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If there's a word I'd use to describe Endride, that word is "stiff."

It's there in the writing, it's there in the characters, and it's there in the animation. Just a general feeling of stiffness that takes away from most positives you could hope to find.

At first glance, Endride is a very pretty show. The character designs are nice and clean, the weapon designs are elaborate but fun in that Tokusatsu way, and in general it has a really nice palate and everything going on. But when you actually watch it move, it's just... well, stiff. The staging is perfunctory and unambitious, ... the characters move to a limited degree, and the action scenes are devoid of life and energy. It gives a very cheap and underwhelming feeling to an otherwise nice-looking series.

Unfortunately, that just continues in other elements. The story itself is fairly banal - a young boy, who hilariously is a rock and crystal collector, finds himself launched into a mystical fantasy world. More isekai good times, right? Well, kind of. The thrust of Endride is that there is a world within our world, an underworld, that is full of fantasy action and monsters and has been concealed from mankind through history. Our hero, Shun, wants to make his way back to the surface, and the only way to get there is with the "Babel" in Babylon, a city that has now been taken over by evil. Along the way, he finds a ragtag group of adventurers, including a rebellious prince.

So, yeah. Nothing here that you haven't seen before. The only real twist is the underworld idea, and it doesn't really play into much, as it still just looks like a fantasy kingdom with no real differentiation. You have humans and beastmen, and kingdom intrigue that's extremely shallowly developed.

Because to go along with stiff, you can call a lot of things here shallow. The main two characters, Shun and Emilio, are classic rivals - one in red, one in blue, one with a sword, one with a spear, a classic dynamic that's been around since Voltron. However, there's no reasoning behind it, and little development, at least as far as I watched before tapping out. It's kind of funny that they're two teenage boys that just kind of can't stand each other, but that's about it.

And no one feels very lively. We get lengthy mid-episode flashbacks trying to give our characters dimension and backstory, but it doesn't seem to connect a ton to who they are in the modern time, and it doesn't actually add depth to a lot of their actions. They just feel like a group of stock characters, fairly lifeless, and animated in lifeless fashion.

That's before we even get into the fact that the story moves along at a glacial pace. Those flashbacks? They eat up a ton of run time each episode, leaving us little time to actually... do anything. One episode is largely spent with the main duo teaming up with their happy little Robin Hood band - and doing laundry and chores. On the one hand, there's the potential for it to be charming - they're with mysterious revolutionaries, and being tasked with doing legwork and grunt work in this socialist commune environment where everyone has to pull their weight. But while it should be a comedic and light-hearted scene, there's barely any comedy actually pulled off in it, and the characters don't get a ton to do. Instead our effeminate seer takes a tumble into the lake, is revealed as a man despite his womanly appearance - though he does have a manly voice, too - and we find out that he has bad luck. And if it's a scene that's really played for comedy, or intended to be - and it seems like it might be just because I don't know what other response I'm supposed to be getting from it - it fails. It's just a series of events that happen.

I'll be honest, I went in wanting to like this show to a degree, and not even knowing the full bad press it had gotten, because I just kind of added a ton of shows to my watch list and forgot about them. I like going in blind. But going in blind didn't make it any better. It's just a nice on the surface package that falls apart as soon as it starts moving. Or not moving, as is far more often the case, because this show just kind of meanders through much of it's run time, going nowhere.

The original Digimon Adventure stands, in my somewhat biased and nostalgic opinion, as one of the best kids shows and kids anime of all time. Deep, well written, with a fun environment and great, developing cast of characters, not to mention awesome creature design, and a far more ambitious sense of scope than it really needed. So as a kid, when 02 was announced? I was hyped. We were getting a whole new season, and if Digimon had taught me anything, it was that when things move on to the next stage, it's just bigger and better, and usually has more ... spikes.

Well. 02 has spikes, I guess.

Simply put, 02 is a show that is badly overshadowed by its predecessor, and that stands both for in general, and for the characters in the show. It does what so many "sequel" anime do - adds new gimmicks, more flashy character designs and powers, but fails to actually develop the characters or the story with any degree of finesse. I'm looking at you, Yu-Gi-Oh, when I say this. And Dragonball GT. Is Armor Digivolving cool? Absolutely. Jogress/Fusion Digivolution? Sure! But I need more than that, actually, and 02 isn't really inclined to give it to us.

One need only take a look at the main cast of this season. Our original chosen children, with the exception of Takeru and Kairi, have "aged out" of being protagonists, and it is, admittedly, fun to see them a couple years more mature, having changed their look and style a little bit. It would be better, though, if we got to follow the characters we love instead of these guys, though. Daisuke, Miyako, and Iori - or Davis, Yolei, and Cody if you prefer - aren't horrible characters, necessarily, but they're far weaker than the ones whose shoes they're stepping in, and 02 could not make that all the more apparent if it tried. The entire story of the season is based on them fitting the legacy that's been left for them, with Daisuke inheriting Tai's courage and Yamato's Friendship, Miyako inheriting Sora's Love and Mimi's Purity, and Iori getting Koushiro's Knowledge and Jou's Sincerity. Except none of them are as good as the characters they are taking the place of, and when they're getting the screen time and emotionally-tied powerset of two previous characters, you'd think that might at least mean they get twice the development and growth, right?

It doesn't.

We see the cast of the first series struggle, grapple with real problems, grow and flourish as they come to terms with things like what love really means, what it means to be a leader, or a hero, a big brother or a son or a dozen other things. Our hero and rival butt heads over two different ideas of family and taking charge, our main heroines start as contrasting ideas of femininity that soon become fast friends who respect one another deeply, and even our kid sidekicks get a ton to do. Daisuke in episode 1 and Daisuke in episode 50 of 02, though? Basically the same dumbass. An endearingly well-meaning dumbass, sure, but I don't feel like he's actually learned or changed in any meaningful way.

That goes for all of them. Really the two characters with the strongest arc this time around are villains, with our first arc enemy of the Digimon Kaiser, Ken Ichijouji, suffering a massive fall from grace, a brutal awakening from his "middle school syndrome"-induced sociopathy, as he realizes that he's been living a cruel child's dream to hide from his real pain. Now that's good stuff, but he's side-lined compared to Daisuke and Iori and Miyako who, simply, don't do a lot. There's Black WarGreymon, too, a manifested symbol of darkness, literally brought to life out of the corruptive influence of a Dark Tower, who has to learn what it means to actually have a soul and be alive, and is far and away one of the most memorable arcs of the entire show, but it's only a few episodes and late in the game.

Instead, 02 is more content to show off fun Digimental evolutions and the way that their main characters use their powers, or introducing villainous gimmick after gimmick from dark rings, to dark spirals, to dark towers, to dark spores. And while Digimon Adventure has a slightly rote "new enemy pops up with More Power" dynamic as well, as is typical for kid friendly action shows, 02 couldn't be more transparently by the books, not to mention the sometimes inexplicable appearances of villains like Demon just to, well, show up and make trouble it feels like.

So with the story and character stripped down to bare parts, you're left with what Digimon always was. A somewhat cheaply animated show designed to sell toys and video games, and while again, 02 has some really stand out moments of animation and ambition - the jarringly weird but fantastically atmospheric HP Lovecraft pastiche in the Dark Ocean will always linger with anyone who watches this season - it only feels all the more cut and paste and by the book because it doesn't have story beats and character work like Adventure to make up for it.

Ultimately, 02 is a disappointing follow up to an unexpected and underappreciated gem. A show shouldn't take so much time reminding you how much better that the old cast was than the new one, either - especially if they're just going to ruin it at the end with this, the first (for me) and worst of the "and then they grew up and had kids" epilogue. It sticks badly in my craw, and has only gotten worse after seeing Harry Potter, Naruto, Bleach, and a dozen more do the same, though I'm not sure any have made me more upset than this incoherent mess.

No wonder they go in a different creative direction for Tamers, and I'm excited to see how that one holds up. And at the end of the day, 02 is a perfectly fine show. It's still Digimon. Your beloved characters are here, the monsters are fun and interesting, and while the story is by the book, it's competently told, with probably a stronger all around villain roster than Adventure had, besides. But all it really is is yet another kid's anime capitalizing off media buzz, and it's predecessor, to fill air time and make a buck. If you go in just wanting 50 episodes of kid-friendly lightness, you'll be content. Just don't expect anything more.

Few artists have been as brave as the creative staff of Ulysses: Jeanne d'Arc and the Alchemist Knight as to ask the tough questions, like, what if Joan of Arc was a thirsty loli, and also, you could buy drinks that are supposed to taste like her drool?

I think I'm on a watch list just for typing that, now.

Ulysses, which is all I'm going to call it from now on because that name is entirely too long, is what I personally like to call a "big tiddie anime." You are here to watch this show for, frankly, one reason and one reason only. ... It is full of waifu bait girls, most of them generously endowed as, in fact, the English end credits VA likes to point out. This show is not here to make any illusions about what it is, and what it's for. Sexual elements permeate it. The sloppy and often graphically detailed kissing to pass on "elixir" as power up; the wacky harem shenanigans; the generous jiggling; the outfits; the 'virginity test' episode; numerous threats of rape; I could go on. And to an extent, at this point in my life, it's the kind of thing that I largely find tacky more than titillating, and it's one of the reasons why, frankly, Ulysses is just not a good show.

Now, it can be an enjoyable show. If you want to look at cute waifubait in scandalous situations, having middling-tier action scenes against other waifus or setting up harem shenanigans, hey, you'll have a good time. And while the characters - painfully rendered actors in real French history aside - are pretty by-the-numbs trope fare, they are at least largely charming. Personally I preferred to watch the English dub on this one - I tried both but hte English VAs were actually good and I found some of the Japanese VAs a little too sqeauky for my tastes - and they certainly try their best to make the characters feel fun and alive, in spite of their largely two dimensional nature. And look, while I'm no longer a hormonal teenager who can entirely be satisfied with ecchi waifu action, I'm not going to lie to you: a lot of the character designs in this show are ones that are quite attractive and nice to look at. I use the term "big tiddie anime" derisively, but I'm not going to pretend I don't enjoy it for what it is at times, and La Hire and Charlotte in particular are welcome on my television any time. I love a badass gunslinger with a drinking problem and lesbian overtones, what can I say?

But when you peel away the nice visuals and the sometimes tiresome or outright unseemly goofiness, there's just not a lot here. The plot is about as paint by numbers as it gets, using the trappings of the Joan of Arc legend for a bland fantasy narrative about warring kingdoms and magic rocks. There's a little bit of attempted historical drama, between our main character - confessed child murderer Gilles de Rais turned into bishonen harem lead - having to deal with his affection for his saintly lady in arms, Joan of Arc, while also dealing with a political marriage to his cousin in order to gain military power, but most of these names could frankly be changed around to generic fantasy names and you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference.

You have your energetic loli-esque lead who is naive and chipper and desperately in love with the lead. The childhood friend that he has to rescue. The somewhat temperamental princess. The gun-toting ladette. The sarcastic fairy mentor. A cast of harem characters you could find in a dozen shows, and I'm probably going to forget most everything about all of them within six months of now. And really, once the show moves on from its wacky harem shenanigans and virgin testing and the like in the first half, and turns into its dramatic, war-focused conclusion, it just loses itself in mediocrity and beats that I've seen a dozen times before, and a dozen better.

Like I said, this is not a good show. The writing is mediocre, the character designs are nice but the animation is nothing special, the characters are pretty but forgettable, and a lot of the themes and elements are outright tasteless and uncomfortable, like our main hero professing that he can't be in love with Joan because he's not a pedophile - and then ending up with her in the end game ship anyway, yikes. I realize that, sometimes, in fanservicey anime you just have to accept these things, but really, I shouldn't have to. Be less weird, Japan.

I guess that's the message of Ulysses. Hey, Japan, be less weird. Don't talk at length about how your sexualized lead, who is, again, supposed to be famed historical saint Joan of Arc, looks like a child. Hey, don't turn a child murderer into a pretty boy harem lead. Hey, maybe don't sell drinks that are supposed to taste like anime girl saliva.

Just. Please. Be less weird.

I feel like I can sum up this review in five words: "It's fucking Cowboy Bebop, dude."

But that's lazier than Cowboy Bebop, frankly, deserves.

An absolute watershed, iconic piece of animation - of, frankly, television with no genre or medium boundaries - Cowboy Bebop is one of the most beloved, respected, and cherished pieces of anime television, and I'd say especially in the US. And that kind of makes sense. When put against its piers, Cowboy Bebop is one of the least "anime" of anime. It's a story that could be told in a lot of different mediums - in, really, a lot ... of different genres, as you could pare away a ton of the sci-fi, planet-hopping trappings and be left with an almost identical piece of storytelling that would lose very little. This makes it commonly peoples' first anime, at least away from something like Pokemon or even Dragonball Z or Sailor Moon that feels, at times, like "just a cartoon" to a childhood audience, whereas Cowboy Bebop is clearly something removed into a new genre, and a new world. No wonder it's so often recommend as a good intro-anime for people who aren't into the medium, since you don't have to put up with the wacky fanservice and distended faces and bizarre anime trope-isms that litter the medium, and look, a lot of that stuff is great, but it can be pretty goddamn impenetrable and off-putting to an outsider.

That being said, Cowboy Bebop doesn't run away from its medium, or its sci-fi genre. It can exist safely and strongly without them, but that's a comment on its strength of narrative, character, and restraint, not a condemnation of the other elements. Cowboy Bebop uses its medium deftly, better than most, to build a stunning moody, gripping, cohesive universe. Later works like Firefly owe themselves to Bebop's sense of realistic sci-fi, and it's something that stands up with the original Star Wars as a lived-in, decaying, authentic world where space travel simply exists, and it doesn't feel glossy and unrealistic, but simply a part of life. The starships and such of CB exist in the same plane as the heavily graffiti'd subway trains of our modern world, comparable to our time where air travel is commonplace and mundane, even frustrating, in a way that would be mind-blowing to those from a century before.

There are few worlds that really feel as cohesive as Bebop's, to both itself - a world that lives and breathes and exists and never feels like the fiction is pulling at its own seams, or barely painting over the rough edges that no one stopped to think about - but also to its story. While you could drop the crew of the Bebop into 1930s New York or 1960s Shanghai or modern LA and not have to change a ton about it to make it work, this is a world perfectly suited to its cynical, jaded, wandering bounty hunters.

And what a cast they are. Spike, Faye, Jet, and Ed are simply four of the most iconic faces in anime - a stunning 90s anti-hero who works as what an anti-hero should be, not just a gritty and violence asshole, but a man who is deeply flawed, mysterious, cynical, but driven by a good heart and an ugly past that is compelling without being exploitative; a femme fatale lead who is one of the most beloved women in anime, not just for her stunning looks but the depth of her charm, her broken bird charisma, the heart breaking reality of what being Faye Valentine is against the sensuous image she portrays; the grizzled right-hand man, who stands as the perfect balance for Spike, a fully defined and fully realized character in his own right that could easily shoulder the weight of his own narrative, and gets to on a number of episodic occasions; and even Ed, who seems at first like she's going to be your standard wacky comedy teenager, but has so much more to offer and say, with one of the most touching character send-offs I've seen in a long time.

And, look, there's this modern opinion that Cowboy Bebop has been deemed some unassailable classic that you're not allowed to say anything bad about, and maybe that's true, a bit. It does have its fervent defenders. And it should. It's an unassailable classic like the Godfather is, frankly, or Citizen Kane - a movie I personally don't like, but can at least see the potent strengths in. Hell, I don't like Final Fantasy 7 or Seinfeld, either, and I still know they're both genre defining classics. That's what Cowboy Bebop is.

Is it perfect? No. The episodes can sometimes feel meandering, an episodic piece that is more interested in mood and philosophy than a defined arc or story. If you're looking for a complete, coherent, satisfying narrative, Cowboy Bebop is not going to scratch that itch, more than likely, because it isn't interested in trying. Bebop wants to tell you a story about who people are, about what redemption and atonement mean, about how your past defines you, or doesn't, about what it means to step away from the ghosts that haunt you, or revisit those haunted places and understand what's become of them. You have to be willing to put in the work and peel back the layers to fully appreciate a show like this, and I don't say that to imply that people who don't like it are watching it "Wrong" or "don't get it" or, even worse, aren't smart enough to. Sometimes you just don't click with things. Sometimes you don't want media that forces you to do your homework and rewatch it again and again to get the full picture and appreciation. Sometimes a show, or a book, or a game, or whatever should just be what it is, and can be perfect as what it is, without needing to be studied and dissected.

But Cowboy Bebop isn't one of those. It's an ambitious, weighty, mature narrative, one that has stood the test of tine, with animation and visual and music and really every production metric you could hope for standing the test of time like it rolled out this week. Bebop did one of the best things that any piece of media could do: it knew exactly what it wanted to be, on every level, embraced that style fully, and did everything it could to make it work.

Cowboy Bebop isn't perfect. Nothing is. To paraphrase a famous anime villain, perfection is the enemy of any scientist, or artist for that matter.

But goddamn, it gets pretty close.

"YOUR MOTHER IS A CRAB"

I should be honest up front that an otome game adaptation is probably not something that was Made For Me, on account of being a grown-ass man who typically prefers his anime with heavy psychological drama or shonen punchkick action.

That being said, I wanted to go into this liking it. It's pretty and shiny and I grew up on Power Rangers, and have been watching Sentai series recently, so that kind of Sentai action is definitely something I have a soft spot for. Seeing it polished up in a lovely anime package sounded great - except this show trades ... production values in instead of charm, and that's where it stumbles short.

Don't get me wrong, Scared - or Scar-Red - Rider Xechs is very nice to look at. The cast is full of pretty characters, as befits an Otome Game, each one of them distilled conveniently into pretty bland tropes - the stoic main character, who my understanding is was invented for the anime anyway; the cool and perpetually scowling "lancer" who sits at the right hand; the Big Guy who is mellow and mature and kind; the token shota, girlish and cranky; and my least favorite, the wacky eccentric glasses character who constantly speaks in broken English, because that kind of gimmick hasn't been done absolutely to death.

The otome protagonist is here, too, perfectly inoffensive and there to be projected upon by the girls who want to be her, with a bubbly, blonde best-friend type to round things out. No one really stands out beyond their generic role, and maybe there's room for development in the back two thirds of the series, but at this point I've seen nothing to make it worth investing in any further.

After all, Sentai are predicated on fun villains and action scenes, and this show has neither of them. There's no Lord Zedd here, no Gorma commanders, at least not introduced as far as I made it, leaving the 'Nightfly O'Notes,' - and boy let's just chew on THAT naming choice for a second - as just a pack of generic monsters to be destroyed with little problem. The action scenes themselves feel pretty perfunctory, and episode 4 just straight up doesn't have any, being content entirely with slice of life, as it seems like the intent is just to have the action as a framing device, I suppose, while the characters and comedy and romance get the bulk of the air time, but that... doesn't really seem to happen either.

No, instead I'm left wondering why we're even here for most of the run-time. It seems like the implication is that the heroes are idols and musicians as well, and we're told in the first episode that Red Leader is more focused on playing guitar than training, because he cant transform for some reason - but that's a plot point that is given no time at all to develop, because instead he just... Does It at the climax of the first episode and it's not touched on again from there. There are a few scenes of them practicing music, but it's not delved into with any depth, and episode 4 starts with them filming a [hilariously bad, but on purpose hilariously bad so it's actually great] commercial, but that again just leads to wacky beach shenanigans, blue boy Takt getting stuck in a crab costume, and a relay race because... reasons.

Look, again, I understand this is an otome game show. It's build around pretty boys being charming and having fun and periodically doing Their One Thing but mostly just being male moe archetypes. And if you want male moe archetypes, I guess that's here alright, but they feel so bland and ill-defined it's hard to imagine anyone getting big husband vibes from any of them, not when there are dozens of shows that could better scratch that itch. A show like this either needs great character writing to elevate itself from the pack, or a great gimmick it can play with, and Xechx, frankly, doesn't seem overly interested in doing either of those things.

In the end, it comes across as a lazy cash grab, as so many mobile game adaptations are, slapped together with a competent and glossy visual production to draw in the fans of the game to buy more merch and blue-rays, with little genuine effort put into any phase of production. So, like, if you really like the game this is based on, I guess give it a shot, or if you're really, desperately thirsty for a new otome game-style show for another harem of boys, but man. I cannot help but feel like you should really try to shoot higher.

Shironeko Project: Zero Chronicle is a story of light and dark, which makes it rather appropriate that it's a shiny, sparkly, light up package that's completely empty inside.

Mobile game adaptations are rarely exceedingly good, usually more of a cash-grab taking advantage of a pretty set of visuals, a build-in fanbase and market, and a limited storyline for an easy bang-it-out product. That could not be more obviously the case here. SP:ZC is banal. Bland. Proof positive of how important competent screenwriting is to a series actually being successful.

Because don't get me wrong, this is a very pretty pile of nothing. ... The animation is clean and crisp, with a lovely palette and characters that are charming and nice to look at, if often overdesigned in that modern anime/VG way, with too many clashing hair elements and stuck on accessories for their action scenes and the like. But they're nice, and the action scenes are fine, and other than the cheap CGI used to animate the big scary dragon boss Baahl, there's nothing offensive visually. Moreso, the music and voice acting are better than acceptable, with a genuinely excellent OP and ED that make it all the more disappointing how boring a show they're wrapped around. I'd rather listen to LIBRA on repeat for 25 minutes than watch the show, I'll tell you that much.

Because there's nothing here. I wanted to like it. I did! I love dark and light stories, angelic/demon themes, clashing fantasy kingdoms, dragons and monsters. It's good stuff. But it's all so totally by the numbers. A Kingdom of Darkness filled with edgy bad boy types that are actually more golden-hearted than they seem, with horns and spikes and orcs everywhere. Meanwhile, a glistening, gleaming fantasy kingdom of goodness with pretty princesses and noble nights and oh lord I'm falling asleep just thinking about it. And it's all wrapped around a Romeo and Juliet narrative that's been done to death and brings nothing especially interesting to the table. Him dark. Her light. Them kiss.

Except the worst part is, it's a Romeo and Juliet romance story and it takes almost half the run time before the critical characters even meet! Well, okay, a third, but it's a few more episode before they develop any kind of interpersonal relationship beyond terse political maneuverings. Because the real cardinal sin of this show is the pacing. My god. It jumps all over the place, with weird, out of place action scenes, and the early episodes jar abruptly between the two kingdoms at the episode break, telling half the story in the Light Kingdom and half in Dark, and it's not until episode four that they actually meet. A truly climatic feeling battle after they finally agree to an alliance together hits in episode 5 of 12, against the godlike Baahl, and then episode six is just slice of life nonsense that goes absolutely nowhere, with toothless dress-swapping fanservice and cooking scenes.

It's a whole lot of blah. Criminally boring, when it's not spasmodically throwing itself into paint-by-numbers action sequences that are entirely underwhelming. The first episode sees our nameless Prince lead fight a big manly warrior. They spar. He gets his butt whooped. The big dude dies and tells him he's the prince now, and needs to take over the Kingdom of Darkness. Do we know who this guy is? No. Did we know that he was sick or infirm in any way up until he collapses to the ground dying? Not at all. We don't have time for that. We have CGI action to throw at you and lengthy sequences of princess waifus talking about nothing. MOVING ON.

Bah. Just put the OP on and think about how cool this show could have been. You'll have way more fun.

Future Diary, or: How to develop a thing for yandere in 26 easy steps.

Hey, do you like edge? I mean, do you like seriously edgy content? Sonic-the-Hedgehog-with-a-gun edgy? Batman-flying-in-a-rocket-plane-with-dual-miniguns edgy? Sasuke-Uchiha's-characeter-arc edgy? Then boy, do I have a show for you with almost no soft spots or smoothness.

Future Diary, or Mirai Nikki, is a wild goddamn show. It's your traditional survival game, with 12 people thrust into combat at the behest of a bizarre and questionably CGI'd god figure named, literally, Deus ex Machina. They are all gifted with magic cellphones - well, with a couple relevant exceptions ... - that give them various levels of... shall we call them psychic powers? Time manipulation abilities? It's hard to know just what to label them as, but really, it doesn't matter. Diaries, is what they are called, and our main character, Yukiteru, can use his to see the future. This is convenient, especially when he's introduced to this power by text messages telling him that he's going to die today.

Oops.

Turns out there's a serial killer on the loose, also a Diary user, who has put Yuki in his sights. And as Yuki is your traditional modern milquetoast everyman lead, he has absolutely no skills or pychological fortitude to handle this kind of situation out of the gate. If only he had some kind of protector who could sweep in and save the day! If only...

Cue the only reason anyone really watches Mirai Nikki, I am 90% sure: Yuno Gasai, one of the poster girls for yandere everywhere. Vibrantly pink, and vibrantly insane, Yuno is in love with Yuki for reasons that are clear to few people, least of all Yuki himself, to the point that her Diary is almost exactly the same as his - because it's a point-by-point retelling of HIS future, specifically. This allows her to know that he's in danger, and sweep in to the rescue, with brutally applied murder.

A recurring theme, that.

Mirai Nikki is, from there, a wild, violent, psychologically disturbed and profoundly unhinged show, revolving around mental manipulations and gamesmanship based on various future reading powers. The cast of characters is colorful, to say the least, both in literal and metaphorical terms. It's worth noting that Future Diary is a gorgeous show, with rich, glossy colors, sleek and distinctive character designs, and a lot of really solid animation. It's one of the better done shows I've watched, with a particular scene involving an axe and some mask-wearing cultists leaping quickly to mind as a high point, but no more shall be said there in the name of spoilers.

The real question is, do you like super edgy content? Do you like being besieged with weird sexual issues and child abuse and basically every character you run into being a total basket case? Do you like gore and brutality, sometimes against the least-likely characters? Do you like axes and butcher knives, and the girls who love them? If the answer to any of those is yes, you'll love Mirai Nikki, an anime for the Hot Topic generation who thrives on excess and wildness.

Because excess is really the order of the day. Mirai Nikki throws a smorgasbord of characters, lore, supernatural abilities, violence, and fanservice at you with every episode, cramming as much content into its content as it can manage. Sometimes this is great, and sometimes this turns it into a disasterpiece. It's a show that things it's more polished and intelligent than it really is, that wants to be a more vibrant and dynamic Death Note with more titties, when really it comes across like someone smashed Misery into Code Geass in a blender, with a dash of South Park and Happy Tree Friends era sensibilities. It's a lot, is what I'm saying, and that can be super fun, if you enjoy what it's hurling at your face, but if you don't love that kind of thing, it can quickly get overwhelming and overbearing.

So, really, the question you need to ask yourself is, do you like crazy chicks? Do you need a waifu who will tie you to a chair and hook you up to an IV so that you can never, ever leave her? Then give this one a spin, you won't be disappointed in the slightest by the madness on display. But if you need anything resembling restraint or sophistication in your anime, well, you've probably come to the wrong place.

Also the opening is a hardcore jam. Bump that shit.

Call me Tai because I'm sliding my nostalgia goggles firmly into place.

The one that started it all. One could call it the Baby Form of the Digimon franchise, if they wanted to, but that frankly does a disservice to the series that set the bar for everything that came after it - something that most series of Digimon would fail to do.

It's worth stating up front that Digimon was one of my favorite media franchises period when I was a kid. Pokemon was a fun game, but I always preferred Digimon as a show, and it was really what led me into the ... world of fandom on the internet at all. I learned about fanfic from it, and shipping, and a lot of my early forays into the net as a preteen tot were Digimon motivated. To call it formative to who I am as a person is probably an understatement, and that... might be a worrying thing to say, but that's neither here nor there.

But how does it hold up?

Honestly, really well. I'm biased, of course, but the difference between Digimon and Pokemon as a piece of narrative fiction still feels night and day. Sure, Pokemon has a fantastic game and was a media juggernaut, and deserves lots of acclaim for bringing anime to a lot of kids, even if they didn't fully understand it at the time. But Pokemon, most of the time, is a fairly paint-by-numbers "monster of the week" show with little narrative stakes or development. It's a show about familiar characters going through familiar situations and meeting colorful new side characters and Pokemon that are, largely, promptly forgotten next week - at least, the stuff I grew up on. Digimon is something different.

Does it have monster of the week elements? Absolutely. But even from the start, it has a strong narrative weight. Seven kids thrust into another world with funny monster companions, fighting for their lives against terrifying opposition - including a real Digital Devil as the head of the first arc. It starts off with a fairly light and childish tone, expectedly, being a kids anime, but the real weight behind Digimon is its characters. The main cast are significantly better developed and deeper than they really need to be, and we watch them grow and change and struggle in shockingly human ways for the elementary school protagonists of a battling monster show based on a tomagotchi clone.

Tai has to struggle with the weight of being a leader and a big brother, causing him to brutally snap on more than one occasion. Sora comes to grips with an at times overbearing mother and, at only, what, 10? not knowing if he even knows what love is. Yamato and Takeru are the children of divorce, struggling to feel like brothers when they live apart. Koushiro is adopted. Jou is a, in hindsight, hugely relatable anxious mess who feels like the weight of the world is on his shoulders at all times, and if he's not keeping people safe he's a failure. Mimi is, well, Mimi is there for most of it, as a pretty breezy character in comparison, but coming to grips with being a ditzy princess and how that shapes her is an arc in and of itself.

I don't want this entire review to just be Digimon vs Pokemon, but man, Ash Ketchum is pretty much Ash Ketchum through the 20-ish year history of Pokemon, and these kids go through a firestorm. There's a deep and potent heart to Digimon, a show that is intending to tell real stories, albeit for a childish audience, and wants to treat its viewers like people and not just kids plunked in front of a TV to be mindlessly entertained for 20 minutes.

Of course, I'm not just going to crow about it. Ultimately, Digimon is a decades old kid-focused anime. The animation is largely fairly cheap, because it doesn't need to be significantly more, though especially when they return to the human world there are moments of real beauty, and I've always found the general designs of the Digimon super impressive, and wildly detailed. It does enough, technically, that there's not much to complain about, but outside of a few moments you're not really going to be impressed. And while I've spent a lot of time talking about the impressive nature of the story and the characters, I'm also grading it on a curve. It's a kids show, and none of these arcs are going to stand up to something truly sophisticated and weighty, or blow your mind. It's just a layer of sophistication that's one more than most shows would do in its place - impressive, and good for what it needs to be, but by the standards of an adult viewer, mostly passable.

Honestly, I don't know that Digimon Adventure is a show for an adult to dive into for the first time. It's cheesy, and silly, and there are Digimon that throw hot pink poop, and the production values are middling for the most part. If you have no nostalgia or fondness for the anime of childhood, probably move on. But if you watched it as a kid and want a refresher course, I'd highly recommend giving it another go around - I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by how much it can still charm you. And if you've got a chosen child of your own that's growing up, well, there are a lot worse kid friendly anime you could get them started on, too.

How could Japan allow such degeneracy as an anime about blatant, uncensored handholding?

Okay, god, I wish it was just that joke.

In reality, Hand Shakers seems to contain a lot of the most obnoxious and overplayed tropes in Modern Anime. Revel in the use of meaninglessly pretentious foreign verbiage like Ziggurat, Nimrod, and the like to make it sound more meaningful and cool than it is. Dazzle at the bug-eyed, soulless moebait designs that could have been popped wholesale out of any mediocre doujinshi. Gasp in awe at the use of heavy and uncomfortable sexuality symbolically tied into combat powers and paint over ... the relationships of these characters. A guy and a girl have to awkwardly change or take a bath together while holding hands. There's bondage porn and pairs of tits that seem to be afflicted with a serious case of Parkinson's.

The first episode of Hand Shakers is simply one of the worst things I've ever seen. Incomprehensible editing makes for a baffling piece of television, that seems to start with a narrated trailer sequence over the opening credits, intercutting bizarre action sequences with little rhyme or reason while our main character, if he can generously be called a 'character' as one of the more banal and lifeless milquetoast harem lead main boys you're ever going to see, pontificates about... something. Who even knows.

We then go into full on hentai squealing as a girl is chained up and stepped on and things only get more bizarre from there. Maybe it's just that I've 'aged out' of really blatant ecchi stuff and no longer find enjoyment, and maybe I just should accept that this kind of media isn't for me anymore. Like, I like erotic material from time to time. I like tits. I'm a redblooded American who is attracted to women. I don't need the breasts to seem to be self-sentient and trembling like a pair of anxious chihuahuas, and I don't really need my anime kicked off by thirty seconds of orgasmic mewling.

The next couple episodes settle into something far more bland and comparatively inoffensive, but there's nothing gripping. They go through the wacky romantic comedy beats that one would expect from a boy and girl who have to hold hands and can't stop touching one another. There's a class president girl who seems far too interested in such a boring and lifeless hero, who also has big and seismically shifting jubblies. His parents have no problem with their son bringing home a cute and seemingly too-young 'exchange student' - that he sleeps and takes baths with. There's a girl who's anxious about looking like a ten year old despite being an adult guys we promise it's not weird that we're sexualizing this character we keep telling you is childlike and looks like a ten year old she's an adult we promise it's cool. A goofy doctor fresh out of a dozen anime.

And maybe that'd all be fine. Maybe I could tolerate another bland moe-archetype action anime with a main character who makes Emiya Shirou look like the most charismatic man in the world, except Hand Shakers isn't just a bad story with lame characters.

No, Hand Shakers manages to do something impressive, taking managing to have at times gorgeous visuals, texturing, and elements while also being just completely upsetting to look at. The 3D/2D combination anime is just extremely poorly executed, stilted and even ghastly at times, and the character designs are stereotypically bug eyed and generic for the most part. The real problem, though, comes from the cinematography - or the vicious anti-cinematography, rather. The normal, slice of live scenes are fine, inoffensive and competently staged, but as soon as action enters the table, it constantly enters this swooping, spinning, unstable camera that is just bad for the eyes. I've never had an anime give me vertigo, and I can watch shaky cam found footage horror until the cows come home, but Hand Shakers action scenes just make me want to watch anything else.

It's hard to imagine why anyone would really enjoy Hand Shakers. It brings nothing to table story wise that hasn't been done before, and there are countless ecchi moe style shows with better character designs and animation, let alone content beyond the packaging. And who knows, maybe it gets wildly better in the back two thirds to become something worthwhile. But I really, really doubt it.

Best to keep this one hands off.

Season one of My Hero Academia, or Boku no Hero Academia depending on your preference, was a beautiful, charming, but fairly unambitious story-wise example of the shonen genre. Not the highest of highs, but certainly a strong contender for anyone who's a fan.

Season 2 is where things kick into gear.

We have a tournament arc! Kind of. We have far more interesting villains! We start to plumb the rich psychological backstory of our leads and side characters! Everything that Season 1 was missing is here, with an even shinier package, featuring some of the most beautiful action scenes I've seen in ... anime in a hot minute. I'd favorably compare the sheer quality to FMA: Brotherhood, for one, and I don't make that comparison lightly.

Not to wade too deeply into spoiler territory, but the story punches up hard here. The Sports Festival Arc is pretty much the moment where I think most fans of the series would agree that MHA Gets Good, hitting a very similar beat to the Chuunin Exam in Naruto in that way. The cast expands in a big way here, with the likes of Todoroki and Uraraka getting even more heaps of development, and side characters like Tokoyami, Kirishima, and Momo getting time to shine - or not, in fact, in ways that build their development nicely. And things only speed up from there. The Hero Killer arc is delightful, as the titular villain, the Hero Killer Stain, is a far more interesting presence and viable threat than anything that's shown up in the series so far, and his repercussions will only build, leading two more fan favorites to debut at the end of the season.

Other than that, it's really more of the same. The heart and charm is still there, with pretty much every character offering something to like - except a certain grape who will remain nameless - and a surprisingly thorough chance for our side characters in Class 1A to shine all over the place. There's barley any filler, and what there is carries its weight nicely, with a special episode focusing on everyone's favorite frog girl, Asui.

Now, as with my review of Season 1, it's worth noting that I'm coming to this fully loving superheroes and shonen action both, so if you're not a huge fan of those particularly trope-tastic genres, you might struggle with this. But there's enough depth to the backstory, enough charm to the personalities, and enough sheer, unadulterated quality to the animation itself that I think most people would find something to like here.