9
votes
What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga)
What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.
If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!
I haven't seen enough of Kurau: Phantom Memory to say anything meaningful yet, but I hate seeing this thread sit empty. I'm 8 episodes in, and I'm not really sure I know what it's about yet. Ostensibly it's about a woman with rather ill-defined super powers and her... sister? Avoiding capture by an organization that means to use them as a source of energy. I understand the story picks up later on, but it is slow to start.
Unrelated note: Anyone have any animes they really like, but never get a chance to talk about? I'm looking for more shows to watch. The older/shorter/more obscure the better. Less Naruto/ One Piece/JoJo, more NieA_7/Key the Metal Idol/Xam'd: Lost Memories. Happy to read anyone's review of anything, though!
Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit comes to mind. Criminally underrated show. It has 26 episodes, which I find to be just the right length. It was a great fantasy adventure, I'd compare its vibes to that of Avatar: the Last Airbender, but written for a more mature audience.
Premise
A famine has struck an empire, and in desperation, they seek to slay the reincarnation of an ancient water spirit that their first Emperor killed - but the water spirit, in a cruel irony, has reincarnated in the body of the Emperor's own son. The young boy is saved by a mysterious spear-wielding mercenary, and the two of them embark across the world to try to find a way to save him.I also LOVE Natsume's Book of Friends. This one has LOTS of seasons, but I surprisingly never seem to hear anyone talking about it or anything! Maybe I'm just not in the right circles, though? I wholeheartedly recommend it. It leans towards slice-of-life - sometimes just funny and cute, sometimes heart-wrenchingly bittersweet and tragic - but it does also have some really good action and intrigue throughout the show as well, especially as it goes on. More than anything, though, it's written with a lot of heart.
Premise
Takashi Natsume is a young man who's never been able to fit in because of his ability to see spirits. One day, he accidentally releases an ancient spirit, Madara, who notes his resemblance to his late grandmother, Reiko Natsume, who was infamous across the world of youkai for her "Book of Friends" - within which she wrote the names of many spirits, and bound them to her service. This puts a huge target on Takashi's back, because - as the successor to Reiko - *he* now has the power to call upon the spirits in the Book of Friends. Takashi doesn't want anything to do with the trouble this book brings, so he strikes a deal with Madara: if Madara helps Takashi free all the spirits that Reiko had sealed, then he'll give the book to Madara when he passes away. However, over the course of their quest, they'll cross paths with many rivals and foes who want the Book for themselves, or have their own designs for spirits...I actually just watched Moribito this year! It was really good, I wish more of the light novels would have been adapted, Balsa is such a cool character. In my brain, it's on the same shelf as Intrigue in the Bakumatsu, both being slow-burn, character driven fantasies with historical settings (although Moribito doesn't seem to take place on earth, and Bakumatsu explicitly takes place during Japan's Boshin War)
Natsume looks interesting, and the fact that the top recommendation is Mushishi tells me it's definitely worth checking out. Thank you for the recommendations!
Natsume Yuujinchou is one of those series that always makes me reflect on how it's the storytelling and not the ingredients which drive the show.
In this case, you have:
It's the perfect recipe for a shounen fantasy battle anime in the vein of Jujutsu Kaisen or Ushio to Tora, right? But the actual show takes those ingredients and cooks up 8 whole seasons of something completely different with a protagonist who eschews violence. It makes me wonder whether other genres that seem stale and overdone could be transformed just by looking at them from a different perspective.
I watched Kurau at around the airtime and remember the animation being quite good, but I have to admit the story hasn't stuck with me at all (although I remember the 'blue energy' part of the setting being neat).
My recommendation is Odd Taxi. It's a mystery show centred around a taxi driver working in a city of anthropomorphic animals. The story is told from the perspectives of multiple characters in different intersecting plotlines. I've only ever heard this show mentioned by one person (who recommended it to me), but I loved both how different it is from anything else and how the story ultimately resolves.
I will also check out Seirei no Moribito mentioned below as I loved both Avatar series. I find that with the sheer number of shows that come out every season, there always ends up being a ton of stuff that would appeal to me if I gave it a chance but which I end up overlooking completely, so this weekly thread and its recommendations are a great help!
Thanks also to the poster last week who recommended Sonny Boy, which I've now finished. I enjoyed the show a great deal, although the heart of the show ended up being very different to Drifting Classroom / Robinson Crusoe and that whole castaway / survival genre and
spoilers for the ending
while I thought the bittersweet ending was in line with the themes in the show, it's probably not going to sit well with some viewers that he doesn't keep his promise...My wife and I just started watching Mr. Villain's Day Off. The show is about a generic Power Rangers-style supervillain trying to enjoy his days off from his job. It's a comedy slice-of-life so far (just about four episodes in) and it's really cute.
I'm a huge tokusatsu fan - specifically Kamen Rider - so I'm getting a big kick out of watching how the show plays with the tropes of the Super Sentai series. My wife was the one who recommended we watch the show, to my surprise as she's not familiar with tokusatsu much at all, because she thought the premise looked cute on an Instagram clip she saw. She's loving it too! It's just a very charming, funny slice-of-life - not much more to say. I guess I could note how I'm pleasantly surprised that the main character is not just "secretly nice", but really is a bad guy, just extremely into preserving the peacefulness of his days off. It's hilarious to see him rage internally about exacting his vengeance on humanity for the crime of (e.g.) removing his favorite ice-cream flavor from his local convenience store.
I'm hoping that if my wife likes it enough, I can leverage it as a chance to get her to watch The Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World with me. She's a huge fan of isekai stuff (when done well), whereas I'm normally not... but I read the manga for this and it's been really high-quality, addressing almost every problem I have with the isekai genre as a whole, and is just a rock-solid fantasy adventure story, with great action, comedy, worldbuilding, etc... I'm hoping that when she's become more familiar with the beats of the Super Sentai genre, she'll be more willing to give it a chance, because I genuinely think she'll love it. I just have to hope the anime is as good as the manga has been!
My well of random things to put in each week is starting to run dry, but I'm not out quite yet. This week is https://myanimelist.net/anime/59730/A-Rank_Party_wo_Ridatsu_shita_Ore_wa_Moto_Oshiego-tachi_to_Meikyuu_Shinbu_wo_Mezasu.
This is a show that I have to imagine began with the pitch, "mid fantasy harems do well enough, how about we just do another one of those?" Girls keep piling in and being like, "oh he's so dense. He misses that we all want to marry him no matter how many times we say it. He doesn't even get that marrying one of us wasn't just for convenience like he thought!"
The main premise is pretty basic. He left his party and then got invited to a party of 3 girls. Together the 4 of them formed the party Clover. The show isn't afraid to willfully ignore the number-based name they chose and just keeps adding them. I think it's up to like 6 girls now.
There has been some mildly interesting stuff with the way some dungeon work though. Some dungeons effectively seem to be portals between different realities or times. Like there's some stuff I wasn't expecting where something that happened in one dungeon became the catalyst for something that happened in another, but with like 1000 years between the events from the perspective of the entities in that reality.