Seto Kaiba

Seeing a decent-quality arming doublet figure really makes me wish Tatsunoko Pro would go back and revisit the Science Fiction Sengoku Saga pitch they canned back during the development of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. There's a fair bit of love for retro designs on the air right now and that could actually go over pretty well. Certainly a lot better than their attempts to get back into the mecha genre.

It is, yeah. Designing a believable transformation for something like a car, a tank, or a plane is pretty damned hard even when you're cheating and using "anime magic". It gets far harder if you have multiple alt-modes to consider and they all have to plausibly look like they belong to the same vehicle. Designing that same transformation in a way that can be applied to a transforming toy or model kit is exponentially harder. Keeping it simple while still getting the job done is a virtue, even if it sounds silly in the abstract... and the Spartas's transformation is simple enough that it CAN be replicated on toys or model kits with a minimum of "cheating". The Ammonite design team did all right job considering they were trying to keep the designs simple enough for merchandising and were not by any means specialists in designing transforming robot toys the way Kawamori is. (There are certainly transformations that could be described in less dignified terms out there... like the Gundam Arios and GN Archer from Gundam 00. Their combined flight form essentially involves the GN Archer jamming its head up the Arios's backside.)

Caught both the KonoSuba movie and the The Irregular at Magic High School OVA over the course of a long and particularly tedious road trip. The KonoSuba movie God's Blessing on this Wonderful World!: Legend of Crimson is about as frustrating to watch as I remember the same story arc was to read in the light novel. It isn't actually padded, but it feels padded because of how much of the story is spent sitting around doing essentially nothing. There's a little bit of humor in how cringeworthy all the residents of the Crimson Demon village are as an entire (designer) race built on the concept of chuunibyou but it wears out its welcome relatively quickly and that leaves a lot of the humor in the hands of jokes about how Yunyun is friendless and Megumin's family is broke. It's beautifully animated, at least, and the anime adaptation skips over a lot of the light novel's worst moments of Kazuma's lack of character development. The Irregular at Magic High School: Reminiscence Arc is a lot less fun. It's basically just an exposition dump about Tatsuya and Miyuki's backstory and a lot of it is stuff that already had been established earlier in the series. It's mostly just an excuse to show off that Tatsuya has always been stupidly OP. Starting The Irregular at Magic High School S3 over lunch. Given how serious the series has been up to this point, the first episode of season three has several very out-of-place moments where the animation style changes to support physical comedy. One female character goes super deformed and sprouts a Warner Bros-style wheel of feet to charge across the classroom and a protracted bit comedy in the middle where multiple characters slide across the screen without walking. It feels especially out-of-place by the end of the episode where the Chinese representative is seen to take orders from some kind of cybernetically puppeteered corpse.

As far as we know, it had not left its position in Macross City from the time it's restoration was completed in 2012 until Sharon Apple hijacked it in 2040. There is no mention of it leaving its position after that event.

HIGHSPEED Etoile is still a very strong contender not only for most skippable series of the Spring 2024 lineup, but of the last year and CY2024 as well. A dumbarse protagonist can work in a shounen adventure series where their only concern in the world is being strong enough to beat up the next bad guy. It's less believable or excusable if the protagonist is in a profession with an extremely high skill floor and they're forced to operate in a professional context. Like Ep1, Ep3 feels like a waste of an entire episode because... There's a limit to how much idiocy you can excuse in a protagonist... and when Rin Rindo not only doesn't know the rules of the sport she's debuting as a professional in but also doesn't know who the people she's competing against even are, it strains believability too much. An Archdemon's Dilemma: How to Love Your Elf Bride was good again this week. They're trying to build some tension in the story, but all it really feels like is the author showing that they at least looked up the list of demons in the Lesser Key of Solomon on Wikipedia. There's some good character moments though. Vampire Dormitory is feeling increasingly like one of my standouts for the season. It's surprisingly good fun with Mito and Ruka having some good banter and some nice moments together. It's very reminiscent of Ouran High School Host Club in some ways, with Mito being very similiar to Ouran's Haruhi. As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World is still pursuing its unconventional approach to the isekai genre, and I'm happy to see it. It's not quite as exciting as the other titles that made names for themselves by subverting the genre's expectations (e.g. Overlord, KonoSuba, Yojo Senki, Re:Zero, and Shield Hero) but it's still very engaging character drama right now and it's undeniably satisfying watching the classist but not unreasonable Lord Raven repeatedly eat crow as his son Ars brings him various incredible talents that he can't bring himself to reject. Chillin' in Another World with Level 2 Super Cheat Powers is not really developing in any new, interesting, or unconventional directions. It's very much a form letter "overpowered protagonist" isekai fantasy, though it's at least a little less lazy about it than many of the other entries in that category like Isekai Cheat Magician. It's watchable, but thus far the series hasn't brought anything to the table we haven't seen other shows do before and do better. It mostly seems to be veering into the obligatory harem part of the mandatory tropes, with the main love interest Rys spending most of the episode chasing away other girls she thinks are trying to capture her "husband's" attention romantically. I Was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince so I can Take My Time Perfecting My Magical Ability is also not developing in any new, interesting, or unconventional directions. It too is more form letter isekai-style power fantasy and unlike Chillin' in Another World it's INCREDIBLY LAZY about the fact. The story has no stakes because nothing in it can do more than to harmlessly amuse the incredibly overpowered protagonist Prince Lloyd. It's just boring. It feels like if you were to cut out all the scenes of people ranting about how amazing or impossible the things Lloyd is doing are, the show would probably be only about a quarter of its total runtime (and a good chunk of that would be the OP, ED, eyecatches, and the omakes). Re:Monster still has yet to do anything to really distinguish itself as an isekai series, with the last several episodes having been devoted almost entirely to a standard isekai binge acquisition of new Skills in the inexplicably game-ified fantasy world. Nothing about it really feels original or interesting, and the only thing it's really doing differently from other titles with essentially the same premise like So I'm a Spider, So What? and That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime is that the protagonist has a harem who seemingly all love him simply because he's not a standard-issue rape-y j-fantasy goblin. Otherwise, it's pretty much pure form letter isekai power fantasy writing so it's incredibly dull with little-to-no sense of direction or purpose to the story. There's some hilariously bad copy-pasted animation in this latest episode though, with all of the summoned skeleton warriors using exactly the same looped animation. The Banished Former Hero Lives as He Pleases could only politely be described as incredibly tedious. It's never moved beyond being one of those isekai-adjacent titles that has an obligatory overpowered protagonist with cheat powers from the gods in a j-fantasy world with unexplained game mechanics. It doesn't even do anything with its one halfway original idea about the Power of the Hero leading to the Hero inevitably being as hated and feared as the dark lord they've been created to destroy. Eminently skippable. Tadaima, Okaeri is one I'm starting this week. It was billed as a more straightforward story about a gay couple raising a child together and dealing with discrimination because of their orientation... and that description turned out to be more than a bit wide of the mark. A more accurate description of the setting reads more like a prompt for an mpreg fetish writer than anything, so I'm not surprised they didn't mention that... It's not lewd in any way, thank goodness, but the bait-and-switch premise makes the story a lot less topical, interesting, or impactful. It honestly feels like kind of a wasted premise and a weak effort to dodge a potentially controversial topic in the laziest way possible that inadvertantly makes the story unnecessarily complicated to no useful end. I'm actually rather disappointed by this one, as there've been a number of shows recently that've tackled similarly thorny topics without resorting to such cheap cop-out moves and done them justice.

And it's exactly the nonevent anyone familiar with the franchise already knew it would be from the outset. Yaaaaay... 🥱 A final pointless chapter in a stakeless side story set in the Nonevent Saga where all the main characters are Saved By Canon because it's an interquel and the villain's just a disposable expy of a popular antagonist from the TV series. Otherwise, it's pretty much the usual form letter writing you see in Robotech comics. We get the obligatory reminder that the story is set between the two sagas the fans actually care about: the Macross Saga and the Sentinels. There's the occasional reminder that the Army of the Southern Cross is canonically useless, some halfhearted fanservice in the form of unnecessary cameos by established characters and incidental fanfic-level stuff like naming ships after dead characters that breaks the flow of the story, a character who isn't canonically infantry goes full Rambo for some reason, a fair amount of horribly stilted banter between enemies, and they take the mandatory cheap shot at Minmei based on how she was flanderized in Sentinels too just to put the cherry on top of this sundae of mediocrity. It's a mess... but it's a mess in all the usual and expected ways that licensed Robotech works are a mess. That horribly dated writing is 100% on-brand for Robotech, though. It's a product of the editorial process of the TV series. They were trying to take three shows that were written with a high school-aged audience in mind and dumb them down for a primary school audience. All that exposition dumping was to make sure the audience could still follow the story. (The same reason other kids shows do the same thing where the villian monologues and explains their entire plan.) That's also not exactly a small part of why projects like Shadow Chronicles got mercilessly dragged by fans and non-fans alike when they put them up on public display. They're still writing like their audience are kids from the 80's and not the older teens and twenty-somethings they were trying to attract in the 2000s or the adults that've made up most of the fanbase since the late 90's. That's just how Robotech has always treated him since Robotech II: the Sentinels. Never mind that Breetai was one of the most senior commanders in the Zentradi forces in the Macross Saga or that he's hands-down the most experienced fleet commander the Earth Forces have by an enormous margin thereafter, he's made into one of Rick and Lisa's loyal sidekicks and assigned to the segregated all-Zentradi unit aboard the SDF-3. He even gets killed off in an undignified manner after leading a dwindling force of Zentradi grunts for decades in Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles. The disrespect is real... but then, in Robotech, Humanity is canonically xenophobic as all get-out. It's certainly a far cry from the respect he got in Macross, where he became commander of the Spacy's flagship after the war and Chief of Staff of the Spacy a few years after that when General Global retired, with his service being commemorated by naming a Macross-class ship after him.

A Condition Called Love is definitely one of the creepier romance stories I've seen. That Hotaru is basically romantically tone deaf is about the only thing keeping Hananoi in the game, because this guy is constantly engaging in stalker-tier behavior. It's actually kind of weird nobody has called him on it and that word hasn't gotten around his school considering how many acrimonious exes he supposedly has. A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics is definitely keeping things fresh and unusual with its changes in perspective from the princess working as a detective to the homeless lady knight. It's a comedy, but it gets weirdly frank about several hard-hitting topics like homelessness, illegal immigration, and now the predatory behavior of cults in Japan.

Watched Mysterious Disappearances Ep2 today. Honestly, I can't even muster up the enthusiasm to review it properly. It's as bad as the first episode, and yeah it still feels like a vaguely horror-themed contrivance used to excuse shots of the protagonist's massive rack.

For some reason, Southern Cross's writers and the design team "Ammonite" seem to have had it in for the Logan. Despite already having a bunch of secondary fighter designs that were specifically and explicitly made to be destroyed onscreen, the Logan's the one they saddled with the rep of being replaced because it was ineffective on the battlefield. That the Logan's a bad fighter in-universe is one of the few consistently mentioned details about it. Even the show's promotional materials get in on it at points. (That Marie Angel's hangs on for as long as it did is apparently more an indicator that the "Cosmo Amazon" just that good.)

Gave Mysterious Disappearances a whirl last night, and first impressions were frankly terrible. It's usually not a great sign if a show's OP has multiple shots of clearly-intended-for-fanservice nudity in it. Mysterious Disappearances seems to be hoping its audience will be too entranced by the "tracts of land" on display to notice the writing is hot garbage. Don't get me wrong, I adore bad horror movies... but Mysterious Disappearances' first episode is bad on a level that's less "so bad it's funny" and more "flies clean off the end of the critical spectrum into the cloying void of dispassionate loathing" bad. It almost feels like what you'd get if you asked Bing's version of ChatGPT to write a j-horror short story. The characters seem to be on a mission to react in the least believable way at all times.

Unnamed Memory is definitely a bit of an odd one for a fantasy series... Not really sure what to make of this one yet. Oscar and Tinasha seem to have pretty good chemistry right off the bat, though it's almost hard to say what the genre here is meant to be. It starts out feeling like fantasy/adventure but seems to course correct into a romance/drama partway into the first episode.

I've had an unusual amount of time to watch today, since it's "annual mandatory training" season and those things are always so easy you'd have to be blind drunk and suffering a severe concussion to actually get those questions wrong. 🤣 I Was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince so I Can Take My Time Perfecting My Magical Ability feels like a show worth skipping. It's one of those isekai adjacent titles where the world's a fantasy one that runs on RPG logic and the protagonist is basically just pure power fantasy. This one's a hard pass if you actually want an engaging story. Chillin' in Another World with Level 2 Super Cheat Powers is exactly what it says on the tin. It's a more literal application of isekai tropes with the only real twist being that the main guy was already living in a fantasy RPG world and got isekai'd to a subtly-different one. All I can describe this one as is "eminently skippable so far".

The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio is a rather unusual little drama/comedy about two high school students who, on being cast on a radio series, each discover that the other is ALSO a high schooler who's been moonlighting as a professional voice actor. I'm definitely gonna keep following this one... it's a ways outside of the usual, and it seems like it'll offer some good character development. As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I'll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World seems to be shaping up to be one of the few new isekai titles to offer a reasonably original take on the premise. Instead of the reincarnatee being stupidly overpowered, he seems on course to rise to power by being a superhumanly good judge of character and bringing out the true potential in others by leveraging their hidden or unrealized talents. This is definitely one to follow this season. It keeps going to interesting and unconventional places.

Crunchyroll's 2024 Spring lineup is providing a veritable bumper crop of unusual shows... I've added The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio, Yatagarasu: the Raven Does Not Choose Its Master, Mysterious Disappearances, Unnamed Memory, KonoSuba 3, and a few other titles to my watchlist. I'm up to 27 this season. First up on my lunchtime watchlist is Vampire Dormitory Ep2. I missed, last episode, that this is a commemorative work for the 70th anniversary of Nakayoshi magazine. After a rough first episode, Vampire Dormitory's made some massive improvements and this new episode is quite a bit of fun. In no small part because Ruka is just such a dork. He and the protagonist Mito have surprisingly good chemistry that I wish had been more visible in the first episode.

Astro Note continues to be a weird throwback of a series. As goofy as it is, Astro Note continues to be a delight to watch for both the visuals and the story. The reactions these characters have are over the top in a wonderfully old school way.