbitrary and I'm not convinced at all by any of it. A lot of the 'progress' of each episode is just a character waxing philosophically about how everyone has to find their own path and determination, and that somehow renews their motivation and we're supposed to feel like meaningful progress has been made.

Yatora paints some photorealistic-looking still life, and then is sent into shock when he sees his classmate's equally great-looking still life, because apparently it's just better? Maybe an actual art student would appreciate this more, but personally it feels like they might as well have replaced the paintings with numbers, and whoever paints the highest number is the best artist, because that's how simultaneously vague and objective this show treats the quality of art. It also doesn't help that the show itself is pretty ugly. I can understand a low budget, but the show just looks drab and depressing 90% of the time. They're always in blank gray rooms with dim, cold lighting, depressed faces, and this quiet, boring music.

The cast of characters are essentially just the usual, tired anime girl tropes (tsundere, kuudere, etc.) but pasted onto boys. The drama usually stems from a character being completely unreasonable, behaving exactly as you would expect their female counterpart in a usual trashy shonen would, and then it's resolved after Yatoro stares at them and says something dramatic and they all blush and romantic feelings are HEAVILY IMPLIED BUT NOTHING HAPPENS.

Next complaint: just let them kiss already. We know you want to. We want you to. Just do it. I haven't read the manga so I don't know if that's what's supposed to happen, but the show is constantly baiting romance between virtually every male character, without ever really crossing the line into explicitly implying attraction. They just blush, a lot, every time they talk to each other, and do typical tsundere stuff. It feels cowardly, like they want to attract the audience who's interested in that type of romance, without scaring away the people who dislike it. Stop being a coward, Blue Period.

I'm being too harsh, honestly. The show is not bad it just fails to really grip me anywhere. The first episode I was excited because I've never seen something like this. I wanted to learn more about the characters, see what it's like to become an artist, possibly see some romantic development. But nope, the show has its blinders on and only cares about art, but treats art like it's some kind of Bleach superpower where Yatora has to complete a study mission to level up his Composition Ability from lvl 3 to lvl 4. All of the characters fit neatly into character tropes that were tired 20 years ago, the only difference is they're boys instead of girls I guess. And Yatoro just goes through the same cycle of getting discouraged, inspired, then making a dramatic proclamation to get better. Again, it's not bad, it's just mediocre all around. Let's hope it proves me wrong in the second half

This is your archetypal 2000's harem manga, 'nuff said.

...The first half is quite good for this genre and deserves at least a 7/10. Unfortunately it progresses in exactly the direction you won't want it to (i.e. nothing happens) and the resolution comes out of nowhere and feels like a step backwards. But the girls are cute, it's kind of funny, it's an easy read, and it (usually) does a good job of just taking itself seriously enough to feel like a real story without getting bogged down in drama.

Let's be honest, you're reading this for the ecchi. Umi no Misaki delivers on that front ... for sure, by gradually building up the sexual tension and going a bit further in each encounter, throwing in some extra girls here and there, and all around it's a good time. But for some reason, around the 2/3's mark when we're finally getting to see the things we've all been waiting for, it just stops with the ecchi almost entirely and shoehorns in some crappy drama that consumes the rest of the series. It's very disappointing because at that point, the story feels like it's been laying the foundation to a proper ecchi series, where the characters are all in the right setting and states of mind to get some juicy romance. But then it just... doesn't happen. There's a BIG DRAMA that gets quickly resolved and the story ends.

Story-wise, it kinda sucks but it's a quick read, so it's not too bad? Seriously, the dialogue is VERY light and simple, I've never read a ~130 chapter manga so quickly in my life. So even though the plot is paper-thin, it progresses quickly enough that it stays fresh. Honestly didn't find myself bored until the end, mostly because I could get through 10 chapters in as many minutes. The characters are fun and have their own personalities, although Soyogi and Shizuku are basically the same person, and Karin (the most interesting character by far) gets the short end of the stick most of the time. Nagi is about as bland as they come and spends most his time passively observing the girls as they lose their minds with jealousy and try to take his pants off.

Our main dude, Nagi, is the "remarkably level-headed"-type, which is the most tolerable of harem protagonist archetypes. He basically just earns the affection of every girl he comes across, simply by being less insane than they are and also not an asshole. He has no interests, backstory, motivations, or personality. But he's kind of a nice guy and that's enough for three women to spend their lives fighting over him. Whenever one (or all) of the girls start losing their minds with jealousy, he pats them on the head and tells them to believe in themselves, and they transform into a little puppy and go back to fighting over him.

Do I recommend this? If you're already reading reviews for this manga, then you're clearly already the type to enjoy it. So go ahead and read it until you get bored, then stop. There is no satisfying resolution, nothing exciting is revealed towards the end, so you're absolutely free to give up whenever you lose interest. It's fun if you want some summery, nostalgic ecchi, but it's probably not enough to actually crank one out to and you're not gonna find anything particularly memorable. Try it out, it's fun.

This show is stupid, but it's fun. The important bits are rock-solid: clever, unpredictable scheming by the genius main characters, loads of unique and detailed superpowers, and a big, mysterious conspiracy looming over everything. But all of the secondary details fall painfully short. Fortunately, these aren't crucial to the enjoyment of the series, but they do make it difficult to take seriously sometimes.

Munou Na Nana is easily compared to Death Note: you have two genius characters, one who is trying to enact their murderous plot to save humanity while pretending to try to uncover their own identity, while the other plays detective and tries ... to confirm their suspicions of the former.

And in terms of sheer cleverness of the plots thought up by each character, they're on par with DN's Light and L. However, the same cannot be said for basically any other element of the story. Aside from looking like a generic shonen anime from 2005, Munou Na Nana's biggest weakness is its direction, particularly in the way that it portrays the clever feats of its characters.

Each time Nana or Kyoya do something really clever, we don't actually see them do it. Instead, we skip ahead in time until moments before disaster, only for Nana/Kyoya to be saved by their genius plan which they already set up off-screen. Then explain it to the camera through boring monologue. Having your setup take place *after* the payoff feels pretty unsatisfying after the third or fifth time it happens.

There are numerous plot contrivances that might drive you crazy, but personally I think they're superfluous if you treat the series as a dumb, fun mystery. Yes, all of the students seem impossibly stupid to fall for Nana's lame-ass pep talks and phony personality. Yes, Kyoya ought to have made way more progress at this point if he wasn't so conveniently blind to some obvious details. And yes, the entire premise makes absolutely no sense if you think about it for ten seconds (how are parents not freaking out when their children all go missing at these camps?)

But if you treat Munou Na Nana like the pulpy mystery-drama it is, it's seriously a blast. Just turn off your pedant brain and enjoy the clever schemes, the goofy characters, the unique super powers and their mechanics, and the ever-deepening hole Nana seems to be digging herself into. My biggest hope is that it does well enough that future seasons can get the budgets they deserve.

A powerfully executed story that sacrifices depth and realism for exploitative sympathy-bait. This is a film created with a single goal in mind: to make you cry.

Without spoiling any more than MAL's synopsis, the film's plot is as follows: A bunch of sadistic 11 year-olds bully a deaf girl until she transfers to another school. Ishida - one of the bullies - takes all of the blame which results in him being ostracized by his classmates and his realization of the weight of his actions. Five remorseful years later, a suicidal Ishida bumps into the deaf girl and decides to apologize. She immediately forgives him ... (or rather could never think badly of him to begin with) and they begin building a friendship.

That's the first 45 minutes of the movie; an emotional (albeit simplistic) story about a bully who learns remorse and reconciles with his victim. But wait, the film is over two hours long... what else is left to resolve? This is where the film decides to wring the audience for every molecule of sympathy they're capable of feeling. The latter 90 minutes are a combination of Ishida and the deaf girl rejecting each other's advances, because they're too oblivious and wallowing in misplaced guilt to recognize them, and one of the old bullies showing up and deciding to interfere for reasons unexplained. Finally, she too is miraculously cured of her sociopathy and the movie abruptly ends.

Notice how I keep referring to our heroine, Shouko, as 'the deaf girl'. This is intentional, since she's lacking any personality, interests, backstory, opinions, or defining traits aside from being deaf. Her Buddha-like passiveness and inability to experience contempt is all conveniently justified by her deafness. She is a narrative tool to make possible a plot in which bullies can dish out abuse without consequence for as long as it takes for them to start feeling remorse, and to give Ishida a prize for developing empathy and becoming a decent person.

The world of Koe No Katachi is one where every person is either a Good Person, perfectly moral and determined to bear the weight of all the world's pain, or a Bad Person, sociopathic and bent on torturing all that is pure and good - until somebody flips their empathy switch and they instantly convert to Good where all their sins are forgiven. If they feel guilty enough to attempt suicide, they'll get a girlfriend for compensation!

While these elements might be written off as idealistic or a bit shallow, the excessive exploitation of the characters' suffering is what makes the film seem self-indulgent and borderline offensive. The entire second half of the film serves no purpose other than to delay the resolution of Ishida's and Shouko's feelings, and to drag them through a gauntlet of abuse for the sake of fostering the audience's sympathy. Shouko's speech, which is impeded by her disability, is utilized exclusively for her humiliation. Ishida is routinely punished for the bullying he already spent 5 years and a suicide attempt getting over. Minor characters, whose roles in the story are just shallow mirrors of Ishida's, show up to harass the main cast for reasons left unexamined. The movie really, really, REALLY wants you to cry, and it's willing to kick as many puppies as is necessary to make you do it.

Somehow, the film does manage to strike a few powerful emotional chords and deliver some heartbreaking moments. It is visually gorgeous, with expressive and well-acted characters, and a score that's always subtly guiding you on how to feel. But what is it all in service of? What's the point of anything past the 45 minute mark, when Ishida has already repented and made amends? "Don't antagonize innocent disabled people?" "Don't hang out with psychopathic bullies?" or perhaps, "Don't kill yourself?". Nothing that wasn't said with a thousand times more subtlety and effect in the first 45 minutes is present in the remaining two thirds.

Koe No Katachi is a carefully constructed exploitation of pity, which beats you over the head with the pointless suffering of good people until you're so worn out you either cry or disengage entirely. The film can superbly execute emotional scenes, but fails to construct the context to justify them, yet it shamelessly stuffs them in anyway. There's a touching little short-film in there, but it drowned in a bloated, unrealistic, and exploitative plot.

A global conspiracy plunging the world into chaos, with the fate of everything hinged on finding the answer to a single question! Unfortunately, 20th Century Boys doesn't seem to have been written with an answer to this question, and so the whole thing feels like an empty promise.

The story is extremely engaging and constructs an elaborate conspiracy rich with intriguing characters and dark secrets. With each mystery solved, a dozen more take its place. The further you read, the less you know, until the situation becomes so desperate that the fate of the entire world is at stake. Through it all, everything comes down ... to the one question we've been asking since the beginning: "Who is Friend, and what's his motive?"

I feel it's my responsibility to let you know (without spoiling much) that the "big reveal" will occur in literally the last 5 pages of the final chapter, and it is the biggest ass-pull I've ever witnessed. No foreshadowing, no plot relevance, just something completely inconsequential which "resolves" the central mysteries with a handwave. This leaves a very bitter aftertaste, since the manga endlessly teases at the 'big reveal', literally every few chapters, building up our expectations so high despite having absolutely nothing to offer.

That said, the story is still extremely entertaining. The characters are memorable, the story is engaging, and the artwork is unique and full of expression. The story evolves through shifting character focus, a setting that changes drastically, and the ever-deepening mystery at its core. Despite that mystery having an utterly boring and anti-climactic resolution, it is still intriguing all the way to the end.

It's a surreal mystery that combines a level of realism that is unusual for anime with an utterly absurd premise, which succeeds in being simultaneously a wacky comedy and a dark thriller. The execution is nearly perfect; it knows how to tell a gritty, dramatic story that never holds back from putting its characters through hell, while also embracing its goofiness to have a consistent layer of humor and crazy premise. This aspect of the story weakens, however; as the circumstances gradually become so far-removed from reality that a suspension of disbelief is impossible, while being told that everything happening is the logical result of some mundane event from the characters' childhood.

As long as you can manage your expectations for the ending, this is a fun read. It is emotional, compelling, and complex. The important characters are unique and multi-dimensional, and develop throughout the story. The plot is far from cliche or predictable, and never stays in one place for too long, even if that means is goes to some pretty ridiculous places. The constant teasing at the 'big reveal' becomes obnoxious and is unfortunately the driving force of the plot, but the story mostly manages to stand on its own despite that.

Sad girl stops being sad after people are nice to her for 26 episodes.


The anime is just too long, it's an episodic SoL in disguise. The core story of Chise and Elias' relationship and their growth as individuals doesn't justify more than a few episodes, so it ends up being heavily padded. The bulk of each episode is some inconsequential subplot that contributes little more to the overarching narrative than reaffirming what we already know about Elias and Chise so far. There's very low "content density", where only about 10% of the ~500 minutes of total runtime is dedicated to progressing the plot and ... the rest is split between little subplots and hammering in Chise's mental state. This might be fine if the show embraced its episodic nature and put more thought into its subplots, but they are usually only shallow metaphors for whatever Chise is currently feeling, or contrived to create an opportunity for Chise to monologue about her feelings.

Chise's story is itself endearing but overly simple. Ultimately she is a pure-hearted nice girl antagonized by sadistic weirdos, so there isn't a whole lot of depth to her character. She hasn't done anything wrong and doesn't have any real flaws, so she has no character arc to progress through - she only needs to accept that she's not a bad person. This isn't exactly an applicable moral story, since real people aren't innocent, perfect, and only sad because evil people traumatized them; real people are flawed, do less-than-good things, and must self-improve to feel better. There is some tension between her and Elias, but usually in the form of one of them being broody and refusing to communicate which does less to create actual drama than it does to insert fake tension and prolong the story, since it never amounts to anything significant.

It's just too slow and unengaging. The setting and subplots aren't given the attention they deserve, and so they end up feeling like padding that stretches the story thin instead of an engaging world to explore. The emotional core is simply that a perfect girl is sad because she was bullied in the past, and she eventually realizes there's nothing to be sad about and stops. It could easily be condensed to a few episodes, which it is in the OVA's, so just watch those instead.

MMO Junkie is one big build-up to a finale which is totally unsatisfying. Right off the bat, an impending “reveal” is set up that will be used as the fuel for all of the dramatic tension of the series. The reveal consists of the main characters realizing that they are actually long-time friends in an online game – which will undoubtedly result in the beginning of a romantic relationship. The problem is that the reveal is held off until so late into the story that there is no time to explore the aftermath, and that it’s dealt with in the most juvenile and unrealistic way ... possible.

The first half of the show sets up a nice little opening to a story: Morioka has quit her job due to anxiety and spends her days playing an MMO when she begins bonding with someone in-game, only to meet that person in real life – unbeknownst to her. They take an interest in each other in the real world, but are too shy and dependent on gaming to advance their relationship. With that premise established, all that’s left to do is reveal their identities and watch as they develop as a couple and overcome their issues in life. Instead, the reveal occurs at the very end of the series, amidst a bunch of forced misunderstandings and delays, so that nothing really happens until literally the final seconds of the last episode.

This is disappointing for a number of reasons; for one, it’s all build-up and no payoff – we don’t get to see how the characters are affected by this reveal. For another, none of the major problems affecting the characters are resolved: Morioka’s crippling anxiety, addiction to gaming, lack of a job, and the various problems arising from a relationship between socially-deficient gaming addicts who hardly know eachother are completely swept under the rug.

That’s what makes the show frustratingly and offensively simple – the audience is expected to believe that love literally solves everything. Two characters love eachother, therefore there’s no need to deal with any of their problems on-screen because the audience just knows it will all fix itself somehow. This is juvenile fantasy to the extreme and an insulting finish to a story that was promising so much more.

Everything else in the story is left untouched after 6 episodes; the videogame itself, the numerous side-characters, and Morioka’s future are just kind of forgotten and never explored again. What should have been a 15-minute scene in the middle of series instead consumes the entire latter half by spending 2 hours showing Morioka idly sitting around while she builds up the courage to do the thing that ends the show.

Otherwise, the writing is generally mediocre; the whole premise is built off of impossible coincidences and stereotypes played completely straight. It's like the writer knows how to set up a good story but has no idea how to finish it, and hasn't had a relationship since the fifth grade. The fact that the characters are well into adulthood makes their childish behavior that much harder to stomach

A decent cast with a unique plot that was unfortunately weighed down with pointless pseudo-drama and overstuffed with cuteness. Anyone watching this show expects a cuteness overload and plenty of slice-of-nothing-happens, which is completely fine if done properly. However; A Place Farther than the Universe reaches for something more complex and story-driven, but falls short on delivering any engaging drama.

The story and genre are at odds with each other; it strives to have dramatic tension between characters, but also wants to beat you over the head with cuteness and positivity. The result is a boatload of forced drama caused by characters being too nice to ... eachother, or some external event which conveniently soaks up all the blame, which gets resolved in 10 minutes and has no effect on the overall story or characters. Afterwards, one of the characters will recite platitudes about how "the world is filled with people living their lives" or "you just have to try your best and see what happens!"

The show isn't without its strengths: the characters are genuinely likeable, though impossibly naive, and the plot - however thin - is real enough to keep the show focused. The friendship of the main characters feels organic and justified, and the different dynamics between each character are consistently entertaining.

It fails with its weak conflicts and generally slow pacing. There are way too many obstacles on the road to Antarctica that come out of nowhere and amount to nothing, while the major dramatic plots are too simple and predictable. There's too many preachy moments of characters waxing philosophically on mind-numbingly generic life advice, and there's also a consistent undercurrent of sexuality that betrays the innocence of the show, with highly-animated boob physics and lots of "generous" camera angles... which comes off as a bit cheap and manipulative for a show that tries so hard to project an image of pureness and good.

In all, it's not a bad slice-of-life show and it delivers on cuteness and some genuine bonding moments, but the dramatic elements that supposedly elevate the series to something more than just an episodic SoL are just too bland and heavy-handed to take seriously.