What have you been watching / reading this week? (Anime/Manga)

Watched season 1 of Jigokuraku / Hell's Paradise, the adaptation of the Jump manga about a condemned ninja who is sent with nine other criminals and their guards to a mysterious island rumoured to be the afterlife. Each is tasked by the shogunate with finding and retrieving the elixir of immortality in exchange for their freedom.

• This is very much your standard Jump action / fantasy fighting show, but it also has a fun adventure element. Almost right off the bat, the cast is thrown into this alien world filled with danger and mystery, and it's interesting to see it slowly fleshed out as the characters run into one weird thing after another.

• The animation is fine, albeit a bit rough by Mappa's standards, with flat colouring, minimal composition and action sequences that occasionally get a bit choppy.

Not super deep, but fast paced and fun to watch.

Also finished watching cour 1-2 of To Be Hero X. We're absolutely inundated with superhero anime these days, but I really enjoyed this one!

• In addition to the show's signature '3D with 2D composition' style, the show actually has a good number of episodes where it's just fully traditional 2D animation. Fortunately, the quality of the 2D animation really picks up, and by the time it's regularly 2D, it looks great.

• The story is told non-linearly in a series of short but interrelated arcs, each focusing on a different character (usually one introduced in an earlier arc). Each of these arcs has its own premise, but all of them are based around the key theme of the show and how it affects that character.

  I'll reserve judgement on the main story until the series is complete, but the individual arcs are all enjoyable in their own right, with the focus generally kept on the characters as human beings with human-scale drama and motivations rather than dudes beating each other up with super powers or saving the world.

Impressions for this season's shows

• Boku no Hero Academia Final Season: Pacing is back on track now that they're no longer trying to tell 5 stories at once. Animation is also excellent even by this series' high standards. I think they've dragged the central conflict out too long for the drama around the main characters to hit as hard as the series' peak moments, but I'm generally satisfied with how they're landing the plane so far.

• Gachiakuta (cour 2): Pacing is still incredibly slow, but the antagonists are at last being introduced and the plot is finally moving forward. The main character is still a bit of an unlikeable maniac, but that feels about right given his background.

• Fumetsu no Anata e S3: I was a bit worried by them bring back so many past characters in the first couple of eps, but this week's ep has me convinced that the plot is heading in a good direction. The new characters are interesting and firmly in the driver's seat.

• 3-nen Z-gumi Ginpachi-sensei: I had to drop this. All the original characters are there with their quirks and voice actors intact, but the context and story which all of that plugged into is just completely stripped away. The result is something that looks the part but doesn't feel it, like a reanimated corpse.

• One Punch Man S3: Pretty awful. Despite the story really not being deep at all, the first episode has about 8 separate plot threads going at once, with none of them getting more than a couple of minutes of screen time. The animation is somehow even worse than S2, and I'm pretty sure there was one scene where a guy's still image was just mouse dragged across the screen when he was supposed to be walking. It is still absolutely watchable with your brain turned off, though.