Reviews

Released in 2013, Golden Time is a romantic comedy/romantic drama anime that follows the main character Tada Banri, a college student (yes, you read that right, a college student) in his struggle between two lives.

Right off the bat, this show establishes that it is going to be a bit different from the average high-school-where-female-uniforms-require-a-short-skirt setting found throughout a majority of anime. This is pretty much seen from the dead-beginning of the very first episode, as the secondary main character Koko Kaga walks up to the central character Tada Banri's newfound friend, Mitsuo Yanigasawa, while wearing a frilly-looking dress with a long skirt as some rather elegant-sounding music plays in the background, and slaps Mitsuo back and forth with a bouquet of roses. She then tosses the poor abused flower bouquet onto Mitsuo as she gets back into the car she came from, saying, "I removed the thorns!" This scene pretty much leaves me with a moment of "So that just happened.", which is an almost-recurring sentence I found myself saying as I continued to watch this show. Anyway, it's soon explained that the reason why Koko pulled a flower-bouquet-hit-and-run is because Mitsuo evidently came to this college to get as far away from her as possible. See, it turns out that Kaga and Mitsuo were childhood friends, but Koko was always super inflexible when it came to taking "no" for an answer, as she is determined to spend the rest of her life with Mitsuo. In other words, she's been stalking Mitsuo since they were children. Now, this might seem like an attempt at making Koko Kaga a comic relief type character at first glance, combined with her name that is pretty obviously (at least to me) a reference to the brand of cereal called Cocoa Puffs mascot's catchphrase, "Coocoo for cocoa puffs!", but as the series progresses, it once again proves that barely anything is predictable. It's definitely one of those rare instances where you can try to predict what will happen next, but you will most likely be wrong.

In fact, the show as a whole seems to really enjoy hitting the audience with an extreme - and I do mean EXTREME - amount of heavy-hitting or otherwise blatantly unexpected plot twists. It is for this same reason that I will also refrain from revealing anything that may spoil the show outside of the 'struggle between two lives' I mentioned regarding Tada Banri earlier. Apparently, he was involved in an accident of some sort back in his high school years that left him with complete amnesia. He has no idea whatsoever about what he used to be like prior to attending college. Personally, I absolutely freaking love the idea of the timeline split this allows the show to have. The aformentioned amnesia Banri suffers from was pretty much the entire reason this show was able to play around with its entire setting as part of the main story. Like I said before, it follows an entirely adult cast - most of which are attending college - but thanks to Banri's amnesia, it also implements what I saw as an extremely creative form of storytelling: At many points it flashes back to another story altogether, that being the story from before Banri lost his memory - In other words, his previous life as a high schooler.

Outside of the storytelling method, I really enjoyed the real-world aesthetic this show produced more often than not. What I mean by this is that there are many points throughout the show that manage to feel like something you could legitimately see for yourself if you were to travel to the real-world versions of the locations and cultures found throughout the show. On the topic of real-world cultures, I especially enjoyed the poetic and extraordinarily subtle symbolism I feel this show had regarding the Eiffel Tower. As it turns out, Koko wants to visit the Eiffel Tower someday with the one she loves. And here's the symbolism I saw in this: The Eiffel Tower's lights are turned off at night - in our modern era, mind you - to honor the victims of dramatic events around the world. Recall the accident I mentioned earlier that resulted in Banri's amnesia.

I also really appreciated how the relationships between characters felt so genuine and relatable, very similar to Toradora, another anime released around 5 years prior. However, this show felt like it was mimicking Toradora! A little too much at times in my opinion. To be perfectly blunt, sometimes the characters felt like clones of the characters from the aforementioned show. Sure, I liked the characters in Golden Time a hell of a lot more than their Toradora! Counterparts, but I still felt they could have been a little bit more... I don't know, original, I suppose.

Something else I disliked was the content I didn't see as easy to be understood by the intended demographic, or at least people who come from an overly-conservative background: For example, at one point, Kaga goes to a goth band's concert and tries to climb onto the stage, ultimately resulting in her messing up the band's performance. From the way it is presented, one would most likely be led to believe she was simply exhausted, but honestly, there's a bit more adult-minded pretext behind this scene. Another example is when Tada Banri gets a job alongside Mitsuo at a party in order to make money, but... well, let's just say they had them both mandatorily wearing some eh... questionable fashion choices, let's call them... that resulted in quite a lot more adult-minded pretext than the previous example. It was moments such as these that left me with what may have been the single most weird mix of feelings I have ever felt while watching any anime ever. I found the idea both extremely hilarious and uncomfortable at exactly the same time. I found it funny because it was something obviously done with the intent of making the audience laugh, but I also found it uncomfortable because of knowing the primary audience this show is intended for is a bit younger than my own age group, and I really don't think most people in that age group, or at least people with a conservative mentality, would be likely to understand that this was a joke.

Also riding on the same train of thought as the previous talking point, there were many points that I felt could certainly have been represented better. Of course the first example of this is the aforementioned gag I talked about previously, but there were a few other examples of this as well. Like, I'm pretty sure people don't typically dress the way they did for the clubs in the school club scene from the first episode as they do in the real world. Those uniforms from the Glee Club or the Latin Music Club, for instance. Despite all that, though, Golden Time was something I saw as being a legitimately creative and extremely enjoyable show, even with its listed flaws, and I highly recommend it.

Here's a Dengeki Bunko series that is a refreshing trend-breaker in my opinion: Spice and Wolf. It is an adventure/drama anime that feels more like a medieval folktale than an actual TV series, at least to me. It takes place in a fictionalized version of the real-world time period of 14th century medieval Europe, specifically when the Roman Catholic Church had power over even royal families. The show follows the main character Craft Lawrence, a somewhat greedy travelling merchant, in his journey to the fictional far northern city of Yoitz in order to bring his traveling companion Holo back to her hometown.

The first thing I absolutely loved about this show, especially in the first season, was just how refreshingly different this show felt from the usual trendy anime affair, which actually makes sense to me because - as previously mentioned - this series takes place in the 14th/15th century time period of Europe. For example, historically speaking, high schools wouldn't even be created until roughly 400/300 years later, so the idea of high school characters being in this series was completely and entirely absent.

But on the topic of the absence of high schools and/or high schoolers, this wasn't the only anime trope this show was lacking. As a matter of fact, this show is lacking nearly every overused anime trope ever, at least in my opinion. There are no girls wearing short skirts, the extremely small number of females in this show are just as capable as the males, and, most importantly (at least to me), the nudity is often overlooked rather than blatantly acknowledged.

Another thing I liked was how the main characters weren't klutzy or anything to that effect. In fact, they were extraordinarily clever and overall intelligent. And surprisingly, I found that Holo was the character I enjoyed more than Lawrence. She was exceptionally clever, she had personal problems, and she was an outright sassy yet enjoyable smartass a majority of the time she spent on screen. However, that's not to say I didn't enjoy Lawrence as well. He was extraordinarily experienced, he also had his own share of personal issues, and he generally did his best to keep situations professional.

One other thing I enjoyed was how the series as a whole felt like a legitimate storybook folktale in a similar vein to the classic Paul Bunyan or Johnny Appleseed stories. For me, everything from the first season's theme songs (the opening theme being On a Journey by Natsumi Kiyoura, and the credits theme being Ringo Biyori ~ The Wolf Whistling Song by Rocky Chack), to the overall atmosphere and aesthetic of the series to the story as a whole was enough for me to feel like I was back in kindergarten reading a classic folktale.

Also, after I rewatched this series in the English dubbed version, I freaking love the voices that every character was given, as they felt much more like their personalities storywise. For example, Holo sounds like a dignified goddess instead of a youthful girl, Lawrence sounds like a gruff merchant instead of a teenage boy, and the same pattern applies to many other characters as well.

I actually didn't have any personal issues with anything in this series per se, but there was one thing I certainly felt could've been done better. This problem I speak of is how the characters explaining certain things wound up getting more than a little boring as a teenager, which caused me to stop watching after about halfway into the series back then. It was only when I began to watch this series again in preparation for this review as the adult I am now that many of the things the characters were talking about and/or explaining started to actually bore me less and even made much more sense to me, now that I'm older. Back then, most things they were explaining in the show confused me beyond recognition. Other than this, however, I have just about no complaints whatsoever. At the end of the day, Spice & Wolf was an extremely different story than the usual Dengeki Bunko anime, but still had an overall execution that left me feeling it was meant for adult minds rather than people in their late teens.

Despair. I think that's the easiest way to sum up this story in a single word. Released in 2014, Black Bullet is a sci-fi/post-apocalyptic anime about what little remains of the human race after being driven to near extinction by a parasitic organism known as the Gastrea virus. In this show, we get a main character who might just be (at least to me) the most depressing main character to watch in any Dengeki Bunko anime ever, Rentaro Satomi. He has suffered more than many main characters prior to him even being shown on screen. His family, his arm and his leg, all gone before we even see him as a fully-fledged teenager for the first time. The only form of connection to anything he has left to cling to in life is the friends he can make now. In place of his lost limbs, he now has a cybernetic arm, leg, and a pistol that shoots bullets made of Viranium (not to be confused with Vibranium from Marvel), which nullifies healing factors (which makes it more like Carbonadium from Marvel). This is relevant as he would be useless to the series without these.

The secondary main character for this series is a little 11-year-old girl by the name of Enju Aihara who, at first glance, looks to be nothing more than an overly-annoying stereotypical anime girl who jokes about marrying the main character someday. However, there are an awful lot more royally screwed up things going on that we find out about her as the series progresses. For starters, her genes have somehow been naturally infused with the Gastrea virus from birth which is constantly life-threatening, as if she is exposed to the virus for too long, she dies. She doesn't die in a peaceful way, either, no, it's rather brutal. Her entire body would literally explode into mush. This is also true for literally thousands of other little girls found in this series as well. They are all commonly referred to as, "The Cursed Children". Secondly, as she shares common genes to the same thing that nearly made the entire human race go extinct, humans nearly everywhere resent her and her fellow Cursed Children, blaming them for being part of the entire reason humanity is so royally screwed over to begin with. This results in the vast majority of the Cursed Children literally being forced to live the rest of their lives away from their parents and - in many cases - the rest of civilization.

Now, I for one enjoyed many things about this show, starting with the relationships between pretty much every last character. I found myself unable to refrain from being happy when characters were happy, sad when characters were sad, and angered when characters were angered. If I had to pick just one pair of characters I especially liked, it would definitely be Kagatane Hiruko and Kohina Hiruko, who were not only father and daughter, but also partners just like Rentaro and Enju. Unlike those two, however, Kagatane and Kohina were completely murderous psychos. They had a noble goal in my opinion, they just went about pursuing said goal in the wrong ways.

Another thing I enjoyed was how well the storytelling painted this absolutely horrendous picture, that being one of a future that had humanity falling apart, or, to quote a line from one of my all-time favorite video games, InFAMOUS, "Civilization committing suicide." The survivors try to uphold daily life as it was before the apocalyptic outbreak of the Gastrea virus, but ultimately, I feel like that was an illusion, as I could feel for even the nameless random citizens. I could feel the fear, the despair, the overall hopelessness of their situation. Even the main characters shared in this abysmal aesthetic, especially towards the end of the show. Rentaro in particular perfectly captured the mood of this series in pretty much every scene he was ever in.

Quite frankly, there wasn't anything I really disliked about this series, as anything I would have had major issues with normally found a way to counteract said potential issues. For instance, the relationships between certain cursed children and Rentaro. While the fact remains that he is 16 and the cursed children are apparently unable to age past being little kids (likely due to the healing factors), one might think it would seem apparent that Enju hitting on Rentaro even as a joke would be inappropriate, but I found it tolerable more often than not, considering they do seem to think of each other as surrogate family. As far as the other Children go, Rentaro is more acting out of charity due to knowing what it's like to be an orphan.

Another thing I enjoyed disliking about this series was just how damn gruesome it was. Sure, it was disgusting and all sorts of nasty whenever the Gastrea were involved in pretty much any way, but I somehow found myself able to watch the series more intently knowing that this graphic imagery aids in illustrating this bleak and hopeless situation. I think the show pretty much takes every chance it can get to tell the audience that this is just how it is; nothing can save these characters if they die or get close to death. And I, for one, appreciated that aspect of it, as it means this show isn't afraid of showing that bad things happen, both to the protagonists and antagonists.

All in all, Black Bullet was an extremely well-executed series despite only getting 13 episodes, and didn't shy away from showing bad things that somehow made me care about the show even more.

The Irregular At Magic High School is a sci-fi/action series revolving around the idea of magic being formally accepted as a form of science in the distant future. While this might sound like a cool idea on paper, I sadly found myself lacking much to say about how exciting the show was. There was very little I enjoyed about the show other than some of the recurring side characters. There are two central characters (neither of which I found myself able to care for in the slightest) named Tatsuya Shiba and Miyuki Shiba. And as one might have guessed from their names, they are brother and sister (although it's not entirely clear to me exactly how they are siblings). Throughout the show's run, these two are repeatedly called upon by the military to essentially lead counter-terrorist operations. The aforementioned side characters I enjoyed were pretty much literally all of Tatsuya's classmates. Especially in the case of Erika Chiba, who felt like a total badass and/or snarky smartass a majority of the time. The other character I enjoyed most was actually not a high schooler or even a human, for that matter. This character was named Pixie, and she was an android who, in season two, was possessed by a rogue parasite-demon-monster-thing from an alternate dimension (confusing, I know).

Probably my biggest issue with this series was pretty much anything involving Tatsuya, and because he is pretty much the main character, that meant I spent more time watching him in this show than anyone else. The primary reason for my distaste for Tatsuya is because he's just too perfect as a character. To me, he felt like he always knew literally everything. There was just about no character development from him whatsoever in the first season, and only a very small bit in season 2 as far as I'm concerned. He also possessed so much power that it made fight scenes involving him repetitive and boring to watch. It's like Saitama from One-Punch Man with the same amount of power but none of the fun. My second biggest issue with the series is how much time it spent with a borderline incestuous relationship between Miyuki and Tatsuya Shiba. Tatsuya never got romantically involved with any of the characters whatsoever as far as I could tell, but weirdly enough, the closest he ever got to doing so was with his own sister. No thanks. Granted, it was primarily Miyuki attempting to flirt with Tatsuya a majority of the time, while Tatsuya seemed to be trying to keep it professional a majority of the time. Another thing I disliked was the entire soundtrack for the first season. Everything just felt incredibly bland and boring whenever any of those stupid techno beats began playing. Don't get me wrong, I like Techno and many other genres, but the soundtrack here just felt incredibly basic to me. The biggest example of this for me was with the first season's first opening theme song, Rising Hope. While it was performed by LiSA, a veteran anime theme song performer who is also a personal favorite of mine, whenever I compare the original music video to the performance within the series itself, it just felt incredibly dialed down when compared in such a fashion, at least to me. Overall, The Irregular At Magic High School was an incredibly bland, boring, and overall uninteresting series that leaned on incestuous sibling fanservice as a crutch far too often and didn't have much else going for it at all, in my honest opinion.

If anyone who reads this has ever seen most people's public feelings about the Trueblood TV series and/or the Twilight movies, then they may already know why I dislike this series with a burning passion. But to those who don't, allow me to elaborate:

Here's what I liked:

The concept of the series was somewhat interesting to me at first, before I ever actually watched it: A high schooler (because when you're in an average Dengeki Bunko anime, that's just what you do for main characters) named Akatsuki Kojou lives on a completely man made island known as Itogami Island. But (surprise surprise) he has a secret he has to hide from even his closest friends: He's a vampire. Not just any regular vampire, either, he is what's known as the Fourth Progenitor, which apparently makes him one of the most, if not THE most powerful vampire(s) of all time.

As a result, a secret, shady, religious organization known as The Lion King Organization assigns a young girl named Yukina Himeragi to be Kojou's Observer, which in a nutshell, means she has to make sure he doesn't do anything out of line, and if he does do anything out of line, her mission is to kill him.

Kojou also starts out with no control over almost all of his vampire abilities, especially in the case of his Familiars. In order to master his control over his dormant abilities, he has to suck people's blood after getting aroused. This idea would be pretty cool if it weren't for the whole arousal part of the deal. I guess there were only three things I admittedly liked in the entire show.

The first thing I liked was the story arc known as The Empire Of The Dawn. In this story arc, we got a character who went back in time to prevent some sort of evil force from destroying her future. The catch? Turns out this girl just so happens to be from a future in which Kojou and Himeragi finally dropped the act and had a kid... and this girl was that same kid, as it turns out at the dead end of the story arc. I thought it was a nice touch.

The second thing I liked was Kojou and Himeragi's double-act-catchphrase at the near end of literally every single story arc. While it was too overused for my tastes, I will admit, it was a pretty hardcore line delivery:

Akatsuki Kojou: "From now on, this is my fight!" Yukina Himeragi: "No, senpai. This is OUR fight!"

The third and final thing I liked was the first opening theme song, oh-so-creatively titled: Strike The Blood! While the song's title might sound like nothing original, at the very least, it temporarily distracted me from the parts I disliked throughout the rest of this show.

Here's what I didn't like:

The plot itself is...... well... It sucks, there's no better way for me to put it. Not only does it suck because it is a vampire show (HUHUHU... PUN!), but also because it feels only mildly different from other vampire media that don't involve Dracula. To sum it up, the story becomes your standard vampire story (of course with anime tropes and elements mixed in) after the 1st episode, in that the secondary main character, Yukina Himeragi, winds up falling in love with the main character as the series progresses, Akatsuki Kojou. More importantly, as the story progresses, more characters get introduced just about every story arc, which normally I wouldn't mind. However, nearly every new character introduced who is "important" to the main plot of each story arc is a female, and as previously mentioned, since Kojou needs to be aroused to awaken his abilities, he winds up getting a bunch of other women to fall in love with him (unintentionally) as the show progresses. Because of that, the show becomes more of a vampire harem anime (that being where the main character has romantic affairs with multiple characters) than an action/drama anime.

Something else I didn't like was how the endings of nearly every single story arc felt almost exactly the same to me. They even went as far as to make Kojou and Himeragi do their double-act catchphrase I quoted earlier at the near end of every single fight scene at the end of literally every story arc. And these fight scenes almost always involved Kojou fighting some big monster or something while Himeragi fought a primary villain usually controlling said monster in some form or another.

Another thing I didn't like was just how far they were willing to show Kojou and the other female's "sexy vampire" scenes... They went on for a bit longer than I feel they should have. I honestly felt really uncomfortable watching them.

Strike The Blood was a series that was so sexually explicit (especially after it started getting released direct-to-video) it made me want to take an axe, break into the residences of everyone and anyone who still possesses a copy of this series, smash a hole through the middle of the disc, and say, "HERE'S IAN!!!" to the owners. All just to spare them from this abomination of a series known as Strike The Blood.

Meggy Spletzer. The name of a character that always gets back up, no matter how many times she gets knocked down. From her second ever line in SMG4, she has always had a never-give-up presence to her, no matter what the scenario. Despite me never checking out any of the original Splatoon franchise in general until literally a few days prior to writing this review, I have always enjoyed rewatching this episode of SMG4 over and over and over again. The way Meggy interacts with Mario over the course of the video is also pretty cool too. While at first she completely dismisses him, over time he seems to grow on her. Not to mention that scene at the near-end of the video when Meggy loses splatfest, and Mario comes over to her side to tell her to not give up, even if it's in one of his signature Mario ways: talking about spaghetti. I love this episode, and not just because of everything I've said so far, but I also love it for being the episode that gave us Meggy Spletzer, one of the best characters in the series so far, at least in my opinion.

This episode was and is my absolute favorite one in the series so far! Despite being a story that is, in essence, a training montage episode, almost the entirety of the video felt like much more than that. To be honest, I don't even think this review can do it proper justice no matter how good it feels or how professional it gets. But even so, if you are a modern SMG4 fan, or even just a fan of the series as a whole, you owe it to yourself to check out this episode. My personal favorite scene highlight is definitely the rooftop scene between Meggy and Mario, especially because Mario doesn't act like a complete jerk or an idiot like he usually does, but instead does his best to sympathize and cheer her up, even going so far as to give her his newest plate of spaghetti! And if you've watched just about any other episode featuring Mario in SMG4 ever, you'll definitely know that he does NOT hand out any of his spaghetti freely to anyone...ever. So yeah, in summary, I love this episode to death, even if it's not my favorite thing i've seen in my life.

I must confess that growing up, I heard about this series quite a lot, primarily from my sister. And to be perfectly honest, the first video I actually watched when I finally gave it a try ("The Evilness of Eggman(?)") was the very same episode I stopped watching exactly 35 seconds into it. I genuinely hated it, mainly because of the fact they changed every character's personality from the ones I loved and cherished up until that point. Many years later (when I was 19 years old, to be exact), a different episode popped up in my Youtube application's Recommended section ("We are number one but it's a Waluigi parody"), and I decided to give the show another go. And I was not disappointed whatsoever! It wasn't until a few days later that I found out that this was the same person who had made the video that drove me away from the series in the first instance. But even after finding this out, I was still intrigued, and began watching every episode of SMG4 after this occurred.

Now, I must point out that i wish other people obsessed with the past please just shut up about this show not being good today. It has, in my opinion at least, had a few repeated jokes and episodes, sure, but that's also more or less the whole point of it. Also, 2011-2013 WAS TERRIBLE. All those so-called "jokes" about gay people, racist comments, and otherwise poorly-delivered poop jokes have absolutely no need to be in this show. This is another reason why modern day SMG4 is better than classic, as the characters are slowly but surely learning from the mistakes they made in the past.

One example of this is Luigi in one of the newest episodes at the time of this being written. In "The Weegee Uprising", Luigi recognizes the same beings from "The Luigi Labyrinth" when he tried to take over the world using Weegee dolls. He even says this line in the new episode: "No...Not again! They're back?!" This shows he regrets his actions from back then.

Another example is Meggy in the episode, "There's Something Up with Meggy", where Meggy is trying to cope with having to watch Desti (her former rival-turned-friend) get murdered right in front of her while she could do nothing but watch (which still makes me cry every time i see it). By the end of the episode, Meggy's motivation to fulfill Desti's dying wish is reawakened thanks to Mario, Luigi, and Tari.

My last example I will give (but certainly not the last one to be seen in the show, just look closely and you'll probably notice even more of these examples) is, of course, Super Mario. I legitimately love the fact that even though he spends almost all of his time on screen either eating or making love to spaghetti (or both), Mario has definitely improved his attitude towards his friends and family over the years. A prime example of this is pretty much, at least in my opinion, almost anything involving him and Meggy or him and Luigi (Especially in the case of the latter character). Meggy and Mario definitely got off on the wrong foot in the episode titled, "If Mario Was in...Splatoon". Seriously, that first ever scene with them together where Mario opens the paint can and unwittingly sets Meggy free in the process was a really great way to start off that episode and their overall relationship, especially considering that Mario becomes determined to win Splatfest with Meggy throughout that same episode (and indeed, the rest of the series thus far). And then of course, there's Luigi, Mario's famous younger brother, the second half of the Mario Brothers...and likely the most cowardly human to ever exist in fiction. But all of that aside, Mario actually begins treating Luigi with respect rather than...well, disrespect, especially in more recent years. I honestly cannot STAND the fact that back when I first started binge-watching the show as a whole, Luigi being made fun of by the other characters, even (if not especially) Mario, just because he was "gay" was such a terrible comedy shtick. In my honest opinion, it shouldn't even really be considered a "comedy show" when calling people gay is the goto "joke" of every single episode, as I stated above. However, over time, the creator(s) seemed to realize this fact (whether due to more people entering the creation of the show behind the scenes, or perhaps just that they realized these "jokes" had long overstayed their welcome), and Luigi eventually became much more of an accepted character by the rest of the cast in the series. One thing I especially love is the fact that despite everything Luigi has gone through over the years, ranging anywhere from rejection to cowardice, he definitely redeems himself these days due to brotherly love for his older sibling serving as the basis for the more...insane things he tries. I mean, just watch or even re-watch Mario SAW if you don't believe me.