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Posted
1 hour ago, Stormwolf said:
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That series made me sad. Absolute best girl died in the beginning and while it did have a good ending, she just could never match up to her sister.:(

 

Spoiler

I know, and even the second best girl - Akane - doesn't get chosen by the MC. Though for story telling Aoba is the correct choice.

 

Posted
6 hours ago, ittaku said:
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I know, and even the second best girl - Akane - doesn't get chosen by the MC. Though for story telling Aoba is the correct choice.

 

Spoiler

I dont really agree. Many people look for people who're similar to ones they love/loved. Instead of solely focusing about the fact that she looks the same and is just a replacement, they could have put focus on the fact that while they're similar, they are in fact 2 different girls. Protagonist had no spark with the main girl if i dont remember things wrongly, so the choice was obvious from my viewpoint.

 

Posted
22 minutes ago, Stormwolf said:
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I dont really agree. Many people look for people who're similar to ones they love/loved. Instead of solely focusing about the fact that she looks the same and is just a replacement, they could have put focus on the fact that while they're similar, they are in fact 2 different girls. Protagonist had no spark with the main girl if i dont remember things wrongly, so the choice was obvious from my viewpoint.

 

Spoiler

What the main character had for the heroine was respect in addition to being almost identical in personality to her. I think the respect was adequately portrayed and a powerful reason. It was the harder story to pull off and had other sentimental value that a new girl would not have ever had. It worked for me at least, but yeah I can understand why it wouldn't for others who would have just seen her tsun side. Her tsun side though was a cover for feeling that she should not be allowed to like him knowing that her sister loved him. It worked to explain why Kou liked Aoba, but Aoba herself was still hard to like as a viewer, especially during the middle third of the series. Even my wife often said "Aoba's hard to love."

I've watched the series a dozen times so I've thought about this way too much :s

Posted
58 minutes ago, ittaku said:
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What the main character had for the heroine was respect in addition to being almost identical in personality to her. I think the respect was adequately portrayed and a powerful reason. It was the harder story to pull off and had other sentimental value that a new girl would not have ever had. It worked for me at least, but yeah I can understand why it wouldn't for others who would have just seen her tsun side. Her tsun side though was a cover for feeling that she should not be allowed to like him knowing that her sister loved him. It worked to explain why Kou liked Aoba, but Aoba herself was still hard to like as a viewer, especially during the middle third of the series. Even my wife often said "Aoba's hard to love."

I've watched the series a dozen times so I've thought about this way too much :s

Spoiler

I agree with your wife :P i think akane would make for richer storytelling than no romance with a sudden "i love aoba" at the very end. I'm not sure anyone asked for that :lol:

 

  • 2 weeks later...
Posted (edited)

This is a bit of a follow-up to my "Sundays suck" post, as one of my primary "workarounds" for being too tired to do anything is watching anime so dumb that it requires no intellectual effort to follow. So I've binged nearly the whole season of Sakura Trick. And it's... Well, just as bad as I've expected it to be and I like it as much as I hoped I would.

Its story and writing are pretty much trash-tier, being neither compelling nor really funny or witty. It's pretty much just a neverending stream of yuri fanservice, but also not just any kind of fanservice. It's both bold with how it inserts kisses and making-out sessions into literally every episode, but also does not go overboard with creepy shots and nudity. It's definitely ecchi, but a particularly cute variant of it, which really fits with the overall theme and stylistic. I actually thought that after a few episodes the kissing scenes and awkward interactions would get boring but... Not really. Obviously, it would be virtually unwatchable for someone who isn't into yuri, but the only things it does right, it does quite right

Just a shame there's so little substance in the SoL and comedy sections. It could've been quite a good show even without toning the fanservice much. 

And, well, now that I'm nearly finished with it, I guess it should be easier to start on the better yuri shows after it. My plan is to climb the quality ladder going: Sakura Trick —> Aoi Hana —> Strawberry Panic —> Maria-sama Ga Miteru. Should be fun. :3

Edited by Plk_Lesiak
Posted

I've just recently completed watching Book Of Bantorra... One of the most entertaining anime I ever watched! A pre-world war era with guns and magic kind of theme! The English dubbed is fantastic! The art style and effects seems pretty decent for a 2009 anime adaption!  Hope to see more this stuff! 

I'm gonna try watching xxxholic. I heard its a pretty otherworldly and unique. Looking forward to it. 

Posted
On 11/26/2018 at 11:12 AM, Plk_Lesiak said:

This is a bit of a follow-up to my "Sundays suck" post, as one of my primary "workarounds" for being too tired to do anything is watching anime so dumb that it requires no intellectual effort to follow. So I've binged nearly the whole season of Sakura Trick. And it's... Well, just as bad as I've expected it to be and I like it as much as I hoped I would.

Its story and writing are pretty much trash-tier, being neither compelling nor really funny or witty. It's pretty much just a neverending stream of yuri fanservice, but also not just any kind of fanservice. It's both bold with how it inserts kisses and making-out sessions into literally every episode, but also does not go overboard with creepy shots and nudity. It's definitely ecchi, but a particularly cute variant of it, which really fits with the overall theme and stylistic. I actually thought that after a few episodes the kissing scenes and awkward interactions would get boring but... Not really. Obviously, it would be virtually unwatchable for someone who isn't into yuri, but the only things it does right, it does quite right

Just a shame there's so little substance in the SoL and comedy sections. It could've been quite a good show even without toning the fanservice much. 

And, well, now that I'm nearly finished with it, I guess it should be easier to start on the better yuri shows after it. My plan is to climb the quality ladder going: Sakura Trick —> Aoi Hana —> Strawberry Panic —> Maria-sama Ga Miteru. Should be fun. :3

I hope you enjoy Strawberry Panic, that was my first taste of the yuri scene way back when. It also has one of the best supporting characters of all time.

 

As for me it is still Bloom and it is still really wonderful and everything that I hoped it would be.

Posted
35 minutes ago, Ranzo said:

As for me it is still Bloom and it is still really wonderful and everything that I hoped it would be.

It's pretty great indeed, although if you look carefully, I think Touko sometimes gets close to Mei's level of being messed up and emotionally abusive, she's just much more discreet about it. It unsettles me a bit and I wonder whether there's enough time left to make her believably change her attitude within this season... 

Anyways, I was also wondering, what's your take on those "lesser" yuri anime from the list, Sakura Trick and Aoi Hana. Have you seen them? :)

Posted
Just now, Plk_Lesiak said:

It's pretty great indeed, although if you look carefully, I think Touko sometimes gets close to Mei's level of being messed up and emotionally abusive, she's just much more discreet about it. It unsettles me a bit and I wonder whether there's enough time left to make her believably change her attitude within this season... 

Anyways, I was also wondering, what's your take on those "lesser" yuri anime from the list, Sakura Trick and Aoi Hana. Have you seen them? :)

That's been a comparison that has been brought up quite a bit but I think they are on two completely different wavelengths. For one thing at least with Touko we get several crucial moments from her perspective compared to getting jack shit from Mei. Also, Touko is considerate enough to ask for permission and knows when to back off while Mei is pretty much incapable of that. Her reason for being who she is also more well defined, and comes from a place of actual loss. I'm not going to deny that Touko is manipulative but she does have warmth.

I have only seen a few episodes of Sakura Trick and while I thought it was okay I didn't find anything that really made me feel invested in it at all (even thought the kisses were pretty rad)

Aoi Hana I've never seen but I read the manga a bit and got bored of it.

Posted

So on this beautiful, sleepless night (my stomach was apparently fed up with the way I was treating it lately and went for a mutiny), I've finished watching Aoi Hana... And TBH, this was quite a beautiful show. I understand well why people might not really enjoy it - the art is heavily dated, some plot elements seriously overstated, the conclusion open-ended and involving friendship rather than straight-up romance. It's also this kind of old-school, non-fanservice'y yuri that can easily bore someone who isn't very tolerant of slow-paced, SoL content - I can imagine that in manga form it could've been genuinely dull, just as @Ranzo suggested.

I, however, loved most of it. While Fumi is a fairly meek and at times annoying character, A-chan is absolutely lovely and the drama in the show, for the most part, feel genuine and interesting. It's also not as detached from reality as most yuri shows, dealing with the social stigma and uncertainty that would come from the characters being in similar positions is RL Japan. It was definitely imperfect when it goes to details, but generally highly satisfying - I would definitely love to see more yuri shows like that instead of creepy comedies or fanservice-filled disasters such as Citrus (although with Bloom into You I can't complain that much I guess). A solid 8/10.

Learning a bit more about Strawberry Panic, I'll probably skip it for now and go straight to Maria-sama ga Miteru the first opportunity I get. Before that, however, I don't think it would feel right to go forward without watching the worst yuri anime ever created: Netsuzou TRap. It's a short series with 9-minute episodes, so I won't be wasting much time for it, but I'm extremely curious about just how dreadful it can be... :nico:

Posted (edited)

OK, I'm done with Netsozou TRap - here are my general thoughts (copied from my Crunchyroll review):

Spoiler

As the title suggests, this is a show about cheating, so by that point alone, it won't be for everyone. If you don't want to see major characters being complete pieces of shit and toying with other people, just avoid it altogether.

The problem with Netsuzou Trap, however, that it's not even good at being an NTR series. Because of how short it is (9-minute episodes, including a full-length opening and a short ending sequence, leaving a stunning 6,5 minutes for actual plot), it ends up feeling rushed and shallow. To make some kind of impact, it could've chosen two different approaches - going grimdark like School Days, punishing the characters for their behaviour, or elaborate on the internal conflicts in them and give them a proper chance for redeeming themselves. It did neither, ending in a horribly unsatisfying note.

I think it didn't have to be that way, if not for one fatal problem - Hotaru. Her boyfriend, Fujiwara, being an abusive dickhead fitted the formula, just like the fact of the protagonist, Yuma, being torn between her attraction to, and later love for Hotaru and unwillingness to hurt her genuinely nice boyfriend, Takeda (spiced up by the confusion about her own sexuality). Yume makes questionable choices and could be considered a bit spineless, but means well all throughout the story. Hotaru, however, not only acts like a psychopath, seducing, sexually assaulting and toying with Yume, but the justification the show gives for it is simply absurd. She receives a happy ending with Yume, while everything she deserves from her is a slap across the face. Paradoxically, the one real "romantic moment" the show offered was the one that upset me the most - it didn't earn this conclusion in the slightest.

The show is also pretty tone-deaf, including comedic moments that completely don't fit its general climate - it makes School Days look like a masterpiece of an NTR drama. Unlike some, I don't really hate all the characters and the general concepts Netsuzou Trap uses (I really did enjoy School Days after all). It simply doesn't know how to use any of them properly or how to appeal to any of its possible audiences. It fails as a yuri romance and it fails at least as hard as an NTR show. Even the fanservice isn't very interesting, always either including Yume being sexually assaulted or the scene being interrupted by someone (after all, you have to condense all the conflict into the tiny runtime). It ends up being and series for no one and without any real redeeming qualities.

Avoid, unless you want to watch it from morbid curiosity,like I did.

4

The sad thing is, this show actually had some potential. I realized that I'm not against this kind of messed-up cheating drama if it sets up the tone right and sticks to it. I actually liked the School Days anime quite a lot, because it not just followed some particularly awful characters, but led them to a properly horrible conclusion. In a way, it was a logical conclusion of the harem fantasy - a scenario in which the protagonist screws every girl around him without thinking of the consequences and is punished for it. And that's exactly what this show needed in order to be at least marginally satisfying - a tragedy, and a one horrible enough to show the characters the full extent of their misgivings. And it ends up with a "I know you sexually and emotionally abused me for the last 11 episodes, but now I understand you did it out of love". And I find that way more perverse than any head in the bag on any boat...

Edited by Plk_Lesiak
Posted

I think I'm going to drop Kimagure Orange Road :( While girls are great, and I love the music, I cannot stand the protagonist. It surprises me, as I'm mostly okay with donkan/hopeless protags. I had no problems with Maison Ikkoku's Godai most of the time, but Kyousuke is just too whiny and childish for me. I know, he's only 15, while most high-school protags are 17, and maybe those two years make a difference, but still, he annoys the hell out of me...

Does he get better later? (I'm past Ep.13 currently)

  • 3 weeks later...
Posted

Skimmed through the first episode of Eien no Aselia OVA.

Well, I thought the idea of adapting 50+ hour long VNs like Grisaia or Rewrite into 13 episodes of anime was already pretty stupid.

Now I know that somebody actually thought it was a good idea to condense a 50+ hour long VN into 2 episodes of anime. :notlikemiya:

  • 2 weeks later...
Posted (edited)

Back at 2018, I did binge both of Isekai Shokodou and Takunomi at Youtube, although as of now unfortunate we can't watch the former completely from Youtube. As for the type of the anime, both of them were deal with cuisine. Let me try to describe it here below.

In Isekai Shokodou we have the setting that there's a restaurant that did have the door that was connected to another world, and that the door was only appear at each Saturday. Our MC is a middle age (At 40's) chef who cook at that restaurant, and his costumers consist of human from the Earth and some characters from the another world. He also got the half demon and a black dragon as the waitresses, and each episode did consist which food that each characters favor. It didn't have much plot though, but instead we obviously have food porn. Another interesting thing to note is that the other world technology was still like in usual RPG (Around 15th centuries maybe), while the chef himself did live at 2015 (Based on first edition novel publish year) so obviously the other world characters themselves find the food are very exotic and delicious (So much that some of them did keep the door's existance as the secret) while for us it's just the normal foods. So in the end while there's no much interaction between the characters, it's still interesting to watch for of how another world people react with normal food that we have.

I would say that Takunomi here did it better at characters interaction, because instead of several characters who eat the food we only have four main casts which all of them were women at the working age (More than 20 yo). The MC is a blue haired woman who came to Tokyo in order to work there, and she did live together with other three women in a share house. While it did depict some interesting thing like what the MC have gone through in her daily life, ultimately since I mention cuisine it should be obvious that there'll be food somewhere. And by food I mean something that could accompany alcohol drinks that the four women drank at each episode. Yeah this anime did sort of functioning as alcohol drink (ie beer, wine) promotion, which is interesting if you like alcohol and want to know more (Unfortunately I don't know any and not interesting to learn more, so all if the information were lost on me). So what I can conclude is that Takunomi here is like Koufukku Graffiti only with alcohol drink (Maybe).

I think that all for my comments here, and both of anime were episodic so you can watch those two anime easily without worrying about the story.

Edited by littleshogun
Posted

The Made in Abyss subs were apparently bad enough to kill any desire for me to watch anime for a few months, but I finally revived them by picking up the recent blu ray release of Hataraki Man, and boy am I glad I did. The show is a delight and satisfies my hunger for shows about ordinary working stiffs. The characters are super relatable for me, though they may be less so for the rest of this forum... but whatever. I think I'm five episodes in, and they're at a point where they're going around focusing on individual characters for each episode, and each character so far has gotten solid growth out of their single episode. So if that's your thing, it's a particularly enjoyable watch.

Worth mentioning that the subs are great. I get so used to seeing subs that read like crap nowadays (which I'm sure is at least in part due to the natural result of our race to the bottom on quality: simulcasts) that it's always surprising when I watch something with actually enjoyable subs. They even subbed all the (rather nice) background music lyrics, and you can tell the people responsible really cared about making the song lyrics sound all right. Props to the folks who worked on this one.

Posted

Yuri Kuma Arashi-I definitely like its style. The soundtrack is amazing. I've heard it's a metaphor for how homosexuals are treated in society, but it does something a lot of yuri works tend to do: pretty much every character is a lesbian. Instead of portraying the isolation of being a minority in a society full of people who deem their sexuality as non-deviant, I've noticed that a lot of Japanese stories tend to avoid this by making everyone a minority. Besides that, I can't say I have a very in-depth understanding of the show, but I'll probably look into it more when I finish it.

Posted

Finished Hataraki Man. It kinda tapered off and didn't really give me a satisfying conclusion; I'd say it kinda feels like one of those anime that's intended to drive readership to the source material, except that apparently the source material also went on infinite hiatus, so... yeah. A little disappointing. Still, it did end with a solid promise of what was to come, and it still did a lovely job of doing character stories for a lot of the office. No regrets about watching this short but very solid show.

Next up, I'm planning to watch Crest of the Stars and Banner of the Stars, since they're long-standing recommendations to me from @Nandemonai. More retro anime with a recent re-release, here I come!

Posted (edited)

Having deleted all the last few non-VN video games from my computer (I guess we're getting into the epilogue part of my years-long struggle) and having no better idea on how to spend my evening, I've watched the first half of the Bunny Senpai show. From what I read about it, I was worried it's going to be an overly-convoluted mess, but so far, it's actually pretty balanced. There's a lot of supernatural phenomena, but every piece of it is more or less a setup for really well-written and heartwarming drama. I'm sure there was a metaphor or two in it that went over my head, but considering how dense I can be when it goes to following philosophical mumble effectively, I've found everything in it fairly straightforward.

I also very much like that it doesn't go overboard with the drama, establishing the main couple very early on and doing things much more interesting than just throwing hurdles at their feet. It's not your typical romantic comedy that is fueled by pointless contrivance and misunderstandings. All the problems in it, even if "fantastical" in their expression, feel rather believable and the chemistry between main characters is just lovely.

All in all, it's engaging, but in a way that nearly reminds me of various "healing" anime - it made me feel all kinds of positive emotion and bond with the characters nearly instantly. We'll see whether it can keep it up past episode 6, but I don't think it'll leave me disappointed despite all the hype. ^_^

Edited by Plk_Lesiak
Posted (edited)

Trying to find something easy and relaxing, I've stalled Bunny Senpai for a bit and tried watching Yuru Camp. It might literally be the first anime I've explicitly decided to drop, after 5 episodes. Usually, I stall things and promise myself to come back one day, but somehow I completely couldn't get into this one. I've enjoyed the Encouragement of Climb series in the past, so I thought this one would be just as enjoyable... But it just tries so hard to be moe and character's mannerisms are so over-the-top.

I thought I'm quite ok with the "cute girls doing cute things" formula and thoroughly enjoyed shows like New Game!, but this is just so empty and over-stylized... I don't get how it can have an 8.3 rating on MAL. :s

Ehm... Going to try Gabriel Dropout, I guess? Trash comedy anime will never fail me. :nico:

Edited by Plk_Lesiak
Posted

I almost never watch anime, but recently loved Goblin Slayer (Priestess <3) and now somehow got sucked into Nakaimo.

I feel like a trash weeb for enjoying it so much, but I was definitely in the mood for "jealous imoutos".

Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Corrupted said:

I feel like a trash weeb for enjoying it so much

Being a trash weeb is a bad thing? I think it's something to embrace. :nico:

And staying true to this topic, I really, really enjoyed Gabriel DropOut. Such a nicely balanced, cute show, which just focuses on the humour instead of delivering pointless fanservice or going overboard with "moe". The setting is pretty shallow and characters only get basic amount of development (but to be completely fair, it's still more than most episodic comedy shows do in this regard...), but they work perfectly within the formula and the actual length of the show. It might also be because I'm a sucker for this kind of "role reversal" setups, but I simply had such a great time with it...

It doesn't surprise me it was made by a studio that had its hands in Yuru Yuri and New Game!, I enjoyed those shows to a similar degree.

...I'll probably also give Yuru Camp another try, considering how tired and sleep-deprived I was in the last few days, I don't really trust the impressions I've shared above. :P

Edited by Plk_Lesiak
Posted
3 hours ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

...I'll probably also give Yuru Camp another try, considering how tired and sleep-deprived I was in the last few days, I don't really trust the impressions I've shared above. :P

I'd appreciate if you made up your mind. Do I call off the hitman I've sent you, or not? :notlikemiya:

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