What Current Anime Are You Watching Version v4.0

[Seto Kaiba]

The Jack-of-all-Trades Who Was Kicked Out of The Hero's Party ~ A Swordsman Who Worked as an Enchanter Due to Party Circumstances Rises to Become a Master of All Trades

F*** me that's a title.  I can see why the localization team wanted to abbreviate it to Jack of All Trades, Party of None.  

This is one for the "Another Bloody" file.

As in, "it's another bloody isekai adjacent j-fantasy series about an adventurer who is kicked from the Hero's party of total arseholes for being Not Good Enough and discovers he's actually amazing".  Like, this is almost exactly the same series as The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become The Strongest just with a slightly different art style.  This ground is so thoroughly well-trodden at this point it's legally an eight-line interstate highway.

Spoiler

The introduction is pretty much a form letter.  The one noteworthy minor deviation from the usual is that the Hero is the only one NOT being a dick about it.  He's trying to keep things professional and explain the practical need for a dedicated support mage, and it's the rest of the party who are being high-and-mighty jerks about how he's "only" really good at a lot of things instead of being great at one thing.  

Then it's straight back to formula with the protag soloing a dungeon and rescuing a girl who's been abandoned by her party so he has someone to monologue about how he's totally awesome while he fights.  

It's not an isekai series, but the world is inexplicably organized around terminology borrowed from MMORPGs.

Definitely seems like it's going to be a skip-worthy snoozefest with nothing to show for itself.

Edited January 2 by Seto Kaiba

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

13 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The Jack-of-all-Trades Who Was Kicked Out of The Hero's Party ~ A Swordsman Who Worked as an Enchanter Due to Party Circumstances Rises to Become a Master of All Trades

F*** me that's a title.  I can see why the localization team wanted to abbreviate it to Jack of All Trades, Party of None.  

This is one for the "Another Bloody" file.

As in, "it's another bloody isekai adjacent j-fantasy series about an adventurer who is kicked from the Hero's party of total arseholes for being Not Good Enough and discovers he's actually amazing".  Like, this is almost exactly the same series as The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become The Strongest just with a slightly different art style.  This ground is so thoroughly well-trodden at this point it's legally an eight-line interstate highway.

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The introduction is pretty much a form letter.  The one noteworthy minor deviation from the usual is that the Hero is the only one NOT being a dick about it.  He's trying to keep things professional and explain the practical need for a dedicated support mage, and it's the rest of the party who are being high-and-mighty jerks about how he's "only" really good at a lot of things instead of being great at one thing.  

Then it's straight back to formula with the protag soloing a dungeon and rescuing a girl who's been abandoned by her party so he has someone to monologue about how he's totally awesome while he fights.  

It's not an isekai series, but the world is inexplicably organized around terminology borrowed from MMORPGs.

Definitely seems like it's going to be a skip-worthy snoozefest with nothing to show for itself.

I watched it.  I agree with all you said.  That title is crazy.

[Seto Kaiba]

A few more of this season's new simulcasts have dropped.

 

The Daily Life of a Part-Time Torturer is... well, on paper it's allegedly a comedy.  I say allegedly because it's not actually funny.  Not even slightly.  The series is set in an alternate Japan where torture and murder are not only legal, but a form of private enterprise.  The protagonist Cero is a 20-something former job-hopper with more than fifty different part-time jobs under his belt who has settled comfortably into his new chosen vocation of torturer at a torture firm named Spirytus Company and is living his daily life wringing confessions out of a variety of ne'er do wells, criminals, and the like through force with his coworkers, whip-enthusiast Siu, horror author Mikke, and a man named Hugh who is simply Too Pretty to work with others.

It's billed as a comedy, but nothing about it is funny unless you count the absurdity of the setting treating torture like it belongs to the same basic class of manual labor as hospitality, restaurant food prep, or construction.  (To the extent that a torture hardware supply store has a loyalty card like a Japanese supermarket.)

Nothing about it is funny, though, and the characters aren't engaging enough for it to pass for a slice-of-life story either.  It doesn't even manage to feel inappropriate.  The subject matter's transgressive as all get-out but it's so bland that it doesn't feel like it.  It's just dull.  I don't think I could recommend it, even as a form of torture.

 

 

Kunon the Sorcerer Can See is a fantasy slice-of-life series about the son of a marquis who is born with a heredity disability called the Hero's Scar because he is a descendant of The Hero who was terribly maimed defeating The Demon Lord.  In his case, he was born blind.  He's terribly depressed about this because it means that he really can't do anything and requires constant care from others.  Then, a faux pas on the part of his magic tutor gives him an idea... he decides to study magic in the hopes of being able to create new eyes for himself.  

It has an interesting premise and got off to a promising start, but it quickly becomes apparent that the story doesn't really know what to do with its own premise and it's padded like a menstruating fire hydrant.  The protagonist's more of a one-trick magical pony than Harry Potter (the only spell he knows creates a ball of water) and yet he is treated as some kind of godlike magical prodigy.  Somehow this very basic magic all but eliminates several aspects of his disability, and by the end of the second episode he's not only able to discern colors, he's able to read and is attending the now obligatory-in-j-fantasy School for the Nobility.  Past about the halfway point in the first episode the series feels really lazy and uninspired... veering straight into "boring" territory by the first episode's end.  

[Seto Kaiba]

In the actually-worth-watching category, we've got the apparently VERY long-awaited anime adaptation of Hanazakari no Kimitachi e... more than twenty-one years after the original manga ended circulation, and almost 30 years after it started serialization in Hana to Yume back in 1996.

Gave the first two episodes a whirl.  It's definitely a high-quality adaptation with a lot of very experienced voice actors behind it.  It does have a weird vibe to it, though... I think because the story was written back in the 90's it feels slightly odd and out of place even with modern animation behind it.  Not bad, just... different.  Still fun, still well-executed.  I'm looking forward to more.

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

Wash It All Away started and it was a cute 1st episode.

[Seto Kaiba]

Two more new ones today...

 

You Can't Be In a Rom-Com with Your Childhood Friends! is about a first year high school student named Yonosuke who is obsessed with rom-coms where the protagonist falls in love with their childhood friend.  That old and overused story trope.  Of course, he is also realistic/cynical enough to understand that romance comedies are fiction and doesn't believe he could ever encounter such a circumstance in real life.  Because he is IN a rom-com, he's also entertainingly wrong.  Both of his female childhood friends have the hots for him and he either has suffered so much rom-com brainrot or is so uninterested that he hasn't noticed.

By 1:05 into the first episode, it's pretty clear what we're in for is another one of those ecchi excuse plot harem comedies where the driving force of the plot and the only things that keep the story from ending at chapter one are the protagonist's Buddha-esque aversion to desire, his chronic inability to read even the most blatant signals imaginable, and a total failure to comprehend how abnormal his situation is despite abundant evidence.

Spoiler

"No girl would be interested in me!" says the guy whose female childhood friend makes a regular habit of slipping into his bedroom through the window to sleep with him.

By 4:10, this series has lost me.  This excuse plot is painfully thin even by the already-low standards of the genre.  I'm not even going to bother finishing the episode. and deleting it from my watch history.  SKIP.

 

Wash It All Away is a slice-of-life series about an amnesiac girl named Wakana Kinme who runs a private laundry service in a quaint seaside town as she navigates daily life.

This seems to be one of those titles that either has some clear creator provincialism or government sponsorship behind it, given that the first couple shots of the series are devoted to faithfully recreating real locations.  Enough so that we can practically identify what street her fictional business is on.  We see her pass through several Tawarahoncho landmarks like Atami station and pass through Atami Heiwa-dori shopping street on her way back to her small business, suggesting she's probably in Sakimicho, Atami, Shizuoka.

It's cute, but so far there doesn't seem to be a lot to this one besides the incidental events of the slow daily life of a girl who just really likes doing laundry.

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

The Demon King's Daughter Is Too Kind!! started today, It has got to be the cutest thing I have watched in a long time,  Doux is too precious.

[Seto Kaiba]

Tried two more new ones today.

I was hoping for something unconventional, and Isekai Office Worker: the Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter seems to be set to fit that bill.  Its basic premise seems to be very similar to titles like The Saint's Magic Power is Omnipotent, with a general j-fantasy alternate world that's under threat from periodic outbreaks evil miasma™️ that only the chosen isekai'd Lady Saint™️ can clean up with her magical powers.  Where it differs is that it's about a random office worker who is accidentally isekai'd along with the future Lady Saint while trying to save her from being isekai'd.  He's so used to Japan's toxic work ethic that, despite being told the kingdom will give him a generous stipend to live on as an apology for being isekai'd by mistake, he demands a job.  So the kingdom sets him to work in its government accounting office, where he is immediately stunned by its relaxed work ethic... then finds its lax practices have been allowing all kinds of questionable accounting that he tries to crack down on just as the miasma sends the kingdom into a state of emergency.

It's... unusual.  I'm curious to see where it goes.

 

The Case Book of Arne is, most unusually, apparently an adaptation of a freeware horror mystery video game made in RPG Maker and released back in 2017.  Apparently it garnered enough of a following to be adapted into a manga in 2018, and now an anime.

On paper, it's a supernatural detective story about a vampire who works as a Sherlock Holmes-style private detective solving crimes with supernatural origins that the conventional authorities just can't.  I'm going to withhold judgement on this series until I've seen at least another episode or two, because the first episode is so badly composed that calling it a mystery or a detective story feels like Blatant Lies or at least false advertising.

Spoiler

For some reason, the whole first episode revolves around a decoy protagonist... the son of a murdered detective... who despite living in a world where things like vampires and witches and ghosts are all very much real suffers a crippling case of Arbitrary Skepticism and ends up being Right For The Wrong Reasons in what feels like a massive arse pull.

Spoiler

Said kid's father is mutilated, murdered, and drained of blood in a physically impossible manner by a serial killer the locals call the Grave-Digging Vampire and he is absolutely convinced Vampires Do Not Exist, so he sets out to find the real killer himself despite being all of like nine years old.  

Honestly, he's so stupid about it that you can't even feel bad for him.

Putting aside that he denies the existence of the supernatural while talking to a vampire within earshot of a zombie, he never once seems to consider that the killer's MO is physically impossible.  The killer is abducting adults and exsanguinating them by wringing their bodies out like a wet washcloth.  He also never seems to even consider that such a feat is also impossible for his suspect (a decidedly unmuscular innkeeper's wife), or that the chances of confronting someone who can do that to a full-grown man as a child and living to tell the tale are 0%.  So he runs off to confront his suspect alone, she gives a full and boastful confession and reveals that she's a witch who's been using stone golems to commit the crimes and one of her golems immediately kills him by punching a basketball-sized hole clean through his abdomen DIO/Akaza style.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

 

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

I started Easygoing Territory Defense by the Optimistic Lord: Production Magic Turns a Nameless Village into the Strongest Fortified City.  Nothing about it seems original.  I am not sure I will stick with it.

[Dangard Ace]

Sentenced to be a Hero Eps 1  was what OPM season 2 and 3 wished it was.    I'm following this series now.

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

Chained Soldier Season 2 started,  It was good return.  

[Seto Kaiba]

OK, lots more shows dropping now.

The third season of MF Ghost has begun in earnest.  The eurobeat's back with the OP Timeless Power... but is it really necessary to show the chubby race queen getting hit in the face with a packaged ham in the OP?  They're finally starting to wrap up the plot they left hanging at the end of season two with an injured Katagiri who couldn't use 2nd gear falling way behind.  They're really dragging this race out though, yeesh.  It was 2-3 episodes last season and it's gonna be at least 3 this season too.

Tamon's B-Side... jeez this girl Utage is thirsty AF.  She's taken the "fangirl turns her room into a shrine" thing to the point of even having a poster of the titular idol on the ceiling over her bed.  Honestly, it's part of what makes the comedy work.  She's so absolutely obsessed with this idol that she refuses to reject him for being a real person with real problems and manages to come off as a bit of a heroic comedic sociopath while she's helping him because she can't bear to see him fail.  It's cute, it's funny, and it's on the unconventional side.  I quite like it.  

One new one I picked up is Champignon Witch, a light fantasy series about a feared and shunned, but generally harmless and well-meaning, young witch who makes a living brewing medicines for nearby towns and generally helping people.  The people of the kingdom are wary or afraid of her because her magic causes poisonous mushrooms to spring up in her wake wherever she walks, which is also the reason for her unusual nickname "the Champignon Witch".  Apparently there's some fantastic bigotry involved with the kingdom she's in being ruled by one faction or species of witches and her belonging to the other.

Spoiler

Apparently there are actual legitimate reasons people avoid her... since the mushrooms she spontaneously calls into existence are poisonous because they absorb dangerous toxic energy from the environment (e.g. the fear and hatred of a public execution site), and because normal people can't even touch her without dying.

 

[Hikaru Ichijo SL]

Hell Mode started today. It seems to be a typical isekai. But maybe it will surprise me.