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Now that Boruto has finally wrapped up I will give my retrospective on the series as a whole. There are actually quite a few parallels that can drawn between this series and something like Dragon Ball Super. Both can be viewed as studio cash grabs attempting to continue a story that really should have ended a long time ago. Both have to jump through ridiculous hula-hoops of baffling logic to justify character's relative strength because of where the previous series left the protagonists, never allowing the heroes to be as strong as we know they should be so that bad guys can still seem like ... they have a chance. Both are indicative of a general trend in media that it's easier to sell something even slightly familiar than to gamble on a new, untested product.

But I could sit here all day complaining about the existence of Boruto. We all know it didn't need to exist, but it's here, so let's see if it managed to do anything in it's roughly 6 years of tenure. At the very beginning of the series, we are treated to an arc that takes place before the events of the Boruto movie, which had thus far been our only glimpse into the era. The latter half of the arc also serves as an adaptation of one of the light novels, a trend they followed throughout Boruto as the manga is only published monthly and they needed something to pad the runtime. I'm not going to lie, I actually kind of enjoyed getting to know this new cast of characters. True, many of them are lazy copy/pastes of their parents, something the author admitted, but that was true of many of the teams in the original series. Is Kakashi/Obito/Rin really that different from Sasuke/Naruto/Sakura? It's an intentional choice to show the Will of Fire and the generational connections everyone in the village shares. And looking back the filler that takes place mostly in Konoha was some of my favorite parts of the show. It was like watching a lighthearted slice of life series that happened to take place in the world of Naruto.

The early series could feel like it had little direction at times, other than the teaser at the beginning showing a destroyed Konoha and giving us a glimpse at someone named Kawaki, we didn't really get a sense for what the show wanted to do in the long run. I think where the series really started to catch people's attention was in those brief moments when they were adapting the manga, the movie again, or just the rare episode where you could tell they saved the animation budget for that month on one particular fight scene. The slice of life stuff was all well and good, but it was the next part of the canon story that people were really holding out for.

And I think those moments really do shine. The aforementioned fight scenes where all the money went are superb, almost making up for the areas where they clearly had to be more conservative to make up for it. The introduction of Kara as the new sort of Akatsuki was where I really think the series started going all in on trying to adapt the main story, and they kept it up for a decent amount of time. I was initially hesitant about Kawaki as a character but I grew to appreciate what he adds to the story, an interesting twist that Boruto's rival would turn out to be his adopted brother.

I would have given the series a higher grade overall, but there were a couple filler arcs toward the end that were just so awful it really holds the show back for me. I'm talking mainly about the second Kirigakure arc, and the Labyrinth Game arc. They came at an awful time when the series had actually been getting good again for a while and really were just a slog to get through. I didn't mind the Kawaki Himawari school arc so much, I thought it was cute. Like I said the filler that took place mostly in Konoha was usually alright. I think the top tier filler arcs were the Parent and Child day and the Back to the Future arcs.

Anyway, it all averages out to a show that was sometimes pretty good, sometimes a weekly hate-watch, and never quite captured the magic of the original. Naruto part 1 first hundred episodes or so some of the best shounen of all time, Boruto often just a sad imitation. 7/10

This is an isekai type show that's actually held back quite a bit by it's own gimmick. The two high school kids, and especially the girl of the pair, are just so insufferably obnoxious it ruins what otherwise would have been a cute romance story about tsundere princess. There's still an alright enough story there under the surface, but you have to muck through so much to get to it it's almost just not worth it. By the end of the show I was literally skipping through any scenes where the high school kids were talking, a tactic I highly recommend if you want to ... get any enjoyment out of this.

The art style is about what you can expect from the otome game isekai sub-genre. Character designs seem to be copy/pasted from whatever template book all these shows are using. It's not awful, just forgettable. Sound design is fine, and I liked the opening song. I don't really have anything else positive to say about the show. 6/10

I'll start off with: Yes, it's good. It's getting mainstream attention because it deserves it, it's not just an empty hype train. Jujutsu Kaisen is fast paced action, heart-driven storytelling and power fantasy wish-fulfillment. In other words: Shounen at it's finest. If you want to say it's like such and such show that came before it, it's only because whatever show you're talking about was just as good at embodying the same concepts. Comparisons to Naruto seem to be the most common, likely stemming from people who've only ever seen 2 other anime so they don't have a lot of references to draw from. This ... is a wildly different show with a few superficial similarities, and a protagonist far more like Goku or the Monkey King he's loosely based on.

The show has great action, though a somewhat generic power system. There were a few stand out powers that were unique, just the overall way they work with a generic inner energy source fueling the wide array of abilities we see. The protagonist gets to be strong without seeming too overpowered right out the gate, so there's obviously room for him to grow. Having the teacher be as strong as he is feels sort of like a cheat, a cheap way to write your way out of a corner if your heroes get into too much of a pinch but thankfully his personality and the fact that the adventurers guild is spread so thin go a long way to convince the audience he isn't always going to be around to save the day.

The villains are done excellently. Right from the introduction of the main baddies we're treated to the very real threat they pose, and the purely evil nature they exhibit. There's no campy mustache twirling bad guys, and they do an excellent job of making you hate them right away. One critique is how they keep getting away and surviving, takes a bit away from any sense of accomplishment on the heroes part if you just let the villains live anyway, but it does add to the threat because you know exactly what they're capable of and what's at stake now when they meet the hero again.

Overall I had a great time and binged the whole thing in a couple sittings. Any show that can do that, especially with all the fatigue I've felt lately watching some shows, must be a good one in my book. 9/10

There are good and bad elements to this show, but I ended up liking it more than I thought I would after the first few episodes. It's one of those shows that on the face of it should be really stupid. The fun kind of stupid, but still, very very dumb. It's the kind of show you can be trying to describe to a friend and realize how ridiculous that sounds on the face of it, only to realize the execution was far more mundane than the setup made it sound. For example the fact that it has a yakuza boss who wants to run ... away from crime city and become a magical girl, or the hot spring city where panties are illegal. It throws a bunch of really comedic sounding ideas at the wall, and then executes them like you're going to a business lunch and don't want to stand out too much. All of the potential is there for it to be a crazy high-concept comedy show, but it plays it straight like I'm meant to take any of this seriously.

However I found myself enjoying it anyway, if you just embrace the stupid high-concept nature of the world and focus on the character interactions you can have a good time with it. I don't think it's a very memorable show, but if you decide to watch it there are worse ways to spend your time. The 3D animation was decent and not too distracting, I've seen worse. If 3D is a turn-off for you just on the face of it then I guess stay away. Overall I'm feeling a 7/10

I have no idea what I just watched. You'd think from the imagery and general tone that this is going to be a very straightforward boys love kind of anime, showing that during the most confusing and boring part of England's succession of Kings the so called "War of Roses" Henry VI was actually super gay for Richard III. Then they throw you a curve ball by implying Richard was actually a woman the whole time... kind of.

Let's assume that as it is heavily implied she becomes pregnant in the course of the story, Richard is in fact genetically a woman. It's impossible to be ... truly intersex or hermaphrodite, even if birth defects can sometimes lead to both sexual organs growing one or both will not be functional as a result. They never even state outright what's going on down there, but the fact Richard and Buckingham are able to copulate at all should allow for an educated guess.

So then this should just a traditional romance story between a man and a woman, albeit a woman who was raise as a man and likely has some deformed half-penis growing down there. Yet they lean hard into the homoerotic anyway, trying to fit the classic BL aesthetic anyway. I'm not a fan of the genre in the first place, and the way it's done here is such a mixed bag. It just feels all over the place and it doesn't help that there are constantly shifting gross feeling power dynamics and love triangles.

The romance is I guess supposed to be like a classic Shakespearean kind of tragedy where nobody gets to be happy, and that sort of story just doesn't sit right with me. I know they're technically loosely based on real people and events, and the real history is that nobody gets a happy ending, but they didn't do the characters any favors, usually taking creative liberties to actively make their individual stories even more tragic than anything. Like Anne Neville, the show really does her dirty and she gets probably the worst ending of any of them.

Basically I really dislike shows that are sad and depressing for the sake of being sad and depressing, or trying really hard to be "artistically" sad and depressing or poetic or romantic or whatever women tell themselves these stories are about. Yes the target audience is young women, so having never been one of those I can say definitively that I can't relate. I prefer straightforward romances with happy endings, and there was none of that here. It was all gross double-crosses and infidelity, and no happy ending. 6/10 animation was alright I guess

The conclusion to a side story nobody asked for with a character inexplicably favorited by many a gacha game player purely on her design and nothing about her character or role in the series. If you couldn't tell, I'm not a fan.

If you haven't seen season 4 of the main series you may be left scratching your head, as the later half of this spin-off relies on you having knowledge of Kurumi's backstory, which isn't explained until then. Looking at it that way it's slightly more interesting as a continuation of those story beats, but seeing as I still don't care for the character in ... the first place it can't really save a mediocre show. The plot was predictable and boring, telegraphing it's only real twist so hard you wonder why they bothered trying to make it a twist, and making sure to kill off all those boring characters introduced in part one who's names I'm sure you don't remember.

It wasn't horrible, just nothing remarkable here to make it worth watching if you're not some weird Kurumi stan. 7/10

Kurumi is a character I do not understand. I don't just mean that her character arc is confusing, or her motivations unclear. Those things are also true, but what I'm talking about is I don't understand why on Earth she's apparently so damn popular. My speculation is that it's purely on an aesthetic level. People like her design, or they like cosplaying as her or whatever, I don't think it has anything to do with her role in the show or her personality or anything like that. For some reason that irritates me on a fundamental level, and makes me want to not like her.

This ... spin-off exists solely on the marketability of Kurumi merch. It's like the Fate franchise, alternate timelines that exist for the sole purpose of selling you on a character so you'll be more likely to spend more money on the gacha game trying to get it. They're barely even trying to disguise how blatant an advertisement this is. The story is a half-baked death game we've seen done a million times, with characters who matter so little I feel like they didn't even get names. Maybe they did, but does anybody remember or care about them?

Where this sits in the timeline of the main series is confusing, as Kurumi's character in general is something something time-travel clock girl and my eyes glaze over with boredom thinking about it. Really skippable unless for some reason you're one of the weirdos that likes the character, in which case, seek help. 6/10

It was neat coming back to this series after so long. Honestly I was hesitant because of how far I felt they had drifted from the initial premise in past entries, and wasn't sure if this season would be anything worthwhile. For me my favorite part of this series is when Shidou is just going on his dates with new girls and getting into whacky harem hijinx with the ones he's already sealed. When it delves too far into the main "plot" with the evil organization and boring sci-fi crap my eyes glaze over and I wish I was watching something else. It doesn't do ... the serious storytelling very well and it ends up just being a watered down worse version of both genres.

Luckily we have plenty of the good stuff this season, and two new girls to add to the harem. The mangaka one was pretty funny, bringing a kind of horny the show hadn't really done before. I thought the space girl was a little bland, even after getting her personality back, but she's fine and has an interesting power set. I was never a fan of the clock girl, her story was too intricately tied with the serious side of the plot for me to get invested, but I actually started coming around to her a bit now that she has a proper backstory and motivation established and isn't just flying around through time being vague.

Can't forget the real main characters of the show, the three girls from Shidou's class that always say "that's so lame" in the English dub. Honestly the only reason I watch the show in English, the valley girl accents and generally bad line reads from the whole cast really add the humor in an unintentional way. If you didn't think this show was all that funny just watch it in English, and if you like cringe humor you'll be laughing your ass off. 8/10

It's been a minute since I watched an entire series in one sitting, queuing up each new episode one after the other just because I wanted to see more. Some are saying it's overrated, it's just seasonal hype, yada yada. I, however, am not so much of a contrarian that I feel the need to sh*t all over something just because other people like it.

I'm a sucker for romantic comedies. Give me a cute happy couple force into an unlikely situation and slowly falling in love and I'm happy. Add onto it the gimmick of them all having secret lives and some surprisingly polished action ... sequences and animation and you've got a recipe for a good time. It also helps that Anya is cuteness personified and every scene she's in is instantly better.

If I had any complaints it's that there wasn't more of it. I know there's a part 2 coming in a couple months but I would have liked more of an ending than the one we got, just felt like a regular episode that just sort of ended. It's still a really good show, and if you're sleeping on it just because it's the new popular thing to like right now and you hate bandwagoning, just watch it anyway and I'm sure you'll have a good time. 10/10 just to make that one guy who left a 7/10 after only watching 3 episodes mad.

When adventure shows do these one-off type episodes that put the characters in a light-hearted slice of life situation like doing a festival or just shopping around the town, it's only fun for the audience if those characters have manage to create a rapport or be likeable in any way. When you're instead actively rooting for against the happiness of those characters because you hate them so much, watching them do anything fun becomes torturous. I made it no secret how much I dislike this series and it's characters in my main review. I don't want to see them going to parties and eating shaved ... ice and dancing with ghosts. 4/10 I'd rather watch Sword Art again