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Brave Witches is the concept of Strike Witches retooled into an actual show. It's an abstract remake of the first season of SW starring Miyufiji with an inverted color palette and hair that goes down instead of up. A gang of magic girls with airplane legs is once again waging war against shapeshifting aliens with the help of their new recruit from not-Japan. Despite that premise it's a very different take on the same basic idea. The characteristics of Strike Witches are mostly inverted: the MC is noticeably underpowered instead of overpowered, she's not competent and nearly kicked out of the 502nd on arrival, and ... her relationships with other characters start as standoffish or antagonistic instead of instant friendship. She's still in a support role like Miyufiji but has no magical ass-pull to lean on, nor does anybody else. Different characters have different traits and defects making it so that nobody can entirely carry the team by themselves. Additionally the Neuroi are now a dangerous threat instead of just a present one: fighting them isn't free, and even when they lose it's after they've caused damage and bent the trajectory of events that follow. All this greatly affects the character interactions because now they're operating from an entirely justified sense of self-preservation. Being a hero will get them killed so there's a limit to how much they'll stick their neck out for each other. However they also need to co-operate to win, and there's a war in the background with a bodycount that will keep rising until they take action to stop it. Strike Witches dabbled with all of this but would eagerly end conflicts on a shitpost or gag to defuse the tension. The main difference with Brave Witches is that it doesn't and plays everything mostly straight.

Ecchi content returns from Strike Witches in a more moderated role. It has the obligatory episode where they took a doujin they liked and made it canon, and contains the biggest horndog character in the entire franchise, but gags mostly wait their turn for the plot to be finished first. This is still a fanservice show, though.

The art for this show got trashed when it was new because the CGI in the TV version was rough and they leaned into using it for every striker flying scene. In re-releases this was cleaned up a lot and now it looks a little more reasonable like Road to Berlin.

On the whole if you want to get into the whole Witches series, Brave Witches isn't a horrible place to start. It has a plot and if you're coming from other anime it'll align with your expectations a little better while not being totally unlike the other shows. If you don't like it then you won't like the other ones. If you're coming from Strike Witches it can be refreshing change of pace from the ecchi gag format.

Utterly terrible in every way that matters and some that don't. A must watch. This studio loathed every second of making this show and the results that barely make every 5 minute episode functional are peak art. The titular Ken is a one-man Juralien apocalypse, he does not suffer a single one to live and will do as many pointless transformation sequences as he needs to until the job is done. He will gun them down in the street. He will run them over in a truck. He will tie their families to bricks and throw them in the river. He will traumatize them and ... force them to do it themselves. He does this not because he wants to, nor because anybody told him to, because nobody did, but because it must be done. Juralians could be anywhere. They could be anybody. They could be your parents. They could be your dog. They could be the cute girl at school. They could even be Juralians. In this world you need to Charging Go or you'll be Charging Gone.

This show is aimed pretty narrowly at people who want a low-energy office romance show where everybody acts like an adult. It's not encumbered by drama, it's not concerned about having a plot, its comedy is circumstantial and matter-of-fact. The soundtrack is downbeat and the characters are never on guard around each other to support the idea that you're supposed to be taking this show easy. It's about normal people hanging out and that's it. In all it's a pretty comfy package, if played a little too safe for its own good (maybe a lot too safe).

As said, there is no plot to speak of ... and things end just about where they started. What you get is a slow drip of insight into the characters and the setting, which can be interesting but doesn't materially affect much. You find out this is a soft fantasy setting where everyone in the office reports to Buddha, the MC is a snowman on his mom's side, and one co-worker has deployable fox ears. Otherwise this is contemporary Japan and most people are still pretty normal and have normal problems to solve. From there the romance begins with the cast neatly subdivided into 3 couples who all have their own things going on. And that's where it stays for the whole series. On one hand the low stakes do make it easier to watch casually and enjoy it as a wind-down show, but on the other hand you could probably watch in random order and not miss anything. This is fine from a SoL angle but this kind of non-commitment does hurt it as a romance because there's no point to any of this if they can't decide whether they're in a relationship. It has the ongoing romance manga problem where it's too scared to break the status quo and potentially end the story, so it strings things along forever. Not a show-stopper but when people dislike the show this is probably what they're talking about.

Most of the show is dialog so there's not much to talk about technically. There's no feats of animation happening here, although some interesting compositing is used to make the eyes a little more lively. It's not bad looking but most of the characters have the same deadpan stare all the time just because that's their personality. Some shots are recycled to the point where you wonder if you've already watched this episode before because it's the same set of exterior shots again. No obvious defects or mistakes, though.

On the whole: I watched it, I didn't mind it. It's not a must-see show but it occupies its micro-niche of easygoing office romance well enough.

Also the fox girl is voiced by Rudeus from Mushoku Tensei and you will never be able to un-hear it. The Rudeus voice even makes a cameo which is hysterical.

A double fake-out of a show. What initially looks like degeneracy is actually a pretty safe SOL about a reserved dude forced into the role of a girl with some added fanservice. Slowly the fanservice also drops off and it becomes a straight retelling of the PG-rated web manga. If you're OK with Ranma 1/2, this show is probably even tamer. The center of attention is the animation - Bind is still the same studio behind Mushoku Tensei and this time they brought help. The kind of help that also worked on, or even directed, shows like Madoka Magica and Monogatari. Most of the rating ... comes from being extremely pleasant to look at while also not imploding anywhere else and having comedy that doesn't fall flat. Overall another Bind show that sets up an awkward situation and works to make you sympathetic for the people involved rather than gawking at the premise, even if it's nowhere near as ambitious as MT.

The story is OK. The original web manga isn't quite a 4koma but it's not exactly a high-stakes adventure either. There's no real over-arching plot to it, it's a sequence of events all summarized as 'Mahiro tried something new; he only slightly fucked it up'. The only real conflict is that Mahiro is a shut-in by default and reverts back to it at the first sign of trouble, so the support cast work to keep him in his comfort zone while he works to expand the things he's comfortable with. Obstacles are tackled as they happen and are very matter-of-fact problems like 'Mahiro is still conceptually a dude and doesn't like walking around the womens' section of stores'. It's hard to fault it for what it is, because it's following the standard CGDCT formula and has no illusions about being anything else. There's no big-brained explorations into the ramifications of what's happening or what could happen in the future - everything is what it is and it'll stay that way for the foreseeable future, which was probably the right way to play it. This IS still a Bind show though, so expect an occasionally uncomfortable level of honesty about how bent the premise is and the things that are happening. Also a suspicious number of bathroom emergencies. And a suspicious number of Ark Systems Works games.

For animation go watch the OP and ED and that'll tell you everything you need to know. The show's not a cinematographic masterpiece but its key animation is second to none, for some reason. If anything it crosses over into a mismatch of too much animation for a show that's pretty easy-going. There's not many fanservice shots compared to the runtime, with a few episodes having completely none, but the ones that do show up are _extra_ and there's a reason this show gets tightly associated with them. If that's not your thing, there's just plain not that many of them.

On the whole: I don't really like rating it an 8, but it's better than a 7 and competent enough that I don't have anything to ding it points for. Pretty good easy watching gleefully made harder by its studio literally injecting a weird premise into it and actively baiting people into thinking it's smut when it's not.

(Side note but the Crunchyroll/SFW edit of this show deletes some scenes and changes some dialogue, you probably want to seek out a more literal sub track with non-cut video if you can help it)

Every season there's another new popular meme show adapting some manga everybody has read except for me and every season I ignore them. Oshi No Ko was in that bucket until enough people recommended it anyway, so I carefully went in expecting to hate it and thinking the plot summary was stupid. 'Gynecologist' and 'Rebirth' and 'Idol' is a combination of words that would normally be sandpaper to my brain. Instead I ended up really liking everything this show's doing. It's an airtight story of likeable characters bouncing off each other in fun ways. There are multiple, massive fake-outs that make it absolutely impossible to ... figure out where the story's going. The comedy hits and the drama hits in equal measure. This is an IMPRESSIVE show. Doga Kobo does good stuff but I didn't think they had the capability for something like this.

The first hint that something was different was that none of the idol scenes are CGI. For economic reasons most idol shows use 3D CGI in dance scenes because they can mo-cap actual idols and save the large amount of effort it would take to hand-draw or rotoscope it. Not here! They did it the hard way and it's gorgeous. The animation is minimal where it can be but steps up whenever a scene is important enough to warrant it, leading to a lot of memorable visuals. Composition is consistently excellent, the show feels like a movie because there's some really impressive cinematography going on with some really clever set-ups and use of lighting. Some of the pseudo dolly shots are unironically incredible. Oshi no Ko doesn't necessarily go as hard as a show like Onimai with its key shots, but it consistently has just the right amount for whatever's happening (including belting out something incredible if it needs to be).

Not really gonna rate the plot. Go in as blind as possible because it's absolutely ridiculous in the best way. It ricochets between genres and pulls out some absolutely absurd twists to the point you want to watch just to see where all this is going. It's self-aware enough to realize why people wouldn't be comfortable with its premise, and manages to get you on-board anyway.

The voice acting is excellent. Rie Takahashi knocks it out of the park. Ruby's VA is great despite being completely new to voice acting.

For a show about music, fortunately the music itself is pretty good. The OP theme gets all the attention but a lot of the ambient themes and insets are also pretty good and used at points appropriate to show them off.

This is one of the very few shows where I have nothing critical to whine about. They made a bunch of weird creative decisions that all paid off. The audacity to pair this level of production with such an unhinged premise demands respect. Kino/10.

Set in the current year of 2011, this show is a pretty specific love letter to a pretty specific era of being a weeb on the internet. It's all about showcasing the different genre of otaku and calling back to the shows that the otaku were fawning over. The creator Jun Inagawa grew up in San Diego, which gives the show an unusually American perspective on otaku, which is why 'weeb' might be the actual correct descriptor for what the show is going for. Adult Swim DNA is all over this. The hard rock/hardbass OP, the distorted low-fi ED, the pre-digital color grading, the shitpost-y ... irreverent attitude. One of the side characters is _very obviously_ Zone-tan, which is somebody pretty notable with weebs, but who most Japanese otaku have probably never heard of. It's interesting, it's not typical, and I am interested in seeing where this goes, because it's pretty specifically aimed directly in my face.

That said the show between the OP and ED is rough. It can't quite be compared to Shimoneta despite having a similar premise, Shimoneta puts in the basic effort to pretend to be soft sci-fi in a real world. The rules are silly, but it does follow basic ones, like 'people can't be in more than one place at a time'. Magical Destroyers has no such reservations. You will be sent to the drug trip dimension regularly. There is no distinction between what you should be taking seriously and what you should be taking literally. The story structure is 'lmao'. There are a lot of things to like in the art direction of this show, and there's a lot of reason to think that more is happening than what we're seeing, and there are occasional flashes of what they're trying to do. But so far it's 50/50 whether they actually stick the landing.

Mostly incoherent with lots of signs that production of this show did not go well. The key staff involved aren't unskilled or even new to the Witches franchise, but seeing that there are SIX more producer credits than there are episodes, things start to make sense. The badness is jarring after it seemed like they were getting this series pretty well dialed-in after doing Brave Witches, Road to Berlin, and Take-Off in a row, which were all pretty great. This show is not those. Only watch if you will literally die without watching a new idol anime.

The good: The voice acting is fine or pretty ... good. Most of the staff are new to anime, the only negative thing to say is that some characters sound like they're doing impersonations of other Witches characters. The art is sometimes good (there is a big caveat here). They learned their lesson from Brave Witches and striker flying scenes are hand-drawn in closeups and only switches to CGI at a distance, and they all actually look pretty good too. A total of about 2.5 episodes are also executed well with a clear introduction, rise, climax, descent, and resolution. Most of the characters also manage to be distinctive or even likeable. George S. Marshall makes a cameo and he's a fan of the best girl Mana, which is respectable.

The bad: All kinds of stuff. The plot is incoherent. Not just bad or boring, the things happening do not follow from the things that previously happened. Conflicts show up that occupy entire episodes until the characters decide to ignore it and watch it fix itself via a massive butt-pull, which is what always happens. Entire concert scenes are alluded to but happen off-screen because they ran out of time to get them animated. Substituted in their place are massive dialog dumps that remind you of things that you already know to distract you from the fact that everyone was in uniform in the last scene and a concert is supposed to be happening now. It almost develops a plot when they go on tour, but that barely survives 6 episodes, and the show comes apart at the seams between that and the ending. The last 3 episodes are fever dreams running on magical logic. It's a cliche to call something AI-generated when it has uncanny nonsensical properties, but they actually do use AI-generated backgrounds made with photoshop content-aware fill, and towards the end the story is SO convoluted that it's an actual question whether they generated that too. Conflicts are started, ignored, brought back, hijacked by someone else, car-crashed into somebody else's conflict, ignored again, talked about for an entire episode, and finally resolved when everyone decides it was never really a problem and none of this mattered anyway. MAYBE two episodes manage to avoid this. It's hard to see how much of it was fumbled execution and how much of it was stretching when they couldn't execute the original plan on time.

The art gets its own paragraph. Some of the backgrounds look like they were made in Powerpoint. They're glaringly terrible at first glance and get worse the closer you look at them. Perspectives don't line up, low-res jpeg stock art is photoshopped in, they used google maps to make aerial shots, and the mentioned nonsensical AI-generated fills where a pile of metal sticks is supposed to be a construction site. Huge, obvious problems that are almost hard to explain. Kemono Friends had the budget of a family picnic and managed to avoid any of the problems this show has. It's not consistently that bad, and some of it actually looks pretty good, but when it gets bad it makes any other show look better. Also most of the character designs are outright abducted from other idol shows, making the whole thing look more like a cynical cash-grab than it already was.

The ugly: Familiars were a weird thing to add in this show (not really a spoiler, introduced in episode 1). In this show, magical girls become witches when they meet a magical animal and it agrees to be their familiar. If the familiar decides to go away, they can't use magic anymore. This isn't actually a retcon, this is canon to the Witches series, but it only shows up in the mangas and like 10 seconds of the OVA. The other animated shows deliberately ignore them and pretend they're hiding off-screen somewhere. Luminous does absolute back-flips trying to explain how this works and that familiars are really important while we've never seen them in any other show before. They were just invisible! No they're not, we can see them. Other animals in this show can see them. Other witches can see and acknowledge them. They have animal problems and get sick and have to sleep so you can't just ignore them. This is more weird rules about magic in a series that already can't keep its own rules straight. Do the familiars just die when they turn 18 and that's how it works? They can't just adopt another one? Also the reason the other shows ignored familiars is that between the OVA and Strike Witches they decided familiars are just extra characters who can't talk and thus unnecessary, which absolutely becomes a problem for Luminous. One familiar is important to the story while the rest exist to run around in establishing shots or sleep in a corner. A weirdly specific thing to suddenly remember and not use well.

Conclusion: Bad. The thing that worries me is this show introduces a few named characters you've never heard of before and a 503rd JFW. When they did that before was when the 502nd made a cameo in the movie before getting a real introduction in Brave Witches. This implies a Brave Witches 2 might be on the way, and I'm absolutely worried about how they'd execute that after watching this.

All-around not great but better than the rock bottom I was expecting. Starts at story chapter 0 in the game and works forwards chronologically. Extraordinarily slowly paced for the first 6 episodes or so, but it does get traction in the back half. Might be better in a season 2 (if it happens) since now the boring part of the story is out of the way and the crew making it seems mostly competent.

The good: I like the ED and OP a lot, both the songs and the OP sequence itself. The animation isn't standout but it's consistently OK. The voice acting is good to ... excellent with some fairly senior VAs all reprising their roles from the gacha. Yukari Tamura is a stand-out as SOPMOD II even if she's basically doing a more enthusiastic murder-themed version of the Rika voice (or maybe that's why it's good). Best girl M14 is here, but she doesn't talk so it cancels out. After the boring part (most of it), it whacked me in the head with some actual clever foreshadowing like a real show, and from there through the ending it's actually not bad and kept my attention.

The bad: For the first 6-8 episodes this show is boooooooring. You can skip through entire minutes of it and not miss anything. It's not incoherent or horribly written or anything, it's an accurate recreation of the famously story-light early game in the gacha except without any gameplay. Scenarios start boring and resolve to nothing important. A lot of sangvis ringleaders are introduced that die within an episode or two and they're all non-characters except maybe three of them, all of which show up at the end when the show is better in general. A LOT more of this should've been skipped. The depictions of how t-dolls fight are also strange. They're trying to split the difference between how it works in the game meta and how actual warfighting works and it doesn't really make any sense for either. Team comps are too random to be a good even in early game, and shikikan makes the tactical decision to send the handguns to a rooftop to be snipers. Huh?

The ugly: People made a big deal about shikikan becoming a named character with voice acting, it's mostly fine but doesn't really achieve anything for the show. She doesn't really do anything and is a passenger while AR team drives the plot around her. Other named shikikans are introduced and when they start talking to each other about their favorite t-dolls the show teeters dangerously close to becoming pokemon, but thankfully does not and starts being good after that. Pedantic point but all of AR team's guns are incorrectly drawn as AR15s.

Conclusions: Season 2 should steal Lycoris Recoil's homework and be about the moe adventures of [spoiler character] and SOPMOD. I would watch that and it would be good. Otherwise probably skip this, but if you want to watch it's less bad than it could've been and isn't a total disaster.

Mixed feelings for sure. About 75% of this show is great but the plot is a little too flawed to recommend uncritically. What's left is executed extremely well, so this show shouldn't be completely written off either. Come expecting a good time but don't expect that good time to last the entire series.

The good: The art is gorgeous. The premise and world building is tons of fun. And this is one of the only shows that actually understands how guns work! They get it more correct than other shows that are specifically about guns. Like that other one about girls near a front line. The ... choreography is fantastic and learned the right lessons from things like Equilibrium and John Wick. Scenes are easy to parse and you're rarely left confused about what's happening. Action scenes are plentiful and they consistently look good. The supporting cast is fun, and when they get side arcs those episodes are also fun. The show has some near-future sci-fi trappings and those are utilized effectively in the story without feeling cheaty or out of place. On the whole, the early show feels a lot like a Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex sci-fi investigative drama with a lethal amount of moe slice-of-life injected into it, and it manages to do both at the same time successfully. When this show is on a roll it is a LOT of fun.

The bad: The plot. Imagine John Wick but you find out midway through that his parents are getting a divorce and that's the focus of the movie now. It's not a total derailment, but it squanders the opportunity to keep doing what the show was already doing extremely well. It's also not so offensive to shut the whole show down, but there's a point where I was wondering what happened to the fun show I had been watching. It's a hard enough pivot that people coming for the action or the moe parts of the show will probably be put off after the story kicks in. The characters central to the plot aren't strong enough to support a character drama of the type it's attempting.

The ugly: The role of villain is assigned somewhat arbitrarily and even the show asks itself why the main villain is the villain instead of one of the other, obviously villainous people. The plot as a whole is structurally airtight but this is a hole it doesn't resolve successfully even after spending a lot of time on it. This is a non-spoiler review so specific characters won't be named, but some central characters are obviously villainous even by the ethically skewed standards in this universe. They explicitly hide in the shadows and manipulate people to avoid anyone finding out about the evil things they do. The show kind of tries to sell this as a good thing because one of the victims of it doesn't mind? Meanwhile the show's stated villain has some very credible complaints about the extra-governmental child death squads running around and he's treated like a monster. This is presented as ambiguity but it comes off more as dissonance between what you're watching happen vs. what you're told is happening, and it's bad enough to weaken the show.

Closing: This show would probably shine in a season 2. Its main weakness is the central conflict, and the central conflict is now resolved and out of the way. The cast is good, the setting is good, and the premise is fun. Keep it simple a la Akiba Maid War and there's the makings of a solid 8 or 9 show in here somewhere. This show, by itself, does not really warrant a total recommendation, but parts of it do shine.